Three morals and a Trump story

HOURS after India’s Ministry of External Affairs issued a six point-by-point rebuttal on how the US never mediated last week’s India-Pakistan conflict, Donald Trump has insisted, for the sixth time since the conflict began, that he did.

“…And by the way, I don’t want to say I did, but I sure as hell helped settle the problem between Pakistan and India last week, which was getting more and more hostile,” Trump told troops at the US al-Udeid airbase in Qatar on Thursday, the last stop of his Gulf tour. It sounded like a parting shot. I’m telling you guys, he was saying, I am the one who averted a nuclear war.

Now you could roll your eyes or you could believe what the US President says, which is that it needed a powerful third party — him — with influence in both New Delhi and Islamabad to stop the natives from going at each other again and continuing their “1,000-year war.”

But there are three more morals to the story. The first penny dropped when External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar got on the phone with his counterpart in Afghanistan, Taliban Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi, on Thursday evening. Nobody knows who called whom, but the MEA did put out that Jaishankar expressed his appreciation of Muttaqi’s earlier condemnation of the Pahalgam massacre.

The first (of the last three) morals is not that Jaishankar and Muttaqi actually spoke to each other — a leader of the world’s largest democracy speaking to a man who doesn’t even represent a country, merely a regime — or that he did so openly.

The lesson here is that New Delhi didn’t seem unduly bothered whether it would be criticised or not for speaking to the Taliban, which has violated every rule in every book before and since it came to power for the second time on August 15, 2021.

Fact is, Jaishankar was only taking a leaf out of Trump’s book. Which is that if you have the ability to exercise power, you will be forgiven the vanity of changing your mind as well as the direction of your country’s policy.

Just check out Trump. He is making nice with Vladimir Putin, his country’s arch-enemy; in Riyadh earlier this week, he shook hands with the Al-Qaeda’s newest ally which now rules Syria; and in Qatar, the home of the radical Islamist Muslim Brotherhood group, he ignored all the signs because the Al-Thani sheikhs flattered him with a welcome that included the gift of a $400-million plane for the US President’s use.

Even when Trump brought up his grouse about Apple CEO Tim Cook making iPhones in India with Qatari businessmen (“I said to him, ‘my friend, I am treating you very good… but now I hear you are building in India. I don’t want you building in India…”), New Delhi simply refused to react. They turned to the Apple folks, instead, who assured them that Cook would, indeed, continue with his plans to set up factories in India.

In the bad, old days, New Delhi would have been shaken if someone as powerful as the US President said the things he did. But India is learning to hold her own, in the face of far more powerful economies like China and the US cutting a deal that brings down their own tariffs — a decision that is bound to affect India’s own exports.

Fact is, this week, India relearnt the oldest maxim in the book of politics — there are no permanent friends or enemies, only permanent interests. Like yesterday’s newspaper which is today’s raddi, last week’s fast friends could be distant cousins today.

That’s why ‘Ab ki baar Trump sarkar’ is a slogan from another century. Today’s protection will come from having Apple on your side, because that company is so powerful that Trump has no option but to have Tim Cook on his side.

As for Trump taking credit for “mediating” between India and Pakistan, in any case, even the New York Times now admits that India inflicted the most damage on Pakistani facilities. As for Pakistan celebrating its “victory” in this conflict, perhaps neither Trump nor the Pakistanis have noticed that 11 Pakistani bases were spiked by Indian missiles. Which is when the Pakistanis sought the attention of the US President and requested him to shut it down.

Or, maybe, Trump has noticed — just that he’s moved on to something else, this time to celebrating a newly arrived grandchild.

The third moral is that in his three months in power, Trump has successfully antagonised half the world. The fact that he went back on his own promises to burn China to the ground — because his own enormous US conglomerates who make in China and large profits at that, must have told him that high tariffs would only hurt American customers — only indicates that when you’re this powerful, talk is cheap.

As for the Jaishankar-Muttaqi conversation, the fact that it took place so close to the end of Operation Sindoor or that Pakistan and Afghanistan have been at daggers drawn for some time has escaped no one.

Fact is, India has been wooing the Taliban for some time now, almost as soon as it took Kabul in 2021 on the anniversary of India’s independence. On a visit to Kabul a year later, it was plain to see that the Taliban were already losing patience with their one-time mentors and guardians, the Pakistani military establishment.

The story of how the ISI won over the Taliban and nurtured it, until the West took back Afghanistan in the wake of 9/11; how the ISI bided its time for 20 years and then helped the Taliban wrest the country back from the Americans and its NATO allies — that’s a story for another time.

In this great game this week, as Trump changes course as quickly as the Sutlej and the rest of the world rearranges itself — the story of how India won over the Taliban is perhaps the most fascinating of all.

Comments