Barack Obama will assume the US presidency on January 20, 2009. While his foreign policy platform is likely to take on greater clarity, three items on his tentative agenda should be eliciting attention in New Delhi, apart from his handling of the US economy, which will be of great significance for the rest of the world.

Kashmir: In an interview with Time magazine’s Joe Klein in late October, Obama brought up the topic of renewed American engagement with India and Pakistan on the dispute over Kashmir. He subsequently mentioned it in an interview on MSNBC, and had previously discussed it in an essay in the journal Foreign Affairs last year. “Kashmir ... is an interesting situation,” he told Klein, “that is obviously a potential tar pit diplomatically.”

“But, for us to devote serious diplomatic resources to get a special envoy in there,” he added, “to figure out a plausible approach, and essentially make the argument to the Indians, you guys are on the brink of being an economic superpower, why do you want to keep on messing with this? ... I think there is a moment where potentially we could get their attention.” Obama also revealed that this was something he had spoken about with former president Bill Clinton.

Diplomatic intervention on Kashmir has long been a major theme for Bruce Riedel, Obama’s chief policy advisor on South Asia. In December 2006, Riedel argued that Bush should “move beyond crisis management between India and Pakistan to try to help the two countries resolve the underlying issue that has brought them repeatedly to conflict: Kashmir...the problem has gotten worse and has repeatedly taken the subcontinent to the brink of disaster.”

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