A discussion of the country’s foreign policy in terms of the personal predilections and traits of the Prime Minister in office is not a new phenomenon. It has certainly not started with Rajiv Gandhi’s accession to that office. Indeed, it did not begin even with Indira Gandhi’s prime ministership. It was all too familiar when Nehru was at the helm of affairs.
It would be ridiculous to suggest that personality does not play a part in the formulation and presentation of a nation’s foreign policy. It does. But it would be extraordinary if a leader, however wilful and powerful, could shift it significantly without damaging the national interest. For that would show that a country’s foreign policy is a toy the leader can play with. In reality it is no such thing. It is rooted in a country’s geography, history, and long-term and urgent national needs. India’s foreign policy is not an exception to this rule.
In a sense, India’s foreign policy defined itself. It did not need an architect. Or to put it differently, Jinnah defined it for us. The country’s partition placed Pakistan in control of the north-west frontier and the coastline which directly opens on to the Gulf. This in turn ensured that the West, already engaged in a cold war with the Soviet Union and fearful of its intentions and capabilities in the oil-rich Gulf region, would seek an alliance with Pakistan. Nehru could not have changed this harsh geo-strategic reality however well disposed he might have been towards the West. Nor can the grandson.
Unlike other members of the Western fraternity, the United States at the time of India’s independence was at once an Atlantic and a Pacific power. As such it was deeply disturbed by the triumph of communism in China and was, therefore, interested in an arrangement with India which could help it contain the Maoist revolution. But this view was the result of a misperception not only of the nature of the Chinese revolution, Stalin’s attitude towards it and Mao’s response, but also about India’s place in the kind of strategy the United States evolved and pursued towards Beijing. An anti-China Indo-US alliance just could not have proved viable.
Adverse Results
And it would have produced a number of adverse consequences to which Nehru was extremely sensitive. For above all else, it would have effectively undermined India’s freedom of action not only abroad in respect of foreign policy, but also at home in respect of economic and social policies. Not to speak of a large public sector, even a genuinely autonomous private sector could not have come up. India would have become a much larger and a much poorer version of Iran or the Philippines.
In any case, Jinnah did not give Nehru an opportunity to consider the possibility of any kind of arrangement with the United States. He struck on the very morrow of independence and partition. While millions of refugees awaited rehabilitation in India as well as Pakistan, he organised a tribal attack on Jammu and Kashmir, with Pakistani armymen providing the necessary leadership and stiffening. India had to fight back this aggression and it did. But it was an inconclusive affair and the UN had come to be involved. The resulting preoccupation with Jammu and Kashmir played a central role in defining the essential content of India’s foreign policy. India had to go to war a second time in 1965 to defeat another armed incursion into the state.
There is scope for difference of opinion on whether India should have rushed to the rescue of Jammu and Kashmir and whether it should have subsequently tried its hardest to hold it in the Union. But one cannot in fairness argue both ways, that is one cannot accept the legitimacy of the Indian actions and argue that Nehru or Indira Gandhi distorted the country’s foreign policy out of a personal anti-Western and pro-Soviet bias. They were acting out of compulsions as these developed.
On the face of it, the Kashmir issue has receded into the background and it is therefore pointless to recall it in a meaningful discussion of Indian foreign policy. Two points are, however, notable in this connection. First, if the issue has receded, it is thanks to the liberation of Bangladesh over which no one can deny Indira Gandhi had presided. Secondly, America’s pro-Pakistani orientation has now acquired a new content and strength as a result of the Soviet military presence in Afghanistan. By the same token, Pakistan must once again become the central preoccupation of Indian policy planners, and this time a Pakistan which, on its own admission, has acquired a nuclear weapons capability.
Three Developments
These three developments – the Soviet presence in Afghanistan, resumption of US military aid to Pakistan and Islamabad’s nuclear weapons capability – have placed India in a most uncomfortable position even if we disregard other events such as the establishment of the US rapid deployment force and acquisition of bases in the Indian Ocean region. In the post-1971 period India’s relations with Pakistan could have become normal and possibly even friendly if these developments had not intervened. But they have intervened.
