NEW DELHI, 21 April — Christina B. Rocca will be United States’ new assistant secretary of state for South Asia. She will be succeeding Karl Inderfurth. Her appointment spells a great relief for India keen on improving relations with United States.
Rocca, in the Indian circles, is popular as the person who worked behind the scenes for lifting the post-Pokhran sanctions. Currently, she is a professional staff member for Sen. Sam Brownback, serving as his foreign policy adviser. She has worked with Brownback for the past four years. During this period, Brownback moved two amendments adopted by the US Senate in 1999, vesting powers with the president to lift sanctions against India and Pakistan.
This enabled then President Bill Clinton to partially lift sanctions. Previously, Rocca served as a staff operations officer for the CIA Directorate of Operations from 1982 to 1997. Incidentally, this was one of the most disturbing periods in South Asia which saw turbulence in Afghanistan, deaths of Indira Gandhi, Ziaul Haq and Rajiv Gandhi and quick changes of power in India and Pakistan.
Undeniably, Rocca’s appointment raises India’s hope that President George W. Bush administration will lift the remaining sanctions against India. New Delhi’s priority is to persuade Bush’s administration along this line. This issue was raised in a recent meeting in Washington between the US Secretary of State Colin Powell and India’s External Affairs Minister Jaswant Singh. India’s Ambassador to United States Lalit Mansinh said that the US administration had given the assurance that sanctions were being reviewed and would be lifted soon. Mansinh said, “We hope that they will be lifted very soon.”
Mansinh also placed the Indo-US relations to be at their best at present, “For the first time in our bilateral relations, we are not picking each other’s faults.” At the same time, he commented as to how could the two nations have such close relations and yet have sanctions against each other, “This just does not make any sense.” Certainly, with Rocca taking over, observers have become more hopeful about sanctions being lifted “soon.”
This development, however, should not be a cause of any concern or anxiety for India’s archrival Pakistan. Rocca is said to have a serious regional perspective as opposed to interest in one or two countries in South Asia.
From this angle, Rocca’s appointment is very much suggestive of Bush administration’s regional perspective toward South Asia being devoid of specific interest in India against Pakistan. This point is further supported by comments made by the US Assistant Secretary of State, Alan Eastham. While in Islamabad, he said that United States has no intention of moving closer to India at the cost of “abandoning” Pakistan.
