India queues up for Iraqi spoils

[donsu]

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/GB03Df03.html

While it is too early to expect normalcy to return to Iraq any time soon, with the Sunni resistance showing no signs of backing off, the heavy turnout as well as the relatively smooth conduct of the Iraqi polls has set the foreign-policy mandarins in New Delhi into rethink mode, with perhaps a grudging recognition that the United States has indeed pulled it off, for now, in Iraq. It is clear that India will now seek to engage the new dispensation in Baghdad, with the belief that the United Nations and Europe will not be able to deride the legitimacy of the new authority much longer.

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As a first step, India will also look to send back an ambassador to Baghdad in place of B B Tyagi, who returned a couple of months ago because of the deteriorating law and order situation. Until then, India's newly appointed special representative for West Asia, Chinmoy Gharekhan, is being dispatched to the region for an on-the-ground appraisal of the situation.

Indeed, India and Iraq do go back a long way. The Iraqi people are familiar with having Indians in their midst, one of the reasons US President George W Bush had applied several back-channel pressures on New Delhi to acquiesce to the US request for troop deployment. From a strategic point of view, Iraq is important to India as a large number of Indian citizens are employed in the Persian Gulf region, as well as it being an important source of India's energy supply. India is not shy about eyeing the huge reconstruction pie that is yet to be divided among nations, and aims at the very least at regaining oil exploration and production rights that India's Oil and Natural Gas Corp had won.

In India, estimates put the reconstruction opportunities in Iraq at more than US$100 billion. The year has seen Indian business and government delegations visit the US and Iraq to lobby for work, as well as to make first-hand assessments of the extent of possible Indian involvement, and to see the security situation and establish crucial contacts. The Indian business lobby that stands to gain through the Iraq-US dispensation is quite powerful as India and Iraq have been traditional business partners for a long time. Some estimates put the value of new contracts that India hopes to garner at over $10 billion, mainly in the fields of oil, power, telecommunications, construction and railways
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the bribes to the bushgang must be flying thick and heavy to land one of those pieces of the "reconstruction pie" that is Iraq.