Hum, tum aur woh

An answer in Parliament last week, on one of the few occasions when Question Hour was actually permitted to take place, is the immediate provocation for revisiting a subject which readers with a very long memory might recall from my having written on this matter in this column over five years ago. Ram Naik, minister for petroleum and natural gas, confirmed to Congress MP, Satyavrat Chaturvedi, that feasibility studies have been commissioned for the India-Iran gas pipeline, and that both the deep sea route and the overland route via Pakistan would be evaluated. When, by way of a supplementary, I asked whether he had seen the report of a joint India-Pakistan study group presented by one Jaswant Singh to the Foreign Secretary in December 1996 recommending the overland route after setting out the steps that could be taken to ensure security of supplies even in the event of hostilities, the minister confessed he had not read the report but added that, in any case, after Kargil the security situation was no longer as it might have been five years or more ago. He ducked my second supplementary, which asked whether we were going to involve Pakistan in this exercise of evaluation and, if not, how the overland route and its security implications could be examined without involving Pakistan.

I say ‘one Jaswant Singh’ because Jaswant Singh’s participation in the study group was as an individual. So was mine. The initiative to convene the study group was taken by Shirin Tahir-Kheli, an American of Pakistani origin whose father was one of P.V. Narasimha Rao’s gurus in the old Nizam’s Hyderabad. Tahir-Kheli was on the staff of the US National Security Council and is the only American of South Asian origin to have served as a US ambassador to the UN. The Pakistani side included one of Benazir Bhutto’s ministers of state (as also the poor Pakistan MP and PIA chairman who has been jailed on the charge of complicity in Nawaz Sharif’s attempt to hijack General Musharraf’s plane, which led to the general’s air-based coup). The Pakistan minister lost his job — along with the fall of the Benazir ministry — even as we gathered in Udaipur at Jaswant Singh’s invitation for the final round. Although none of us knew then, destiny had fingered our host for high office from which he could do everything to translate our private recommendations into public policy. Alas, over the last four years, Jaswant Singh, the private individual, has done nothing to influence Jaswant Singh, the external affairs minister. Thus doth high office addle the brain (even if it deepens the baritone and makes more incomprehensible the accent).

In his Lovraj Kumar memorial lecture in August 1996, held in memory of one of the greatest techno-bureaucrats the petroleum sector in this country has seen, the petroleum secretary of the day, the equally distinguished Vijay Kelkar, pointed out in a telling aphorism that what petroleum was to the 20th century, natural gas would be to the 21st. Technology is advancing and it is in gas much more than petroleum that the future lies. Alas, we are as deficient in gas as we have been in oil. The only way we can fuel and sustain high rates of growth over the long term is through assured access to imported natural gas. The silver lining is that even if we are ourselves gravely deficient in gas reserves, we are surrounded by some of the biggest natural gas lakes in the world. Ideally, the west coast of India should be served by natural gas from Iran, the south from Oman/Qatar, the east and north east from Bangladesh, and the north from Turkmenistan, the country with the largest natural gas reserves by far in the world and, therefore, the Saudi Arabia of the coming century. Thus, for both the north and the west (and possibly also for the south if unproven deep sea transportation technology does not work) India needs Pakistan for accessing both Iranian and Turkmenistan natural gas.

Happily, Pakistan needs India for getting its Iranian gas because the demand for gas is too limited in Pakistan for it to be economically viable for the Iranians to make the investment in pumping out and transporting the gas only to Pakistan. Moreover, the US conquest of Afghanistan is best understood in terms of securing their route to Turkmenistan. This is the new Great Game — and Jaswant Singh, author of The Defence of India understands this better than most. Of course, as foreign minister, he displays much less understanding of this imperative.

So, how do we establish our 21st century economic life-line? Ram Naik says the security situation has changed after Kargil. Our report took into account not merely a clash across the LoC but hostilities on a much larger and prolonged scale. Our best bet is the producer, Iran. Why would the Iranians sit back and see their investment go kaput because Pakistan turns off the tap? The overland pipeline would be endangered only if hostilities were to break out between Iran and India. That has not happened since Ahmed Shah Abdali invaded India 350 years ago! Moreover, if we desist from an overland route through Pakistan, we are ruling ourselves out of access to the much bigger reserves in Turkmenistan. There is no sea route to India from Central Asia.

As for the deep sea route, it is a technology which does not exist — which is why the India-Oman agreement worked out by the former Congress petroleum minister, Capt. Satish Sharma, has collapsed. The technology does not exist primarily because there are no two developed countries in the world which need a deep sea route for the transportation of natural gas. In North America, Alaskan natural gas passes through Canada. The US-Canada treaties in regard to the security of supplies provide the model we could work on with Pakistan. Supplies to western Europe from Central Asia will all be overland. The Americans — specifically, Bechtels — plan
to access Turkmenistan overland through Pakistan and Afghanistan. The Baluchistan ports of Pakistan are readily available for Bechtels
to ship the gas out to points west in giant tankers. Pakistan will get
its share en route. Only India will be left out if we do not know how
to forge a trilateral relationship with Pakistan.

The real security of India lies in rapid economic development. The NDA government’s refusal to deal with Pakistan jeopardises that security.

Earlier Columns