India raises scope for cooperation with US by frisking N.Korean freighter

Sonepat (Haryana), Aug.21 (ANI): By taking the bull by the horns and not releasing the North Korean ship nearly two weeks after it was seized, New Delhi has opened new possibilities for cooperation with Washington and also sent unmistakable signals to hostile proliferation racketeers and intelligence agencies not to snoop around its waters, says an academic.

According to Sreeram Chaulia, an associate professor of world politics at the Jindal Global Law School in Sonepat, Haryana, though the Mu San has been cleared of any weapons of mass destruction, India's naval sentinels are still puzzled why one of its detained crew was a North Korean government agent.

He says the answers are hard to come by, as only one of the North Korean sailors was said to be conversant in English.

What is even more surprising is the North Korean Government's silence on the grounding of the Mu San.

According to Chaulia, the incident does not contain enough incendiary circumstances to blow out into a major diplomatic row or a confrontation between the governments of North Korea and India, which anyway have minimal relations.

However, he says, the fact that the Mu San, with a history of traveling back and forth to China, approached the strategically sensitive Andaman Islands is an angle that India's Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), will probe.

All that New Delhi will admit presently is that the Mu San will be booked under the Indian Maritime Act for illegal trespassing. (ANI)