India’s Congress Party Victory Boosts Obama

The victory of India’s Congress Party and the new regional superpower Iran offer new opportunities for the American president. With seven hundred million voters, it is slightly more crowded than Luxembourg, but finally they have finished counting: in India the Congress Party won more convincingly than expected. This is a boost for Obama, who elevated Afghanistan, and especially Pakistan, as his top priority.

Tensions

The victory of the moderate Congress Party in fact means that the nationalist-Hindu BJP loses: a party not only partly responsible for domestic religious tensions; but also, as an extension of that, a party that acts towards Islamabad like red cape taunting a bull. It is known that what constitutes the great peril for the Pakistani government is not the Taliban (therefore only half-heartedly fought), but the rulers in New Delhi.

To this day, Islamabad hides behind the “Indian threat” in order to keep most of its armies at its eastern border and not deploy them to the western frontier. And as a Hindu-identity is emphasized more in India, the stronger Pakistani rulers can use this “because of the urgency to protect Muslims.” This is used as an argument to: keep most armies where they are, avoid serious confrontation with the Taliban and to ignore Western criticism regarding democratic deficiencies since emergency trumps the law.

Arch Enemy

This argument has been removed from Islamabad by the election results in India. Though this does not mean that they will now admit to it. The concept of India as an arch enemy is too profitable: the power of the army is based on it, and large economic interests are connected to it. Plus, by never definitively defeating the Taliban, the United States can be permanently financially blackmailed with the Taliban threat.

Tehran

In contrast to Bush, Obama grasps the importance Tehran, and it explains the change of direction: a rapprochement toward Iran, the most stable nation in the region and the arch enemy of the Taliban. Bush’s short-sighted military actions, both in Baghdad and Kabul, freed Tehran from its most important enemies, and made Tehran into a regional superpower, a status which has become indispensable.

This now also applies to the Holy Land, through Iran’s allies Hamas and Hezbollah. That’s why Obama has made his position very clear to Netanyahu. Israel is gambling on the fact that it can escape a peace settlement because the Sunni U.S. allies Egypt and Saudi Arabia fear Shiite Iran.

But no matter how much Mubarak and the oil sheiks hate the ayatollahs, as long as the latter take pity on the Palestinians, the former cannot afford – because of the pro-Palestinian sympathies of their own subjects – to choose against Iran and for Israel.