Chapter 436: The Ledger of the Two Hemispheres
Chapter 436: Chapter 395: The Ledger of the Two Hemispheres
Chapter 395: The Ledger of the Two Hemispheres
September 10, 1979 — 0900 Hours to 2230 Hours IST
Hyderabad House, New Delhi
At eight-forty on the morning of Monday, the tenth of September, the sky above New Delhi was the washed, brilliant cobalt that follows the final retreat of the southwest monsoon.
When the blue-and-white Boeing VC-137C of the United States Presidential Air Fleet had touched down at Palam Technical Area two hours earlier, there had been no crowds of placard-waving protestors along the airport road and no frost on the tarmac. Eleven months had passed since the Geneva Accords and the Tokyo G8 Summit had buried the animosity of 1977 beneath billions of dollars of mutual commerce. Yet as the long motorcade of black Cadillacs and armoured Indian Shikari staff sedans swept through the wrought-iron gates of Hyderabad House, the men inside both sets of vehicles knew that today was not a courtesy call.
In Geneva in January 1978, Washington and New Delhi had negotiated to end an economic war.
Today, four days after Prime Minister Yashwantrao Chavan had stood in the Central Hall of Parliament and torn up India’s membership in the Non-Aligned Movement, and nine days after the Indian 14th Corps had planted its flags along the 2,600-metre line of the Tian Shan mountains, the two largest capitalist democracies on earth were meeting to do something far more dangerous and far more permanent.
They were meeting to audit the rules of a world in which they were now the two dominant commercial syndicates.
Inside the high-ceilinged, teak-panelled Nizam’s State Dining Room—converted into a sealed, electronically swept plenary chamber—the twenty-four-foot rosewood table was divided down its length by a strip of green baize.
On the American side sat Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, National Security Advisor Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Secretary of the Treasury W. Michael Blumenthal, flanked by Assistant Secretary of State for Economic Affairs Richard Cooper, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Robert Komer, and two senior corporate-technical plenipotentiaries representing the American energy, mining, and aerospace consortium waiting at the Oberoi Hotel: Clifton Garvin of Exxon and George Shultz of Bechtel.
On the Indian side sat Prime Minister Yashwantrao Balwantrao Chavan at the centre; to his right, Chief Minister Karan Shergill of Uttar Pradesh; to his left, Dr. Manmohan Singh, Finance Minister of Uttar Pradesh and Special Macroeconomic Plenipotentiary of the Union; alongside Minister of External Affairs Sardar Swaran Singh, Foreign Secretary Ram Sathe, and Dr. Arjun Sengupta of the Asian-African Development Bank.
There were no junior note-takers. The heavy brass-studded double doors were locked from the inside.
Prime Minister Chavan did not waste time on ceremonial speeches. He gestured toward the silver coffee service and the pots of hot Darjeeling tea already placed along the table, folded his hands on his blotter, and looked across at Cyrus Vance.
“Secretary Vance, Secretary Blumenthal, Dr. Brzezinski—welcome back to New Delhi,” Chavan said in his deep, unhurried baritone. “Allow me first to convey the appreciation of the Government of India, and of the Provisional Council in Kashgar, for President Carter’s statement from the White House last Saturday evening recognizing the Free and Democratic Republic of Tarim and condemning the Soviet military occupation of Dzungaria.
“Your private message of September 1st laid out four areas of structural coordination between Washington and New Delhi: the commercial development of the Tarim Basin; the reciprocal opening of our financial and industrial markets; the stabilization of Central America and East Asia; and the impending explosion in the Persian Gulf. We have twelve hours today. Let us put the ledgers on the table and begin with Item One: Kashgar.”
Treasury Secretary Michael Blumenthal opened his thick black leather binder first. Beside him, Zbigniew Brzezinski leaned back, watching Karan Shergill across the table with the sharp, appreciative gaze of a fencing master saluting an opponent whose footwork he knew by heart.
“Mr. Prime Minister, Chief Minister Shergill, Dr. Singh,” Blumenthal began, his voice crisp and businesslike. “When President Carter went before the television cameras on the night of September 1st to recognize the Republic of Tarim and announce that the United States would open an Embassy in Kashgar this week, we took New Delhi’s Vigyan Bhavan declaration at face value: namely, that the Tarim Basin is an open, sovereign democracy and not a closed colonial preserve.
“As we communicated in our backchannel note, a consortium of leading American energy, mining, and engineering corporations—led by Exxon, Chevron, Kerr-McGee, Westinghouse, and Bechtel, backed by a five-hundred-million-dollar initial facility from the US Export-Import Bank—has flown to New Delhi with us today.
“We propose a straightforward 80–20 Sovereign Consortium Framework for the development of the Tarim Basin’s fifty billion barrels of petroleum, eight trillion cubic metres of natural gas, and one hundred and forty thousand tonnes of uranium oxide,” Blumenthal said, sliding the printed American term sheet across the rosewood table. “Eighty percent to Bhartiya Urja Mahasagar (BUM), the Indian National Petroleum Endowment (INPE), and the Treasury of the Republic of Tarim; twenty percent full equity to the American Consortium.”
Across the table, Karan Shergill did not even open the American folder. He rested his right forearm on top of the leather cover and looked straight at Blumenthal and Brzezinski.
“Ten percent,” Karan said calmly. “Non-voting revenue participation. And only in the central Taklamakan petroleum blocks around Shayar.”
Blumenthal frowned, leaning forward. “Ten percent non-voting in one oil block? Chief Minister, be serious. Without President Carter’s immediate diplomatic recognition on Saturday night—and without the United States blocking the Soviet and Chinese protests at the UN Security Council—you would be facing a unified global diplomatic front accusing India of partitioning China alongside Moscow!
“More than that,” Zbigniew Brzezinski added softly, leaning his elbows on the table and letting his heavy Polish accent carry the unspoken steel beneath the velvet, “a twenty-percent American corporate presence on the ground in Kashgar, Yarkand, Aksu, and Khotan—alongside a thirty-man US Embassy—is the finest security insurance policy the Republic of India could ever purchase in Central Asia.
“The Tarim Basin is three hundred thousand square miles of desert and mountain gorges bordered by Soviet Kirghizia, Soviet Tajikistan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan,” Brzezinski said evenly. “When American engineers, American drill rigs, and the American flag are invested at twenty percent across every oilfield and uranium basin from Kashgar to Korla, two things happen automatically: first, Marshal Ustinov’s generals sitting above you on the Tian Shan mountains know that crossing the 2,600-metre line means shooting at American citizens and American property; and second, no radical preacher or intelligence service in the Middle East will dare funnel a single rifle or a single gold coin to stir up religious insurgency along your six-hundred-mile railway and pipeline corridors.
“Twenty percent is not a tax, Chief Minister,” Brzezinski said with a thin, cold smile. “It is the price of absolute peace and quiet while you pump four thousand crore rupees a year out of the sand.”
Karan held Brzezinski’s gaze for three seconds without blinking.
Neither man needed to say a word more about the CIA’s capabilities in the bazaars of Khotan. Karan knew the threat was real, and Brzezinski knew that Karan knew—and also knew that if the CIA ever actually tried to arm jihadists in Kashgar, R&AW and the 9th Para-Commandos would turn every CIA safe house in Peshawar and Islamabad into a smoking crater within forty-eight hours.
“We do not pay protection money to anyone, Dr. Brzezinski,” Karan replied, his voice quiet and level as steel. “If anyone tries to drop a match into the bazaars of Kashgar or Yarkand, we have forty thousand soldiers and the 9th Para-Commandos on the spot to extinguish the match—and the fingers that held it.
