No one knows for sure why the Nixon Administration chose to adopt a hostile stance towards India at the time of the war in the subcontinent last month. In the absence of hard evidence – the Anderson papers, too, do not throw any light on President Nixon’s reasons for pursuing a blatantly pro-Pakistan policy – speculation has run along conventional lines.
Almost all commentators have assumed that President Nixon has been biased in favour of Pakistan since the early ‘fifties when he played a key role in persuading the Eisenhower Administration to go in for a mutual security pact with it, that he found Mrs. Gandhi too “cold and didactic” and General Yahya Khan warm and friendly, that he has not got over the cold war psychology which makes him strongly anti-Soviet and anti-India, that he has been keen to preserve the artificial power balance in South Asia which the United States had propped up all these years and that the importance he attached to his forthcoming trip to China has distorted his thinking.
Hostile
Different commentators have emphasised different aspects of this ease against him and his principal foreign policy adviser, Mr. Kissinger. No one has seriously challenged it so far, not even those who have deliberately set out to defend them. Instead, by making out that India is strongly pro-Soviet, that it is likely to grant base facilities to the Russian fleet at Vishakhapatnam and that it intended to dismember West Pakistan, they have only sought to confirm the impression that President Nixon and Mr. Kissinger were so hostile to this country that they did not even wish to look at the facts of the situation.
There is perhaps a good deal of justification for this view. But it needs to be re-examined in so far as it relates to America’s new China policy. If President Nixon could resume bombing raids on North Viet Nam without fear of adverse Chinese reaction, it is unlikely that he thought that his trip to Peking would be in jeopardy if he did not “tilt” – to use the latest White House jargon – towards Pakistan.
President Nixon and Mr Kissinger may be morally as insensitive and politically as incompetent as their critics have made them out to be. But they were by no means unaware of the realities; the Anderson papers leave no room for doubt that they and other US officials did not expect the Pakistani army to hold out for long in Bangla Desh.
An alternative hypothesis to the one that has received general acceptance is not easy to substantiate. If one is advanced here it is in the hope that it may encourage fresh thinking on a matter of vital importance not only for India but for the whole world. The hypothesis is that there is a connection between the disappearance and possibly the liquidation of Marshal Lin Piao and other top military leaders, America’s China policy and China’s America policy. This is not to repeat the Hong Kong report that Marshal Lin Piao and other members of the supposedly all-powerful Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party opposed the invitation to President Nixon and thereby invited wrath of Chairman Mao Tse-tung. The suggestion is that there was an intense power struggle in Peking before Mr. Kissinger’s visit to Peking last July, that President Nixon and his principal foreign policy adviser became aware of it, that they decided that it was worth their while to try to tip the scale in favour of the anti-Soviet Mao group and that they have stuck to this policy because they are convinced the stakes are sufficiently high.
Since some of the very top men in Washington have been excluded from the Sino-US dialogue as it has developed in the past six months – according to one report, even the Secretary of State, Mr. Rogers, was not informed in advance about Mr. Kissinger’s first visit to Peking last July and that when he protested to President Nixon, he was told that Mr. Kissinger received Chinese clearance only when he was in Islamabad – it is difficult for anyone to support this speculation. But there is one piece of evidence – the composition of the new Chinese leadership as disclosed by Peking on the occasion of the burial of Marshal Chen Yi – which is most revealing.
This is not that Marshal Lin Piao and other military leaders are absent from the list but that the strength of the Politburo has been reduced from 25 at the time of its reconstitution at the last party Congress in March 1969 to 13 today.
It is, of course, possible that the ageing Mao has become so suspicious that he distrusts almost everyone around him, that he imagines conspiracies where none exists and that his fear of the Soviet Union wanting to undermine him and his experiment has become so obsessive that anyone who is not totally hostile to it invites his wrath. But it is not inconceivable that a power struggle took place and that Chairman Mao managed to win a slender majority of one in the Politburo with some difficulty.
Well Known
It is well known that Mr. Chen Po-ta, a long-time confidante of Chairman Mao, Kang Sheng, and Hsieh Fu-chih, Vice-Premier and head of the public security forces, disappeared from public view long before Marshal Lin Piao. Huang Yung-sheng, Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces, Wu Fa-hsien, Commander of the Air Force, and Li Tso-peng, political commissar of the navy, followed suit last September. Also, it is impossible to say at this stage whether the two groups shared a common approach to domestic and international problems. But it is not impossible that even if there were differences among them, they came together some time last summer for the sake of survival. The history of the Soviet party is replete with such temporary alliances of convenience.
Two other related points are of great interest in this context. First, Washington has for years taken a good deal of interest in the problem of succession to Chairman Mao and has been keen to place itself in a position where it may be able to influence, however slightly, the outcome of the anticipated struggle. This means that President Nixon and Mr. Kissinger will be willing to pay a considerable price for winning and retaining such an advantage if they feel that Chairman Mao’s obsessions and declining capacity to run China have given them the necessary opportunity.
Secondly, Peking’s new America policy cannot be explained solely in terms of the desire to contain the Soviet Union’s growing military power and political influence, partly because its antipathy towards Moscow is not a new phenomenon and partly because there is no dearth of evidence to show that domestic considerations of economic reorganisation and power politics have always influenced China’s foreign policy.
Bizarre
The view that Peking is acting out of weakness – the Russians say that it is facing a grave political crisis – and that President Nixon is trying to turn it to his advantage, is so contrary to the popular view of China as the third superpower and of American ineptness that it is not likely to find much acceptance. For all that we know, it may not stand the test of time. But the American and Chinese behaviour towards each other is so unusual that familiar explanations no longer satisfy.
If this line of speculation is not wholly off the mark, President Nixon’s performance during the Bangla Desh crisis and the Indo-Pakistan war may not appear to be as bizarre as it does otherwise. It can at least be argued that he took up an anti-India stance at the UN not because he expected to influence the course of developments in the sub-continent but because he wanted to impress the Chinese with his toughness and disregard for the Soviet Union. Similarly, he might have sent a task force of the Seventh Fleet into the Indian Ocean not so much because he believed India could be frightened as because he wanted to demonstrate his willingness to take on the Soviet navy in these waters and thus reassure the Chinese.
This is not to argue that American policy has been in any way realistic or that it has not been unduly influenced by the China factor. The suggestion is that President Nixon and his chief policy adviser have been making gestures to a weak China. They also seem to have been acting in the belief that their ties with India are strong enough to stand the strain and that Mrs. Gandhi is not likely to act out of pique. Thus Mr. Kissinger’s statement about the Prime Minister may be quite as significant as his desire to “tilt” towards Pakistan.
This, of course, does not explain all that Mr. Kissinger said at the White House meetings as disclosed by Mr. Anderson. He was doubtless influenced by the long-standing American bias against India and in favour of Pakistan. But there may be a new element in the American policy which is not perceptible at this stage
The Times of India 19 January 1972