By IOL South Asia correspondent

NEW DELHI, February 3 (IslamOnline) - As the world braces for an almost inevitable U.S. attack on Iraq in the coming weeks, India has begun to shift gears.

Although Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee has appealed to the super-power to show super-restraint and Defense Minister George Fernandes said, “India cannot take any part” in the war, Indian leaders seem to have already decided not to criticize America and maintain what the Indian Express described today as “tactical silence.”

There are benefits to be reaped from this stance of maintaining a “tactical silence” as the U.S. would find it more helpful than an India or Israel, for that matter, clamoring to jump on the war bandwagon.

In Afghanistan, American action was helped immensely because India was asked not to join the war materially. Had India joined it, the strategic support from Afghanistan’s next door neighbor Pakistan would not have been so easily forthcoming.

During the first Gulf War Bush Senior had to coax and cajole Israel to stay out of the fireworks. Pat Buchanan wrote that “Bush I had to bribe Yitzhak Shamir with $5 billion in aid, $400 million in loan guarantees, and Patriot missiles to stay out of the fighting, lest Israeli intervention dynamite our coalition.”

This time too Israel and India’s silence would be more helpful for the U.S. purposes.

India’s Foreign Secretary Kanwal Sibal is presently visiting Washington for a series of consultations at a point in time being described here as a “defining moment” for Indo-U.S. relations in the years to come.

As all this has been going on here, the Iraqi ambassador has been crowing about India’s support to Saddam’s survival.

In the past, too, such fast developments have overtaken Iraqi diplomacy. During the first Gulf War, Desert Storm, India was “opposing” the war, but allowed U.S. warplanes to refuel at one of its air bases in north India.

For its tacit understanding with the U.S., India hopes to get dual-use technology from that country. India hopes that the U.S. will cooperate.

Secretary Sibal is expected to meet U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage as well as Deputy National Security Advisor Steve Hadley at the White House. Iraq is expected to be an important issue at the talks.

Influential opinion leaders, even some of those who have so far been opposed to a war in Iraq, have begun to veer round to the position that if Bush cannot be dissuaded from going to war, it is better to begin mending fences with “Uncle Sam”, instead of bothering about what happens to Saddam.

Senior Indian officials will keep engaged with the U.S. in the weeks ahead. One of the most influential bureaucrats, Brajesh Mishra, will meet U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in Munich, where he is to participate in an international security conference from February 7 to February 8.

The Indian side hopes that the U.S. would substantially ease the restrictions on a number of dual-use items.

If that happens, it would virtually signal the end of U.S. sanctions imposed in the wake of India’s nuclear tests in 1998.

For that Secretary Sibal would meet Kenneth Juster of the U.S. department of commerce, a key figure in decisions regarding sanctions.

In any case, the sanctions have to be lifted soon. India is already cooperating with the U.S. on crucial issues like strategic missile defense, on which discussions between the two sides began in mid-January.