By IOL South Asia Correspondent

NEW DELHI, October 1 (IslamOnline) - The days of India-Iraq friendship may be numbered. At least, the future of India’ s friendship with Saddam-led Iraq is no longer certain, because India has accepted the U.S. doctrine of sovereign right to pre-emptive attack on a perceived enemy.

India’s Finance Minister (till recently Foreign Minister) Jaswant Singh’s remarks to the media in Washington Sunday, September 29, that not only the U.S. but any other country had the right to launch a pre-emptive attack against another shows the gradual shift in India’ s policy. It is clear that India is raring to put this doctrine to its use in its regional conflicts.

Only on September 6, India’ s ambassador to Russia, Krishna Raghunath, told media persons in Moscow, “India and Russia have a common stand on Iraq and, like most of the members of the global community, speak for the political solution of the crisis on the basis of UN resolutions.”

Earlier, India’ s Foreign Minister Yashwant Sinha, addressing Arab and African ambassadors in New Delhi said, “We are very clear that there should be no armed action against any country, more particularly with the avowed purpose of changing a regime” .

That stand may not hold any longer. In late September, defense analyst K Subramaniam, who is very close to the establishment, wrote an article in the Times of India arguing that India should look at the Iraq situation "pragmatically" and accept the U.S. diktat rather than going through the "futile exercise" of opposing it.

India has been assiduously cultivating the US and Israel over the last few years, and it would be foolhardy to expect that it would sacrifice its ties with these two countries for Iraq. The Iraqis, who know this, have been trying hard to induct India into the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC) as a special favor to India.

Bahrain, which has struck large business deals with India, too, has been trying to get India into the OIC. However, the Iraqis were wary of India because during Operation Desert Storm also India had been opposing the war, but allowed U.S. warplanes to refuel at its military airports.

Keeping the past experience in mind, Iraqi ambassador to India Salah al Mukhtar told reporters in Mumbai last month, “Iraq hopes that this time Indian policy will be clearer. India has understood fully now that any war with Iraq, besides the absence of legal coverage, will affect directly its major interests. India has at least four million Indians working in the Gulf.”

What the Iraqi ambassador did not say was that out of the “four million Indians in the Gulf region,” there are only a few thousand left in Iraq. Indian remittances from the Gulf are around 6$ billion per year. Very little of this comes from Iraq now.

However, Indo-Iraq business ties had grown recently to nearly $1 billion per year from a modest $300 million in 1999. Recently Iraq has dangled some lucrative contracts, including oil exploration rights, to win Indian support.

As it is, India and Russia, despite their wishes, can do little to thwart a concerted American bid at regime-change in Iraq. Realizing their limitations, it is likely that they would decide to go along.

India would not object to U.S. use of force if it is mandated by the UN. According to reports originating from official sources, there is going to be no publicly stated opposition to U.S. moves in the near future. The government is mainly concerned about the possible spiraling effect on oil prices following a US invasion of Iraq.

That India would not go all the way to support Iraq was clear from Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee’ s statement in New York about “ the international community’ s desire to see the relevant UN resolution on weapons of mass destruction complied with fully.”