It is only proper that Mr. Morarji Desai should have left the British Prime Minister, Mr. Callaghan, in no doubt that New Delhi is not willing to be taken for a ride on questions relating to the Indian Ocean, Africa and Afghanistan. This country may not approve of all that the Soviet Union and Cuba have done or propose to do in Africa. But it cannot disregard the facts. For instance, even the former director of the CIA, Mr. Colby, has acknowledged that covert intervention by that agency in South Africa and Zaire led to the Soviet-Cuban involvement in Angola and that without the first the second might not have taken place. Similarly, if President Mobutu feels free, with or without Western encouragement, to support the rebels in Angola, it becomes difficult to appreciate the outcry in the West over the Angolan-Cuban help to the Katangan rebels in their attempt to seize the Shaba province. And if France is entitled to send not only its planes but also its men to bomb and otherwise fight against the rebels in the Sahara and Chad on the plea that it is honouring bilateral agreements with the governments concerned, by what logic can one take exception to the Soviet-Cuban assistance to Ethiopia in its struggle to preserve its territorial integrity against thinly disguised aggression by Somalia? It is the same story in the Indian Ocean. The West is raising a lot of hullabaloo just because this vast stretch of ocean has ceased to be its exclusive preserve which it had been for over hundred years – a British lake till the early sixties.
India is non-aligned and its vital interests cannot be said to be at stake in Africa. As such it has no particularly urgent and good reason to take sides in the East-West conflict in that continent. But it is notable that till the Portuguese empire collapsed in Mozambique and Angola, the US administration presided over by Mr. Nixon and Mr. Kissinger had not the slightest doubt that the white man would continue to dominate southern Africa, that the West considered the outcome of the struggle between rival parties in Angola vital because the victory of the factions backed by the CIA, South Africa and Zaire would have won respite for the white man in Rhodesia and South Africa, and that this might well have happened if the Soviet Union and Cuba had not come to the rescue of the MPLA. In plain words, the Soviet Union and Cuba have rendered invaluable assistance in the black Africans’ painful search for a measure of dignity in their own continent. Surely India cannot but be sympathetic to this role of theirs, especially when it knows as well as anyone else that unlike the West, the Soviet Union does not depend and need not depend in the foreseeable future on Africa’s mineral resources. While it is nobody’s case that Mr. Brezhnev and Mr. Fidel Castro are in the charity business, it will be difficult for anyone to argue that they are out to loot Africa, which is what the West has been doing and wishes to continue to do. Finally, if the Soviet Union is to help friends and allies in Africa and adjoining regions, it must maintain a naval presence in the Indian Ocean. By that yardstick, the present level of its activities cannot be said to be excessive and the chances are that these will soon look pitifully small as the West steps up its efforts as it is now determined to do. It has no dearth of resources, allies and excuses.