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From me at Foreign Policy: India's special envoy anxiety, part II:
Go read the rest.At an off-the-record Aspen Strategy Group meeting held at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Washington, D.C. in early December, a high-level delegation from India told American foreign policy experts -- including three officials who were part of the formal Obama transition team -- that India might preemptively make Richard Holbrooke persona non grata if his South Asia envoy mandate officially included India or Kashmir, people familiar with the meeting said.
Among the Obama transition figures who attended the meeting, held as part of the Aspen Institute's U.S. India Strategic Dialogue: former Navy Secretary Richard Danzig; Kurt Campbell, the director of the Aspen Strategy Group who is expected to be named assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs; and former Pentagon official Ashton Carter, a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School.
Such foreign-policy events occur throughout the city every week, of course, and it's certainly no surprise that top foreign-policy hands, including some who advised President Obama's campaign and his transition, were included.
But Obama administration officials have insisted to Foreign Policy that the Obama transition held no meetings with foreign governments or representatives of foreign governments at all during the transition. "The transition met with no foreign governments and no representatives of foreign governments pursuant to a policy laid out by the then President-Elect," one administration official said by e-mail. What's more, he said, in effect, they did not have to be influenced to exclude India from Holbrooke's official mission, because it was "not contemplated" for the South Asia envoy's portfolio to have an Indian role. [...]
And while the Obama transition may not have met with any foreign governments or representatives of foreign governments in any official capacity, foreign governments including India's did try to influence the future administration's policy decisions by working the phones, meeting with Obama transition figures at the margins of conferences, at Washington receptions, and through third parties.
"The message was clearly conveyed by India to the Transition and received," The Cable was told. "It led to a change in how Richard Holbrooke's mission was publicly described and unveiled." ...
Update: More from Ben Smith. "The aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that Holbrooke's job definition wasn't changed by Indian lobbying. Indeed, the Obama aide said, he and the other people involving in defining the envoy's job weren't even aware of the lobbying."