“However,” Karan continued, leaning back slightly and gesturing to Dr. Manmohan Singh, “we are businessmen. And we recognize the value of shared capital, shared risk, and specific technology—provided the rules of control and the rules of geographic reciprocity are respected.”
Dr. Manmohan Singh opened his blue folder, his voice calm, precise, and unhurried.
“We are prepared to move from ten percent to twenty percent (20%) participation for the American Consortium across the Tarim petroleum, natural gas, copper, and uranium development blocks,” Manmohan said, “subject to three non-negotiable structural conditions:
“Condition One: Operational Control and Non-Voting Equity. The twenty-percent American stake shall be structured as Class-B Non-Voting Participating Equity. One hundred percent of board voting control, pipeline routing authority, security management, and sovereign pricing discipline—including adherence to our forty-dollar global oil ceiling and Rupee-clearing rules—remains vested permanently in Bhartiya Urja Mahasagar (BUM) and the Department of Atomic Energy of India. American firms receive twenty percent of net commercial dividends and twenty percent of physical off-take at benchmark prices, with zero veto over operations.”
“Wait a minute, Manmohan,” Clifton Garvin of Exxon protested from the second row, leaning forward. “You want Exxon, Chevron, and Kerr-McGee to put up two billion dollars in capital and drilling technology for non-voting shares where BUM makes every operational decision?”
“We put forty thousand Indian soldiers and two hundred Arjuna tanks across seventeen-thousand-foot passes to secure that basin, Mr. Garvin,” Karan said flatly, not even looking at the Exxon chairman. “You are putting up drill bits and balance-sheet paper. In a strategic frontier zone six hundred yards below the Soviet Red Army, there cannot be two captains on the bridge. BUM commands the ship; you collect twenty percent of the cargo.
“Condition Two,” Karan continued, looking at Blumenthal and George Shultz of Bechtel: “Mandatory Technology Transfer in Ultra-Deep In-Situ Uranium Leaching and Environmental Rehabilitation.
“The seven uranium belts at Yarkand, Uch-Turfan, and Khotan lie beneath fragile desert aquifers and ancient karez underground irrigation channels that have kept the oasis farms of the Tarim Basin alive for two thousand years,” Karan said, his tone sharpening with genuine engineering insistence. “We will not allow strip-mining or open-pit acid tailing ponds that poison the groundwater of Kashgar and give our miners lung cancer at thirty-five—the way Jharia was poisoned for decades!
“Kerr-McGee and Westinghouse in Wyoming and New Mexico have perfected closed-loop, deep-well alkaline In-Situ Recovery (ISR) uranium leaching and automated subterranean aquifer restoration—injecting oxygenated sodium bicarbonate solution down through double-cased wells two thousand feet deep to dissolve the uranium directly out of the sandstone without digging a single open pit, without exposing a single miner to radioactive dust, and pumping neutralizing agents back into the rock afterward so the water table returns to drinking purity within twelve months!
“To earn your twenty-percent equity in the Tarim uranium and mineral blocks, Kerr-McGee, Westinghouse, and Bechtel will transfer one hundred percent of their deep-well alkaline ISR leaching technology, down-hole submersible pump patents, and full post-mining ecological rehabilitation systems to the Indian Atomic Energy Commission and Shergill Mining—and apply those exact environmental standards to every well in the Tarim Basin and in Bihar and Orissa!”
Blumenthal glanced at George Shultz and Robert Komer. Sharing commercial alkaline in-situ leaching and environmental remediation technology was entirely civilian mining engineering—and it solved the exact political criticism that environmental groups in the West might otherwise raise against American firms mining uranium in Central Asia.
“We can agree to the Class-B non-voting structure and the full transfer of deep-well ISR leaching and ecological rehabilitation technology,” Blumenthal said, nodding slowly. “What is Condition Three?”
Karan’s dark eyes gleamed with a sudden, predatory warmth.
He reached to the side of his chair, pulled out a large rolled map of North, Central, and South America, and spread it across the centre of the rosewood table on top of the map of Xinjiang.
“Condition Three,” Karan said smoothly, “is that a highway between two superpowers must have traffic moving in both directions.
“You ask us to open our brand-new strategic backyard in the Tarim Basin so that Exxon, Chevron, and Kerr-McGee can take a twenty-percent non-voting slice of Asian oil, Asian copper, and Asian uranium.
“Very well. Then the United States will open its hemisphere to Bhartiya Urja Mahasagar, Shergill Mining, and the Indian National Petroleum Endowment on the exact same structure: twenty to thirty percent non-voting equity participation across the Americas!”
Cyrus Vance and Michael Blumenthal both stiffened in their chairs, staring down at the map of the Western Hemisphere.
“Specifically,” Karan said, tapping four red circles marked across the map of the Americas with his silver pen:
“First: The Deep-Water Gulf of Mexico. BUM and Shergill Offshore Engineering have developed the world’s most advanced deep-water subsea manifold and semi-submersible platform technology at Bombay High and the Andaman Basin. We want a twenty-five percent non-voting equity stake alongside Exxon, Shell Oil US, and Chevron in the new deep-water outer continental shelf leases in the Gulf of Mexico off Texas and Louisiana!
“Second: The Copper of Chile and Peru. Under the military regimes in Santiago and Lima, state mining monopolies like Codelco and Centromin are starving for capital to expand the Chuquicamata, El Teniente, and Cerro Verde porphyry copper belts.
“Third: The Bauxite and Iron Ore of Brazil. In the Amazon basin, the Carajás iron-ore range and the Trombetas bauxite deposits are the richest in the Western Hemisphere, currently locked up inside sluggish state corporations under the Brazilian military government.
“Fourth: The Bauxite and Alumina of the Caribbean and Central America—specifically Guyana, Suriname, Trinidad, and Jamaica.” Karan looked straight at Cyrus Vance. “In Guyana, Suriname, and Trinidad, over half the population consists of people of Indian origin—the great-grandchildren of indentured labourers from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar! For ten years, corrupt local regimes in Georgetown and Kingston have nationalized the bauxite mines, mismanaged the alumina refineries into bankruptcy, and discriminated against Indian workers while their economies rot!
“We want a twenty-to-thirty-percent equity partnership with Alcoa, Reynolds, Kaiser, Anaconda, and Bechtel across the Gulf of Mexico oil leases, the Chilean copper mines, the Brazilian iron and bauxite projects, and the Caribbean bauxite belt!”
For five seconds, the American delegation stared at Karan in stunned silence.
“Hold on, Chief Minister!” Assistant Secretary of State Richard Cooper blurted out, his glasses slipping down his nose. “Aside from the Gulf of Mexico—which is under US Department of the Interior jurisdiction—the copper mines in Chile, the Carajás iron mines in Brazil, and the bauxite mines in Guyana and Jamaica are owned by nationalized state companies of those Latin American governments! How can the United States Government grant Indian corporations a twenty-five-percent stake in mines that were nationalized by generals in Santiago, Brasília, and Georgetown?!”
Dr. Manmohan Singh adjusted his spectacles and looked across the table at Cooper and Blumenthal with the serene, devastatingly polite expression of an apex central banker explaining how gravity works.
“Mr. Cooper,” Manmohan said gently, “between 1973 and 1979, the military governments of Brazil, Chile, Peru, and the state corporations of Guyana and Jamaica borrowed seventy-eight billion dollars from Citibank, Chase Manhattan, Bank of America, and the International Monetary Fund.
