When in the midst of a difficult economic and political situation in 1974 Mrs Gandhi began pointing towards the CIA as the source of the mounting attacks on her and her government, I for one took the view that she was looking for a convenient scapegoat and said so in editorials in this newspaper. And I never took seriously her subsequent charge that this agency was responsible for her defeat at the polls in March 1977. On both occasions her credibility and popularity were low and it was not necessary to look for other explanations for what had happened. I am not so sure now in view of the fantastic nonsense the former US Ambassador to this country, Mr Patrick Moynihan, has written in his book “A Dangerous Peace.”
Mr Moynihan is a prima donna and prima donnas are often as innocent as they are vain. It is, therefore, quite possible that he has not invented what he has written, that it is precisely what he was told by his aides in New Delhi and that he accepted all that rubbish in good faith. In that case, the conclusion is inescapable that he was taken for a ride by those in the US embassy set-up who had much to hide. But whether or not Mr Moynihan is an innocent abroad is a peripheral issue, the central one being the charge against the united Congress Party and its utter incredibility.
Funds
It is beyond belief that the Congress Party in power could have failed to raise the necessary funds for contesting the mid-term poll in Kerala in 1959 within the country and that it should have depended on the US government for the small sum that used to be spent on elections those days. Mr Nehru was then at the height of his power and popularity and he was all along fairly suspicious of the CIA. There was a powerful anti-Communist sentiment in the country at that time. The industrial-business elite was anxious to keep the CPI out of office everywhere. It relied solely on the Congress to meet the Communist challenge. In such a situation, the CIA could at best have funded some individuals, not the ruling party. The same applies to the elections in West Bengal in 1967, though Mr Nehru was no longer alive.
It is equally incredible that the US intervention in India’s political process should have been so marginal at the height of the cold war in the ’fifties and the ’sixties and that the CIA should either not have tried to finance friendly small parties or been turned down by them. One reason why I have not taken Mrs Gandhi’s charges against the CIA seriously is that I have not been able to convince myself that her policies hurt or were designed to hurt vital US interests in the region and that this infuriated successive American administrations so much that they regarded it necessary to topple her. Two apparently incontrovertible instances have often been quoted in this connection – the Indo-Soviet treaty and the Indian armed intervention in 1971 in what is now Bangladesh in the face of President Nixon’s much publicised “tilt” towards Pakistan.
I have not been impressed by this argument. It was clear at the time of the conclusion of the treaty with the Soviet Union itself that the Russians had in a manner of speaking fallen into their own trap – they had been keen on a treaty for some years for reasons best known to them – and that Mrs Gandhi would have little use for it once she had settled the Bangladesh issue in India’s favour. Subsequent events fully confirmed this assessment. In 1972 itself the treaty had been reduced to what a Russian diplomat once described it to me half jokingly – a Soviet-Soviet treaty. While Moscow celebrated its anniversary, New Delhi quietly ignored it.
Any lurking doubt on this issue should be removed by the fact that in 1973 Mrs Gandhi firmly and quickly grasped the Shah’s hand of friendship so much so that by 1975 it looked as if Indo-Iranian cooperation was going to provide the nucleus for a relatively stable order in the region. And the Shah of Iran, it need hardly be recalled, was the linchpin in the US scheme for the area.
I have also not been persuaded that the Nixon administration was hell-bent on preserving the integrity of Pakistan in 1971 or that it took firm steps either to deter India from intervening in Bangladesh or to persuade or compel the Soviet leaders to use their influence in New Delhi to restrain Mrs Gandhi. Indeed, I have been convinced on the basis of what a number of American officials have told me from time to time that Washington was not too averse to the division of Pakistan, that it had reasonably good contacts with Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, that it was principally interested in ensuring the integrity of what was then West Pakistan and the survival intact of the Pakistani army, and that it sent a task force of the Seventh Fleet into the Indian Ocean towards the conclusion of the 1971 war not to prevent the surrender of the Pakistan army in East Bengal but as a warning to Mrs Gandhi lest she orders her troops to step up the attack on the western border.
Influence
I have always found it difficult to see Mrs Gandhi in a pro-Soviet and anti-US role. This has been particularly so since the summer of 1973 when there was a sudden turn for the better in Indo-Iranian relations. For there is not the slightest doubt that the US embassy in Teheran used its influence with the Shah to promote Indo-Iranian friendship. Ambassador Helms made a quiet, though not a secret, trip to Delhi in early 1974 to inform the ministry of external affairs that the Shah had cleared the decks for a wide-ranging economic agreement with it and Mr Kissinger himself told me at the time of his visit to New Delhi later that year that the US administration attached the greatest importance to the growing Indo-Iranian ties. There can also be no question that the success of this effort would have embarrassed the Soviet Union and that Mrs Gandhi was as aware of this reality as Mr Kissinger.
One doubt has bothered me in this assessment. There has been enough evidence to show that the subjective and the irrational elements play an important role in the making and implementation of US policies, that as a rule the Americans have preferred puppets and stooges to independent-minded friends in third world countries and that different departments in the administration function as separate empires, often at cross-purposes with one another. Thus it has not been possible to dismiss completely the possibility that while the State Department under Mr Kissinger was well disposed towards her (Mr LK Jha and Mr TN Kaul had easy access to him), the Pentagon and the CIA were not.
Mr Moynihan’s account of his ambassadorship in India reinforces this view. For, despite the fact that he was in New Delhi at a time of a critical turn in India’s foreign policy – friendship with Iran which was without doubt the principal instrument of US purpose in the area – he has gone so far as to say that Mrs Gandhi had tied this country to the Soviet Union. It does not clinch the issue of the CIA’s intervention against Mrs Gandhi but such issues are seldom clinched.
Creed
Mr Moynihan is a celebrity, perhaps rightly so in the United States where the concept of free enterprise is the accepted creed. But it is truly extraordinary that he should be so imprisoned in that conceptual framework that he should fail to recognise the obvious point that India could not repeat America’s experience in respect of economic development and that the entry of the public sector into the field of basic and heavy industry was the result of hard-headed realism and not of Mr Nehru’s adherence to fabian socialism. It is even more extraordinary that he should have attributed India’s economic difficulties in 1972, 1973 and 1974 to “rigid state socialism” and not the widespread drought in 1971 and 1972 and indifferent monsoons in 1973 or that he should have convinced himself that Mrs Gandhi was pushing the country in that direction.
Mrs Gandhi, as anyone familiar with Indian politics should know, is not an ideologue. She stands for certain values. But nationalism is the most important among them, not socialism. Under persuasion of some of her advisers, she had agreed to the takeover of the wheat trade in 1973. But she was quick to learn from the dismal failure of the experiment and she packed off the architect of the scheme, Mr DP Dhar, to the Moscow embassy, the pragmatists among her group of advisers had won. In 1974 they had pushed through a package of measures which had begun to stabilise the prices. If Mrs Gandhi was moving towards some form of dictatorship which Mr Moynihan claims to have anticipated, it had little to do with doctrinaire commitment to “rigid state socialism.” It was the product of other factors – the decline in the standards of public morality, the campaign of vilification against her and her family, the irresponsible railway strike in 1974, the JP movement with its utopian overtones, her belief in her own indispensability and the authoritarian streak in her character.
The Times of India, 18 April 1979