SYRIANA STYLE DEAL in India and Saudi/Pak/Iran chess moves?

India has a new oil minister in a cabinet shake-up that Reuters reports:

The appointment of Deora was one of the biggest changes in a cabinet reshuffle announced by Singh on Sunday. The new minister took over from Mani Shankar Aiyar, who had sometimes been seen as at odds with the foreign ministry on issues such as pipelines to Iran.

The Financial Times expands in an offline article in its Monday morning paper:

Aiyar's dismissal removes a powerful supporter of the controversial Iran-Pakistan-India gas pipeline project and his replacement by Mr Deora, a long-time Congress Party figure from Maharashtra and familiar figure in Washington, could signal a shift in focus.

"The U.S. Administration has opposed the Iran-Pak-India pipeline, preferring a route that sidelines Iran" says Petrowatch in Mumbai.

In a possibly related development, India and Saudi Arabia signed a comprehensive energy agreement over the weekend which could include alternative energy sources to the IPI pipeline that appears ready to be shelved.

Saudi Arabia accounts for a quarter of India’s crude oil imports and has said in the past that it was keen to enter the refining and retailing sector in India. India, which imports 70 percent of the oil it consumes, has signed a series of preliminary agreements, hoping to get help from foreign partners to win access to oil and gas fields abroad.

The new Indian oil minister Deora is from a business family in Mumbai and well-versed with the political and business complications of foreign downstream investments in the Indian private sector.

In countervailing [?] moves to US interests, India rebuffed US objections to its own investments upstream in Syria [hence the title of this piece] and promised to abstain on the IAEA vote on sanctions against Iran for its nuclear infractions.

The complexity of the Indian situation in South Asia is daunting, and another piece of the puzzle just made things more complicated with the unexpected victory of the

Hindu nationalist BJP party was set to take control of the key southern Indian state of Karnataka after the collapse over the weekend of the Congress-led government there. According to The Financial Times

The loss of Karnataka, whose capital is the high- technology hub of Bangalore, dealt a further serious blow to India's ruling Congress party, which was forced to hand power to the BJP in the northern state of Bihar in November.

Control of Karnataka would mark the first time the BJP has taken power in a southern state. Events there are likely to be closely watched since Bangalore accounts for some 65 per cent of the $17bn in annual revenues generated by India's IT and outsourcing industries.

The BJP won late last year in another important province, Bihar, and now PM Manomohan Singh must feel the warm breath of a competitor close on the heels of the ruling Congress Party.

The US Ambassador David Mulford was a former squash opponent of mine in Saudi Arabia and must be exercising his present energies to the full making sure India recognizes that in the long run, its best ally and friend in the region is the USA.