“Every single one of those governments is currently running a massive balance-of-payments deficit and has sovereign debt rollovers coming due in New York and London over the next twelve months—while simultaneously relying on forty-dollar Indian stabilization crude and AADB commodity clearing lines to keep their ports and electricity grids running.
“Why did those Latin American governments nationalize those mines in the late 1960s and early 1970s?” Manmohan asked softly. “To feed bloated military bureaucracies while output fell by thirty percent and their citizens remained poor!
“If the United States Treasury and the IMF in Washington, and the Asian-African Development Bank and the INPE in New Delhi and Bombay, issue a joint, coordinated Sovereign Debt and Structural Adjustment Directive next month to Santiago, Brasília, Lima, and Georgetown—”
Across the table, Zbigniew Brzezinski’s eyes widened, and then a slow, wicked, utterly delighted grin spread across the National Security Advisor’s face as he grasped the sheer, ruthless beauty of what the Indians were proposing.
“—we inform those governments,” Karan picked up seamlessly from Manmohan, a matching glint of dark amusement in his eyes, “that neither the IMF nor Wall Street nor the AADB will roll over a single dollar or rupee of their sovereign debt—and in fact, that both Washington and New Delhi will impose joint financial sanctions citing ‘human rights, democratic governance, and economic mismanagement’—unless they immediately denationalize and privatize forty-nine percent of their state copper, bauxite, and iron-ore monopolies into joint-venture operating consortia owned by American and Indian corporations!”
Karan leaned back and spread his hands with deadpan benevolence.
“After all, Cyrus,” Karan said, “as President Carter himself says so eloquently—state monopolies breed tyranny, whereas free enterprise and human rights go hand in hand. Either those regimes in South America and the Caribbean open their mines to benefit our citizens and yours through efficient private management, or they can sit in the dark under joint US–Indian human-rights sanctions and explain to their voters why their currency just collapsed!”
For two seconds, Cyrus Vance stared at Karan—and then Michael Blumenthal and Zbigniew Brzezinski burst out laughing at the exact same instant.
Clifton Garvin of Exxon and George Shultz of Bechtel looked at each other and grinned from ear to ear. For ten years, American mining and oil companies had been kicked around Latin America and the Caribbean by tinpot nationalists and military juntas who nationalized American shafts and then begged Wall Street for loans—because whenever Washington threatened sanctions alone, the juntas threatened to run to the Non-Aligned Movement or Moscow for sympathy!
Now, India—which had just killed the Non-Aligned Movement on Thursday and controlled the only alternative bank and oil supply in the world—was offering to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Wall Street and use a joint IMF–AADB sledgehammer to force Latin America and the Caribbean to privatize their crown-jewel mines into joint US–Indian hands!
“God almighty,” Blumenthal chuckled, wiping his eyes and shaking his head at Karan and Manmohan. “If Adam Smith and Lord Clive had a baby, he would look just like the two of you. You want to useJimmy Carter’s human-rights doctrine and the AADB’s oil ledger to denationalize South America!”
“And in Guyana, Suriname, and Trinidad,” Swaran Singh added dryly, “where the local governments have been suppressing the Indian-origin majority for fifteen years, having Shergill Mining and Alcoa jointly own forty-nine percent of the bauxite industry guarantees that our diaspora in the Caribbean will never be touched by a corrupt policeman again.”
“Twenty-five percent non-voting equity for BUM in the Gulf of Mexico deep-water blocks,” Blumenthal said briskly, his pen already moving across the term sheet, “and a joint 60% US / 40% Indian Consortium taking forty-nine percent privatized equity in the Chilean copper, Brazilian Carajás iron-bauxite, and Caribbean bauxite denationalizations—giving Indian entities a net twenty to-five percent non-voting stake across all four Western Hemisphere resource sectors, in exchange for the American Consortium’s twenty percent stake in the Tarim Basin!
“And what about infrastructure construction in Africa and Asia under the Belt and Road?” Blumenthal pressed, looking at George Shultz of Bechtel. “You have committed fifteen thousand crore rupees—twenty billion dollars—to build ports, railways, and power grids across thirty-eight African and Asian nations.”
“Under the Belt and Road,” Manmohan Singh answered immediately, having calculated the exact figure with E. Sreedharan on Sunday afternoon, “Indian public and private engineering corporations retain seventy percent of all railway, port, and highway construction. However, in large-scale African hydroelectric dam and high-voltage turbine engineering—specifically the Inga Dam stages on the Congo River, the Kafue Gorge expansion in Zambia, and the Volta and Niger river basins—we will award thirty-five percent (35%) of the civil and hydroelectric engineering contracts to pre-qualified American construction and turbine consortia led by Bechtel, Morrison-Knudsen, and General Electric, financed directly out of AADB Series-C bonds, provided that Indian engineering firms—L&T, IRCON, and Shergill Infrastructure—receive a reciprocal twenty-to-thirty-percent sub-contracting share in Inter-American Development Bank port, rail, and highway projects in Central and South America!”
George Shultz leaned forward and tapped the table once with his knuckles. “Thirty-five percent of the African hydroelectric dam docket for Bechtel and GE, and twenty-five percent of Latin American infrastructure for Indian firms. Secretary Blumenthal—sign that before Dr. Singh changes his mind.”
At twelve-thirty, while stewards served roasted chicken, Kashmiri rogan josh, and chilled fresh lime soda in the adjoining loggia overlooking the monsoon-washed Mughal fountain, the economists and lawyers turned to Item Two: The Financial Pipeline and the 1971 Tariff and Patent Walls.
When they returned to the rosewood table at one-forty-five, Michael Blumenthal and Dr. Manmohan Singh went head-to-head on the capital accounts.
“Under our Geneva framework last year,” Blumenthal said, opening the Treasury’s capital-markets folder, “we opened the door for forty-nine-percent joint ventures in manufacturing. Now we need to connect the financial plumbing of New York and Bombay directly.
“Wall Street’s institutional investors, corporate pension funds, and major commercial banks—Citibank, Chase Manhattan, Morgan Guaranty, and Bank of America—are sitting on hundreds of billions of dollars in pension float that is getting eaten alive by ten-percent Western inflation. They want access to the ten-percent real growth of the Indian industrial miracle and the Belt and Road.
“We want the Reserve Bank of India and the AADB to grant full regulatory clearance for American institutional investors and commercial banks to purchase AADB Series-C Petro-Rupee Infrastructure Bonds, and to acquire up to twenty-five percent minority, non-controlling equity stakes inside India’s tax-free Special Economic Zones in Gorakhpur, Noida, Pune, Madras, and Rourkela!”
Manmohan Singh looked across at Karan, who gave a single, slight nod.
“We welcome long-term American pension and institutional capital into the Series-C Rupee bonds and into minority non-controlling stakes in our Special Economic Zones,” Manmohan said, his voice dropping into the crisp, unyielding register he used when laying down regulatory law to Bombay’s own industrialists.
“However, Secretary Blumenthal, let me issue a clear warning for the transcript so that your friends on Wall Street do not suffer an expensive misunderstanding later:
“Investment in an Indian Special Economic Zone must be honest, productive, long-term capital—not hot-money currency speculation or accounting fraud. Every foreign bank or fund operating inside an Indian SEZ or purchasing AADB bonds falls under the direct forensic auditing jurisdiction of the Reserve Bank of India, the AADB Vigilance Directorate, and our Chanakya-2 automated ledger clearing system.
