The debate in the country on the propriety or otherwise of Mrs. Gandhi’s statement on the current struggle for restoration of democracy in Pakistan shows that widespread confusion prevails on what India’s foreign policy is and should be.
This is understandable on three counts. First, we are relatively new to freedom and therefore to international relations. So, like all inexperienced peoples, we tend to believe that abstract principles can and should guide a country’s foreign policy. Secondly, like all living things, our foreign policy is multi-layered. Since one can refer to the layer convenient to him, it is not particularly difficult for an interested person to press his partisan viewpoint fairly effectively. Finally, despite all our claims to non-alignment, we are as much victims of the cold war propaganda as anyone else in that the views of many of us have been deeply influenced by the cold war.
The last point is almost self-proven as far as communists and fellow travellers are concerned. Though they may claim to be as good nationalists as anyone else and many indeed sincerely believe this to be the case, they invariably see the world through Soviet lenses. The fact that there has been no violent and basic conflict of interests between the Soviet Union and India since the mid-fifties has made it easy for the communists and their friends to believe that they can serve two goddesses equally well at the same time – Indian nationalism and “proletarian internationalism” (read Soviet foreign policy interests).
“Friends of America” have had no such advantage. America and India have often clashed on issues of vital importance for this country – US support for Pakistan over Jammu and Kashmir in the fifties, military supplies to Pakistan in the ‘fifties and ‘sixties, opposition to the merger of the Portuguese colonies of Goa, Diu and Daman with the Indian Union in 1961, tilt towards Islamabad over Bangladesh in 1971 and resumption of military supplies to Pakistan in 1981. But this has not discouraged “friends of America” from pushing their line.
Strategic Interests
They have shown remarkable resilience. They were, for example, quick to drop their hostility towards China in the early ‘seventies when the United States sought rapprochement and “strategic consensus” with Beijing. Earlier they had advocated joint defence arrangements with Pakistan in order mainly to contain China. Any Pakistani regime, however cruel at home and whatever its designs towards this country, has been assured of the support so long as it maintains close ties with the United States.
Like the communists and fellow travellers, they too see no conflict between the demands of Indian nationalism and the considerations arising out of the cold war. On the contrary, like the communists they too interpret requirements of India in terms of the preferred superpower’s strategic interests. Both, of course, accept a limitation. Neither has advocated or would advocate that India cede bases to their friend.
All this tells another story, the story of the weakness of Indian nationalism. Indian nationalism has by and large been on the defensive. We have been lucky inasmuch as we have had leaders first in Mr. Nehru and then in Mrs. Gandhi who, on the sheer strength of their personality and pride, have managed to cover up this reality sufficiently and thus prevent foreign powers from trying to impose their will on us. But the face breaks through the mask.
Our circumstances have been adverse. Independence itself was accompanied by partition, a communal holocaust on both sides of the newly created borders and migration of millions of people across these frontiers. This was followed by Pakistan’s bid to seize Jammu and Kashmir and China’s occupation of Tibet. And, as is well known, by 1953 the United States had decided to arm Pakistan. India has since engaged in a series of balancing acts which have helped preserve its independence. But while India has without doubt been one of the few major countries which have steadfastly refused to subordinate their foreign policies to either superpower, it has not been able to rise to its natural and proper stature in the region and the world.
Support To Democracy
There are other reasons for this Indian failure – our economic performance, for example. But whatever the reasons, the pertinent fact is that we have become thoroughly used to being on the defensive. Our response to the current upheaval in Pakistan amply illustrates this point. The central issue is not whether or not Mrs. Gandhi should have made a statement on the upsurge in Pakistan but whether we the people of India, especially the intelligentsia which claims to be committed to the and cause of democracy, should have extended moral support to the struggle across the border and whether we have done so. Surely, the answer to the first part of the question cannot but be strongly in the affirmative and to the second in the negative.
In our polarised world, most people are selective in their praise and condemnation. The talk of judging every issue on its merit is so much empty nonsense in most cases. So it is not particularly surprising that many of those Indians who have been greatly exercised over the imposition of martial law in Poland should have no hesitation in embracing General Zia-ul-Haq, if not his hangmen and floggers. The trouble is that Pakistan is for us neither a faraway country about which we know nothing nor a mere pawn in some distant cold war. The Americans may place it in Central Asia, the Gulf or the Arab Muslim West Asia according to their convenience. For us it remains very much a part of South Asia.
In the context, it may be recalled that Mr. Nehru formulated the policy of neutrality (later christened as the policy of non-alignment) at the same time as he formulated the concept of Afro-Asian cooperation. The two were closely interlinked in his mind. For implicit in both was the desire to keep out the great powers – the old European colonial powers as well as the two superpowers – from India and all other newly independent countries of Asia and Africa. At that state he was not much interested either in Latin America or in Eastern Europe.
It was more than an irony of fate and much more than a fortuitous combination of circumstances that Pakistan had concluded a security pact with the United States before the Afro-Asian conference was held in Bandung. It was the product of the US attempt to “contain international communism” and establish pax Americana and of the Pakistani military-bureaucratic elite’s determination to find a powerful patron in its struggle against the people of Pakistan on the one hand and India on the other. The dispute over Jammu and Kashmir also served both these ends. It immobilized democratic India as the military-bureaucratic elite consolidated its hold on the other side of the border and it distracted the attention of the people of Pakistan from the suppression of their own civil liberties.
By and large we in India have not seen these two wars by the Pakistani rulers as not being interlinked. But they have been. This is not to suggest that the Pakistani rulers have waged the two wars with equal intensity. They could not have done so and they have not done so. In their dealings with India they have had to take complex international realities into consideration. But the deeper connection between the two wars is obvious. All Pakistani rulers have sought on the one hand to keep themselves in power by suppressing the people in that country and, on the other, to legitimize their usurpation by maintaining a measure of hostility towards India.
Mr. Bhutto was not an exception in either regard. He ruled Pakistan through the use of terror and he was far from friendly towards India, though he adopted a more sophisticated approach. He was biding his time. On a superficial view, this assessment would undermine the thrust of this article. But it does nothing of the kind. Mr. Bhutto did not come to power through the electoral process. He waded to office through a river of blood. Doubtless he won the poll in the present Pakistan in 1970. But Pakistan was then a much bigger entity. Moreover he did not behave as a democrat. He dismissed elected governments in the NWFP and Baluchistan and in the latter province he even unleashed the army.
Zia Buying Time
General Zia has played it soft in his dealings with India but simultaneously he has brought back the United States into South Asia and he has stepped up the war on the people of Pakistan. In the name of Islam, he has sought to legitimize brutalization of a whole people. Like Mr. Bhutto, he too is buying time. Like Mr. Bhutto, he too may depart from the scene before he acquires the bomb and destroys resistance to his rule by flogging anyone who raises his voice against his order. The people in Pakistan, especially in Sind, are fighting not only for their own freedom but for our security as well.
A democratic regime must of necessity be preoccupied with domestic problems, particularly in heterogeneous societies like India and Pakistan. And a democratic regime cannot allow itself to be manipulated and cast in the role of a gendarme for the Gulf by the United States. It is not an accident that America’s allies in Asia, Africa and Latin America are mostly military dictators. “Friends of America” as much as “Friends of Pakistan” should take cognizance of some of these facts.
The Times of India, 14 September 1983