Despite the obvious success of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s visit to the United States, it is an open question whether it marks a turning-point in Indo-US relations. The answer will depend on a variety of factors, above all on whether we can come out of our defensiveness and whether America is willing and able to help us do it.
For all her strong points, Mrs Indira Gandhi was on the defensive most of the time both at home and abroad. Her critics believed that she raised the bogey of a disruptive and destructive opposition in the country and of a revanchist Pakistan backed by a hostile America and China for political gains. This was a misunderstanding of her personality. She genuinely believed that both the country and she personally were besieged. Any number of individuals within India and the Soviet Union played on her fears.
Not many independent-minded Indians bought her description of the opposition and of the danger from Pakistan. Certainly, no one in the West believed that despite the US supply of sophisticated arms which were clearly not relevant to the Soviet military presence in Afghanistan, Pakistan could constitute a threat to India’s security. On the contrary, many of them felt that Pakistan had reasons to fear an Indo-Soviet pincer in view of the closeness of Indo-Soviet ties.
The situation changed to some extent as the Akali agitation in Punjab acquired a terrorist and secessionist dimension. This created for Pakistan an opportunity it could exploit. But the opportunity was limited because Pakistanis could not possibly risk a proper armed conflict with India so long as Soviet troops were present on the Khyber. Mrs. Gandhi ignored this fact and plugged the line of danger from Pakistan perhaps partly because she wanted to give the Akalis an exit which they, of course, refused to take.
Obviously, Mr. Rajiv Gandhi is differently made. This is evident from the way he has handled the question of US arms supplies to Pakistan during his visit to the United States. “We do not at all feel threatened. Our only problem is that we have to divert scarce resources to weapons,” he told a correspondent at the National Press Club in Washington. It is difficult to think of Mrs. Gandhi having taken up this position.
Proper Response
Mr. Rajiv Gandhi too, however, did not demonstrate the same kind of confidence in relation to Pakistan’s search for nuclear weapons. He had, of course, reasons to be concerned over Islamabad’s relentless search for a nuclear weapons capability and Washington’s willingness to acquiesce in it even if under the compulsion of circumstances arising out of the Soviet military presence in Afghanistan and its determination to bleed the Soviets there. But an Indian Prime Minister confident of himself and his people should assess the situation for himself, formulate and implement a proper response. Americans would certainly have been impressed by such an approach.
Two additional points are notable in this connection. First, Americans have tried and failed to persuade President Zia-ul-Haq and his colleagues to give up their nuclear programme. Americans have been engaged in this effort for almost a decade. Mr Kissinger forced the French to withhold a reprocessing plant they had agreed to sell to Pakistan when he was secretary of state and Mr. Bhutto was Pakistan’s Prime Minister. Secondly if they can still step up pressure on Pakistan, they do not need to be prodded by us.
Perhaps Mr. Rajiv Gandhi has been guided by some other considerations which are not known to us. In any case, this is a relatively small point judged against the overall picture of confidence that he projected in the United States. This should help strengthen Indo-US relations. Americans do not have much use for those who lack self-confidence.
We can blame Americans for many of our problems. That would be relevant in an ideal world in which one is his brother’s keeper. It has no relevance in our harsh world which proceeds on the reality of power. Many other nations are better able to come to terms with this reality than us. We tend to wallow in the past and the wrongs someone has done to us. What a contrast the Vietnamese, for instance present. They have been anxious to establish normal relations with the same United States which waged war on them for 10 long years and finally went back on the help it had agreed to extend them for the reconstruction of their devastated country.
We Indians can justly pat ourselves on our collective national back on having won and preserved substantial room for manoeuvre for ourselves. This has not been an achievement which one can legitimately deride. Not many countries in the third world have a similarly impressive record to their credit. But essentially, our policy has been defensive.
Serious Challenge
The story is a long and complicated one, involving as it does policies of other countries in the region of immediate interest to us and outside of it. So it is not possible to narrate it in detail. The narration will of necessity need to be sketchy. But that should suffice to substantiate the observation that India has been on the defensive.
