Having defined the framework in which India, in my opinion, thinks and operates, it is hardly necessary for me to take up the second question I have been asked to try and answer. Even so I propose to speak at some length on the issue of India’s relations with the two superpowers because there is widespread misunderstanding about them here in the United States.
This misunderstanding is largely emotional. Many of you Americans have assumed, consciously or unconsciously, that since India is a democracy, she should have sided with you in your contest with the Soviet Union. You have not been familiar with our concerns and priorities and the irrelevance of the cold war to us. You have not paid proper attention to the trauma that partition meant for us and the challenge that Pakistan, with its espousal of the two-nation theory based on religion, and China, with its claims to influence not only in south-east Asia but also in south Asia, have posed to us.
You were sympathetic towards us in the late ‘fifties and early ‘sixties as far as our conflict with China was concerned. But you grouped her with the Soviet Union, which we did not. For since the Khrushchev-Bulganin visit to our country in 1955, we had known that Moscow and Peking were not pursuing the same goals in Asia. Indeed, Mr. Nehru explicitly drew the conclusion that the Soviet leadership was seeking to befriend India in order to be able to “contain” China. And, as you know, we wanted to “contain” China by bringing her into the UN so that she felt bound by the UN charter at least to some extent. In retrospect, it cannot be said that our judgment was wrong in either case. By 1956 the differences between Moscow and Peking were discernible to careful observers.
Wrong Perceptions
We, on our part, have tended to be self-righteous; to raise non-alignment to the status of an eternal verity, not recognising that it could make sense only in the context of the cold war; to exaggerate your support for Pakistan, ignoring the fact that you have sought to maintain a balance in your relations with her and us; to take your word in respect of China, whether hostile or friendly, for deeds; to disregard your concerns arising out of your inability to match the Soviet Union’s conventional military power, your attempt to establish a reasonably just international order and your contribution to the well-being of other countries; and to concentrate on your blunders as in Indochina. We have needed aid from you and your West European and Japanese allies, but we have not found it possible to express gratitude for it in an adequate manner. For one thing, it hurt our pride and for another, we quite unjustly saw you as our adversaries.
But in spite of these perceptions, our relations have not been all that bad. Permit me to recall what I said at a seminar which the Carnegie Endowment had organised in New York last June. I had then said that the Indo-US relations have run two tracks and given the following examples. In 1954, you decided to extend military assistance to Pakistan, against which we protested sharply. But in 1956, Mr. Nehru visited Washington at President Eisenhower’s invitation to confer with him on issues concerning Asia. And in 1958 Mr. Eisenhower returned the visit and used the occasion to leave no room for doubt that in her growing conflict with China, India could depend on the United States. In 1962, President Kennedy responded immediately to Mr. Nehru’s request for military assistance when China attacked India and played a key role in ensuring that Pakistan did not take advantage of the war to try and grab Jammu and Kashmir.
At the time of the Indo-Pakistan war in 1965, President Johnson cut off military supplies to both, which hurt Pakistan more because her forces were equipped mostly with US gifted weapons. In 1971, the Nixon-Kissinger team tilted towards Pakistan and ordered a task force of the seventh fleet into the Indian Ocean, apparently to ensure that India did not move into West Pakistan and destroy her armed forces which Mr. Kissinger regarded as the only guarantee of her survival. But they made no move to stop the emergence of Bangladesh as a sovereign state, and by 1973 they were encouraging the Shah of Iran to befriend India. And it is not even necessary to recall that most of the aid India has received in the last three decades has come from the United States and its allies and from institutions dominated by them, such as the World Bank and the IMF.
Ambivalent Ties
Our relations with you have, of necessity, been complicated and ambivalent. That would have been the case even if you had not taken our rhetoric and self-righteousness too seriously. 1 have already dealt with the basic reason for an ambivalence towards you and I need not go over the same ground again. Some of your political actions like your arms aid to Pakistan, your efforts to befriend China in the past one decade, your talk of assisting the modernisation of her armed forces, your opposition to our takeover of the Portuguese colony of Goa, have reinforced this ambivalence on our part. But it would have been there even if these specific problems had not arisen between you and us. It would only have taken a different form. In the absence of specific disagreements, you would have wanted us to be your allies, very junior ones by virtue of our economic and military weakness, and we would have never agreed. We could not have agreed without splitting our people and in the process provoking anti-Americanism which is a feature of life in all third world countries aligned with you?
In passing, I might add that the impression persists in your country that Mr. Nehru was anti-West, especially anti-American. This is based on a superficial view of the man. It is based on his utterances of a certain period and it ignores his personality. He saw himself as a renaissance prince. He read only Western writers and journals. He could have had no respect for Stalin or Mr. Khrushchev. He positively disliked Chairman Mao Zedong. The Chinese, on their part, found him arrogant and condescending, perhaps because he was not prepared to accept that they were, as if by right, the big brother in Asia. Perhaps they also distrusted him because of his friendly ties with the Soviet Union.
Mr. Nehru was also convinced that Marxism was dated and said so. He rejected the concept of class struggle and he abhorred the violence and suppression of liberty inherent in the communist system. His chief mission was to win for India sufficient room for manoeuvre so that she did not find herself hemmed in by hostile forces and could shape her future in relative freedom according to her lights as influenced by the West’s liberal humanism. He may have erred in detail, but he never deviated either from the central purpose of increasing India’s room for manoeuvre or in his adherence to liberal humanist values.
Mr. Nehru brought in the concept of socialism, pan-Asianism and anti-Fascism into the Indian freedom movement. And on the strength of his personality and the fact of his holding the office of Prime Minister for 17 long years, he was able to create the impression that these were the dominant influences in the shaping of India’s foreign policy.
Seeking Soviet Arms
The reality has been different. In fact, India has all along pursued a fairly hard-headed policy of promoting her own interests. Indeed, Mr. Nehru’s own approach changed as a result of experience in office, especially after the border conflict with China came into the open in the second half of the ‘fifties even though, for some reason, he did not articulate the new approach.
India has leaned towards the Soviet Union in defence of her specific interests. She, for example, befriended the Soviet Union in the mid-’fifties when the United States decided to arm Pakistan. She sought a Soviet veto in the Security Council first on Jammu and Kashmir in 1956 and then on Goa in 1961 when the West and its third world cronies turned against her and spoke as if they were great votaries of Gandhian nonviolence. It may be interesting to recall that in 1961 Mr. Kissinger, perhaps one of the most cynical practitioners of realpolitik, pretended to be shocked at India’s use of military power to liberate Goa.
Similarly, India turned to Moscow for arms after the 1962 Chinese attack when the US finally turned down her request in the wake of Mr. Nehru’s death in 1964. But her interlocutor on the fundamental issues of the appropriate institutional framework and value system has, as I have tried to show, been the West, indeed the English-speaking West, which in practice has meant the UK and the US.
Our relations with the Soviet Union have not suffered from the ambivalence which has characterised our ties with you precisely because these have been functional. By and large, we have never been attracted to the Soviet Union as a possible model for us, though we have been impressed by its success in emerging as a superpower and borrowed the concept of centralised planning from it. Its policy in our part of the world has broadly been reactive; so has been ours. Moscow has sought to contain the western influence, and so have we. We have not expected much from the Soviet Union. So we have had no reason to be disappointed. We have been glad to receive from it whatever help it has been willing and able to extend to us.
(Concluded)
This is the third and last part of the text of the talk at Princeton University on November 16.
The Times of India, 10 December 1982