“Every rupee entering from Citibank or Chase Manhattan must have a five-year minimum lock-in period on direct equity and a three-year minimum maturity on bonds. If any Wall Street desk attempts offshore transfer-pricing fraud, circular invoice round-tripping, or speculative short-selling against the Rupee corridor, its Indian license will be revoked at midnight, its capital frozen under the Foreign Exchange Management Act (FEMA), and its directors prosecuted under Section 420 and 409 of the Indian Penal Code. If they come to build and earn an honest twelve-percent dividend, they will be treated like kings; if they come to gamble, they will lose their shirts.”
“Fair enough,” Blumenthal said with a dry chuckle. “Wall Street understands hard rules better than vague ones. And in the other direction?”
“In the other direction,” Manmohan said, sliding a cream sheet across to the Treasury Secretary, “India’s domestic financial institutions—specifically the Life Insurance Corporation of India (LIC), the General Insurance Corporation, Shergill Capital, and the State Bank of India’s International Division—are now accumulating over nine thousand crore rupees ($12 billion USD) a year in long-term domestic insurance float and corporate surplus.
“We require the Federal Reserve Board and the Securities and Exchange Commission in Washington to grant permanent Qualified Sovereign Institutional Investor clearance to LIC, Shergill Capital, and SBI—permitting them to deploy up to five billion dollars annually of liquid Indian float into tax-exempt US municipal infrastructure bonds, Texas and Gulf Coast energy commercial paper, and high-yield industrial debentures in the American Rust Belt (Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Illinois), with full tax-treaty exemption on repatriated interest!”
Blumenthal’s eyes lit up. Five billion dollars a year of patient, long-term Indian insurance money flowing directly into cash-strapped American municipal water-and-power bonds and Rust Belt factory debt—right before the 1980 presidential election year—was political gold for Jimmy Carter.
“Approved,” Blumenthal said immediately. “The Fed and Treasury will issue the exemption rulings by October 1st.”
Then Karan Shergill leaned forward, tapping the edge of the Geneva compliance binder with his pen.
“Before we discuss lowering our December 1971 external tariff walls by a single percentage point, Cyrus,” Karan said, his voice cooling by ten degrees as he looked at Vance and Blumenthal, “we have two pieces of unfinished housekeeping from last year where American corporations and American bureaucrats have been acting like a pain in our ass.”
Vance’s eyebrows rose slightly. “Specify them, Chief Minister.”
“First: Biotechnology and Agricultural Genetics,” Karan said sharply. “At Geneva in January 1978, the United States signed a binding commitment to grant India unfettered technology transfer in recombinant DNA research, fermentation biologics, and high-yield drought-resistant seed genetics.
“Instead of honouring that treaty, what happened? Four major American agro-chemical and pharmaceutical lobbies—led by Monsanto, Eli Lilly, and Upjohn—filed suit in the United States Federal Court for the District of Columbia and have spent the last fourteen months dragging the technology transfer before the United States Supreme Court (Diamond v. Chakrabarty and the export-licensing injunctions), claiming that genetically modified microorganisms and fermentation strains are private corporate property that the US Commerce Department cannot compel them to license to Indian laboratories!”
Cyrus Vance winced slightly. As a former corporate litigator in New York, he knew the exact docket Karan was talking about.
“Chief Minister, we apologize for the judicial delay,” Vance said carefully. “Under the American separation of powers, the Executive Branch cannot simply order the Supreme Court to dismiss a private corporate lawsuit. And frankly, the reason Monsanto, Eli Lilly, and Pfizer are fighting tooth and nail in court against transferring their latest recombinant biologics and fermentation strains to Hyderabad and Pune is India’s Patent Act of 1970!
“Under your current patent law,” Vance explained, leaning forward earnestly, “India recognizes only five-to-seven-year process patents on pharmaceuticals and agro-chemicals, not product patents! American biotech firms are terrified that the moment they hand over a hundred-million-dollar recombinant insulin or interferon strain to an Indian lab under the Geneva treaty, an Indian generic manufacturer will tweak one step of the chemical synthesis, declare it a ‘new process,’ and export it globally without paying a cent in royalties!
“If India is willing to meet us halfway on intellectual property,” Vance proposed, “if you amend your law to recognize a ten-year product patent protection for genuinely new, post-1980 biological and chemical entities in international export markets—while keeping your statutory twelve-percent social pricing ceiling untouched for domestic patients inside India and the AADB’s poorest African members—the Justice Department will file an immediate statement of overriding national security interest with the Supreme Court next week, indemnify the corporations under the Defense Production Act, and put every single biotech and seed-genetics blueprint on a plane to New Delhi within thirty days!”
Karan looked at Manmohan Singh.
Since 1976,Gorakhpur and Hyderabad’s own scientists were already inventing original semiconductor lithography, composite materials, and new drug molecules that needed international patent protection of their own. Protecting domestic Indian patients with twelve-percent social pricing while enforcing a ten-year export product patent on post-1980 discoveries actually protected India’s own rising R&D empire as much as America’s.
“Domestic social pricing inside India, Tibet, Tarim, and the Tier-Three AADB states remains permanently exempt and untouchable,” Karan stated. “For commercial exports to developed markets on post-1980 biological entities, we will grant a ten-year product-patent window—effective the day the last biotech transfer packet from Bethesda and Monsanto lands in Hyderabad.”
“Done,” Vance said, writing it down. “What was the second pain in the ass, Chief Minister?”
“Your Federal Aviation Administration and your Department of Energy commercial attaches,” Karan said, his dark eyes fixing on Blumenthal and Cooper with laser precision.
“In late 1976 and early 1977,” Karan said quietly, “before our winter disagreement, teams from your Department of Energy and your commercial embassies quietly visited the boards of Shell Netherlands, VEBA in Frankfurt, and the energy ministries in Brussels, Copenhagen, Oslo, and Stockholm—whispering over lunch that buying Indian crude oil was a ‘strategic dependency risk’ and nudging them toward Saudi contracts. We didn’t complain about it; we simply pivoted to specialty lubricants, Bosch and Wacker chemical feedstocks, Rotterdam refinery optimization software, and the ASEAN and African markets, and made forty-two percent higher margins anyway.
“And in civil aviation: at Geneva last year, you withdrew your FAA objection so the British CAA certified our Shergill Aerospace Type-100 and Type-120 wide-body airliners for European skies. Since then, our twin-turbofan Type-120—which burns eighteen percent less fuel per passenger-mile than a Boeing 747 or a Lockheed L-1011 because of our composite wing box and Kaveri high-bypass engines—has taken orders from Air-India, Singapore Airlines, Malaysian Airline System, Kenya Airways, and Lufthansa.
“And how did Boeing and McDonnell Douglas respond?” Karan tapped a thin blue folder compiled by Kavya Ramanathan’s commercial-intelligence unit in Geneva and Zurich. “For the past six months, FAA technical inspectors in Seattle and Washington have been inventing a new ‘noise-abatement and composite-delamination certification sub-committee’ every three weeks to stall reciprocal US FAA Type-Certification for the Type-120, while your Ex-Im Bank whispers to KLM and Swissair that if they buy Indian wide-body jets, their landing slot allocations at JFK and O’Hare might come under ‘congestion review’!”
Blumenthal and Cooper looked intensely uncomfortable—because Kavya Ramanathan’s intelligence unit had caught them red-handed down to the exact bureaucratic sub-committee name.
