Bhopinder Singh | Trump Betrayal On Tariffs Puts Delhi In A Fix; Triggers SCO, China Pivot
The brave talk of “we will not bow down (to the US)” or “swadeshi” is the flavour of the season
Historically, the simplistic narrative has always been that the United States has favoured Pakistan over India, therefore in a hyphenated mindset, Washington DC was perceived as “anti-India”. It was not entirely unfounded as in the bipolar era of rival Cold War “blocs”, Pakistan was an declared “ally” of the US, with which Washington had signed a mutual defence treaty in 1954. A Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG) had been established and the Peshawar airbase had been leased out to the Americans. American bias against India was further felt during both the 1965 and 1971 India-Pakistan wars. The fact that India remained politically centre-left in the initial decades after Independence and was a leading light of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), with a decided tilt in favour of the then Soviet Union, didn’t help focus national emotions towards the US.
Consequently, some conspiracy theories about American malintent towards India were always rife, with the instinctive attribution of political opponents as the proverbial “CIA agents”. In the 1970s, almost all Opposition leaders like George Fernandes, Jayaprakash Narayan and other activists were targeted as “CIA agents”, even though their ideological mooring was anything but aligned to American sensibilities.
Unsubstantiated murmurs of the PL-480 (US Food for Peace Programme to provide surplus agricultural produce) to India with deliberate contaminants (infamous as “Congress Grass”) as a means of invasive weed became folklore. There were credible concerns about American-imposed sanctions over India’s nuclear programme (following the “Smiling Budha” test in 1974), whilst overlooking the Pakistani nuclear programme and its shady development, as a parallel. Other issues like the installation of a nuclear-powered device atop the Nanda Devi mountain in 1965 (ostensibly to keep an eye on China), which was supposedly done jointly by the CIA and India, remains a matter of conjecture. But what was undeniable was the systemic checkmating of India to pursue its own security agenda with certain technology-denying regimes like the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR) or the establishment of the restrictive Nuclear Suppliers Group, which added to New Delhi’s frustrations.
The geopolitics of the time (especially during the Cold War) ensured that relations between New Delhi as a possible ally or “pivot” to China (which hadn’t emerged as a formidable force by then) and Washington DC were frequently frosty. However, with the implosion and demise of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, the Cold War was history, and the emergence of religion-based terrorism along with the dramatic rise of China put India, with its democratic naturality and progressive/pacifist moorings, in a different spotlight. President George W. Bush went on to describe India as a “natural ally” of the US.
Yet, the transactional nature of the US leadership ensured that Pakistan, as the irreplaceable gateway to its strategic interests in Afghanistan (with Islamabad incredulously joining the “war on terror”), was given a long rope. The deliberate tolerance of its machinations in Kashmir irritated India. It was only the brilliant handling and recalibration of India’s foreign policy by Atal Behari
Vajpayee and Jaswant Singh following the American sanctions in the aftermath of Pokhran-II (1998), plus 14 rounds of the Jaswant-Talbott talks, that turned the tide in the relationship. Soon after, secretary of state Hillary Clinton was to note in a Foreign Policy article that “India’s Look East policy and our Look East policy are starting to converge. We want to work more closely together in Southeast Asia and the Asia-Pacific”.
For the first time there was a palpable sense Washington DC was favouring New Delhi over Islamabad, irrespective of the presidential tenures of Barack Obama, Donald Trump (first term) or Joe Biden. With the growing strategic convergence of the geopolitical outlook and the cozying up of Islamabad with Beijing as the only other alternative — the view that Americans need to be distrusted started ebbing. Prematurely (in hindsight), many celebrated the return of Donald Trump in his second term as a step towards furthering the India-US relationship. The new wave of the Indian leadership, clearly enthralled with their own supposed chemistry with Mr Trump and having no sense of history, like the US Seventh Fleet sailing into the Bay of Bengal in 1971, drummed up dreams of India-US bonhomie.
But Mr Trump has rudely shattered the Indian dream with his weaponising of trade, tariffs, immigration policies and brazen threats of sanctions. Now the spin doctors have started demonising Mr Trump to an extent that they even see merit in India mending relations with China, with the bloody summer of 2020 and the India-China clashes in Ladakh’s Galwan all but forgotten. The brave talk of “we will not bow down (to the US)” or “swadeshi” is the flavour of the season. New Delhi’s unusual interest in the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) as a counter-move is bandied as the new “masterstroke”.
Predictably, the spadework to contradict Mr Trump’s alleged intervention in the recent India-Pakistan conflict is left to the voluble ministers, while the top executive office remains silent, exactly the same way it refrained from calling out “China” explicitly after the June 2020 conflict. After having led the Indian public to a rosier-than-required garden of India-US bonhomie, the jilted leadership in Delhi is stuck between negotiating with Washington DC behind the scenes and putting on a brave face publicly.