Indian analyst urges US to use secret diplomacy in harnessing Delhi to anti-China “pivot”

By K. Ratnayake, wsws.org

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Excerpt:

A well-known Indian military-strategic analyst has criticised the very public manner in which Washington is pressing for India to act as a “frontline state” in its war drive against China.

Raja Mohan strongly supports India expanding military-security ties with the US. But he cautions that the US’s public pressure on New Delhi—as exemplified by a recent speech by the head of the US Pacific Command, Admiral Harry Harris—complicates matters. ...

Mohan wrote a column that complained about the US’s recourse to “public diplomacy” and contrasted the efforts of India’s Hindu supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government “to advance India’s strategic cooperation with the United States” by “private diplomacy”—i.e. secret negotiations and agreements—with “an overly eager Washington” that “can’t stop talking.” ...

New Delhi, he warns, has become “irritated by Washington’s ceaseless public talk on joint naval patrols,” which “has excited Indian media” and “commentators in Beijing.” “America’s needless public diplomacy,” declares Mohan, “has only complicated Indian decision-making on the subject.” ...

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