“If you want the Republic of India to lower our December 1971 one-hundred-percent external tariff wall on finished American capital goods, heavy earth-moving machinery, mainframe peripherals, and consumer goods from 100% down to a phased 25% over thirty-six months,” Karan said evenly, “then the invisible bureaucratic games stop permanently today.
“We establish a Permanent Indo-American Joint Industrial & Regulatory Commission co-chaired by the US Treasury and the Indian Finance Ministry. “One: Within thirty days, the FAA issues unconditional, reciprocal Part-25 Type-Certification to the Shergill Type-100 and Type-120 airliners for all US airports and airlines, and Shergill Aerospace will source fifteen percent of its cabin environmental and landing-gear sub-assemblies for US-bound jets from American suppliers in Connecticut and Washington State. “Two: India reduces its external tariff on scheduled American capital equipment, medical electronics, and specialized industrial goods from 100% to 40% on January 1st, 1980, and to 25% by January 1st, 1982, while raising the foreign equity cap in non-defense consumer and industrial joint ventures from 49% to 51% wherever the joint venture exports at least thirty percent of its output!”
Michael Blumenthal stared at the numbers on his pad for five seconds, doing the multiplication. Dropping India’s 1971 tariff wall from 100% to 25% and allowing 51% majority-owned export joint ventures opened a seven-hundred-million-consumer market to American manufacturing on a scale that dwarfed the Marshall Plan.
“Reciprocal FAA certification within thirty days, and the Joint Regulatory Commission is established today,” Blumenthal said, extending his hand across the table to Manmohan Singh. “We have a complete commercial and financial accord.”
At four o’clock in the afternoon, the economists and corporate chairmen were dismissed from the Nizam’s Dining Room.
Only six men remained inside the locked chamber for the geopolitical and military protocols: Chavan, Karan, Swaran Singh, and Ram Sathe on the Indian side; Cyrus Vance and Zbigniew Brzezinski on the American side.
Brzezinski moved to the centre seat beside Vance, pulling the maps of Central America, East Asia, and the Persian Gulf into the middle of the table.
“Now that the bankers have made everyone rich,” Brzezinski said, his voice dropping its diplomatic polish for the direct, unadorned register of superpower realpolitik, “let us settle the guns. First: Nicaragua and the Caribbean.”
Brzezinski tapped the map of Central America, where red arrows ran from Havana across the Caribbean Sea to Managua.
“Seven weeks ago, on July 19th,” Brzezinski said, “Fidel Castro’s DGI and the Soviet KGB installed the Marxist-Leninist Sandinista junta in Managua. Since then, Cuban military cargo planes have been landing at Sandino Airport every night unloading Soviet tanks, artillery, and intelligence officers to ignite communist revolutions across El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala—six hundred miles from the Panama Canal and two hours’ flying time from Texas.
“After what your Ambassador Sen did to Fidel Castro in Havana on Tuesday—which, by the way, President Carter watched on tape in the Oval Office twice and called the finest speech delivered in the Western Hemisphere since Patrick Henry—and after Prime Minister Chavan’s speech in Parliament on Thursday abolishing India’s membership in the Non-Aligned Movement, I assume New Delhi has no remaining sentimental attachment to Comrade Castro’s friends in Managua.”
Across the table, Karan Shergill leaned back in his leather chair, a slow, wicked grin spreading across his face.
“Zbigniew,” Karan drawled, “are you asking whether the Republic of India will vote yes at the United Nations Security Council when the United States sends the Marines into Managua to liberate Nicaragua from Soviet-Cuban communism using our Kashgar doctrine?”
“That is precisely what we are asking, Chief Minister,” Cyrus Vance said gravely. “On October 15th, a Provisional Democratic Government of National Reconstruction formed by Nicaraguan civic leaders in San José and Tegucigalpa will formally appeal to the Organization of American States and the United States for immediate military intervention to restore democracy and expel the Cuban-Soviet occupiers. When Moscow brings a resolution to the UN Security Council condemning the American liberation of Nicaragua, we want India’s vote—and if necessary, India’s co-veto—standing right beside the United States.”
Karan laughed out loud—a warm, resonant, utterly shameless laugh—and leaned forward over the rosewood table, placing both palms flat on the map of the Caribbean.
“Vote yes on Nicaragua?!” Karan said, his dark eyes dancing with pure, unholy mischief as he looked from Vance to Brzezinski. “Cyrus, Zbigniew—not only will the Republic of India stand up in the Security Council and applaud the liberation of Nicaragua with both hands, I will personally write the United States Treasury a certified cheque from Shergill Capital for five billion dollars tomorrow morning if you promise to fly a B-52 over Havana on the way back and drop a nuclear bomb directly on top of Fidel Castro’s head while he is eating his eighteenth scoop of ice cream!”
For one second, Cyrus Vance and Zbigniew Brzezinski stared at him—and then the entire room exploded into roaring laughter.
Brzezinski threw his head back and laughed until his shoulders shook, slapping the mahogany table with his open palm. Prime Minister Chavan and Sardar Swaran Singh chuckled openly into their hands, while even the buttoned-up Cyrus Vance couldn’t stop a broad, helpless grin from breaking across his patrician face as he took off his glasses to wipe his eyes.
“Five billion dollars cash on delivery!” Brzezinski gasped, wiping a tear of mirth from his cheek. “My God, Chief Minister, do not tempt the Joint Chiefs of Staff—if General Jones hears there is a five-billion-dollar bounty on Castro’s beard, half the Strategic Air Command will take off from Florida before breakfast without waiting for the President’s codes!”
“And tell them to put a second bomb down the hot-water pipe of Room 412 at the Habana Libre for Ambassador Sen,” Swaran Singh added dryly, setting off a second wave of laughter around the table.
When the laughter finally settled, Karan leaned forward, his expression turning crisp and businesslike.
“Here is the Hemispheric Reciprocity Rule between Washington and New Delhi from this afternoon forward, Zbigniew,” Karan said.
“Everything in the Western Hemisphere—North America, Central America, the Caribbean, and South America—is your security backyard. Whenever the United States moves to clean out a Soviet-Cuban communist proxy in Nicaragua, Grenada, El Salvador, or anywhere else in the Americas, the Republic of India will back Washington one hundred percent at the United Nations Security Council and in every international forum, with zero moralizing and zero hesitation.
“And in return,” Karan said, his finger coming down on the map of Asia and the Indian Ocean Rim, “whenever the Republic of India moves to stabilize, liberate, or secure a state within our Asian and Indian Ocean security perimeter against communist subversion or totalitarian chaos—whether in the Tarim Basin, Tibet, Burma, or the littoral—the United States backs New Delhi at the Security Council with the exact same one-hundred-percent solidarity.”
“Agreed in full,” Cyrus Vance said immediately. “With one specific mutual guarantee in East Asia that both our governments have already co-signed in blood and money: The Korean Peninsula.”
Prime Minister Chavan nodded slowly, his face serious as he thought of the two days he had spent in this exact room eight months earlier in January with Kim Il Sung and Park Chung-hee signing the Delhi Pact.
“The Delhi Pact of January 28th, 1979, is the cornerstone of East Asian peace, Cyrus,” Chavan said firmly. “Because India placed an impenetrable Vajra-Rakshak air-defense shield over Pyongyang while simultaneously underwriting a five-billion-dollar AADB currency stabilization and the Kaesong Joint Industrial Zone for Seoul—with Ambassador Gleysteen’s full cooperation—North and South Korea are today trading tungsten carbide, electricity, and refrigerators across the DMZ and reuniting two hundred families a month at Panmunjom instead of firing nuclear missiles at each other.
