India and America: an Emerging Relationship
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India and America: An Emerging Relationship Dr. Stephen P. Cohen* A Paper Presented to the Conference on The Nation-State System and Transnational Forces in South Asia December 8-10, 2000, Kyoto, Japan * Senior Fellow, Foreign Policy Studies Program, The Brookings Institution, Washington DC. Comments and suggestions welcome. Email: [email protected] Cohen: India and America In late March 2000, Bill Clinton became the first president to visit India in over twenty-two years. At the core of his five-day stay was a brilliant speech to the Indian parliament that acknowledged India’s civilizational greatness, noted its economic and scientific progress, and praised India’s adherence to democratic norms. However, the speech tactfully set forth areas of American concern: Kashmir, India’s relations with Pakistan, and nuclear proliferation. These led Clinton to state that South Asia was the most dangerous place in the world, a characterization that was publicly contested by India’s President, K.R. Narayanan. During the trip, Clinton also signed a “Vision” document with Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, committing both sides to an expanded government-to-government interaction. During a five-hour stopover in Pakistan Clinton also delivered a “tough-love” (encouraging but critical) television speech to the Pakistani people.1 The visit was a triumph as far as images and symbols were concerned. Departing from his prepared speech to the Asia Society in New York on April 14, 2000, the Indian Finance Minister, Yashwant Sinha, said that Clinton swept away fifty years of misperception, and that the two countries appeared to be on a path of realistic engagement. This may be true, but it took Clinton seven years to make a journey to South Asia. His was only the fourth presidential visit to India and the first in two decades. This suggests that the long history of strained relations between these two democracies is based upon more than misperceptions.2 This paper explores the possibility that major structural changes in the India-U.S. relationship are occurring, altering perceptions and policies in both Washington and New Delhi. This opens up a wider range of strategic choices for both countries, and the paper concludes with a discussion of American options concerning its relationship with India. India and the United States: Distanced Powers The strategic distancing of the United States and the leadership of what was to become free India took place several years before the onset of the Cold War, when neither Americans nor Indian nationalists saw a close relationship as vital. Each side allowed other interests to deflect any plans for strategic cooperation. Other than early humanitarian and missionary ties, and an interest in Mahatma Gandhi, the first important contacts between the United States and India began in 1942, five years before independence, when America first perceived a significant strategic stake in the Indian Subcontinent.3 Support for the independence movement was especially strong among American liberals, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt needled Winston Churchill about India. The American media was very pro-nationalist, and Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru received extensive publicity in Life, the New York Times, and other major American publications.4 Page 1 of 37 Cohen: India and America The turning point in American policy, which anticipated later India-American disputes, was precipitated by the 1942 Indian decision of the Indian National Congress not to support the war effort and to launch the Quit India Movement. With allied fortunes then at their low point, the Congress action placed the Roosevelt administration in a position where it had to choose between Britain, the key ally, then under military attack and India, a potential friend. Not surprisingly, Washington chose Britain. While disappointing, the loss of American support was not critical for Indian nationalists. Their overseas lobbying efforts had been focused on Great Britain, especially the British Labor Party. Many Indian leaders had been educated in Britain or in British- oriented institutions in India and had little personal or intellectual interest in America. If anything, they had absorbed leftist British views that the United States was the epitome of capitalism and they shared a prejudice that Americans lacked the cultural refinements of the British. Only a few Indian leaders of these years had ever been to the United States— not including Nehru—and the most prominent of these (J.P. Narayan and B.R. Ambedkar) were not members of the Congress Party. Cold War and Containment The Cold War brought the United States back to South Asia in search of allies in a struggle against a comprehensive communist threat. It also led Americans to think again about the strategic defense of the region. South Asia had come under attack by Japanese ground and naval forces in World War II—what kind of threat did it face from Soviet and (after 1949) Chinese forces? America’s containment policy, as implemented in South Asia, was to help India and Pakistan defend against external attack, to obtain bases and facilities from which the United States might strike the Soviet Union with its own forces, and to help both states meet the threat from internal (often communist-led) insurrection and subversion. Early American studies characterized India as the “pivotal” state of the region, and saw Pakistan as a likely place to base American long-range bombers as well as a potential ally in the tense Persian Gulf region.5 Ultimately Pakistan joined the then Baghdad Pact (later CENTO) and SEATO. It received significant military and economic aid from 1954 to 1965.6 Although India declined to join any of the American-sponsored alliances because it was non-aligned, it received considerably more than Pakistan in economic loans and grants (although much less on a per capita basis), and purchased about $55 million in military equipment from the United States. New Delhi also received $80 million in American grant military assistance after the India-China war of 1962.7 America also pursued Cold War objectives in South Asia on the domestic front, often with the cooperation of regional states. As the internal vulnerabilities of Pakistan and India became more evident (especially in light of the Comintern’s 1949 call for revolutionary uprisings throughout the world), Washington mounted a variety of developmental, intelligence and information programs. The Indian communists were seen to be under the influence of the Soviet Union, and America provided huge amounts of surplus food, economic aid, and technical and agricultural missions in an effort to help Page 2 of 37 Cohen: India and America India and Pakistan counter communist influence. Many of these programs assumed a correlation between poverty and susceptibility to communism: by encouraging economic growth (and redistributive policies, such as land reform) the communists could be beaten at their own game and democracy would have a chance, even in the poorest regions of India and Pakistan. Substantial information/propaganda campaigns were also developed, balancing the much larger Soviet operations. Although this ideological Cold War peaked in the 1950s and 1960s, Washington was still vigorously countering Soviet disinformation programs in the mid-1980s. While Pakistan had become a useful ally in 1954, India was the main prize, and several American administrations believed that the most significant contest in Asia was that between communist China and democratic India. Echoing Leninist logic (that the vulnerability of the metropolitan country lay in its colonies), India was seen by some as a key battleground in the Cold War.8 The extreme form of this argument was expounded by Walt W. Rostow who justified the American intervention in Vietnam because if Communist aggression succeeded then India, the most important of all of the dominos, would ultimately fall to communism.9 (It came as something of a surprise to Indian diplomats to learn from Rostow that their country was the reason why had intervened in Southeast Asia). John Foster Dulles once referred to Indian “neutrality” in the Cold War as immoral. Yet, he and other American officials eventually came to see Nehru’s non- alignment as less and less problematic. Indians were very difficult to get along with. Not unlike Dulles, they were moralistic and preachy, but Delhi’s influence in the non-aligned movement was an important fact of life and American critics concluded that as long as India was not an enemy, it need not be an ally. By the time of the “second” Cold War, 1980-89, Washington did not try to punish India for its close relationship with the Soviet Union, but sought an opening to New Delhi in the hope of luring it away from the Soviets and protecting Pakistan’s southern flank. By this time, India was no longer a strategic prize to be courted and cultivated; it was seen as a state that had, at best, nuisance value, not in the same economic or strategic league as the other two major Asian powers, China and Japan. The Cold War as Seen from Delhi Indian interpretation of the regional impact of the Cold War are quite different than American. Nehru opposed the Cold War although he placed India into a position to receive assistance from both sides. There were many reasons for his policy, which remained a central feature of Indian foreign policy for forty years. First, the Cold War was seen as excessively militarized. This militarization included an arms race that quickly became a nuclear arms race, endangering the entire world. Nehru was appalled by the bombing of Hiroshima, and while he permitted Homi Bhabha to develop the facilities that eventually produced an Indian bomb, he remained strongly opposed to nuclear weapons, to their testing, and to the risk of a global holocaust created by American and Soviet nuclear stockpiles.