It was a sheer coincidence that India exploded its first nuclear device last May when Pakistan was facing a number of major internal difficulties and the anti-Ahmediya campaign was beginning to gather momentum. This partly explains the virulence of Mr Bhutto’s reaction. But even if this country had held the test at a time when its neighbour was at peace with itself, he would have reacted almost equally violently for the simple reason that he would have regarded it as another move on the part of New Delhi to consolidate the new balance of power in the subcontinent which he is still not prepared to accept.
Mr Bhutto, of course, does not take Indian professions of peaceful intent at their face value. But the correctness or otherwise of his assessment is less pertinent than the fact that New Delhi has demonstrated both the technological capacity and the political will to conduct the test. This must by itself be a great shock for a Pakistani ruling elite which has been and remains obsessed with the need for parity with, if not superiority, over this country in terms of both military strength and international status.
New Problem
This is doubtless not a new problem for the Pakistani rulers. They have faced it ever since the country came into existence in 1947. They solved it in 1954 when they entered into an alliance with the United States. But it reappeared again in 1963 when as a result of the shock administered by the Chinese in 1962, India began earnestly for the first time to strengthen its armed forces.
The problem again became acute in the wake of Pakistan’s military defeat in December 1971 and the establishment of a sovereign Bangladesh. But before the nuclear test Mr Bhutto had evolved a strategy which more or less met his political requirements and his people’s psychological needs. On the one hand he had been claiming that he has outwitted the Indian leadership and secured the release of Pakistani territory and prisoners-of-war without conceding anything in return and, on the other, he had acquired sufficient military hardware from China, France and elsewhere to more than offset the losses of 1971. The nuclear explosion has torn a big hole in this strategy and made it difficult for him to convince his countrymen that parity with India is within reach.
Pakistan’s search for parity with India has been and remains the key issue between the two countries. Since he came to power in December 1971, Mr Bhutto has been deliberately confusing it by making it appear that New Delhi is seeking hegemony over its neighbours. As a corollary he has been claiming that while he favours normal relations with it, he would never accept its overlordship. But all this cannot fool anyone who is familiar with the history of Indo-Pakistan relations.
In view of Mr Bhutto’s campaign, New Delhi has done well to affirm again and again its adherence to the principles of sovereignty and equality, though its record of the last 27 years should have been enough to prove that it seeks no undue advantage for itself on the basis of its size and strength. In relations with Pakistan this has been specially evident in the past two years when it not only returned territory and prisoners-of-war without insisting on a final settlement of the Kashmir issue, but also used its considerable influence in Dacca to dissuade it from going ahead with war crimes trials and to defer partly its demand for the immediate repatriation of all Pakistani nationals. Over 350,000 of them are still in Bangladesh while the last POW has been back in Pakistan for months.
India, however, has not accepted and cannot accept that sovereign equality and parity are one and the same thing. While the former is capable of universal application even if it is modified from time to time in practice, the latter is a practical proposition only in relation to countries which are more or less equal in terms of size, population, economic development and potentialities. It specifically objects to Pakistan’s invoking this principle because past experience has convinced it that Islamabad can achieve parity only with massive external assistance and that it would wish to use the strength so acquired to upset peace in the sub-continent, to begin with in Jammu and Kashmir,
The Indian leadership has been in a difficult position ever since the end of the 1971 war. Though it has been far from reassured about Mr Bhutto’s long-term or even short-term intentions, it has had to make, and justify to the people, one concession after another to him because it has been anxious to explore the possibilities of durable peace in the sub-continent and of improving its relations with some of Pakistan’s erstwhile supporters, specially the United States and Iran and, if possible, even China.
No Success
This policy has clearly not been a complete success in that Islamabad and Peking remain intransigent. It has, for instance, been reported that Mr Chou En-lai has not even replied to a letter by Mrs Gandhi. But the policy has paid enough dividends. Mr Bhutto is, for instance, no longer assured of automatic support by Washington and Teheran and opposition leaders in Pakistan itself do not take at face value his warnings against alleged Indian designs. In this situation, however irksome his antics like the recent mobilisation and threats to Afghanistan, New Delhi cannot deviate much from its policy of doing whatever it can to reduce tensions in the sub-continent. It is a difficult and at times frustrating exercise but there is no option.
It is not realised sufficiently well in this country that the Shah of Iran would not have revised his policy towards it if he was not fully convinced that it was not working for the dismemberment of what was left of Pakistan and that Mr Bhutto would gain an enormous leverage in the absence of improved relations between New Delhi and Teheran. For, whether we like or not, Iran is central to American policy in the Persian Gulf and the United States remains the dominant power in the region despite the establishment of the Soviet naval presence in the Indian Ocean. In plain terms, it means that Washington would not have responded to New Delhi’s desire for better ties if the latter had failed to reassure the Shah through its conciliatory gestures towards Pakistan and that it would have continued to back Islamabad. This is not a combination India could have offset with Soviet support even if it is assumed that Moscow would have endorsed such an approach.
India has also been lucky in three other major developments – the Russo-American detente, the revival of internal power struggle and consequent uncertainty in Peking and the military disengagement between Iran and Iraq. The first development has ensured that Washington does not react hysterically to such influence as Moscow commands in the vital area of the Persian Gulf; the second eliminates whatever little possibility there might have been of an anti-Soviet Sino-American axis which, however informal and limited, would inevitably have worked to the disadvantage of Russia’s friends like this country, and the third makes it easier for it to have reasonably friendly relations with both Teheran and Baghdad. Cumulatively, the three developments make it reasonably certain that not many policymakers in Washington would buy the Chinese proposition that the storm centre has shifted from the Sino-Soviet border to South Asia and the Persian Gulf because Moscow is allegedly concentrating its attention and efforts there and that this would involve considerable pressure on Iran and Pakistan.
Top Chinese leaders, including Mr Chou En-lai and Mr Teng Hsiao-ping, have been trying to popularise this thesis in Washington. They first conveyed it to Mr Nixon and Dr Kissinger through Mr Aziz Ahmed, and then dwelt at length on it in their discussions with Senator Jackson, a strong opponent of the policy of detente with Russia and one of the likely candidates for Democratic nomination for the presidency in 1976. But they are not likely to succeed because Mr Brezhnev refuses to deviate from the policy of understanding with the United States and the tensions between Iran and Iraq have not exploded into a full-fledged war.
Arab World
This does not mean that Mr Bhutto has no cards to play. He seems to be pinning a lot of hope on the immense increase in the power and prestige of the Arab World and the resurgence of the pan-Islamic sentiment. He has also allies in this country in men who make irresponsible and unfounded charges against the United States. Neither of these problems is yet unmanageable but Mrs Gandhi cannot afford to ignore them if she is not to throw away some of the advantages which circumstances and her own shrewdness have given her for dealing with Mr Bhutto and whoever comes to the top in Peking.
The Times of India, 31 July 1974