“Therefore, our condition on East Asia is absolute: Zero hostility or destabilization against either North Korea or South Korea. Neither Washington nor Seoul will violate the 30%-reduced Team Spirit ceilings or provoke Pyongyang, and New Delhi will ensure through our radar datalinks and AADB clearing accounts that Kim Il Sung never fires a shot across the 38th Parallel. Korea stays frozen in profitable peace.”
“Washington concurs completely,” Vance said. “The Delhi Pact saved us from a second Korean War while China was burning. Neither North nor South Korea will be touched.”
Then Zbigniew Brzezinski pulled the last map into the centre of the rosewood table.
It was a detailed 1:250,000 military-operational chart of Iran, Iraq, the Shatt al-Arab waterway, and the Strait of Hormuz.
The room grew very quiet. The lightheartedness of the Havana remarks vanished completely; every man at the table knew that they were now looking at the powder keg that was about to blow the Middle East sky-high.
“Item Four,” Brzezinski said quietly. “Iran and Iraq.
“Let us share our raw intelligence so both sides know we are looking at the exact same picture.
“Inside Iran, the three-way civil war between General Neshat’s loyalist military junta in central Tehran, Ayatollah Beheshti’s clerical militias in the south, and Massoud Rajavi’s Soviet-backed Marxist MEK and Tudeh forces in the north has bled the Iranian armed forces white. Thanks to the Kurdish Peshmerga guerrillas in the Zagros mountains—whom your Mr. Kao has been supplying so generously with gold and heavy mortars—the Soviet KGB supply lines from Baku have been choked, preventing a communist takeover of Tehran so far.
“However,” Brzezinski said, his finger coming down hard on Basra and the Shatt al-Arab on the Iraqi border, “our KH-11 satellite passes over the past seventy-two hours show that Saddam Hussein has completed staging seven Iraqi armoured and mechanized divisions—over two thousand T-62 and T-72 tanks and ninety thousand troops—along the southwestern border of Iran opposite Khuzestan (Arabistan)!
“Saddam is paranoid, megalomaniacal, and terrified that after partitioning Xinjiang last week, the superpowers are about to carve up Iran before he can steal the Abadan and Ahvaz oilfields. Our DIA analysts estimate that Iraq will launch a full-scale invasion of Iran within the next ten to twenty days—and that the moment Iraqi tanks cross the Shatt al-Arab in the south, the Soviet Union may use the Iraqi invasion as the pretext to drop airborne and mechanized divisions from Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan into Northern Iran (Tabriz and Rasht)!”
Cyrus Vance looked straight across the table at Prime Minister Chavan and Karan Shergill.
“If Iran falls to Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist army in the south and the Soviet Red Army in the north,” Vance said gravely, “then eighty billion barrels of Iranian oil and the entire northern shore of the Persian Gulf fall into the hands of hostile dictatorships.
“Therefore, the United States proposes a Joint US–Indian Military Liberation and Stabilization Pact for Iran: if Iraq invades Khuzestan, or if the Soviet Union enters Northern Iran, the United States and the Republic of India will intervene militarily together to liberate and stabilize Iran, establish a friendly democratic-constitutional government in Tehran, and divide all post-war Iranian petroleum, gas, and reconstruction concessions fifty-fifty (50–50) between American and Indian consortia!”
Karan Shergill looked at Vance and Brzezinski across the green baize, and shook his head once—slowly, flatly, and categorically.
“No,” Karan said.
Vance frowned. “No to stabilizing Iran, or no to fifty-fifty?”
“No to both,” Karan said, his voice hard as granite.
He stood up and pointed at the maritime chart of the Arabian Sea, the Gulf of Oman, and the Strait of Hormuz.
“First: The Meridian of the Cape of Good Hope is not a figure of speech, Zbigniew. The Arabian Sea, the Gulf of Oman, and the Persian Gulf lie inside the primary maritime security perimeter of the Republic of India.
“Right now, sitting sixty miles off Muscat at the mouth of the Strait of Hormuz, is Carrier Strike Group One—our eighty-five-thousand-tonne nuclear supercarrier INS Viraat, seventy-two fourth-generation naval strike fighters, ten guided-missile destroyers and frigates, two Chakra*-class nuclear attack submarines, and two amphibious assault carriers embarked with two thousand two hundred Manduk shock troops and Sarus heavy attack helicopters, backed by another three armoured and air-mobile divisions staged four hours away in Gujarat and Maharashtra!
“We are not inviting the United States Fifth Fleet or American aircraft carrier battle groups to sail into the Arabian Sea and the Gulf of Oman to establish permanent military bases in our front yard!” Karan said, his dark eyes flashing. “And second: Fifty-fifty for what?!
“Because our carrier group is on station at Hormuz, because our airbases in Jamnagar and Bhuj are nine hundred miles from Bandar Abbas, and because our Army has the heavy armoured lift right next door, Indian soldiers, Indian sailors, and Indian airmen will carry eighty percent of the combat burden of securing southern Iran and the Strait of Hormuz! You expect the Republic of India to shed the blood of our soldiers and spend billions of rupees fighting a ground and air war in the Persian Gulf while the United States sits ten thousand miles away and collects fifty percent of the post-war Iranian oil and reconstruction contracts?!”
Zbigniew Brzezinski did not blink. He did not argue about the distance.
Instead, with a deadpan, poker-faced calm that he and Defense Secretary Harold Brown had rehearsed for three hours on the flight from Andrews Air Force Base, Brzezinski looked straight up at Karan and said:
“Who said the United States would sit ten thousand miles away while Indian soldiers did the fighting, Chief Minister?”
Brzezinski opened a top-secret Pentagon operational binder stamped JCS OPLAN 1094 — PERSIAN GULF and slid it across the table.
“We are completely willing to bleed alongside you, man for man, tank for tank,” Brzezinski said in a flat, matter-of-fact voice. “In fact, on President Carter’s order yesterday morning, the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg and the 101st Airborne (Air Assault) Division at Fort Campbell were placed on seventy-two-hour deployment alert. We have forty C-5A Galaxy and one hundred and twenty C-141 Starlifter strategic airlifters fuelled on the tarmac.
“And look at the northern border of Iran and Iraq on that map,” Brzezinski said, pointing a lean finger at Eastern Turkey. “Turkey is a full member of NATO. At Incirlik, Erzurum, and Diyarbakır in eastern Anatolia—less than one hundred and fifty miles from the northern Iraqi oilfields of Kirkuk and Mosul and the northwestern Iranian pass at Tabriz—the United States and NATO have massive, hardened airbases and pre-positioned heavy armour depots!
“If you think fifty-fifty is unfair because you don’t want India carrying the military load alone,” Brzezinski said, locking eyes with Karan, “then let the United States carry half the military load! We will fly a hundred thousand US Airborne, Marine, and Mechanized troops into Eastern Turkey and the Saudi airbases at Dhahran next week, march south across the Turkish border into Iraq and Iran with five hundred M60 tanks and three wings of F-15s, and fight half the war ourselves! Shall I tell General Jones at the Pentagon to launch the airlift tomorrow morning?”
For three seconds, there was dead silence on the Indian side of the table.
Prime Minister Chavan, Swaran Singh, and Karan exchanged a single, lightning-fast glance.
Brzezinski had just sprung a textbook superpower counter-trap.
