Mrs Gandhi’s visit to the United States has inevitably provoked a great deal of discussion on Indo-US relations in both India and the United States where recently the Council on Foreign Relations, New York, and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace organised, in collaboration with the Indian Council of Cultural Relations, two separate seminars among American and Indian scholars, journalists and businessmen. On the US side, officials from the White House and the State Department participated in the second seminar.
If these discussions have revealed one thing, it is that few people, even at the policy-making level in the two countries, recognise that Indo-US relations have generally run on two tracks and that no “crisis” in them has lasted long. This is a tribute to the community of values and interests the two countries have shared and can serve as the basis for stronger ties between them. The differences of perspectives and interests between the two are obvious and have been discussed often enough. A lot of sentimental stuff on the shared values has also been published from time to time. But it is rarely that Indo-US relations have been seen in a balanced perspective. The following is an attempt to provide such an overview.
Grand Design
Let us begin at the beginning – when in 1954, a critical point in Indo-US relations, the United states decided to arm Pakistan as part of its grand design to contain communism in disregard of India’s protests, it did not lose interest in India’s success as a democracy. Indeed, some Americans, Ambassador Chester Bowles foremost among them, formulated the concept of competition between democratic India and communist China and said that its outcome would determine the future of Asia. It followed that they regarded it as vital that America supported India in the herculean task of modernising its society and economy through the democratic process. They did not represent the dominant US view then. But they came to do so later.
Similarly, when the then Prime Minister, Mr. Nehru, decided in the mid-’fifties to accept the hand of friendship the post-Stalin Soviet leadership offered him in order to be able to cope with what he saw as US attempts at hegemonism and the threats from a US-armed Pakistan on the one hand and a resurgent China in possession of Tibet on the other, he did not give up the effort to maintain cordial relations with America. He visited the United States in 1956 to confer with President Eisenhower who in turn visited India in 1958 and received an extremely warm reception. By then, India’s relations with China had begun to deteriorate openly.
This two-track approach did not change under either President John F. Kennedy, who proclaimed his friendship for India and was regarded by Indians as a friend, or President Nixon, who through Mr. Henry Kissinger proclaimed his tilt towards Pakistan at the time of the India-Pakistan war over Bangladesh in 1971.
There was, of course, a great deal of difference in the attitudes of the two American Presidents towards India and in the response of the two Indian Prime Ministers, Mr. Nehru and Mrs. Gandhi, to them. While President Kennedy did all he could to mobilise for India from America’s West European and Japanese allies and was keen that India should succeed in transforming its economy while preserving democratic institutions, President Nixon cut off all bilateral aid to India in 1971, and ordered a task force of the seventh fleet into the Indian Ocean with the implicit warning that it might act in case India moved into west Pakistan in a big way.
President Nixon also reversed US policy towards China, indirectly further downgrading India in his scheme of things. But while Mr. Kennedy put pressure on Mr. Nehru after the Chinese attack in 1962 to make ‘concessions’ to Pakistan in Jammu and Kashmir, Washington under Mr. Nixon and Mr. Kissinger encouraged the Shah of Iran, America’s staunchest ally in the Persian-Arab gulf, to befriend India and build economic cooperation, marrying India’s expertise and Iranian petro-dollar wealth.
Similarly, while Mr. Nehru, despite his liking for Mr. Kennedy, was quick to get out of the agreements with the USA over joint air exercises and Voice of America broadcasts from New Delhi, Mrs. Gandhi, despite the newly concluded friendship treaty with the Soviet Union and her failure to strike a rapport with Mr. Nixon, grasped the Shah’s hand of friendship and did all she could to extend the areas of cooperation with America’s Iranian ally who, incidentally, was trying to bring Afghanistan into the ambit of Indo-Iranian cooperation. Mr. Kissinger himself tried to repair the damage to Indo-US relations which President Nixon’s ‘tilt’ towards Pakistan had caused and received a warm welcome in New Delhi in 1974.
This two-track approach has survived President Reagan’s decision to arm Pakistan with the most sophisticated equipment, including the dreaded F-16s. On the Indian side, Mrs. Gandhi has been highly critical of this decision, impinging as it does on India’s security, but has refrained from launching a campaign against America’s overall policy of strengthening its strategic nuclear arsenal, projecting its military power in the Indian Ocean, and seeking bases in the region. She has also shown keen interest in improving ties with the United States, China and even Pakistan.
Perceived Interests
On the US side, it appeared at one stage that Mr. Reagan might adopt an even tougher stance towards India than Mr. Nixon. This was so last year when the US opposed the IMF loan to India and took steps to deny it access to the American market for certain goods. But, apparently, President Reagan and his aides have had second thoughts. Else, they would not have invited Mrs. Gandhi to visit the United States and she would not have accepted the invitation. Thus, there is at least a chance that Mr. Reagan, too, might stick to the two-track approach – of arming Pakistan and at the same time trying to accommodate India’s interests.
This two-track approach has clearly been the result of a simultaneous divergence and convergence of perceived interests between the two countries. The divergence has inevitably attracted more attention than the convergence. But the latter, too, has been a fact. And in this regard, while it has been a commonplace that America has a stake in India’s success as a democracy the fact of India’s stake in the survival of America’s power, both economic and military, has often been ignored. But this, too, has been a reality if only because democratic and non-aligned India cannot possibly wish the Soviet Union to prevail and become unchallengeable in the region close to its borders. A rough balance between the two super-powers in the region is a necessary condition for India’s own non-alignment and independence of action.
India is the tallest child of the nationalist revolution that has been sweeping the world since the end of World War II, a revolution which also witnessed the rise of the United States as the leading world power. The two countries have, therefore, symbolised the two most significant and apparently contradictory developments in the post-war period – the rise of a large number of independent states anxious to assert themselves on the one hand, and of a super-power keen to create a world order under its auspices on the other. Their perceptions of world reality were, therefore, bound to be different, and so they have been.
Soviet Strength
Often without knowing it, and invariably without articulating it in so many words, we in India have by and large seen the United States as the dominant power and the Soviet Union as a reactive power despite its adherence to and propagation of, a universal ideology. Therefore, despite its ideological hostility to nationalism, we have seen it as a supporter of nationalism by virtue of its being on the defensive and far behind the West headed by the United States in economic, if not always in military, terms. It is possible, as contended by the West, that the Soviet Union has caught up and even surpassed the US in the military field. But on the West’s own reckoning, it does not possess the economic strength and institutional framework to aspire to preside over a world order. So it has not been necessary for us to review our assessment of the Soviet Union in any basic sense.
Indeed, I might add that one reason why we have been keen to restrain the exercise of US power is because we have never accepted the Soviet communist view that the balance had turned or was about to turn in their favour. Our own ties with the Western world have been far more intimate, our state-to-state cooperation with the Soviet Union in the economic and military fields notwithstanding.
The Americans are an ideological people. Unlike major European states, the United States did not grow in a natural way. It was created round an ideology, an ideology which proclaimed the equality of all men to be an axiomatic truth, which it is not. They are also a self-righteous people. The same is true of us Indians. Unlike the United States, India is not a sudden creation. It has grown over several millennia. Yet, modem India, too, is being created round two ideologies – the ideologies of nationalism and democracy.
Both the Americans and the Indians have, therefore, tended to formulate and articulate their policies and mutual differences in ideological and consequently in sweeping terms. But both are also pragmatic and have, therefore, managed to ensure that they do not push their differences to the breaking- point.
(To be concluded)
The Times of India, 27 July 1982