NEW DELHI (TIP): “India remains ready to respond to the urgent needs of the Iraqi people for stability, security, political progress and economic reconstruction… were there to be an explicit UN mandate for the purpose. The Government of India could consider the deployment of our troops in Iraq.” PM Atal Behari Vajpayee stood up in Parliament on July 4, 2003 to reject a US request to send more than 15,000 Indian troops into Iraq with these words.

This, amid heavy pressure from Washington DC seeking to bolster its efforts in securing Iraq post the fall of Saddam Hussein. After deliberations and with the Opposition up in arms, India made it clear. It was not willing to put at stake its larger ties with the Gulf and be sucked into a non-UN mandated operation in a country where the US had not drawn up a clear stabilising plan.

That was the only time India had been asked by the US in categorical terms to deploy its forces overseas. In September 2015, at the Leaders’ Summit on Peacekeeping hosted by then US President Barack Obama in New York, reports suggested the Narendra Modi government was informally asked to join hands with the coalition forces fighting the Islamic State.

India had no intention of joining the faraway war on the ground, and a formal request by US was not conveyed. This week as Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman addressed mediapersons after talks with visiting US Secretary of Defence James Mattis, in response to a specific question asked by an American journalist whether India was considering contributing to troops in Afghanistan, she said: “We have made it very clear that there shall not be boots from India on the ground.”

“Indian contribution to Afghanistan has been for a very long time and has been consistently on development issues.

Medical assistance is also provided by India. So India’s contribution has been on these grounds, and we shall expand if necessary,” she added. Fact is, a formal request for boots on the ground in war-torn Afghanistan has never been on the table to begin with either by the Americans or by the Afghans. Source: The Tribune