When Prime Minister Narendra Modi made his surprise trip to
lahore via Moscow and kabul, steel baron Sajjan Jindal was part of the entourage, and this set off toungues wagging on how Big Business was helping guide the two nations foreign policy !
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| Modi with Sharif at Lahore |
Media revelations had it that exactly a year ago that the Haryana-based business tycoon
had secretly organised the meeting between
Modi and Pakistani Premier Nawaz Sharif at a Kathmandu hotel as part of a backroom peace
initiative pushed by Big Business. Sharif
is a fellow steel baron from the Pakistani Punjab whose steel mill - Ittefaq –
is run by his son.
Jindal whose firm JSW
has a 16 % stake in theIndian consortium which won rights to mine the iron
rich Hajigak mines in that landlocked country, is being seen as a key corporate
go-between for Modi’s diplomatic overtures to India’s estranged neighbor,
Pakistan.
For several years now the state-run Steel Authority of India Ltd. consortium has been trying
to make some headway in its projects to mine Hajigak which is believed to hold
1.8 billion tonnes of high grade iron ore, but have been trumped by the
logistics challenge posed to shipping the ore to India.
The easiest and cheapest route is by road or rail through
Pakistan. However, with Pakistan refusing to let India ship goods through its
territory to Afghanistan on Indian vehicles or rail wagons, such a project has
been a non-starter.
The support which Pakistan lends to terror groups which
operate in Afghanistan – including the Haqqani network – also make it a
security challenge to have long term mining operations in the central Bamyan
province where the mines are located.
Interestingly, Jindal’s brother and Congress politician
Naveen Jindal owns another 16 % stake in
the mining consortium, while other family members have stakes in it through
various other corporate entities, which analysts calculate could tote up to a
44 % stake.
The corporate grapewine has it that the interest Jindals
have in Afghanistan’s future potential have made them keen to involve
themselves in commercial diplomacy between India and Pakistan.
Indian corporates who have invested huge sums in gas based
power plants and fertilizer factories are also keen that an American backed gas
pipeline project – TAPI (Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India) – too gets
off the ground to bring cheap gas from former Soviet Bloc countries of the
Central Asia to North India.
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| Jindal : ties cast in iron |
Again analysts point out that the pipeline could remain a
pipedream like the Iran Pakistan-India pipeline unless India and Pakistan could
come to an agreement between the two on
peace in Afghanistan and between India and Pakistan, besides negotiating
safe passage for gas through the sub-continent.
This is not the first use of corporate leaders in
back-channel diplomacy between the two countries nor the first time corporate
interests were suspected to be the reason for Tycoons taking an interest in the
estranged neighbours’ peace process.
Earlier Dhirubhai Ambani's trusted aide R K Mishra had
played an important role in Indo-Pak diplomacy during Atal Baheri Vajpayee's
prime ministership.
Reliance owns the world's largest oil refinery in Gujarat
and analysts had then speculated a three-way deal could allow it to import
Iranian crude and gas on the cheap for its refinery.
