Despite the high-decibel speculation about what is going on between Donald Trump and Narendra Modi on the one hand, and Modi and Xi Jinping on the other, there is nothing new about the present shenanigans between the two pairs of nations. The history of modern relations between India, China and the United States has been a continuation of now-on, now-off ties.
India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s loudly expressed love for socialism, in spite of his being rather aristocratic, had resulted in close bonds with not only USSR but also with other countries with pronounced anti-US tilt. Nehru’s closest friends in the Non-aligned Movement were Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt and Marshal Josip Broz Tito of Yugoslavia. Both were sworn enemies of what Communists in that era called “Western Imperialism” and hence they were more or less aligned with the Soviet Union. Nasser was alarmed by the US-led Baghdad Pact, designed to contain Soviet influence in the Middle East, but Nasser saw it as an attempt by the United States and United Kingdom to shift the region’s political centre of gravity from Cairo to Baghdad and so refused to join it. Tito had to seek US help in 1949 when threatened by the Soviet Union and yet he remained a socialist. Both were dictatorial, a perception Nehru’s detractors also held about him.
When China invaded India in 1962, the Soviets felt that India was being pushed towards the “capitalist” United States and United Kingdom, who had started supplying arms to India, threatening the earlier monopoly of the Russians. India’s then-Defence Minister Krishna Menon, a closet Communist with sympathies for the Soviets, was blamed for being soft on the Chinese and was forced to resign. The Soviets lamented “we lost one of our most faithful friends among the India leaders.”
Looking back, we have the United States and India, trading extensively with each other and often praising each other as fellow democracies, mostly ending up being on the opposite sides strategically
India’s socialist leanings did not die when Nehru died in 1964. After the 1965 war between India and Pakistan, the Soviets played the role of peacemaker between the two nations. The Tashkent Pact, with mediation of Soviet Premier Aleksey Kosygin, was signed on 10 January 1966 and within hours the Indian Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri was dead, while still on the Soviet soil. Conspiracy theories keep swirling, with the detractors of Nehru pointing a finger at Nehru’s daughter Indira Gandhi, who promptly succeeded Shastri as Prime Minister.
These events contrast sharply with the loud protestations in India now to Trump’s continued insistence that he brokered a ceasefire between the two nuclear-armed nations on 10 May this year. Clearly, India sees itself differently after these six decades.
In December 1971, during the freedom struggle in Bangladesh, which was being actively assisted by Indian armed forces, the United States as well as the United Kingdom sided with Pakistan, and Washington dispatched its nuclear-powered USS Enterprise-led Task Force 74 to the Bay of Bengal to intimidate India. The Soviet Union promptly dispatched its own naval assets including nuclear submarines, compelling the US and British fleets to retreat. The Soviets had bailed out India six times between 1957 and 1971 on Kashmir, Goa and Bangladesh War issues by using their veto in the Security Council when the other permanent members were stacked against India.
India’s refusal to condemn Russia for the Ukraine war and India’s stance on Russian oil purchases have to be seen in the light of this history of Russians’ strategic support to India when the United States stood with Pakistan.
In harmony with his Socialist stance, Nehru tried to woo China. There are indications that when there was discussion about offering a permanent seat in the Security Council to India, Nehru suggested that it be given to China instead. Chinese invasion of Tibet in 1950 led to the secret escape of the Dalai Lama to India. Nehru gave him refuge for reasons of domestic politics; he had wooed the oppressed castes successfully, and they remain, to this day, an important group supporting the Congress Party, of which his father Motilal was President twice, way back in 1919 and 1928. Many of these oppressed castes, called Harijans or God’s People by Gandhi, drifted towards Buddhism, prompted by their unquestioned leader Ambedkar.
This must have weighed with Nehru when he gave asylum to the Dalai Lama and his followers, antagonising China in the process. Mao Zedong kept dangling before India the Panchsheel, or the five principles, comprising mutual respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity, mutual non-aggression, mutual non-interference in internal affairs, equality and mutual benefit, and peaceful coexistence. Mao, however, was losing his grip on power due to the Great Famine of 1959 to 1961 and he needed a distraction. This resulted in the 1962 Chinese invasion of India and the loss of 38,000 square kilometres of Indian territory.
Thus, looking back, we have the United States and India, trading extensively with each other and often praising each other as fellow democracies, mostly ending up being on the opposite sides strategically. Meanwhile Pakistan, which has been more often a military dictatorship, has generally enjoyed US support. India and China, with their long history of religious, cultural and trade contacts and recent decades of conflicts and reconciliations, remain antagonistic neighbours.
The present dynamics of geopolitics between these three countries needs to be seen in the context of this large baggage of history.
