The current crisis need not and would not have caused the Indian government much anxiety if the Nixon Administration was waiting, as some critics have suggested, for a suitable opportunity to pour in a massive amount of aid in an effort to influence its economic policies. In such an eventuality New Delhi could have accepted aid and retained, as in the past, the right to go its own way. Mrs. Gandhi may have yielded to the US pressure on the question of devaluation in 1966 but five years later she concluded the treaty of friendship with the Soviet Union.
However difficult some of us may find it to accept, the reality is that Washington has neither the will nor the capacity to bail New Delhi out of its present difficulties. India will have to fend for itself as best it can with such assistance as it may be able to secure from friendly countries, including the Soviet Union which is expecting a bumper crop this year.
Not Keen
This does not mean either that the American government and people have become completely indifferent to the threat of a widespread famine in this country or that they would summarily reject an Indian request for credits to enable it to import food. But it will be naive for anyone to believe that Washington is as keen now as it was in 1966 and 1967 to bring about a change in this country’s economic policies or that it is as hopeful of doing so as it was then or that President Nixon enjoys the same freedom of action vis-a-vis the US Congress as President Johnson.
The Watergate affair has clearly undermined President Nixon’s authority with Congress to such an extent that he has virtually lost the capacity to ensure that measures proposed by him can go through. But even if this sordid business had either not taken place or not come to light, it is highly unlikely that the American response to the current crisis in India would have been significantly different. The crux of the matter is that the sad experience in Viet Nam has robbed the Americans of that overweening self-confidence which led them to believe that they knew what was best not only for themselves but for everyone else and that it was within their power to get it. They now recognise and accept the limitations of their power.
The pressure on the dollar leading to three devaluations in the past 18 months or so and the difficulties in securing adequate trade concessions from the European Economic Community and Japan have inevitably strengthened the feeling of disillusionment and the desire to curtail external commitments. This affects India as much as many other recipients of US aid.
In the ’fifties and the early ’sixties when the Americans were in an expansive mood and their dream of world hegemony had not turned into a nightmare in the jungles and marshy lands of Viet Nam, they adumbrated and embraced many theories which led them to pour aid into the third world. They believed that the outcome of the East-West ideological conflict hinged on their success or failure in wooing non-aligned countries, that aid was a decisive weapon in this struggle, that India was engaged in a competition with China for the soul of South-East Asia if not the whole of Asia, that New Delhi’s capacity to match China’s performance based on strict internal discipline depended on the availability of substantial external resources and that in the absence of aid Indian democracy would go under. No wonder, they provided this country with extensive credits and met its food requirements for almost two decades under PL 480 despite New Delhi’s justified refusal to oblige them on foreign policy issues.
The position now is altogether different not so much because objective realities have changed as because America’s appreciation of them has undergone a remarkable transformation. It has more or less abandoned the above theories and consequently changed its policy. This is best illustrated by its unqualified support for Israel despite the problems it creates for it in the Arab world, its enthusiasm for China and, above all, its ability to do business with the Soviet Union. It had become weary of aid many years ago.
Sensitive
This is not to imply that Washington has concluded that competition with the Soviet Union is all but over. On the contrary, it remains highly sensitive on this issue. Indeed it will not be much of an exaggeration to say that this largely explains its China policy and its decision to back the colonels’ regime in Greece and to sell highly sophisticated military equipment to Iran.
But the approach is selective and does not involve much outlay of US resources. The sale of military hardware to Iran and of Boeings to China is in fact good business and helps to reduce to some extent America’s enormous trade deficit with Japan and the European Economic Community. This policy accords reasonably well with the general mood of disenchantment and the compulsion to stay in the power race.
As the Americans appear to see things, the Soviet Union, too, has become aid weary partly because in key countries like Egypt, Ghana and Indonesia their investment has not produced the desired results and partly because the domestic demands on existing resources have become much more pressing. They also seem to have concluded that the competition with the Soviet Union is essentially military and not ideological and that the challenge can be effectively met by pursuing the four-point Nixon-Kissinger strategy of developing friendship with China, curbing the arms race through agreements with the Soviet Union, eliminating the risk of a direct confrontation with it by making extensive political and economic arrangements and maintaining the existing alliances in a reasonably good shape in the critically important areas of Western Europe, the Far East and the Persian Gulf.
Evidently India cannot figure in the new scheme in the same way as it did in the old whereby the United States took an alarmist view of Soviet capability and the appeal of the communist ideology to newly independent countries. It is unavoidable that its evaluation of the importance of this country should have undergone a change as a result of its reappraisal of the nature of the communist movement and its burgeoning relations with China.
Assessment
There is one more facet to this change in the US attitude. American policy-makers also appear to have revised their assessment of the strength of Indian nationalism and democratic institutions. They no longer consider these to be as fragile and as dependent on external props as they once did. Since this point has not received much notice in this country it is perhaps worth remembering that Mr. Kissinger was not flattering Mrs. Gandhi when he said in 1971 that she was too tough-minded a leader to become anyone’s stooge and that Nixon was not indulging in his usual hyperbole when earlier this year he acknowledged India to be the pre-eminent power in South Asia.
Thus the policy of “benign neglect” which the US Ambassador, Mr. Moynihan, has been accused of recommending to his government is as much the result of the end of the cold war as of a genuine respect for the health of our nationalism and political institutions. This can serve as the basis of a new and healthier relationship in future, though right now neither Washington nor New Delhi seems to be in a position to undertake the task of building on these foundations.
This, too, need not be regarded as a tragedy. Indeed, it is possible to take the view that an American intervention in our affairs through large-scale aid could only obviate the need for basic reforms in the country’s economic policies, enable the ruling elite to persist in the kind of approach that has brought the nation to the present sorry pass, confirm it in its illusion that foreign aid is a substitute for domestic savings, internal discipline and sane policies and thereby ensure that Indo-US relations will continue to be plagued by misunderstanding.
The Nixon administration is apparently not in a position to make such an intervention. But the more pertinent point is that Mrs. Gandhi should herself make such changes as she regards necessary in the interest of the country’s economic health and that there must be no suggestion of either external pressure or inducement. This is specially applicable to the United States because the Indian perception of it continues to be influenced by a host of adverse factors like military assistance to Pakistan from 1954 to 1965 and the memories of the cold war.
The Times of India 1 August 1973