If India rejected American troops participating in the war, India lost the moral argument against sharing the post-war pie; and if India accepted a hundred thousand American soldiers flying into Saudi Arabia and southern Iran, Washington would end up with permanent military garrisons right on the shore of the Arabian Sea—unless India steered that American military hammer somewhere else!
Karan looked down at the map of Turkey, Northern Iraq (Mosul and Kirkuk), Southern Iraq (Basra), and Iran.
Slowly, a cold, brilliant light dawned behind Karan’s eyes.
If the Americans were willing to stage two airborne divisions and five hundred tanks in NATO Turkey on the northern border of Iraq… why let American troops set a single boot inside Iran or the Arabian Sea at all, when you could use the American hammer from Turkey to smash the exact wildcard who was about to start the war: Saddam Hussein?!
“Hold on, Zbigniew,” Karan said softly, placing his hand on the Pentagon folder and leaning over the map. “Let us look at the military geometry of what you just put on the table—because for once, the Pentagon’s geography actually solves two problems at the same time.”
Brzezinski and Vance leaned forward, watching Karan’s finger trace the borders of Iran and Iraq.
“First,” Karan said, “let us settle the post-war Iranian economic division so we don’t waste an hour haggling like bazaar merchants. India will carry the primary maritime, amphibious, and southern continental stabilization of Iran, and India sits next door. Eighty percent India, twenty percent United States—the exact same 80–20 formula we just agreed to for the Tarim Basin.”
“Impossible, Chief Minister,” Cyrus Vance said firmly. “Iran is not Xinjiang. American oil companies—Exxon, Mobil, Texaco, Chevron, Gulf—built the Iranian consortium in 1954 and have billions in sunk assets at Abadan and Kharg Island. And we are right now supplying the C-5 airlifts keeping General Neshat’s junta alive in Tehran while your Kurdish proxies block the Russians in the north. Our floor for Iran is fifty-five percent India, forty-five percent United States.”
“Forty-five percent for flying cargo planes from Germany while our Manduks and our 14th and Southern Army Corps take the beaches and the mountain passes?” Swaran Singh scoffed. “Seventy percent India, thirty percent United States—and not a single American warship or troop transport enters the Gulf of Oman or the Arabian Sea east of Hormuz.”
Blumenthal, Vance, and Brzezinski conferred in low whispers for twenty seconds.
“Split the final ten down the middle, Swaran,” Brzezinski said, looking across at Chavan and Karan. “Sixty-five percent (65%) for the Republic of India, thirty-five percent (35%) for the United States across all post-war Iranian petroleum, gas, pipeline, and reconstruction consortia—operated under a joint Indo-Iranian-American Reconstruction Authority once a stable constitutional government is restored in Tehran.”
Karan looked at Chavan and Manmohan Singh. Sixty-five percent gave India the undisputed nearly two-thirds supermajority control over Iran’s fifty-billion-barrel reserves and pipeline corridors, while thirty-five percent was large enough to lock Wall Street and the American oil majors permanently onto India’s side against any Soviet move from the north.
“Sixty-five India, thirty-five United States for Iran,” Prime Minister Chavan said, nodding once. “Agreed.”
“Now,” Brzezinski said, his eyes narrowing with predatory anticipation as he tapped the Pentagon operational plan on the table, “how do we earn our thirty-five percent in Iran—and more importantly, what do we do when Saddam Hussein’s seven Iraqi divisions cross the Shatt al-Arab into Iranian Khuzestan next month?!”
“Look at the map you yourself just drew from NATO Turkey, Zbigniew,” Karan said, his voice dropping into a low, surgical command register that held all five men around him spellbound.
“Why is Saddam Hussein massing two thousand tanks at Basra to invade Iran?” Karan asked. “Because he thinks that while Iran is bleeding in a civil war and while Washington, Moscow, and New Delhi are distracted by Xinjiang, he canblitzkrieg into Khuzestan, seize Abadan and Ahvaz in fourteen days, and make himself the armed dictator of the Persian Gulf!
“If Saddam invades Iran, and we merely push his army back across the Shatt al-Arab border into Iraq and leave him sitting in Baghdad with his Republican Guard and his oil revenues intact—he will simply re-arm with Soviet and French weapons and attack again in five years!
“So we do not stop at the Iranian border,” Karan said coldly. “If Saddam Hussein fires a single artillery shell across the Shatt al-Arab into Iran, we use his unprovoked aggression to finish off his regime and partition the Iraqi oilfields between us in a two-front blitzkrieg!”
Brzezinski’s breath caught in his throat, a fierce, wolfish light flaring in his eyes as he stared down at the map of Iraq.
“Lay out the two fronts, Chief Minister!” Brzezinski said rapidly.
Karan’s finger slashed two converging pincers across the map of Iraq and Iran:
“The Southern Pincer—The Indian Hammer from the Ocean:” Karan tapped the blue icon of Carrier Strike Group One (INS Viraat, INS Airavata, INS Varuna) off Muscat.
“The moment Iraqi forces cross into Iranian Khuzestan, not a single American warship needs to enter the Indian Ocean or the Gulf of Oman. India’s First Expeditionary Fleet steams straight through the Strait of Hormuz to the head of the Persian Gulf. “First: Our seventy-two carrier strike fighters (S-35N Starlighters and S-22 Sea-Serpents) and our submarine-launched Kaumodaki cruise missiles obliterate the Iraqi naval bases at Umm Qasr and Faw and wipe out the Iraqi Air Force over Basra in the first six hours. “Second: At the request of the constitutional authorities in Tehran, our Manduk Amphibious Corps—supported by three air-lifted Indian armoured and mechanized brigades landing at Bandar Abbas, Bushehr, and Abadan—strikes the invading Iraqi army in Khuzestan head-on, drives straight across the Shatt al-Arab into Southern Iraq, and seizes Basra, the Rumaila super-giant oilfield, and the southern Euphrates valley up to the 33rd Parallel!”
Then Karan moved his finger to the top of the map—where NATO Turkey met the mountains of Northern Iraq.
“And the Northern Pincer—The American Hammer from Turkey:”
Brzezinski leaned over the map, his own finger joining Karan’s at Incirlik and Diyarbakır on the Turkish-Iraqi border.
“At the exact same hour Indian forces hit Basra from the Persian Gulf,” Brzezinski said, his voice vibrating with the electric thrill of a grand strategic masterstroke, “the United States 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions, the US V Corps mechanized brigades airlifted into Eastern Turkey, and our NATO Turkish allies cross the northern Iraqi border out of Anatolia!
“Supported by three wings of US Air Force F-15s, F-111s, and A-10s flying out of Incirlik and our existing US Air Force facilities in Saudi Arabia (Dhahran), the American northern spearhead rolls straight down the Tigris Valley eighty miles south of the Turkish border—seizing Mosul, Kirkuk, and the entire Northern Iraqi super-giant oil basin down to the northern outskirts of Baghdad!
“Caught in a two-front vise between the Indian Army and Navy smashing up from Basra and Khuzestan in the south, and the United States Army and Air Force smashing down from Turkey into Mosul and Kirkuk in the north, Saddam Hussein’s army is cut in half and annihilated in three weeks!”
Cyrus Vance stared at the map, stunned by the sheer, overwhelming symmetry of the plan.
“Look at the post-war board if Saddam is foolish enough to invade Iran,” Vance murmured, tracing the lines across Iraq and Iran:
In Iran: The Marxist Tudeh/MEK threat is crushed, the civil war is ended under a stable constitutional government in Tehran, and the oil and reconstruction consortia are divided 65% India / 35% United States.
