Punitive actions under Super 301 and the Missile Technology Control Regime and threats of more to follow by Washington have given anti-Americanism a new legitimacy and a fresh lease of life. Since New Delhi has no choice but to continue to seek American goodwill, it cannot modify official policy in a significant way in the near future. But the government, already on the defensive in view of the conditionalities it has had to accept in respect of loans from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, has been pushed further into a corner. As a result, the cause of Indo-US understanding has suffered.
US policy-makers have obviously their compulsions and calculations which we should try to assess. But the relevant point right now is that if it was possible for them to show regard for India’s susceptibilities in this period of deep psychological uncertainty and confusion for this country, they have not shown it. They may not have singled out India and they may not have been unusually brutal. But they have been less than understanding of the traumatic experience this country has been going through.
No Good Reason
Washington, it can also be argued, has had no good reason to be solicitous towards India. It cannot be seriously denied that till lately, New Delhi has not been particularly friendly and helpful. Even when the United States was able to persuade Arab countries such as Egypt and Syria to join it in its bid to force Iraq to get out of Kuwait, India withdrew refueling facilities for US military planes and Rajiv Gandhi made a dash to Moscow as if the power to make critical decisions still lay there. But it is precisely this and other similar demonstrations of innocence of the realities of power that should have persuaded perceptive policy-makers in Washington not to make the task of their counterparts in New Delhi more difficult than it ready is.
The Indian intellectual and political community has, of course, at been traumatized by the disintegration of the Soviet Union as it was by the military defeat, though fairly limited, at the hands of China in 1962. But the Soviet collapse has shattered the only world independent India has known. As such, it has in the deeper sense, been far more unsettling. In the sixties, India could lean on the Soviet Union to offset the Chinese threat. To whom does it turn now to offset the US demands and pressures?
As it happens, it is precisely at this time of the collapse of the familiar world that Indian economy has run into such an acute balance of payments crisis as to oblige New Delhi to accept what it has been its strongest desire to avoid – acceptance of external guidance and supervision in the management or mismanagement of its economy. This autonomy has been the principal expression of sovereignty for the Indian elite and many Indians believe that this sovereignty has been compromised.
All in all, men and women of discernment in Washington would have known that this was not a good time to be seen to push India and punish it for its natural reluctance to be pushed. Instead we have had Carla Hills who speaks only one language – the language of threat. She is not just insistent and persistent. She is condescending when she is not downright insulting.
India is a very large and extraordinarily heterogeneous country. On a surface view, therefore, it is inappropriate to speak of an Indian psyche. In reality, however, the dominant national elite is fairly small and it possesses a unity of outlook which is quite impressive despite apparent ideological differences among it. Gandhian pacifism and concern for the poor, for instance, merges effortlessly with Nehruvian non-alignment and socialism and the latter into different varieties of Marxism and populism.
This alignment inevitably confuses issues and produces a ‘consensus’ which has led to such bizarre actions as loan melas and reservations of as much as 50 per cent of jobs in the government for those who do not qualify for them. But that has been the informing ‘ideology’ of Indian politics which men like the Prime Minister, the finance minister and the commerce minister are trying valiantly to cope with. Washington has not facilitated their task.
One feature of this elite is particularly notable. It has been divorced from the realities of economic and military power which the United States symbolizes more than all others put together. Once a while an individual or two from the world of science and technology has been brought into the policy-making process, even if at the second remove, but leading businessmen and well-known military men never. This fact by itself tells quite a story. But it may be in order to illustrate it by an example.
Economic Growth
On his own testimony, Mr JRD Tata once tried to raise the question of economic growth with Nehru. Nehru got up from his seat and started looking out of the window. When he lingered on, Mr Tata look the hint, got up and said goodbye. He was not guilty of such ‘brashness’ with Nehru ever again.
The Narasimha Rao government has conferred Bharat Ratna,the highest honour in its discretion, on the same Mr Tata. While it will be naive to suggest that the elite’s attitude towards the business community has changed, the award speaks of what the Prime Minister and some of his colleagues are trying to do. Such men need to be supported and not humbled on some petty matters which is precisely what Washington has done.
While India’s policy of non-alignment has been discussed at great length for years, no one, to the best of my knowledge, has ever suggested that there might exist some connection between it and the absence of an Indian military doctrine and exclusion of military men from the decision-making process involving the country’s security. Frequent coups in Pakistan and other third world countries can possibly be stretched to explain distrust of professionally competent and popular soldiers. But it cannot explain the absence of a military doctrine and ad hocism in allocation of resources. These are expressions of the same mind-set which produces varieties of sickly and sickening anti-Americanism.
There is hardly a device the Indian elite has not adopted to avoid face-to-face encounters with reality. It even managed to convince itself that India could be a social democracy without the necessary economic resources and a leading power without the necessary military prowess. The Soviet connection was extremely useful in this regard. Its psychological importance has been as critical as the access it provided us to military hardware and petroleum products on convenient terms.
Soviet Connections
That is why the extreme reluctance on New Delhi’s part to recognise as late as August last year that the Soviet Union could not survive and that is why the deep anguish at the rise of a supposedly unipolar world. The connection with Moscow in the old form has collapsed but the psychological need for a ‘shield’ against the realities of power survives. Indeed, it has possibly been strengthened.
India, as I see it, is not ready to come into own. The obstacle is not the US pressure to make us sign the NPT or whatever. The obstacle is the nature of the Indian elite. It is adept at escapism and nest-feathering. It is illustrative that in a society where corruption is a way of life, the Bofors payoff should continue to provoke MPs into paroxysm of self-righteous indignation five years after the story first broke. This elite is desperately looking for scapegoats.
Indian business is one clear possibility and the United States another. In fact, for many intellectuals and political leaders, the two are faces of the same ‘satan’ known as capitalism. This is the backdrop against which the efforts of Mr Narasimha Rao should be viewed. He has even to pretend that both socialism and non-alignment are safe with him. Surely someone in Washington should know this much about India.
The Times of India, 11 May 1992