While it is only natural that the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, as we have known it, should have provoked a debate on India’s own future foreign and defence policies, it is clearly premature to draw firm and long-term conclusions. No one can be sure of the kind of world we shall have to live in and cope with in coming years and decades.
It may be a long time before the post-Cold War world falls into some kind of pattern, if it does so at all. The disintegration of the Soviet state is no ordinary event. It has knocked down the very foundation on which the post-World War II order has rested.
It is, for instance, sheer mental laziness to believe that the bipolar world of the Cold War era has given way to a unipolar world. A unipolar world is a logical absurdity. Indeed, the concept of polarity itself is a product of the Cold War. Surely, the theoretical construct cannot survive for long the end of the concrete reality which gave rise to it. The world is neither unipolar nor multi-polar. Right now, it is one vast confusion.
Understandably, the United States looms large on the horizon in the wake of the collapse of, and virtual surrender by, the rival. But the United States has owed its status as a superpower as much to its inherent economic and military strength as to the competition with the Soviet Union. Washington has attracted because Moscow has repelled and frightened. The ‘only superpower’ is, therefore, a meaningless proposition. Power is not an independent category. It is, of necessity, defined in relation to an adversary or adversaries. Who are those adversaries in relation to whom America will now see itself as a super-power?
A great deal has been written and spoken about the challenge the United States faces from the European Community and Japan in the economic realm. So we do not need to traverse that ground except to say that, on the present reckoning, it does not appear likely that Washington will be able to dispose of this challenge in the coming years.
It does not follow, though, that the American-European-Japanese ties are going to unravel. On the face of it, the partners have too much at stake to permit them to fall apart. But the relationship must undergo a radical change in course of time.
Three additional points may be made in regard to the ‘only superpower’. First, its military might would by now have begun to appear anachronistic if it were not for the inexplicable behaviour of Saddam Hussein. The United States owes him a debt of gratitude it can never repay. Indeed, it is difficult to believe that Washington is genuinely interested in getting rid of so convenient a replacement for Hitler and Stalin rolled into one.
The Iranians are already busy manoeuvring so that they are in a position once again to exercise what they regard as their legitimate right in the region. The Iranian empire, it may be recalled, extended up to Greece as far back as the sixth century BC and that Alexander the Great invaded Asia in response the Iranian activities in the Mediterranean. Iranians are among the most history-conscious people in the world, and in Islamic fundamentalism, they have an instrument worthy of their ambitions.
Secondly, the attraction of the US model in both the economic and the political realm has to no small extent been the result of the unattractiveness, to put it mildly, of the rival Soviet model. This is not to suggest that democracy and free enterprise are not desirable in themselves but that they acquired special appeal in the context of Soviet tyranny and economic failure.
It may also be pointed out that the success of both is a relatively new phenomenon; that not to speak of Greece, Spain and Portugal, democracy was under threat even in France till as recently as 1968; that free enterprise can turn out to be as big a disaster in a number of countries as centralised planning; that, inherently, democracy is the most difficult form of government to practise; and finally that if the concept of human rights is used to destablise a democracy like India, the prospect for it could be bleak indeed.
Thirdly, the United States is a most unlikely candidate for the role of the world gendarme, despite its contribution to the defence of civilisation in World War II and in the post-war period, notwithstanding aberrations such as its unprovoked war on Vietnam.
One supposed certainty of the post-cold war era is itself rather wobbly and we should be wary of rushing to conclusions in this twilight period. The need for caution is obvious; and if newspaper reports regarding the foreign policy resolution the executive council of the Bharatiya Janata Party was expected to adopt at its recent meeting were reasonably accurate, which there is no good reason to doubt, it is patently necessary to underline this need.
It would, however, not be fair to blame the drafters and protagonists of the aborted resolution alone for what is after all a national weakness. Jawaharlal Nehru, it may be recalled, pronounced that India would remain neutral in the East-West competition as vice-chairman of the Viceroy’s Executive Council in 1946, that is when it was by no means settled that the country would be partitioned and the cold war had not quite crystallised. The partition decision was finalised in June 1947 and the cold war became an irreversible reality with the communist coup in Czechoslovakia in 1948.
The Indian intelligentsia has more or less been unanimous on the need to continue to fight Western imperialism, though it was already dying by the time we achieved independence in 1947 and was fully dead by the time of Algeria’s independence.
This near-unanimity survived Pakistan’s attempt to grab Jammu and Kashmir in 1947-48, the Chinese invasion and occupation of Tibet in 1950, the distinct possibility that the two adversaries would join together against us and the Chinese attack in 1962. It may not survive the collapse of the Soviet Union. But the desire to relapse into the past remains pretty strong.
Most of us were in agreement with Nehru when he ignored the Chinese occupation of Tibet to sign the ‘panchsheela’ agreement with them in 1954. We supported him in his decision to champion the Chinese case for admission to the United Nations on the plea that otherwise they would feel isolated, draw closer to the Soviet Union and become even more aggressive. Surprising though it may appear, a similar argument is being pressed once again.
The Chinese are, we are told, feeling isolated and lonely after the collapse of the Soviet Union and are, therefore, keen on better relations with us. But, as in the fifties, it is left to our imagination to try and figure out what ‘better relations’ would involve. Are they, for instance, prepared to impress it on their friends in Islamabad whom they have obliged to the point of providing them a nuclear weapon design that to try to undermine the status quo in Jammu and Kashmir and Punjab is to expose the whole region to the risk of long-term instability?
The issue is not whether we should explore the possibilities of economic cooperation with the Chinese. Of course, we should, provided we do not overestimate the possibilities which must clearly remain modest. The issue is whether a dialogue, not to speak of an agreement, on larger political and strategic matters is possible with them.
It may be advisable to remember that the worldview of the Chinese communists has been a product of a strange mix of the cold war, their internal power struggle and their search for great power status. The cold war enabled them to get an enormous amount of aid first from the Soviet Union (up to the early sixties) and then from the United States and Japan (in the late seventies and eighties). Their internal ideological-cum-power struggle accounted largely for the break with Moscow in the sixties and the decision to turn towards Washington in the seventies. In their search for great power status, they have acquired a formidable nuclear arsenal.
Not much is known in the outside world of what is now going inside the Chinese leadership, especially in the wake of the failure of the coup in Moscow in August. Since that cannot possibly be a matter of indifference for us, we have no choice but to wait till we know what is in fact happening in Beijing. It is even more important for us to figure out why the Chinese continue to augment their military power which they can no longer justify in terms of a threat either from the Soviet Union or the United States. Indeed, this must be a matter of the deepest concern for policy makers in Washington and Tokyo as well.
We are not alone in our addiction to the past. If it is true, as is widely believed, that Washington is putting a lot of pressure on New Delhi to sign the NPT and foreclose the possibility of acquiring nuclear weapons, it would be in order to say that American policy-makers are also similarly addicted.
When so sober and experienced a person as KC Pant, a former defence minister, tells the Americans that some 100-odd intermediate-range ballistic missiles, equipped with warheads in the 100 to 250 Kiloton range, are targeted on India, they owe it to themselves as would-be architects of a new world order to tell us how they propose to guarantee our security against this arsenal. Advocates of friendly ties with China also need to address themselves to this question.
Sunday Mail, 13 October 1991