It is premature to conclude that the Chinese action in blocking the admission of Bangladesh to the United Nations is part of a well-thought-out and long-term plan to keep the sub-continent in a state of turmoil. Peking may have its reasons for wanting to do that. But the Chinese will be very naive indeed to believe that they can succeed in this project without creating serious problems for Pakistan in the process. The chances therefore are that they have used their veto in a holding operation to gain time for working out a viable policy.
The crux of the matter is that despite their outstanding dispute with India, their distrust of its relations with Moscow and their dislike for an arrangement in the sub-continent which enables this country to gain its rightful place in the region, the Chinese policymakers cannot be entirely insensitive to the fact that Pakistan needs peace much more urgently than India, and that any attempt on their part to use Islamabad as a proxy for harassing New Delhi can prove disastrous to their old friend. There are two pertinent points in this context.
First, at least for the time being Peking is in no position to off-set India’s military superiority over Pakistan either by supplying sophisticated hardware to Islamabad or by concentrating its troops on the Himalayan border. On the contrary, the military disparity between them is likely to increase in case Pakistan is foolhardy enough to engage in an arms race with India. If the propaganda emanating from Peking is any indication, the Chinese seem to be on the defensive. Their apprehension that India, in co-operation with the Soviet Union, is planning to create problems for them in Tibet is utterly unjustified because ever since 1954 this country has neither challenged Chinese sovereignty over Lhasa nor otherwise done anything to disrupt their hold there. But this is a different matter.
Too Timid
Secondly, if tensions build up in the sub-continent, Mr. Bhutto’s own position, and with it the prospects of a stable Pakistan, can be considerably weakened. His own utterances leave little room for doubt that he recognises this fact, though he continues to waver in the pursuit of a policy of peace because he is too timid to offend hardliners in the army, his party and the country, especially in Punjab.
The Pakistan army will obviously step in if Mr. Bhutto is unable to cope with the multi-faceted crisis, aggravates his difficulties by complicating his relations with India and finally loses grip on the situation. But in view of its crimes in Bangladesh last year and its indifferent performance in the war with India on both eastern and western fronts, its rule cannot acquire legitimacy. The Pakistani intelligentsia will not easily reconcile itself to it. In fact, a military coup can provoke violent resistance in the NWFP and Baluchistan and widespread resentment in Sind. Pakistan can perhaps survive all this but only as a “prison-house of nationalities”. Unless it has taken leave of common sense, even the Punjabi intelligentsia must shrink in horror at such a prospect. However much it may abhor and fear the demand for autonomy by the minority provinces, it cannot wish to disrupt the democratic process which alone can reconcile the various constituent units with one another.
If Pakistan was a more homogeneous entity and was not faced with serious inter-regional problems the Chinese could have cheerfully pushed Mr. Bhutto into a confrontation with India or undermined his position by encouraging the short-sighted right-wing militants who continue to oppose its recognition of Bangladesh, unmindful of the fact that the return of over 90,000 prisoners-of-war is dependent on that. In the given situation they must be devoid of political realism to opt for either of these courses. They can be indifferent to Mr. Bhutto’s position but not to Pakistan’s survival.
Motivation
But it does not follow that the Chinese have exercised their first veto in the Security Council, and thereby risked complete isolation in that august body, merely to enable Mr. Bhutto to tide over a “temporary difficulty” caused as much by his own failure of nerve as by the objective situation – the Urdu riots in Sind, their impact on opinion in Punjab and the consequent increase in the appeal of the Jamaat-e-Islami in that key province. It is not even certain that he approached them to exercise the veto in his behalf.
So far as he is concerned, the result is not altogether helpful to him, for, while Bangladesh’s admission to the UN could have exposed him to the charge that Pakistan under his stewardship had lost the support of an old and reliable friend like China, it would have also weakened the position of the opponents of recognition in Pakistan and thereby helped him get over one of the two major obstacles in the path of reconciliation with India. Thus it is a reasonable inference that the Chinese motivation is much more complex than either the first or the second theory would suggest.
One explanation suggests itself. Having failed to live up to popular Pakistani expectations last December, China is keen to do something to re-establish its credibility both as a reliable friend and as a great power. Though no parallel is ever exact, it is relevant to recall that the Soviet Union poured in military hardware into Egypt after the six-day war in June 1967 not because Moscow expected Cairo to win in the event of another armed conflict with Israel but because it wanted to re-establish its bona fides. Just as the Russians had not given any specific assurance of direct military support to the Egyptians in the summer of 1967, the Chinese had at no point in 1971 held out a promise of active involvement to Islamabad. But like the Russians in the case of Egypt, the Chinese could not ignore Pakistan’s disappointment and were therefore anxious to avail themselves of the first opportunity to prove their bona fides.
This “compulsion” could have been partly neutralised if the Chinese attached sufficient importance to Bangladesh and wanted to repair some of the damage that their support for the Yahya regime throughout 1971 had done to their image and influence there. But they seem to have taken the view that they can afford to incur Dacca’s displeasure for the time being, even if this means increased Indian and Soviet influence there. While they may or may not be justified in their conviction that they can tackle this problem later, it is indisputable that just now they give a much higher priority to their relations with Islamabad than to those with Dacca.
A second explanation is equally obvious. Since the Chinese look upon themselves as the natural leaders of Asia, they are ever anxious to prove that no major dispute involving their neighbours can be settled without their cooperation. A number of other developments – their inclusion among the five permanent members of the Security Council, their remarkable progress in the nuclear weapons field and the studious efforts by the United States, Japan and a number of other leading countries like Canada, Britain and France to befriend them – have encouraged them in the belief that the rest of the world accepts their claim to ascendancy in Asia. They may have been embarrassed by their isolation in the Security Council. But they can take comfort in the fact that they have forcefully made the point that Bangladesh needs their endorsement in order to be admitted to the UN and that India will have to live with their hostility unless it is willing and able to convince them that its treaty with the Soviet Union does not amount to what they call an “aggressive alliance.”
Counterweight
It is impossible to be sure that the Chinese leaders are genuinely as apprehensive of Soviet intentions as they claim to be, that they are not raising the bogey of Russian threat to legitimise the steady improvement in their relations with the United States and that their criticism of India is not the result of a domestic debate which is related not so much to this country’s actions as to the relatively fixed ideological positions of the participants. But it can be said that, whatever their compulsions, they cannot achieve their objectives by sticking to the present approach. They will have to revise it for the simple reason that Pakistan cannot serve as a counterweight to India and as a bulwark against alleged Soviet ambitions in the region. They also cannot trust Mr. Bhutto who is too shrewd not to know that they cannot shore him up for long.
New Delhi should show patience and forbearance because it has nothing to gain by replying in kind to Peking. It should also do all in its power to break the deadlock between Pakistan and Bangladesh. Since Mr. Bhutto is in a weaker position both at home and vis-a-vis Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, it should try to persuade the latter to agree to meet the former and take a more flexible attitude on the question of war crimes trials. The debate in the Security Council should facilitate Mrs. Gandhi’s task inasmuch as it should now be evident to Dacca that even its firm supporters do not approve of the proposed trials. If India can help end this deadlock, it will have denied Peking even the limited opportunity it now has to fish in the troubled waters of the sub-continent.
The Times of India 30 August 1972