Pakistan was launched on the nuclear weapons road long before the Soviets moved into Afghanistan in December 1979. President Carter cut off economic assistance to it on that very ground. Pakistan’s nuclear programme would have complicated New Delhi’s search for reasonable relations with Islamabad even if the Soviets had not been sucked into Afghanistan and the Reagan administration had not decided to provide sophisticated military hardware to Pakistan. But all three factors make a deadly combination.
From a cold realistic viewpoint it is pointless either to justify or to condemn the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan and US military supplies to Pakistan. Neither position is pertinent for an assessment of what India should do in pursuit of its interests. Both are facts and neither our endorsement of one or condemnation of the other can make much difference to them. Mr. Gorbachov is not going to walk out of Afghanistan and if there was any scope for doubt on the question of US policy, what Rajiv Gandhi has chosen to disclose about his recent talks with President Reagan should remove it. In sum, the US leader will not allow the Symington amendment to operate in the case of Pakistan and the new bigger arms aid programme will go ahead.
To be candid the problem facing us is neither immediate nor unmanageable. Though Pakistan continues to deploy 80 per cent of its forces on the Indian border and to acquire weapons it cannot possible use on the Khyber, it cannot think of engaging in an open adventure against this country so long as it is involved in a situation of potential conflict with the Soviet Union on its Western border. Its alleged assistance to Sikh terrorists in Punjab is a different proposition.
Similarly, so long as the Soviet position in Afghanistan is not fully consolidated and the present pro-US military set-up is in command in Islamabad, we do not need to worry about a possible Soviet-Pakistan rapprochement. It follows that we cannot be keen on a Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan so long as such a process is not accompanied by a cessation of US military supplies to Pakistan. For us that has to be the tie-up, though New Delhi would not spell it out.
Military Aid
One Indian assessment is that US military aid to Islamabad is guided as much, if not more, by the larger considerations of Pakistan’s security role in the Gulf, especially Saudi Arabia, as by that of its support to Afghan mujahiddin. On the available evidence, American policy-makers are deeply perturbed over the actions of the Islamic republic of Iran in places such as Lebanon and Kuwait and regard the presence of Pakistan military personnel in Gulf sheikhdoms (two full divisions in Saudi Arabia look after the security of the large royal family) vital for the security of pro-US regimes in the Gulf.
In plain terms, in our assessment of our security environment we have to provide for long-term continuance of US hardware to Pakistan as also for substantial Arab assistance to it. And while China may not regard Pakistan a good enough surrogate for harassing India at the moment, Beijing too must lean towards Islamabad whatever its relationship with the Soviet Union or the United States. China’s friendship with Pakistan antedates both the souring of its ties with Moscow in the sixties and the thaw with Washington in the seventies. India cannot balance these adverse factors without the assurance of Soviet support, all our talk of and attempts at diversification of military supplies notwithstanding.
But Soviet support can only supplement our strength. It cannot be a substitute for it. This is where the relations with the West, especially the United States, come into the picture. These relations have been and remain vital for our economic growth. On its part, the US has had, and continues to have, a stake in our economic well-being if only because an India in disarray would destablise the whole of South Asia and unleash forces which Washington would not wish to have to contend with.
At it happens, Rajiv Gandhi’s arrival on the scene has followed a drastic change in US policy towards the third world as a whole. America’s instinct for generosity is now at its lowest since World War II. It has chosen to brandish the stick and preach the benefit of laissez-faire and commercial credits. India cannot fall in line. But America is not a monolith. We must seek to influence those in Congress and elsewhere who are willing to listen to us. Americans are at once moralists and hard-headed cynics. They seek converts and camp followers and some of them have apparently come to believe that under the present dispensation we are willing to be converted. But we cannot afford to oblige.
The Times of India, 6 November 1985