In a deep, fundamental sense, the story of our defensiveness goes even farther back than our independence. Nationalist India had been on the defensive against elemental Muslim communalism since the late thirties and it was not able to come out of it by the time of independence. The communal holocaust that preceded, accompanied and followed independence converted even this otherwise great victory into a virtual defeat. And before we had had time to recover from the stunning blows of partition, mass killings and mass migrations, the new embodiment of Muslim communalism known as Pakistan delivered another blow in the form of a Pathan tribal attack on Jammu and Kashmir. Since then, we have by and large been responding to Pakistan’s moves. Even at the Simla summit in 1972, we failed to press fully the advantage that our military victory over Pakistan and its break-up had given us.
As if all these wounds on our psyche were not enough to occupy our energies, China moved into Tibet in 1950 and thereby abolished the buffer that had separated the two countries and in the process ensured the security of India’s Himalayan frontier. The Chinese did not complete the occupation of Tibet till 1956 which led three years later to the flight of the Dalai Lama and thousands of Tibetans into India which, in turn, caused a public deterioration in the relations between Peking and New Delhi. But India had reasons to be concerned about its security in the sub-Himalayan belt in 1950 itself.
Mr. Nehru sought a political way out of this potentially serious challenge and negotiated an agreement with China in 1954 which contained the subsequently famous Panchshila formulation. He managed to cover up the fact that he was acting defensively from his people and the world. In fact, he behaved in public as if he was a great statesman assuring peace between the two Asian giants. But, in reality, he was trying to buy peace for his country, and the Chinese knew it.
Wrong Attitude
By the time the Chinese challenge became fully manifest in the mid-fifties, America had decided to arm Pakistan. An Indian leadership not trapped in its self-righteous defensiveness would have anticipated that the two threats would one day converge, as they finally did in the sixties, and sought a way out in advance. President Eisenhower’s offer of military assistance offered an exit. At least it deserved to be explored so that we could be sure whether or not it could help us out of the troubles. But Mr Nehru rejected it, and many of us applauded him for it. We lived in a make-believe world, as Mr. Nehru himself acknowledged after the Chinese aggression in 1962. But perhaps he too did not recognise that we also lived in a world in which incantations supposedly served for real power.
India has been able to break out of this defensiveness twice – once under Mr. Lai Bahadur Shastri in 1965 when it finally decided to buy Soviet weapons after America had turned it down, and then in 1971 when under Mrs. Indira Gandhi’s leadership it went to the rescue of Bangladeshi victims of Pakistani terror and helped them establish a sovereign state of their own. At the time of the underground nuclear test in 1974, it again looked as if India had taken the bit between its teeth and decided to break into the nuclear club and proclaim that it had arrived. But it retreated, defensively, arguing that its test was for peaceful purposes. Since then, it has essentially marked time in its relations with the United States, China and Pakistan.
There can be no question that domestic factors beginning with the Navnirman agitation in Gujarat in 1973 influenced Mrs. Indira Gandhi’s foreign policy. Under siege herself, she saw the country under siege. There can also be no doubt that objective circumstances have strengthened our tendency towards defensiveness. But the same circumstances could have brought forth a different response from others. We Indians tend to be self-righteous and defensive perhaps because we are still not supple and resilient enough to cope with events as they develop.
Americans do not live in the past. They live in the future. They do not give a damn if they have hurt you in the past. They deal with you on the basis of what you can offer them or withhold from them today. It follows that they will assist us to the extent it suits their interests. There is fortunately a partial convergence of our and their interests. They need peace and stability in the region, and so do we. They will emphasise this convergence and de-emphasise divergence, as in Pakistan’s case, if we are willing to do the same. They are likely to follow a two-track approach. We have to be ready to do the same. Which is possible only if we have enough confidence in our capacity to handle our problems, including those created by them, just as they have in theirs.
The Times of India, 19 June 1985