Sweden wants to upgrade defence ties with India

JYOTI MALHOTRA

New Delhi, May 4, 2007: Sweden hopes that an upgraded defence relationship will be the linchpin of its ties with India, but the truth is that the Congress-led government in New Delhi remains doubly wary about sourcing anything from a country which sold them the Bofors gun 20 years ago.

Swedish foreign minister Carl Bildt who is in town to undertake a rediscovery of India, met Defence minister A K Antony yesterday, following up that encounter today with meetings with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and External Affairs minister Pranab Mukherjee.

While Bildt told `The Telegraph’ this morning that he had told Anthony that offers to sell both the Bofors howitzer gun and the Gripen multi-role combat aircraft are ``on the table’’, Swedish ambassador to India Lars-Olof Lindgren is said to have pointed out that Stockholm hopes that an upgraded defence relationship will be the centrepiece in bilateral ties.

Sweden is one of four countries who has been shortlisted by India to buy 126 fighter aircraft, a deal that is worth a whopping $7 billion, the others being the US, Russia and France.

And while the Army seems quite delighted with the performance of the Bofors howitzer, besides which the Swedish government has promised not to have any third-party conditions, truth is that the Congress-led establishment is still hugely nervous about doing another defence deal with Sweden.

``The Bofors may be a very good gun, but it has six times the problems any other gun has,’’ senior government sources said.

Still Bildt, clearly a man of many parts -- he may be the only leader in the world to have his own blog (``it is the most popular blog in all Sweden,’’ Bildt said) -- seemed also to want to reinvent the bilateral relationship by supporting the Indo-US nuclear deal that would give New Delhi a much greater profile worldwide.

``We have concerns about what the deal may do to the non-proliferation regime,’’ Bildt said, adding however, that Sweden understood well India’s need to have energy to support its economic growth.

``Clearly, nuclear energy is part of the answer,’’ Bildt said, earlier pointing out that Sweden doesn’t see India ``proliferating in any way.’’
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However, he also pointed out that the 123 nuclear agreement ``does not look too imminent to me.’’

The Swedish foreign minister seemed concerned with the radicalization of the Middle East as a result of the way the war in Iraq was going, pointing out that there remained a ``grave problem with Islamic terrorists,’’ whether it was the Al-Qaeda or ``domestic terrorism’’ within Iraq.

But Bildt, who along with several worthy neo-conservatives, was a member of the pro-Bush Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, said he now believed that the Bush administration ``took a somehow different route (on Iraq) from what I would have recommended.’’

Bildt said he and PM Manmohan Singh also spoke about Iran and that Sweden was concerned about several aspects of the Iranian nuclear programme.

On Afghanistan, where Swedish troops are part of the international peace-keeping force stationed there, Bildt said Sweden would like India to play a bigger role, but on the political, not on the military side.

ENDS****