Srinagar, April 15 : India's attempts to make some headway in the Great Game in Central Asia may be the reason behind Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's visit to Kazakhstan, says Rediff.com's Nikhil Lakshman, who is travelling with the PM to the Kazakh capital of Sanya
After spending three days interacting with the Brazilian, Chinese, Russian and South African Presidents in Sanya, southern China, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh flew across the expanse of East Asia to Astana, Kazakhstan's flashy new capital.
One colleague on Air India One, the prime minister's special flight, asked this reporter why the 78-year-old prime minister was making this tiring journey (a 7 hour, 20 minute flight) after all those hectic interactions in China when no relationship-transforming agreements currently appear on the anvil in Kazakhstan.
Three reasons: Geography. Natural Resources. Strategic relevance.
And, oh, did we mention China?
When Dr Singh meets President Nursultan Nazarbayev at the Ak Orda, the presidential palace, on Saturday morning, he will be the first world leader to meet the Kazakh leader after his April 3 election victory (eat your heart out Indian politicians, Nazarbayev won 95.5 per cent of the vote).
It will also be the first visit by an Indian prime minister since June 4, 2002 when then prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee visited Kazakhstan's then capital Almaty for the first CICA summit. The Conference on Interaction and Confidence Measures in Asia is Nazarbayev's personal multilateral diplomatic initiative to ensure that Central Asia, where Kazakhstan is the biggest nation, stays calm.
No Indian leader can stay away from Central Asia for so long especially when China appears, in the opinion of some observers, to be the 'only great power pursuing a coordinated strategy in Central Asia,' expanding trade and exploiting the region's natural resources.
China has an impressive footprint in Kazakhstan, already. In February, during Nazarbayev's visit to Beijing (he visits the Chinese capital every year), Kazakhstan agreed to supply uranium pellets to Chinese nuclear plants, a deal worth billions of dollars.
Kazakhstan has the second largest uranium deposits in the world, more than 15 per cent. This year, Kazakhstan will produce 19,600 tonnes of uranium; it has enough reserves to last more than a hundred years.
India too is interested in Kazakhstan's uranium and Atomic Energy Commission Chairman Dr Sukumar Banerjee is already in Astana to discuss an agreement on possible supplies. The DAE and Kazakh's nuclear establishment are also likely to work on a feasibility report to provide Indian small reactor technology to the Kazakhs.
Interestingly, the four groups the DAE set up in the wake of the Fukushima disaster last month to examine the state of readiness at India's nuclear reactors to deal with a catastrophe like the one that befell the nuclear plant in Japan will submit their reports soon.
The DAE committees, sources said, are likely to review among other things, the review criteria for sites to locate future nuclear reactors as well as operating measures at plants like the nuclear facilities in Tamil Nadu. Eventually, the government plans to make these DAE reports public, the sources added.
