WASHINGTON: The Bush administration has sought to underplay_ the significance of a Pentagon document that had suggested that the United Staled should “discourage” Indian hegemonic aspirations over the other states in South Asia and on the Indian Ocean.

The Acting Secretary of State, Lawrence Eagleburger, told the Indian Foreign Secretary, Mani Dixit, on Monday that the Pentagon paper, which was an internal document, should not be taken as a “serious input”, and Indo-US relations should be dealt with on a more substantive level.

Dixit, who had raised the subject in his talks at the State Department, told correspondents that the Pentagon document did not disturb me at all. Traditional view’s and value judgments do not change overnight.” He added “There may be certain sections in the US government which may have that feeling. But I will worry when such perceptions transmute into official policy get direct signals…My impression is that it does not affect the main orientation of Indo US policy.”

 Indicated he would also discuss the matter with the Under Secretary of Defence, Paul Wolfowitz, whom he was meeting on Tuesday,

The Pentagon strategy plan for the post-cold-war era envisages benevolent domination by the United States with no rival per power allowed to emerge Western Europe, Asia or in the former Soviet Union.

There has not been much comment yet on the Pentagon document, but  Writing, in, the New York Times, which published excerpts of the defence department paper on Monday, columnist Leslie Gelb said “The pentagon planner  do themselves and their cause an injustice by being tunable to unhook themselves from their big brother, big bucks mentality. The Bush administration should take a cold shower. Maybe then, Bush planners would stop daydreaming about being the world’s policemen and a 1.2 million dollar defence budgets, and take a look outside their windows.”

The Pentagon on Monday had refused to comment on the documents. “It is a classified document”, it said,

Asked whether he will ask Wolfowitz, “do you believe India has hegemonic ambitions,” Dixit aid “I will certainly ask him if this report was based on his perception and his value Judgement. And then I will come to my own conclusions on how to advise my government and how to react to it.

India, he said, was not native enough to think there would only be one policy within the US administration,

But, he hoped India had the capacity to make an overall Judgement in this regard about what the US government policy was, “WO US government policy was. “We will judge events as they evolve,”

He said that he would also be talking to the National Security Council (His meeting Admiral Jonathan Howe, deputy national security adviser the resident)

Asked whether the Pentagon document shows that it has not shed its old perception of India s a surrogate of the Soviet Union, Dixit said.

Article extracted from this publication >> March 20, 1992