June 26, 2023

I have just finished reading Odd Arne Westad’s book titled “The Cold War, A World History”. It is indeed a remarkable book giving the reader deep insight into the period extending from the end of the Second World War to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Since Indian Prime Minister Modi’s visit to the US made headlines last week, at least after the loss of the Titan submersible, I again read what he said about the Cold War and India to get a better perspective of what lies ahead in terms of India-US, and India-China relations. The following largely reflects my understanding of his views on India’s foreign and security policy during the Cold War.

Jawaharlal Nehru was India’s prime minister for seventeen years, from 1947 until his death in 1964. His Congress Party defined its worldview as nonaligned, anticolonial, and socialist. Moreover, he believed that the Cold War was an international system detrimental to India’s national interests and the values his country represented. Mr. Nehru was a key figure in the launching of the Non-Aligned Movement at the Bandung Conference in April 1955. Thus, India refused to come in on the US side in the Cold War as Washington had expected.

Pakistani leaders, on the other hand, aligned themselves with the US and started receiving substantial military aid. They joined the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) and the Baghdad Pact. Prime Minister Nehru believed that such moves on the part of Pakistan were aiming not at the Soviet Union but at India. Moscow was also unhappy with the Pakistan-US relationship. Unfortunately, India and Pakistan were to fight three more wars in 1965, 1971, and 1999.

In November 1955, the visit by Nikita Khrushchev, the First Secretary of the Communist Party and Prime Minister of the Soviet Union to New Delhi opened the door for Soviet assistance to India.

Following some border skirmishes between 1959 and 1962, in October 1962 at the height of the Cuban crisis, China attacked across the disputed boundaries with India. Indian forces were defeated. Prime Minister Nehru considered asking for Soviet or American interventions. The Kennedy Administration responded with airdrops of weapons for the Indian army. Mr. Kennedy said, “The Indians themselves are at long last fully aware of the Chinese Communist threat and appear to be determined to act.”

However, neither Mr. Nehru nor his successors gave up India’s policy of non-alignment.

Following the death of Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri, Mr. Nehru’s successor, Indira Gandhi, Nehru’s daughter became prime minister. She was committed to a secular, socialist India that sought global influence through the UN and the Non-Aligned Movement to promote its national interests. Even more than her father, she was profoundly skeptical about the US role in the world and viewed the Soviets as easier to work with, especially in the light of the ongoing US alliance with Pakistan and Pakistan’s courting of China. Gandhi’s main security concern was Beijing, and the intensification of the Sino-Soviet conflict in the late 1960s alerted her to how much the Soviets and the Indians had in common strategically.

On April 10, 1971, the US table tennis team arrived in China. In July 1971, Kissinger, Nixon’s National Security Advisor, secretly flew to Beijing from Pakistan paving the way for President Nixon’s own visit.

The Indian response was swift. Gandhi agreed to a treaty of friendship proposed earlier by the Soviets. “In the event of either party being subjected to an attack or threat thereof,” said the treaty the two sides “shall immediately enter into mutual consultations in order to remove such threat”.

In December 1971 a short-lived conflict between India and Pakistan established the People’s Republic of Bangladesh from the territory of the former province of East Pakistan. Despite the jubilation in Dacca, Washington saw this as Indian aggression, a Soviet-Indian power play to humiliate China and the US. Prime Minister Gandhi turned increasingly friendly toward the Soviet Union.

During Nixon’s visit to China in February 1972, he and his Chinese hosts agreed to the joint “Shanghai Communique” through which they pledged to work toward the full normalization of diplomatic relations. As part of the effort, on May 1, 1973, the US opened a liaison office in Beijing to handle all matters in the US-China relationship “except the strictly formal diplomatic aspects of the relationship.” China created a counterpart office in Washington in the same year. Finally, on January 1, 1979, the US recognized the People’s Republic of China and established diplomatic relations with it as the sole legitimate government of China.

The Chinese-American rapprochement was what Indian leaders feared most. From the mid-1960s on, Indian security advisors had warned that “the great temptation before the Western world would be to prop up China as a counterweight to the USSR.”

India was not comfortable with the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. It was also concerned about the unprecedented US support to Pakistan following the invasion. (And there is no doubt that today India is not happy with the Taliban’s return to power in Afghanistan.)

The policies followed by Gorbachev enabled India to rebalance its relations with the US. Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union India-US relations further improved. However, India-Russia relations remained on a steady course.

In remarks to the press with Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov during his visit to Russia in November 2022, this is what External Affairs Minister Dr. S. Jaishankar said:

“Let me begin by emphasizing that India and Russia have a longstanding partnership that has served both countries very well over many decades. This covers a range of practical cooperation in fields like trade, investment, energy, commodities etc. as well as sensitive domains like defense, space and nuclear…”

Despite its understandable discomfort with Moscow’s war, New Delhi has abstained from successive votes in the UN Security Council, General Assembly, and Human Rights Council that condemned Russian aggression in Ukraine and thus far has refused to openly hold Russia responsible for the crisis. Because, regardless of the negative implications of the invasion of Ukraine for Moscow, New Delhi still attributes to Russia some value in the context of its relations with China. And because the principle of non-alignment remains a deeply ingrained dimension of Indian foreign policy, New Delhi does not openly partner with Washington against China, despite the history of an adversarial relationship with Beijing.

This is why President Biden and Prime Minister Modi did not refer to China even once in their remarks to the press during the latter’s visit to Washington. Only in response to a question by a reporter did Mr. Biden refer to the “U.S.-China relationship”. The “Joint Statement from the United States and India” also avoided any mention of China but contained references to the “Indo-Pacific”. Does this mean that they did not discuss their relations with Beijing? No. And they may share some concerns about China, but they must have agreed before the talks, as desired by the Indian side, that the visit would not turn into an act of defiance against China. Because, as before, India’s leaders wish to avoid becoming a party to a new Cold War they wish to prevent to start with. Beyond that, it appears that the economic, scientific, and technological cooperation between the US and India, now the world’s most populous power would expand.

For decades the US tried to contain the Soviet Union. At present, with a weakened Russia, it is focusing on China. Who knows, in a world of endless strategic competition, someday it could be India’s turn to be contained. What is clear is that such competition has only made non-alignment a logical choice, particularly in the Global South.

As Ravi Agrawal, the editor-in-chief of Foreign Policy, has written a year ago, “At first glance, the policy of nonalignment may seem irrelevant in today’s increasingly polarized world. The Western alliance is more united than since the Cold War, with even Finland and Sweden abandoning neutrality to join NATO. Other sharpening divides—between democracies and autocracies, rich and poor—dominate international affairs and contribute to the fragmentation of economies and polities.

Yet after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, nonalignment has become an attractive option for countries in the global south. Several states in Asia, Africa, and Latin America have displayed ambiguity toward the Western coalition, a reluctance to endorse sanctions against Russia and discomfort with the idea of a new cold war.” [I]

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[i] https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/07/01/fp-print-issue-history-lessons/