Mrs. Gandhi’s visit to the United States has been far more successful than anyone in India had expected. Indeed, her key advisers were keen that the trip should not be built up into a momentous event lest it aroused too many expectations which it could not possibly fulfil. Events have proved their fears unjustified.
President Reagan’s aides in the White House were more optimistic, as I had occasion to discover during my recent discussions in Washington. Apparently they knew that their boss had made up his mind to do his best to befriend Mrs. Gandhi. But even American experts not involved in the decision-making process in Washington did not have a clue to what was being planned in the White House with the assistance, valuable and valued in this case, of the State Department.
Most of them took the view that the differences between US and Indian policies were too big to be quickly bridged, that the residue of distrust between the two countries was too great to be disposed of by one visit, that Mrs. Gandhi herself was not sufficiently trusted and respected in the right-wing and obsessively anti-Soviet Reagan administration to be able to persuade it to make the necessary efforts.
Several of these American specialists raised the issues of India’s lukewarm criticism of the Soviet military presence in Afghanistan and recognition of Kampuchea as if they were insuperable barriers to improvement in lndo-US relations. Like the Indian experts they, too, must have been taken by surprise by the warmth of President Reagan’s references to Mrs. Gandhi and her family, including her two sons, and the success of the visit.
It is still impossible to say who in the Reagan set-up took the initiative to explore the possibility of better understanding with India, when and why. But it is reasonably clear that the decision was taken at a fairly high level, perhaps the highest. The move received a fillip as a result of the North-South summit in Cancun when Mr. Reagan met Mrs. Gandhi and discovered to his surprise that she was not the ogre she had been made out to be. It is also obvious that there is in the White House an awareness of the importance of a democratic and stable India.
Balanced Relationship
This awareness cannot be fully explained in terms of the familiar US approach whereby even the late Mr. John Foster Dulles was not prepared to write off India in view of America’s adversary relationship with communist China. For while President Reagan and his advisers are unhappy over the manner in which Beijing has tried to push them on the question of US arms supplies to Taiwan, they have by no means given up the view that China is their strategic, even if undeclared, ally in the struggle against the Soviet Union. Thus, instead of encouraging Mrs. Gandhi to project India as China’s rival and competitor in Asia, they have pressed her to try and further improve ties with it. But since the Reagan administration is unwilling to be dictated to by the Chinese on the question of arms supply to Taiwan and is unsure of the course they will adopt at home and abroad, it is possible that it has recognised the need for a balanced relationship with both the Asian giants, India and China.
President Carter, too, had sought such a balanced relationship with India and China. Only, this fact had got obscured in both India and America because it had come to be automatically assumed that the Janata government’s policy of “genuine non-alignment”, a euphemism for the pro-western and anti-communist stance of some of its principal constituents such as the Congress (O), the Jana Sangh and the former Praja Socialist Party, accounted for it. President Carter was also not associated with the pursuit of an anti-Soviet policy which dominates the thinking of the Reagan White House. That is presumably why, when President Reagan invited Mrs. Gandhi, it did not occur to Indian policy-makers arid commentators that he might be resuming the policy of having a balanced relationship with India and China.
The same was true in the past about the US approach towards its ties with India and Pakistan, and the same may be true now. President Eisenhower, for example, sought to befriend India within two years of his decision to extend military aid to Pakistan in disregard of Mr. Nehru’s strong protests. We all remember President Nixon and Mr. Kissinger for their well-advertised tilt towards Pakistan at the time of the Bangladesh crisis in 1971.But we should not forget that by 1973 they were busy correcting the tilt by encouraging the Shah of Iran, their staunchest ally in Asia, to develop extensive economic and political ties with this country.
Soviet Pressure
In the fifties, the United States was trying to build a cordon sanitaire around the Soviet Union not in response to what Moscow had done but in anticipation of what it might do. This time it has decided to arm Pakistan in a different context. The Soviet Union is present in strength in Afghanistan which means that the threat of Soviet pressure on Pakistan is not wholly imaginary. As such, it follows that if America is to give a sense of security to Pakistan in order to encourage it to play the role of a front-line state in the conflict with the Soviet Union, it must be in a position to promote normal relations between India and Pakistan. This it can do either if it has friendly relations with India or if it is willing to threaten India. Of the two, the first option is clearly preferable for it from every point of view.
This choice could well have been reinforced by Washington’s awareness that the military regime in Pakistan is highly unpopular, that the people in Baluchistan are so alienated from it as to be willing to make common cause with the devil himself, that a strong anti-American current is latent in Pakistan and that it can at any time burst into the open, as it did in 1979 leading to the sack of the US embassy.
It would not be surprising if it turns out that the Americans were thinking of mending their fences with India even as they were negotiating the $ 3.2 billion economic- cum-military aid programme with the Pakistanis. For, however valid our fear that Pakistan will use the US weapons against us and not against the Soviet Union, there cannot be the slightest justification for believing that the Americans would like them to do so. No US administration has viewed its ties with Pakistan in exclusive anti-Indian terms.
The timing of the US initiative is more difficult to explain. But perhaps it is not even legitimate to try to do so. As we know, bureaucratic machines such as the US State Department continue to grind all the time and produce proposals. This time, they could have come up with the proposal to invite Mrs. Gandhi just at a time when President Reagan’s aides in the White House were willing to heed them or thinking in similar terms themselves.
It is, however, more relevant to note that the initiative has come from the United States, as it had to, because, while other countries can show an interest in good relations with it, the decision whether such relations will materialise mostly lies in Washington in view of its overwhelming power, economic, military and political.
No Compromise
Mrs. Gandhi is not the kind of person who is bowled over by a show of warmth and praise. She is cautious and even sceptical by temperament. During her visit to the United States, she has been even more careful than she is normally. She has not allowed herself to utter one word which she could not have said in New Delhi or,for that matter, in Moscow, which she is scheduled to visit in September. Her speech at the banquet in her honour by President Reagan presented a study in contrast to his. And that set the tone for her subsequent utterances. All in all, she has sought America’s friendship without compromising in the slightest degree India’s ties with the Soviet Union, its stand on any international issue, including Afghanistan, and its right to shape its policies in the perspective of its own interests.
On the eve of her visit, Mrs. Gandhi was keen to let it be known that she did not expect specific agreements to be reached. One major agreement has been signed – the supply by France of enriched uranium for Tarapur – and assurances have been given on two major issues. The US treasury secretary has given an assurance that Washington will help India receive the third and so far the largest instalment of the $ 5.4 billion IMF loan and the president of the World Bank, Mr. Clausen, has promised to do his best to increase IDA aid to India. On top of it, the US has offered to consider sympathetically any request for military hardware. This is a significant development regardless of whether or not India buys some US equipment in the near future.
The US vice-president, Mr. George Bush, indulged in hyperbole when he talked of a “special relationship” between the US and India. A visit, however successful, does not produce a “special relationship”. But a new beginning has certainly and past misunderstandings have been set aside. Nee disagreements may arise, as they do in all dynamic relations. But the two governments should now be in a far better position to deal with them in a spirit of understanding and friendship.
The Times of India, 4 August 1982