Mr. Swaran Singh’s first task as Foreign Minister should be to repair the damage that India’s relations with the United States have suffered in recent months. His past record at the Foreign Office gives reason to believe that he can be depended upon to do the job. This may well be one of the reasons why Mrs. Gandhi’s choice has fallen on him.
This is not to suggest that India alone is to blame for what has happened or that Mr. Dinesh Singh has been riding his own hobby horse. But the fact remains that there is a cloud of misunderstanding between India and the USA which needs to be cleared. This country can ill-afford to alienate either of the super-powers except where its own vital national interests are at stake.
The Nixon Administration has been upset over some of India’s actions. The US Ambassador in Delhi has publicly charged this country with having deviated from its traditional policy of non-alignment in respect of the war in Indochina. The pertinent point is not whether Mr. Keating is justified in what he has said or whether a country can be expected to stick to a certain policy framework for all time and in all situations. His charge is relevant primarily because it gives expression to the sense of annoyance and even anger which has been building up in Washington.
One newspaper report from there has in fact gone so far as to suggest that the US Government has more or less decided to lift the embargo on the sale of lethal weapons to Pakistan and that it has done so at least partly because of the growing resentment against India. The report may or may not be wholly accurate but it is not incredible.
Understanding
The Nixon Administration showed a keen understanding of Mrs. Gandhi’s dilemma at the time of the crisis in the undivided Congress party last year. It realised that it was necessary to give the organisation a new radical image even at the cost of unity. It may not have been enthusiastic about the nationalisation of the 14 big banks but it did not raise an outcry that India was going too far to the left. Thus the biggest political upheaval in this country since independence did not affect adversely its relations with America in any way. The misunderstanding between the two countries was a subsequent development.
It can be traced back to the decision last winter to close US cultural centres in places like Trivandrum and Lucknow where America does not maintain trade or consular offices. The US Government took the view that the Ministry of External Affairs was bending over backwards to please the Soviet Union and that it did not care if in the process it had to go back on its own earlier policy and hurt the United States.
The circumstances in which the Ministry decided to order the closure of the cultural centres left the Nixon Administration no choice but to draw this conclusion. Even here many fair-minded persons took the same view.
A number of moves since then have tended to strengthen that unfortunate impression in Washington. Among these are New Delhi’s proposal to upgrade the mission in Hanoi to the Ambassadorial level without a similar gesture to Saigon, its refusal to assist in the return of a US ship by Cambodia last March and to participate in the Jakarta conference on Indo-China last May, the cold-shouldering of the three-nation task force set up by that conference and the recent resolution of the AICC(R) calling for the withdrawal of US forces as a precondition for a peaceful settlement.
Assessment
The irony of it is that while the over-all assessment that has influenced India’s posture towards Indo-China is generally correct, some of the specific moves made by it do not necessarily follow from it. The rationale for these is not sufficiently convincing and does not meet the test of not embarrassing this country’s relations with the United States. It should be emphasised that a similar consideration should be, and has indeed been, kept in view by New Delhi in dealing with East and Central European problems so that the Soviet Union is not needlessly alienated.
It is to the credit of the Ministry of External Affairs that at no stage did it accept the official American view that the massive US involvement in the Viet Nam war could help either to contain China or to expose the hollowness of the Maoist doctrine of “wars of national liberation.” Events have proved the validity of the Indian assessment and the disastrous weaknesses of the elaborate rationalisations which Washington has produced from time to time to justify its actions. In fact it is now obvious that if anything the war has weakened the chances of Laos and Cambodia surviving as independent entities and facilitated China’s task in extending its influence in the region. Even the insurrection in north-east Thailand is largely an off-shoot of the Viet Nam conflict.
India has a stake in the early termination of the war in Indo-China. But how, one may ask, is this objective to be promoted by upgrading the mission in Hanoi? It is also surprising that anyone should seriously believe that the proposed move can make the slightest difference to North Viet Nam’s relations with China. These are bound to remain intimate whatever any country, including the Soviet Union, does unless, of course, China behaves like the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe or the United States in Latin America and makes the blunder of trying to dominate Hanoi.
India’s decision to boycott the Jakarta conference is similarly open to question. This might have been justified if the Government had taken the stand that it was in no position to influence the course of events in Indo-China and that, in its view, no useful purpose would be served by organising the conference at this stage. But it did not do so. Moreover, even if it had adopted what is called a low profile, it should have pondered over the implications of the decision for its relations with countries like Japan, Indonesia, Malaysia, Australia, Singapore and so on.
Three points can legitimately be made in this connection. First, India has been keen to join the regional organisations of which these countries are members. Its refusal to join them in a search for peace in South-East Asia cannot be said to have increased the credibility of its professions regarding regional co-operation in their estimation. Secondly, in spite of their anti-communism, they share the Indian view that a military solution favourable to the United States is not possible in Indo-China. Finally, if certain elements in the governments concerned still favour the military approach it is in India’s interest to reinforce the rival viewpoint. This can best be done through participation in a conference like the one at Jakarta and not through a boycott.
An either or approach is seldom productive of results in international relations. In the extremely complicated situation of South-East Asia it can only be an exercise in futility. The Soviet Union’s reluctance to recognise Prince Sihanouk’s Government-in-exile, its continuing interest in a negotiated settlement between Washington and Hanoi and its efforts to strengthen its ties with Japan, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand illustrate the point.
Foreign Policy
Since the ’fifties India’s foreign policy has been based on the premise that the country needs to have good relations with both the United States and the Soviet Union. Mr. Nehru did not abandon this approach even after the Chinese aggression in 1962 which compelled him to seek and receive military assistance from the West. Mrs Gandhi adhered to it at the time of the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Even those who took a critical view of the Russian action will in retrospect find it difficult to find fault with her cautious approach.
In sum, this means that however strongly New Delhi may feel on an issue, it cannot permit this feeling to distort its over-all policy. This does not mean either total silence or acquiescence in injustice. It only means that the approach in international relations has of necessity to be hard-headed and that there is not much place for sentimentalism, adventurism, utopianism and half-baked solutions in this complicated world. If these factors very often influence a country’s approach it is largely because of lack of enough professional expertise in its Foreign Office.
Both the United States and India are passing through a very difficult period. The Government is under pressure in both countries with the result that domestic considerations are likely to influence foreign policy decisions to a degree which is neither healthy nor proper. But this argues for a more and not a less intensive dialogue between the two so that they better understand and appreciate their differences.
The Times of India 1 July 1970