We are often told that we are the pre-eminent power in South-West Asia and that we therefore, play a role in these regions which is consistent with our power and size. Some of us came to accept this proposition in the wake of our victory over Pakistan in 1971, which led to the emergence of an independent state of Bangladesh in what was earlier East Pakistan and put an end at least for the time being to Pakistan’s power parity with us. In 1973-74, we began to develop cooperation with the Shah of Iran, which promised to enable us to play a role in the region, though we never defined what that role was to be. The Islamic revolution in Iran, in 1979, put paid to that. Indeed, by 1975 itself, when Mrs. Gandhi imposed an internal emergency in the country and virtually suspended the Constitution, it had became reasonably clear that we were far from being a stable enough polity and economy to be able to play a significant role in the world.
Since the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan in December 1979, our Western friends have been urging us to secure the withdrawal of Soviet troops, view with sympathy Pakistan’s security problems in the new context and accept America’s bonafides in extending military assistance to Pakistan. It is a strange plea. We are urged to use such influence as we are supposed to possess with Moscow not to promote a political settlement which would protect minimum Soviet interests as the Soviets perceive them, rightly or wrongly, but to secure their withdrawal, leaving Afghanistan to be taken over by anti-Soviet elements with or without Pakistan’s backing. We are also called upon to ignore our own security interests vis-à-vis Pakistan. But leaving these considerations aside for the time being, we were in no position to influence events in Afghanistan once the United States had come into the picture by way of covert support to the Mojaheedin and military assistance to Pakistan. Speaking for myself, I have consistently defined Indo-Soviet relations in bilateral terms so that we are free to shape our relations with the United States and China in accordance with what we believe to be our interests. I would, therefore, be loath to make Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan a pre-condition for Indo-Soviet friendship.
Peace Zone Proposal
I was among those who urged India in 1980 to persuade some non-aligned countries to try to mediate in the Iraq-Iran war. I am not sorry that a non-aligned group was set up and that it has done whatever little it could to persuade the two antagonists to cease hostilities. But the total failure of the effect speaks for itself.
We have joined other third world countries in making demands on the West in the so-called North-South dialogue in advocating that the Indian Ocean be converted into a peace zone so that the great powers, especially the two superpowers, keep out of it. But we could be successful only to the extent Western powers considered it in their own long-term interest to heed such demands. They have stopped doing so. As a result, the North-South dialogue has become sterile and the Indian Ocean is becoming an important centre of Soviet-US contention. We have few illusions in this regard.
To sum up this part of my talk, I would say that India’s deepest preoccupation has been with herself – with the problems of recovering her identity and of coping with the modem world in the fields of not only science and technology but also values, the values of equality and social justice being the foremost among them – and not with her role in the world. Whatever the ideological formulation in which her leaders and spokesmen have expressed her foreign policy, she has worked it so as to increase the room within which she can pursue this dual goal. This policy has above all been pragmatic in that it has sought to avoid active involvement in the affairs of other countries and confrontation with them. This was not as true of Mr. Nehru as it is of Mrs. Indira Gandhi. But Mr. Nehru was very different from other Asian stalwarts such as President Nasser, President Sukarno and President Nkrumah.
India has not thought of herself as a world in itself. And it has not been a world in itself. She has all the time been interacting with the West. It has been a constant dialogue and this dialogue will continue as far into the future as we can see. Of necessity, it has been and will remain an ambivalent relationship. In view of the nature of our quest, we have no choice but to accept the West as well as reject it at the same time. We want to be ourselves and we want to define this self in terms which conform to Western values and achievements. No one can say whether we shall succeed or fail in this venture. It is a herculean task to revive and renew an ancient culture. But by our very nature we are committed to this enterprise.
Search For Identity
Before I seek to answer the second question to which I have been asked to address myself – India’s relation with the two superpowers – let me add that my observations regarding the primacy of the search for cultural identity in relation to India apply to the two other non-European major civilisations in Asia – the Muslims and the Chinese.
