To begin with, permit me to say that nothing like a consensus obtains in my country on the issue of Soviet presence in Afghanistan and what New Delhi’s response should have been and should be. There is a section of articulate opinion in India well represented in the press and in opposition parties which strongly takes the view that the Soviet military presence in Afghanistan constitutes a threat not only to Pakistan’s but also to India’s own security, that the disappearance of one of the two buffers between the Soviet Union and India gives this country a stake in the survival of Pakistan as a strong and viable entity, and that New Delhi should warmly respond to Islamabad’s overtures so that relations of friendship and mutual trust can be established between the two countries in the interest of their joint security against the new threat.
This view, as is obvious, comes straight out of the writings of Lord Curzon and other British strategists of the 19th century, who were concerned with India’s security, as the Czarist empire moved southward and their own moved westward. According to the proponents of this approach, the great game of Rudyard Kipling’s description has been resumed from the Russian side and calls for an appropriate response from the Indian inheritors of the Raj. And among them are organisations and individuals who are called Hindu nationalists allegedly unreconciled to the existence of Pakistan on the one hand and the attempt to establish a secular polity at home on the other. Apparently they are more anti-Soviet than anti-Pakistan.
Diverse Viewpoints
Then there are the others who believe equally and sincerely that the Soviet action in Afghanistan is defensive; that it is a response to various US moves to establish a strong military and political presence in the Persian-Arab gulf region and to exclude the Soviet influence from this area so close to its borders; that Moscow could not sit idly by as Amin in Afghanistan plunged the country into chaos and at the same time sought to establish contact with Washington through Pakistan; that all it wants in Afghanistan is stability under a genuinely neutralist regime and that it is so much nonsense to speak of the Soviet Union wanting to move to the warm water ports of the gulf via either Iran or Pakistan when it deploys a blue waters navy and enjoys certain facilities in Aden and Scotora.
The advocates of this viewpoint include the pro-Soviet CPI and other leftists. But all those who take such a charitable view of Soviet actions in Afghanistan are not pro-Soviet and anti-West, or to be more specific, anti-US. This distinction is rather important. The left in India is by and large no longer too anti-West; it is only anti-US. These non-leftists who are inclined to give the benefit of the doubt to the Soviet Union tend to believe that, in any case, the Pakistani ruling military elite continues to treat India as its enemy number one, that Islamabad is acquiring highly sophisticated weapons from the United States for use at some suitable opportunity against India, and that, therefore, whatever our view of Soviet intentions, we have little choice but to be vigilant about Pakistan.
It is difficult to say what India’s stand would have been if Mrs. Gandhi was not once again elected to office in January 1980, that is, within weeks of the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan. Mr. Charan Singh, India’s caretaker Prime Minister at the time of the intervention in December 1979, had sent for the Soviet ambassador in New Delhi and spoken rather sharply to him. But it would be risky to rush to the conclusion that a non-Congress (I) government in India would have taken a line very different from Mrs. Gandhi’s. India has good reasons to maintain friendly relations with the Soviet Union in view of the magnitude of the economic and military cooperation between the two countries. And it is worth recalling that it was a government headed by the well-known anti-communist Morarji Desai which concluded the large arms deal with the Soviet Union which is now being implemented.
Criticism Of No Use
Let us leave aside the supposed predisposition of the present Indian Prime Minister and could have-been Prime Ministers and examine what precisely India could have done. Instead of abstaining in the UN general assembly, it could have voted in favour of the resolutions criticising the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan and demanding the withdrawal of its forces from there and in the process earned some goodwill in President Reagan’s Washington. But beyond perhaps increasing somewhat the Soviet Union’s sense of isolation, such a gesture on India’s part would have achieved precious little.
India could not have suddenly reversed its foreign and defence policies of the past three decades and proposed a joint defence pact to Pakistan. And what would have such an offer amounted to in the absence of a settlement of the dispute over Jammu and Kashmir? India, it can be argued, could have offered to withdraw some of its forces from the Pakistani border and thus enabled Islamabad to transfer more of its troops to its north-west frontier. But Mrs. Gandhi gave specific assurances to Pakistan that it did not need to worry about its security vis-à-vis India. But Pakistan showed no interest either then or subsequently in transferring troops from the Indian to the Afghan border and there is no evidence that it is so interested now.
It may be recalled that in the summer of 1980 Mr. Francis Fukuyama, then working at the Rand Corporation (financed out of allocations for the US air force), visited Pakistan to discuss its security problems with its policy makers. His report has since been available. It brings it out in a most unambiguous manner that Pakistan continues to regard India as the principal threat to its security.
It is not pertinent to the present discussion for me either to say whether or not the Pakistani perception of its security interests is justified or to go into the sources of this perception. All that I am trying to find out on the basis of the existing facts is whether India could have done much to influence the course of events in Afghanistan and Pakistan. My inference is that India could not have, even if it was willing to embarrass its relations with the Soviet Union, which, of course, no government in New Delhi would wish to do in a hurry.
Spokesmen of the present Indian government have argued that it tried to shape, in consultation with Pakistan, a joint approach to the issue of Soviet military presence in Afghanistan and that the US decision to supply, against its own better judgment, such highly sophisticated equipment as F-16s to Pakistan, frustrated this attempt. I would not care to press this view for a variety of reasons. For one thing, such a joint approach could not have amounted to much in that the Soviet Union would not have withdrawn from Afghanistan in response to a joint Indo-Pakistan call for such a withdrawal. For another, there is not much evidence to show that Pakistan was interested in working out such an approach. As I see it, Pakistan could not have behaved differently from the way it has.
It had to seek US military assistance for a variety of reasons which are not critically dependent on the Soviet presence in Afghanistan. The Pakistan armed forces stand in need of modernisation, though they have acquired some modern equipment including Mirages from France and elsewhere since 1965 when the US cut off its supplies. The country is ruled by a military junta which must keep its principal constituency, the armed forces, reasonably happy. India has undertaken a programme of modernisation of its military equipment which Pakistan cannot but wish to match, if not supersede. Those of you who have followed developments in the Indo-Pakistan sub-continent would be aware that since late last year Islamabad has been pressing a no-war pact on New Delhi, that after dragging its feet for some time and in the process conceding a propaganda victory to Pakistan, India has offered it a treaty of peace, friendship and cooperation, and that finally an agreement has been reached to establish a joint commission, the terms and scope of which are still to be determined.
Baffling Proposal
I am not quite sure what Pakistan expects to get out of the no-war pact beyond perhaps making it somewhat easier for the Reagan administration to push the aid programme for it through the US Congress year after year. I have been baffled on two counts. First, there is a specific provision in the Simla agreement of 1972 that neither side will resort to use, or threat of use of force, to settle any dispute between them. Secondly, Pakistan has not been interested in a final settlement of the Kashmir dispute on the basis of the status quo which is the least India can possibly offer it.
I am, however, equally baffled by the Indian reluctance to discuss the Pakistani proposal precisely because I find it so meaningless. Mrs. Gandhi might have calculated that the acceptance of such an offer would make it difficult for her to rouse public opinion to the danger arising out of US military supplies to Pakistan and to justify an increase in defence expenditure. Perhaps her reluctance had less to do with her approach to Pakistan than to the United States. Perhaps till early this year, she, too, like many others, did not believe that it was possible even to engage in a meaningful dialogue with Reagan’s Washington.
(To be continued)
This is the text of the talk at a seminar organised by the Columbia University, New York, on November 15
The Times of India, 1 December 1982