Singh, Ahmadinejad

Washington, Sept. 13: For Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who is heading for Cuba for the non-aligned summit, the choice of a new external affairs minister is the least of his worries.

Singh has been inundated with requests for bilateral meetings in Havana, not all such requests from leaders he will be comfortable to be photographed with.

The Prime Minister’s biggest dilemma is that Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad wants to meet him in Havana.

Photographs showing Singh and Ahmadinejad will make many Americans in the White House, the state department and on Capitol Hill hit the roof precisely at a time when the Indo-US nuclear deal is expected to come up in the US Senate for a final vote.

Indian officials travelling with Singh, who is now in Brazil en route to Cuba, are piously hoping that Ahmadinejad will not at least hug the Prime Minister if and when their meeting takes place on the sidelines of the NAM summit.

Last year when he was in New York for the UN General Assembly, Singh agreed to meet Ahmadinejad, but cancelled the meeting after it was scheduled, according to Iranian diplomats at the UN.

It added to Tehran’s resentment towards New Delhi, compounding the ill-feeling caused by India’s stand against Iran’s nuclear programme at the International Atomic Energy Agency.

This time, however, a meeting with the Iranian leader will be hard to avoid: in Havana, at a summit parallel to that of the NAM, Iran will take over the chair of the G15 group of developing countries from Algeria.

India is an active member of the G15 and Singh’s next dilemma over Iran will be whether to travel to Tehran if the group’s summit is held under Ahmadinejad’s presidency in his country.

The six-day summit’s official-level talks began in Havana on September 11 with not a single speaker making even a passing reference to the fifth anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

NAM’s silence on the events of September 11, 2001, immediately angered the Americans.

The Republican co-chair of the US Congressional Caucus on India, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, said in a statement: “To host the summit on the fifth anniversary of the monstrous and despicable terrorist attacks of 9/11 only reinforces the odious view that the Cuban regime has toward western nations where freedom and democracy thrive.”

The Cubans are taunting the Americans. Mocking the Bush coinage of “axis of evil”, Cuba’s deputy foreign minister Abelardo Moreno said yesterday: “I can’t help thinking that the ‘axis of evil’ is growing and will soon be made up of 118 nations,” NAM’s current strength.

What is worse for the Americans, Fidel Castro’s government extended an invitation to the US to attend the Havana summit.

The US has attended several previous NAM summits as a “guest”, but Michael Parmly, head of the US mission to Cuba, which functions under the Swiss flag, said he did not even pick up the invitation from the foreign ministry in Havana.

Singh’s other worries are over the question of associating with the summit’s political declaration drafted by the Cubans, its stand on Lebanon and any meeting with Hamas leaders, in case the Palestine delegation is led by Hamas and not Fatah.

The summit’s stand on Iran’s nuclear programme is unlikely to pose problems since Tehran’s talks with the Europeans are on track for a negotiated settlement.