Not much importance need be attached to the US secretary of state, Mr. George Shultz’s visit to New Delhi. His main business lay elsewhere – Bangkok and Islamabad. It would have been impolite and worse (an unnecessary rude snub) for him to have avoided the Indian capital on this trip. He had no good reason to administer such a snub to this country.
Mr. Shultz, of course, utilized the visit to announce an agreement on the supply of spare parts for Tarapur and to reaffirm his government’s willingness to sell arms to this country if it is genuinely interested. But the agreement on Tarapur had been worked out earlier and the US readiness, indeed anxiety, to sell weapons to India on its terms has been public knowledge for long.
To say this is, however, not to criticize either Mr. Shultz or the government he represents. India does not and cannot figure high on the US list of priorities so long as the military of the Soviet Union and its allies remains Washington’s principal preoccupation. One has to be an Indian communist or fellow-traveller to ignore this obvious fact and throw tantrums over Mr. Shultz’s visit.
There is the other side of this reality which frequently gets obscured for some reason. On its part, India, too, has not wished and cannot wish to establish particularly close relations with the United States, for there has not been and there cannot be a “strategic consensus” between the two countries.
Despite all the great changes that have taken place in the world scene since Indian independence, two facts have remained more or less unaltered. First, the United States remains the strongest military and economic power both in its own right and as leader of the Western alliance, which includes Japan even though that country is not a member of NATO. As such, it remains interested in and, to an extent, capable of imposing its will on the rest of the world. Secondly, India remains a leading non-aligned country and a champion of non-alignment. So a clash of viewpoints between the two countries on a number of issues is unavoidable.
National Interests
A host of Americans and their supporters (and, ironically enough, even their communist opponents) in India have assumed that the two democracies could have cooperated in the fight against communism if the government in New Delhi had not been dominated first by Mr. Nehru and then by Mrs. Gandhi. This is an erroneous proposition, as was demonstrated during the Janata rule. The Janata leadership could make no significant change in India’s relations with the two superpowers because the country’s interests did not permit it.
It is, of course, open to a government in New Delhi to ignore the country’s national interests and subordinate itself to US purposes as defined by Washington. But such a set-up will soon lose popular support and provoke a kind of anti-Americanism this country has not witnessed so far. As such, it will hurt US interests in the region rather than promote them. And the chances are that the Americans will soon develop contempt for it and do not more for it than dole out some assistance to it.
Leaving aside these and other similar considerations, India, in view of its geographical location and the predominantly Hindu composition of its population, could fit into the US strategic schemes only so long as Washington treated China as a Soviet satellite and part of a “monolithic” communist movement with its headquarters in Moscow. Once American policy-makers fully recognised their mistake and opened a dialogue with Beijing, there could be no genuine basis for a common strategy between the US and India. Whatever other blunders Mr. Nixon and Mr. Kissinger might have made at the time of the Indo-Pakistan conflict over Bangladesh in 1971, they were quite right in their central conclusion that India was not vital to US strategic purposes.
This, however, is only one facet of the Indo-US relationship, the other being that they are attracted to each other by virtue of their being plural, open and democratic societies. Indeed, they have a stake in each other. It is as wrong to ignore this fact as to ignore the absence of a strategic agreement. The trouble is that in the discussions within and between the two countries, very few individuals keep both these aspects in view. Most people tend to emphasize one at the cost of the other.
The United States has been engaged in the effort not only to contain the Soviet Union militarily by building a cordon sanitaire around it but also to weaken the appeal of communism. To the second end, it has extended substantial economic aid on a bilateral as well as multilateral basis to a number of countries, including India. America must wish India well, however wilful and assertive the rulers in New Delhi, because the failure of Indian democracy can throw the whole region into a convulsion with unpredictable consequences. Washington has not been too worried on this score because India has shown an enormous capacity to manage its affairs. Even so, it has been an interested participant in this country’s development.
Soviet Assistance
On our side, there is little we could have done or can do to promote, outside our borders, America’s political purpose of weakening the appeal of communism. As it happens, this appeal has never been particularly strong in our region. We have also taken the view that the US has put undue emphasis on the military containment of the Soviet Union and, indeed, that in the name of fighting communism, Washington has sought to impose its own hegemony on other countries. Also, so far, Soviet influence in the area around our country has been too precariously based to cause as much concern justly. All these factors explain why our government’s formulations bear an apparently anti-US bias. But these should not be allowed to cover up the fact that as a democracy we, too, are opposed to the Soviet ideology.
In political matters, since the mid-fifties and in respect of military cooperation since the mid-sixties, India has got on well with the Soviet Union. Indian leaders have accordingly trimmed their utterances to avoid causing offence to the Kremlin on such issues as Soviet military intervention in Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan or the Cuban military presence in Angola and Mozambique. In fact, it can be said that there has been a limited convergence of interests in that both countries have wanted to avoid US domination in West Asia. Essentially, however, each has pursued its own interests. Russia and India have not coordinated their moves and cannot coordinate their moves.
Three additional points may be made here. First, India has found it possible to get on well with the Soviet Union not only because Moscow has been more willing to endorse nationalism and non-alignment in this region but also because it has been in a much weaker position than the United States. Secondly, the Soviet Union has been helpful to India in view of its competition with the United States for influence in the region. Finally, Moscow and New Delhi can be no more frank in their discussions than Washington and New Delhi.
To illustrate this point, two conversations with Soviet diplomats may be narrated. A Soviet diplomat came to see me on the eve of the second anniversary of the Indo-Soviet treaty and asked me why Indians were so indifferent to the pact. Without waiting for a reply, he said: “why should you be interested. After all, it is a Soviet-Soviet treaty”. This was a candid acknowledgement that while India had accepted the Soviet proposal for the treaty in a difficult situation in 1971, it had not reached any long-term strategic agreement with Moscow.
Non-alignment Policy
On another occasion, I asked a top Soviet diplomat how the recent talks between President Brezhnev and Mrs. Gandhi had gone. There had, he said, been no talks, only two sets of monologues. It had always been so, he added, in response to a further question. And it could not and cannot be otherwise. The Kremlin’s objectives and perspectives must necessarily be different from New Delhi’s.
The same is true about Indo-US official discussions, however much the two sides might protest about the frankness and usefulness of a particular round. Mr. Shultz did not sound particularly convincing during his recent visit to New Delhi when he said more than once that the two sides appreciated each other’s positions better as a result of the talks. The Americans know us and we know them and both sides know that on strategic issues we cannot agree with them even if we utter the same platitudes as they.
In response to our problems in dealing with not only the two superpowers with worldwide ambitions but also with countries with regional ambitions such as Nasser’s Egypt, Sukarno’s Indonesia and Shah’s Iran, our policy-makers evolved the concept of bilateral relations. It served a useful purpose. It denied others any kind of veto on our relations with their adversaries. We have, for instance, found it possible under this doctrine to seek normal relations with China when one or the other superpower has been in sharp conflict with it. To put it differently, we have kept out of the troubles of other countries with their adversaries.
This approach is also the natural result of our policy of non-alignment, which is plainly a euphemism for independence and promotion of our own interests. But the approach of necessity restricts the scope of cooperation with the superpowers for the obvious reason that they are not in the business of promoting the independence and interests of other countries. The US it appears, is now seeking to settle bilateral issues one by one with this country, of course, according to its own convenience. The result cannot be satisfactory for either side, though, of course, there is no alternative.
The Times of India, 6 July 1983