In Iraq: Saddam’s aggressive dictatorship is replaced by a federal parliamentary state; the United States secures the entire Northern Iraqi oil basin (Kirkuk and Mosul) linked by pipeline directly through NATO Turkey to the Mediterranean; and the Republic of India secures the entire Southern Iraqi oil basin (Basra and Rumaila) on the Persian Gulf! In the Arabian Peninsula and the Strait of Hormuz: What about the existing American military facilities in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf?
Karan looked straight at Vance and Brzezinski and laid down the final, stabilizing guarantee of the treaty.
“Regarding the Strait of Hormuz and the Arabian Peninsula,” Karan said clearly:
“First: The Republic of India pledges an ironclad, permanent sovereign guarantee of the safety of the Strait of Hormuz and the uninterrupted freedom of navigation and commercial oil trade for all nations—specifically guaranteeing that Saudi, Emirati, Qatari, Kuwaiti, and Northern Iraqi oil bound for the United States, Western Europe, and Japan will transit the Strait without a single hour of interference. “
Second: While the Indian Navy remains the sole blue-water carrier force patrolling the Arabian Sea and the Gulf of Oman, the Republic of India formally recognizes and respects the continued operation of existing United States Air Force and military advisory bases on the soil of the Arabian Peninsula—specifically at Dhahran in Saudi Arabia and Jufair in Bahrain. You keep your existing shore bases in Arabia; we keep the ocean.”
At twenty-one-forty-five hours that night, the chandeliers of the Nizam’s State Dining Room shone down upon two delegations that had been locked in the room for nearly thirteen hours.
Nobody looked tired. The air in the chamber crackled with the unmistakable electric charge of men who knew they had just written the operating manual for the rest of the twentieth century.
In Moscow, Leonid Brezhnev and Marshal Ustinov believed they had outmaneuvered the West by cutting the secret Tashkent deal with New Delhi to partition Xinjiang. They had no idea that nine days later, in the red sandstone palace of Hyderabad House, the two capitalist superpowers of the East and the West had just locked their banks, their patent laws, their space programmes, and their military war-plans together across five continents.
Dr. Manmohan Singh and Treasury Secretary Michael Blumenthal completed the final verification of the six annexes of The New Delhi Concordat of September 10, 1979:
Annex I — The Tarim & Western Hemisphere Resource Reciprocity: A 20% Class-B non-voting equity stake for the US Consortium (Exxon, Chevron, Kerr-McGee, Westinghouse, Bechtel) in the Tarim Basin’s oil, gas, and uranium blocks—paired with full US technology transfer in deep-well alkaline In-Situ Recovery (ISR) uranium leaching and complete ecological aquifer restoration—in exchange for a 20–25% Class-B non-voting equity stake for BUM, Shergill Mining, and the INPE in US Gulf of Mexico deep-water oil leases and in jointly denationalized copper, iron-ore, and bauxite mines in Chile, Peru, Brazil, Guyana, Suriname, and Jamaica (enforced by joint IMF–AADB human-rights and structural-adjustment conditionality), plus 35% US participation in AADB African hydroelectric dams and 25% Indian participation in Latin American infrastructure.
Annex II — Wall Street & Nariman Point Financial Integration: Full RBI clearance for Citibank, Chase Manhattan, and US pension funds to purchase AADB Series-C Petro-Rupee Bonds and hold up to 25% regulated, long-term minority equity in Indian Special Economic Zones (under strict RBI/Chanakya-2 anti-speculation oversight), paired with Federal Reserve and SEC clearance for LIC, Shergill Capital, and SBI to deploy $5 billion annually of Indian insurance float into tax-exempt US municipal bonds, Texas energy paper, and Rust Belt industrial debentures.
Annex III — The Tariff, Patent, and Aviation Settlement: Phased reduction of India’s December 1971 external tariff on scheduled US capital and industrial goods from 100% to 25% by 1982 and raising the non-defense JV equity cap to 51% for export-oriented plants; a 10-year export product-patent window for post-1980 biologicals (while preserving India’s statutory 12% domestic social pricing); immediate US Supreme Court national-security clearance for all Geneva biotech and seed-genetics transfers; and unconditional US FAA Part-25 Type-Certification for the Shergill Type-100 and Type-120 wide-body airliners within thirty days.
Annex IV — The Joint Orbital Space Mission (December 1979): Final operational confirmation by NASA and ISRO that following the triumph of India’s GSLV-1 heavy-lift programme (which was now launching two communication and reconnaissance satellites a month from Sriharikota on its 400-tonne Vikas-core boosters), the three-man joint Indo-American astronaut crew currently completing final orbital simulator training in Houston and Bangalore will launch in ninety days (December 1979) on the inaugural joint ISRO–NASA Orbital Mission, with the Indian flight commander and mission specialist holding full co-command and fifty-percent patent rights on all zero-gravity materials and Earth-observation telemetry.
Annex V — The Hemispheric & Korean Doctrine: Unconditional Indian diplomatic backing at the UN Security Council for US military action to remove the Soviet-Cuban junta in Nicaragua and stabilize the Americas, paired with unconditional US diplomatic backing for Indian stabilization operations across the Asian security perimeter, and a strict mutual guarantee preserving the January 1979 Delhi Pact and the peace of North and South Korea.
Annex VI — Contingency Plan Twin Hammer (Iran & Iraq): A binding 65% Indian / 35% American post-war economic division of Iranian petroleum and reconstruction consortia; Indian sovereign guarantee of open navigation through the Strait of Hormuz and recognition of existing US air bases in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain; and a pre-triggered Joint Military Pincer Directive whereby, the moment Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi divisions invade Iranian Khuzestan, India attacks from the Persian Gulf to seize Basra and the Southern Iraqi oilfields, while the United States and NATO attack from Turkey to seize Mosul, Kirkuk, and the Northern Iraqi oilfields.
At twenty-two-fifteen hours, Prime Minister Yashwantrao Chavan and Secretary of State Cyrus Vance signed the master treaty text, followed by Dr. Manmohan Singh and Michael Blumenthal on the financial annexes, and Karan Shergill and Zbigniew Brzezinski on the strategic protocols.
As the hot wax seals cooled on the leather covers, stewards brought in a tray of crystal glasses filled not with French champagne, but with twelve-year-old Indian single-malt whisky from the Himalayan foothills of Kasauli.
Zbigniew Brzezinski lifted his glass and looked across the table at Karan Shergill.
“Nine days ago in Washington, Chief Minister,” Brzezinski said with a dry, candid smile, “when we looked at the satellite photographs of your Airavat-II transports sitting wingtip-to-wingtip with Soviet Ilyushins on the runway at Lop Nor, half the Pentagon thought you had married Moscow.”
“We don’t marry anyone, Zbigniew,” Karan said, lifting his glass to the light. “We just bought a mountain wall from an old landlord who was short on cash—and now we have fifteen hundred miles of fence to keep him on his side of the snow.
“Make sure General Jones has your airborne divisions ready at Incirlik before the end of the month,” Karan added softly, glancing toward the map of the Shatt al-Arab. “Because according to Kao-saab’s station chief in Baghdad, Saddam Hussein just ordered his tank commanders to paint white invasion stripes on their turrets this morning.”
Brzezinski’s smile turned as cold and sharp as a bayonet.
“Let him cross the river,” the American National Security Advisor said, clinking his glass against Karan’s. “Kirkuk in the north, Basra in the south. To the two largest democracies on earth—and the peace of the marketplace.”
“To the marketplace,” Karan replied.
End of Chapter 395