Madeleine Albright has passed away. In Western society, there is a habit of saying only good things about a person who just passed away and avoiding controversial discussions.
But a true tribute to any person is an honest discussion. From India’s perspective, an honest discussion about Madeleine Albright is all the more important. She was the greatest enemy of India’s superpower ambitions. Want to know why? Well, let me explain.
Pokhran tests and American sanctions
1998 was a landmark year in India. It marked the arrival of India as a nuclear weapon State and strengthened its defences in face of sabre-rattling by its two enemy neighbours- China and Pakistan.
But India faced a pushback directly from the United States. The Bill Clinton administration had then imposed sanctions against India, effectively ending US assistance to India and also threatening to cut India’s access to lending by global financial institutions.
The woman pushing the sanctions was none other than the US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. She had then described the nuclear tests conducted by India as “a felony against the future”.
It was an era when sanctions were being perceived in the US as overused and ineffective. However, Albright was the one who rooted for them and soon other officials in the Bill Clinton administration too agreed on imposing them.
The CTBT drama
This wasn’t it. Madeleine Albright also tried to compel former Prime Minister, Late Atal Bihari Vajpayee into signing the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT).
She also tried to force the Vajpayee government into signing the CTBT. But here is the fun part- Albright kept forcing New Delhi to sign CTBT, but the US Senate had itself rejected it by a narrow 51-48 vote.
So, Albright was practically saying- we won’t ratify CTBT, but we want India to be bound by the treaty restricting nuclear tests. Till today, the US has not ratified the test ban treaty. However, under Albright, it was ready to force India to adopt it.
Albright’s Kashmir plebiscite dream
And finally, Madeleine Albright was obsessed with Kashmir in a big way. In fact, right after India conducted the Pokhran test in 1998, Albright made it clear that she intended to internationalize Kashmir. She said that she wanted to push Kashmir to the global agenda. Albright said, “I think international attention on it will help.”
Read more: Indian forces prepare for the final fight in Kashmir
The then US Secretary of State also said that bilateral discussions between the Prime Ministers of India and Pakistan on their disputes, including Kashmir, “is very important since they deal with the root causes”.
In 2003 however, Albright crossed all limits. She was then out of the US administration as the Bush administration came to power in 2001. Anyhow, she sought to describe Kashmir as one of the ‘most dangerous and tragic places in the world’.
And then, in an act of denial of India’s sovereignty, Albright also said that a plebiscite or referendum was the best way to judge the wishes of the Kashmiri people.
Albright thus pushed Pakistan’s agenda on Kashmir for many years. Given a chance, she wouldn’t have let India become a nuclear-weapon State, nor would she have allowed India to assert its rightful sovereignty over Kashmir. However, Albright failed in her anti-India motives and ultimately American leaders had to establish better ties with India as New Delhi’s stature grew in international politics. However, this doesn’t undermine the future that Albright was India’s number one enemy for a long time.