In view of the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and its spread to almost all Muslim countries all over the world in one form of another, it is hardly necessary to say that with the overthrow of European domination, the Muslim peoples are struggling to re-establish their identity. I am aware that the Iranian revolution and the religious revival in other Muslim societies has been explained in secular terms – that is, in terms of corrupt rulers, growing income disparities, the dislocation of millions of people from their traditional moorings as a result of rapid industrialisation, the bitterness engendered by defeats at the hands of Israel, and so on. I do not wish to minimise the importance of these factors. But I wish to submit that a more basic force has been at work – the desire among the Muslim peoples everywhere to regain their identity.
It is not for me to say whether the effort will succeed or fail. It is also not for me to say whether it makes sense to seek to return to practices which were fashioned in a very different age and place 1400 years ago. All I wish to say is that we cannot understand the conduct of any Muslim society today unless we can recognise its deep urge for a distinct cultural identity based onIslam. I would also add in passing that even Arab radical nationalism under President Nasser represented a similar search, even if it wore an apparently secular garb. For the Arab identity cannot be defined outside the framework of Islam.
The Chinese scene is confusing because the country has been taken over by people who subscribe to the European ideology of Marxism-Leninism and they have sought to transform it into a new society according to the Marxist-Leninist prescription as they understand and interpret it from time to time. As we know, Mao Zedong first tried to replicate the Soviet model in China, regardless of the enormous differences, cultural, economic, geographical, and so on. This phase ended in 1956. Then, in an attempt to make China leap into the 20th century, as it were, in one go, he began an experiment which inevitably led to a clash between him and his colleagues, leading in 1966 to the “great proletarian cultural revolution.”
This movement was, of course, intended to restore his supremacy in the party and the country. But it was also intended to destroy traditional China based on the teachings and all they implied by way of ancestor worship, ethical norms, respect for knowledge and experience, and so on. Placed in this ideological straitjacket, the Chinese have not had an opportunity to assert their cultural identity in clear terms. But the communist revolution in China was also a nationalist revolution, intended, on the one hand to exclude all external domination and, on the other, to unite the country. China has been jealous of its independence and has, through a peculiarly tortuous route which has inevitably involved a violent break and quarrel with the Soviet Union, opted out of the communist movement. It has also begun to loosen the straitjacket, the consequences of which will be interesting to watch. The process of self-recovery and self-renewal will, as in India’s case, be prolonged and painful. We do not know who the interlocutor is going to be. Perhaps it may be Japan which can certainly meet China’s material needs for technology in terms of both machinery and knowhow.
Soviet Quest
I do not know where the United States and the Soviet Union and their competition and conflict fit into my definition of the post-war period being dominated above all by the search by ancient societies and cultures for self-recovery and self-renewal. Western scholars have treated both as offshoots of Europe. The description is clearly valid in the case of the United States, which has sought to inherit the mantle of the former European imperial powers, though it has also sought to transcend it. For the world order which till recently the United States has sought to promote with itself as its leader and nucleus has not been an extended version of the old imperial order.
But I am not quite sure of the Soviet Union. It is a strange hybrid – partly the last frontier of Europe (and by that logic the least European of the European peoples) and partly Asiatic by virtue of the thousand years of Mongol rule and the incorporation of Asiatic peoples into its body politic. The Soviet Union is not an empire in the familiar sense of the term. I, therefore, often wonder whether it is not engaged in forging an identity for itself and whether its travails and its often self-imposed suffering are not an expression of this unconscious quest. If that is so, then the United States is its interlocutor, which it must admire and hate as we Indians have admired and hated the British at the same time.
This is, however, an aside, though not quite. I have brought it in to indicate that I reject the European concept of national interests dominating the thinking and actions of states and view the world and its conflicts in cultural-civilisational terms. This, as you will agree, is pertinent to my approach to the question of my country’s role in the world.
(To Be Concluded)
This is the second part of the text of the talk at Princeton University on November 16.
The Times of India, 9 December 1982