Rudd hoping to ease tensions with India

CANBERRA - Prime Minister Kevin Rudd flew into New Delhi yesterday with key aims in mind: to help ease tensions over violence and scams against Indian students in Australia, and to move beyond the rhetoric of curry, cricket and kangaroos.

Rudd's visit, sandwiched between a surprise Armistice Day visit to troops in Afghanistan and the Apec summit in Singapore, is the latest and most significant of a string of similar missions by federal and state ministers.

The flurry of activity was spurred by publicity surrounding the beatings of at least 30 Indian students in the past five months (the most recent a week ago), the collapse of international colleges educating them, and revelations of widespread fraud.

Officials feared the crisis would undermine the A$15 billion-a-year ($19 billion) foreign education industry, Australia's third-biggest export earner.

But the agenda outlined in official statements demonstrates the far broader incentive for Rudd's talks with counterpart Manmohan Singh to go well.

Potential points of discussion include trade and a possible free trade agreement, the fraught issue of sales of Australian uranium, strategic priorities, energy, climate change, and co-operation in science and education.

But relations between Canberra and the rising Asian superpower have not been all that they should have been, even without Indian students being beaten in the streets or Australia's reluctance to sell uranium to New Delhi because of its refusal to sign the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.

In a paper released on the eve of Rudd's visit by the Lowy Institute for International Policy, international security programme director Rory Medcalf gave a warning that without diplomatic initiatives prospects for a truly strategic partnership would be set back for years.

Rudd came to power in November 2007 with the promise of pushing India to the vanguard of its strategic relationships, and with good cause.

India was already the world's largest democracy with a population of 1.2 billion, Medcalf said, and an important trading partner, and it would become the world's most populous country by the third decade of the century as China greyed.

With China and the United States it would be one of the giant economies.

But Medcalf said Rudd's progress had been uneven and in some areas disappointing. High notes had included a A$25 billion 20-year liquid natural gas contract, increases in the level, quality and pace of contacts between political and military leaders, and an increasing awareness of common challenges.

These ranged from climate change to economic fragility, nuclear proliferation to terrorism, the fraying of Pakistan to the rise of China, and the reshaping of the global and Asian diplomatic order.

Earlier, relations had been boosted by the in-principle decision by former conservative Prime Minister John Howard to sell uranium to India for peaceful purposes, co-operation in an "unprecedented" naval exercise with the US, Japan and Singapore, and the two countries' participation in a new diplomatic forum with the US and Japan.

"Yet in 2008 the big stories were Indian dismay and confusion about two policy shifts under the Rudd Government," Medcalf said.

One was the decision to reverse Howard's position on uranium and withhold sales, based on Labor's long-held policy of not exporting to states outside the treaty.The other was Canberra's shift away from the four-power dialogue.

Although Japan and India were already having second thoughts, New Delhi had been offended by Canberra's "clumsy" handling of its position - downplaying the initiative in company with China's foreign minister.

"These episodes reinforced the obsession in some quarters of the Indian commentariat with the theory, however ill-informed, that Kevin Rudd's close knowledge of China left him somehow in China's thrall," Medcalf said.

But Medcalf said it would be shortsighted to dismiss prospects for a relationship that remained broadly positive and rich with potential.

The present problems that had sent Rudd and other ministers to India were opening a window for serious diplomatic initiatives by both sides.

"But this opening has a downside," Medcalf said.

"If it is squandered, the cost may be more than just another opportunity missed.

"Several times before, Australian leaders have voiced grand aspirations about revolutionising relations with India." Commitments had to follow.