In a move intended to reduce tensions with Pakistan, India announced Monday that Pakistani commercial airliners will again be allowed to use its airspace.
``I don't think it's modest,'' India's spokeswoman for the Ministry of External Affairs, Nirupama Rao, said of the move. ``You're talking of lifting restrictions on overflights.
``That's not a small step. I believe it is a significant step.''
Pakistan had no immediate response to the announcement.
Direct flights between the two countries, which still have about a million troops ranged along their 1,800-mile border, were halted on Jan. 1. Train and bus service had already been stopped.
India closed its airspace to flights by Pakistani aircraft after an attack on the Parliament in New Delhi in December by Muslim militants. New Delhi said Pakistan's spy agency backed the militants, and although Pakistan denied it, the attack put the rivals on war footing.
The troops are likely to stay in place along the border for months, and the process of resolving the crisis has just begun.
But when Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld arrives in New Delhi this week, he will have the ear of India's senior political leaders in a way that would have been hard to imagine for most of the past three decades.
Military cooperation between India and the United States has remarkably quickened since Sept. 11, with a burst of navy, air force and army joint exercises, the revival of American military sales to India and a blur of high-level visits by generals and admirals.
The fledgling relationship between American and Indian military leaders will be important to Mr. Rumsfeld in talks intended to put to rest fears of war between India and Pakistan.
``We can hope this translates into some influence and trust, though I don't want to overstate it,'' a senior American defense official said in an interview on Thursday. ``I don't want to predict this guarantees success.''
The American diplomatic efforts yielded their first real gains on Saturday when India welcomed a pledge by Pakistan's military ruler to stop permanently the infiltration of militants into Kashmir.
India has linked the killing of civilians in Kashmir to a Pakistan-backed insurgency tin New Delhi and has presented its confrontation with Pakistan as part of the global campaign against terrorism.
India itself made an unstinting offer of support to the United States after Sept. 11, and Washington responded by ending the sanctions placed on India after its 1998 nuclear tests. With that, the estrangement that prevailed between the world's two largest democracies during the cold war, when India drew close to the Soviet Union and the United States allied with Pakistan, has eased.
India, for decades a champion of nonalignment, seeks warmer ties with the United States in hopes of gaining access to sophisticated military technology and help in dealing with Pakistan.
From the start of President Bush's term, some influential officials in his administration saw India as a potential counterweight to that other Asian behemoth, China, whose growing power was seen as a potential strategic threat.
But since Sept. 11, the priority has been terrorism. The United States is hoping its deeper military and political ties with India will give it some measure of leverage to prevent a war between India and Pakistan that could lead to a nuclear holocaust and would play havoc with the hunt for Al Qaeda in Pakistan.
The military relationship has certainly accelerated in recent months. ``We've moved from crawling to walking and we're preparing to run,'' said an American military official.
American warships have been docking in the Indian cities of Bombay, Cochin and Madras. The first major sale of military equipment to India - $140 million of artillery-finding radar made by Raytheon - has been approved by Congress. Aircraft engines, submarine combat systems and helicopter parts are in the pipeline.
In the largest-ever joint ground and air operations, American and Indian paratroopers jumped last month from the same aircraft over the city of Agra. Later this year, for the first time, Indian troops will venture to the United States for exercises in Alaska.
American and Indian naval ships are jointly patrolling the Strait of Malacca to protect commercial shipping, while the number of Indian military officers training in the United States has jumped to 150 this year from 25 in 1998.
A parade of military brass has been marching through each other's capitals. ``The current level of military to military cooperation between our nations is unprecedented,'' Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said upon arriving in New Delhi in February.
Mr. Bush took office determined to bring the United States and India closer together, an undertaking that began under President Bill Clinton. The Bush administration's approach to India was conceived as part of a broader geopolitical strategy in Asia.
Some senior officials saw a close American military relationship with India, a developing, democratic nation of a billion people with a million-member army, as a factor that would give pause to a rising, autocratic China, if not now, then a decade or two down the road when India has become richer and more powerful, American officials say.
By most accounts, Robert D. Blackwill, the American ambassador in New Delhi and a China expert who taught at Harvard, is a proponent of this school of thought. He has used his contacts in the White House and the Pentagon to speed up United States-India military collaborations. He was a foreign policy adviser to Mr. Bush during the presidential campaign and the boss of the current national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, when both served at the National Security Council under the president's father. Mr. Blackwill declined to comment.
In public remarks, American officials have been careful not to depict the warming relations with India as having anything to do with China for fear of alarming China or offending India.
But the senior American defense official said in the interview on Thursday: ``Given our strategy in Asia, the more sober view of China, and Russia no longer being a competitor, tin New Delhi were objective strategic reasons the India-U.S. relationship would improve.''
Analysts are more direct. George Perkovich, a South Asia expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said some Pentagon officials see the military relationship with India primarily as a way to make China nervous.
``The joint patrol of the Strait of Malacca is a great example,'' Mr. Perkovich said. ``The administration says it loves India in its own right and is not trying to contain China, but when officials say this, they then mutter under the breath, `Of course, India is a neighbor of China and if China draws certain conclusions, this is O.K.'
``At this point, it is too early for U.S. military or defense officials to see India as a potential military ally and the Indians themselves don't want an alliance,'' Mr. Perkovich went on to say. ``Americans still regard India as prickly, Indian politics as too volatile and the Indian military as too hamstrung by civilian bureaucracy and technical limitations to be of great current value.
``That said,'' he added, ``the U.S. would probably welcome access to Indian ports or military bases down the road.''
India has its own objectives in the relationship. By threatening a war with Pakistan over terrorism that could jeopardize American interests in Pakistan, India has forced American diplomats to say plainly and publicly something they used to say only privately: that Pakistan must stop sponsoring terrorism against India in Kashmir. The United States is now using the weight of its power to exact such a commitment from Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf.
India also sees American investment, technology and influence as crucial to the realization of its great power aspirations.
``That is the essential engine that drives the U.S.-India military relationship,'' said Lt. Gen. V.R. Raghavan, a retired director general of military operations in the Indian Army. ``India requires technological development, economic development and military growth in terms of technology.''
If India had had the radar systems it is acquiring now during its 1999 Kargil war with Pakistan in Kashmir, India could have much more quickly destroyed Pakistani artillery and charged up the mountains to retake the heights, Indian officials say. ``Without any doubt whatsoever,'' Jaswant Singh, India's foreign affairs minister, said in an interview.
India and Pakistan have been fighting over Kashmir since 1947, and the bloody competition drives their military spending higher. This year India has increased military spending 13 percent, or $1.45 billion, and most of that will go for capital expenses to modernize the military. American companies are now contending for a share.
But India is not going to allow itself to become dependent on American military hardware anytime soon. Its primary supplier was the Soviet Union and is still Russia. The United States, with its ready use of sanctions, is seen as an unreliable supplier. For example, after the 1998 sanctions were imposed, India was unable to get spare parts for its Sea King helicopters.
Mr. Singh said the small-scale American military sales to India were still not much more than ``a kind of diplomatic lubricant.'' The Indian emphasis is on self-reliance.
``It doesn't matter if it is not the best,'' he said, ``but we must have it as our own, as something that we produce for ourselves.''
Still, India wants the high-technology weaponry that American companies produce and that the United States has been leery of selling India because of its nuclear program.
``We are looking forward to closer relations both in technology as well as in procurement,'' India's defense minister, George Fernandes, said in a recent interview.
(China Daily June 11 2002)
