By Ranjit Devraj
NEW DELHI, Jun 11 2004 (IPS)

Any plan by the Congress Party-led minority government of India to change earlier decisions not to send troops to Iraq have been nipped in the bud by its communist allies, which oppose U.S. dominance in the occupied country.

”There is no change in the situation in Iraq whatsoever. Iraq has been under American occupation for the last 14 months. There is a popular uprising against the brutal occupation,” said Prakash Karat, member of the politburo of the Marxist Communist Part of India (CPI-M).

Said D Raja, national secretary of the Communist Part of India (CPI), another major component of the powerful Left Front: ”We are clear that Indian troops cannot be allowed to serve under U.S. command.”

For them, the new government scheduled to take over Iraq after Jun. 30 is a ‘puppet government’.

The Left Front, which controls 59 seats in India’s 543-member Lok Sabha or lower house of Parliament, is not a part of the Congress-led coalition government of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

But it provides it critical support with the specific purpose of keeping the pro-Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its allies – which ruled India’s central government until the April and May elections – out of power.

Together with the Left Front, the Congress Party had opposed plans by the pro-U.S. government led by the BJP to oblige requests from U.S. President George W Bush last year to send 17,000 Indian troops to bolster the Washington-led effort in Iraq.

Indeed, the Congress Party and its communist friends, while in the opposition, had also compelled Parliament to pass a resolution in April 2003 condemning the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.

Soon after taking charge, India’s new Foreign Minister Natwar Singh had let it be known that India would be willing to consider sending troops to Iraq under a clear U.N. mandate.

According to news reports, Singh, in Washington to attend the memorial service for former U.S. President Ronald Reagan, indicated to U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell Thursday that New Delhi would review the situation following a U.N. resolution for a ”sovereign interim government” in Iraq.

”There is a resolution unanimously passed in the United Nations and there are Arab members in it. We will look at it very carefully,” Singh was quoted as saying at a joint press conference after he and Power emerged from an hour-long meeting. .

Singh, however, did qualify his statement by adding, ”it would be premature for me to say aye or nay”.

As it turned out, Singh’s caution was justified. There are now calls for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to clear all ambiguity on India’s position on sending troops to Iraq.

”The government must make it clear that there is no question of sending Indian troops to Iraq to bolster the American occupation," said a CPI-M statement.

Karat said in explanation that the U.N. Security Council resolution for the stationing of a multinational force in Iraq till 2006 did not quite mean that there would be a blue-helmet U.N. peacekeeping force there.

"The U.N. Resolution talks of a multinational force under U.S. command. We want the U.S. and British troops to leave Iraq and the United Nations to take over,” Karat said.

Karat also pointed out that countries like France, Germany, Russia and Canada have announced they would not be participating in this force.

”There have been no elections and the Iraqis have had no say in the composition of the new government,” he said.

Singh also came under criticism from Yashwant Sinha, his predecessor as foreign minister. "The Congress (Party) always accused us (BJP) of not having an independent foreign policy, now the people of India have to decide whether or not this is bowing to American pressure," Sinha said.

Any decision by India to send troops to a U.S.-controlled Iraq is also likely to be opposed by human rights groups. They have condemned Washington’s policy against that country since the first 1991 Gulf war, when Iraq came under crippling sanctions that affected the health and well-being of the civilian population.

Said P V Unnikrishnan, spokesman for the international People’s Health Movement, that is based in the southern Indian city of Bangalore: ”We are appalled by the callous use of depleted uranium (DU) shells in both the wars against Iraq and the authorisation to use torture in a country they (U.S. troops) were supposed to be liberating.”

According to Rajan Abhyankar, a top official in India’s foreign ministry and an expert on Iraq, any deployment of Indian troops in Iraq would have to take into account historical contacts between the two countries.

More than 20,000 Indian troops died in Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) in 1915-16 as part of efforts by the colonial British forces to effect a ”regime change” in what was then a part of the Turkish Ottoman empire.

India is also home to the world’s second large Muslim population of 125 million and cannot ignore the sentiments of the large Shiite segment in northern Uttar Pradesh state, members of which regularly undertake pilgrimages to the holy cities of Najaf and Karbala in Iraq.

During the Saddam Hussein regime, cooperation by India included provision of training for Iraqi military officers and fighter pilots. Both countries sourced their weapon platforms from the former Soviet Union.

Wrote commentator on public affairs Saeed Naqvi in an editorial in the ‘Indian Express’ Friday: ”No other nationality has as much acceptability in Iraq as Indians do. We have friends behind the Green Zone, in the old Baathist establishment, among the Kurds and Southern (Shiites).”

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