INDIA: India said yesterday it would reconsider sending its soldiers to Iraq, following the unanimous UN Security Council vote on the US-British resolution earlier this week, on handing over the country to an interim Iraqi administration on June 30th.
"Now the situation has changed. There is a resolution unanimously passed in the UN and there are Arab members in it. We will look at it very carefully," India's Foreign Minister, Mr Natwar Singh, declared.
He was speaking after meeting the US Secretary of State, Mr Colin Powell, in Washington where he was attending Ronald Reagan's funeral.
"It would be premature for me to say aye or nay [on sending troops]," he added at a joint press conference with Mr Powell.
After much hesitation and heated public and political debate, India's Hindu nationalist-led government, which was voted out of office a few weeks ago, had declined last year to send an army division to Iraq for peacekeeping operations, despite repeated requests and pressure from Washington.
It had declared it was willing for its soldiers to serve under UN command, but not as part of the US-led multinational force.
Last week's sixth Indo-US Defence Policy Group (DPG) in Delhi had also touched on the "possibility" of India dispatching an army brigade to Iraq to provide security to UN personnel after power was handed over to the interim Iraqi administration later this month.
Military sources said that at the three-day DPG meeting US officials attempted to "overcome" India's reservations by scaling down their earlier request on sending a 19,000-strong division to Iraq to dispatching a brigade of 3,000 to 4,000 troops instead.
Senior US officials said the Indian force would be utilised "exclusively to protect UN staff and establishments that have increasingly become militant targets".
In a related development, the US Defence Secretary, Mr Donald Rumsfeld, visited Bangladesh on June 5th urging Dhaka, too, to send an army brigade to Iraq. Bangladesh's response was awaited.
Western security sources said Washington had also approached Pakistan, a major non-NATO US ally to contribute a similar force.