India Rebuffs Bush - No Troops for Iraq

In a sharp blow to America's postwar plans, India refused today to send peacekeeping troops to Iraq.

The Bush administration had hoped that India would send a full army division of 17,000 or more soldiers to serve in the Kurdish region around Mosul, and it had exerted considerable pressure on the government of Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee to do so.

The reasoning, Indian political observers said, was relatively simple: the war in Iraq is extremely unpopular here.

Even as American troops were approaching Baghdad in early April, India's Parliament overwhelmingly passed a resolution condemning the war as unjust and calling on the United States to withdraw. News reports spoke of antiwar demonstrations in hundreds of cities and towns. A poll in the current issue of the weekly newsmagazine Outlook showed 69 percent opposed to sending troops to Iraq. Other polls have put the figure as high as 87 percent.