There are two ways of looking at India and China agreeing to end the 54-month old military standoff in eastern Ladakh and resume joint patrolling along the Line of Control in the disputed border areas so as to maintain the peace and tranquillity.
The convenient way is to describe it as an important prelude to the topmost leaders of India, China and Russia meeting during the 16th BRICS summit in Russia ( September 22-23).
In fact, this “highly positive development” took place on the eve of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi leaving for the summit at Kazan where he will be interacting with Russian President Vladimir Putin and there is every possibility of him meeting Chinese President Xi Jinping separately on the sidelines of the summit.
“Building upon the Annual Summit held in July 2024 in Moscow, my visit to Kazan will further reinforce the Special and Privileged Strategic Partnership between India and Russia”, Modi said this morning ( September 22), while departing for Russia. He did not say anything about China or Xi, but reports suggest that there will be parleys now that such an important breakthrough has taken place in Ladakh.
But there is another way that the Ladakh-breakthrough could be seen. And that could be conveying a strong message to the United States that India has the option of reconsidering its otherwise growing ties with Washington, given the way the primacy is being given to the Khalistani terrorists in dictating the contours of Indo-US relations, along with the narratives that India under Modi is becoming an autocratic country without any religious freedom.
Enough attention, perhaps, is not given to the fact that there have been occasions when India wanted to be closer to the U.S., but the rebuffs it got from the latter pushed it closer to Moscow. U.S. diplomat and author Dennis Kux’s book, “India and the United States: Estranged Democracies”, has documented the tortuous strategic relationship between the United States and India in between 1947 and early 1990s, despite the two sharing concerns on communism, Islamic fundamentalism, ideals of democracy, liberalism and pluralism.
Given the similarities that India and the U.S. have, they could have been “natural partners” in more senses than one. But if that has not happened, it is more due to the U.S. not proving itself to be a dependable friend.
Significantly, if one reads CIA’s highly “secret” documents on “Indo-Soviet Relations (https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP85T00875R001100130127-2.pdf that were declassified in 2008, it becomes apparent that the then Soviet Union was always treated with suspicion by India’s two Prime Ministers – Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi.
These declassified documents show how Indian communists, who, supported by the then Soviet Union, were in active and often violent opposition to the Nehru government. Up to the 1950s, Indo-Soviet relations were limited to trade, cultural and diplomatic exchanges. Things changed after Nehru’s visit to Moscow in 1955 at the invitation of Nikita Khrushchev. But that was the time when Pakistan was wooed by the United States to become the members of CENTO and SEATO military alliances. Washington did not support India in the United Nations on the issue of Kashmir, which Moscow did readily.
CIA documents say that India did not like Moscow’s so-called neutral role during the India-China conflict. In fact, Indo-US relations improved substantially in between 1962 and 1965. In those three years, the United States provided India with both grant assistance and military sales. But all this came to a halt with the 1965 India-Pakistan war. Predictably, Moscow took advantage of it, though New Delhi thought that it was being forced to cease-fire to end the war to establish Moscow as a “peace-maker” .
CIA has also revealed how India resented the then USSR’s military cooperation with Pakistan following the Indo-Pak War and Soviet maps showing disputed Himalayan border areas as Chinese, not Indian, territories. Understandably, India did not respond to the Russian leader Leonid Brezhnev’s proposal for “Asian Collective Security” and agreed only to the bilateral Indo-Soviet Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation in 1971, mostly due to the Pakistani actions in Bangladesh, supported by the United States.
The point that emerges is that there has been a strong linkage between New Delhi-Washington and New Delhi-Moscow relations. Whenever two democracies estranged, it led to New Delhi coming closer to Moscow. This was reflected in the economic ties too.
For instance, as the late U.S. Ambassador John Kenneth Galbraith clearly mentioned in his “Ambassador’s Journal” (Ambassador's Journal: A Personal Account of the Kennedy Years: galbraith, john kenneth: 9780241016190: Amazon.com: Books) , the famous Bokaro Steel Plant that Russia helped in the establishment in Jharkhand state, was supposed to be built by the American aid and collaboration, for which he had convinced President Kennedy. He wrote on May 10, 1963, “The President came out strongly on the side of helping the Indians build the Bokaro steel plant and he said it should be supported in the public sector. It was a marvellous no-nonsense statement”.
However, when after Kennedy’s assassination in November that year, the U.S. Congress refused to finance the building of the plant, it went to the USSR, which started building it in 1964.
One could argue that the Cold War years were such that relations between India and the U.S. were to see more downs than ups. And after the end of the Cold War in the 1990s, the relationship has seen more ups than downs, be it the areas of security, space, technologies, trade, or common global issues. America’s Indian-origin diaspora of nearly 5 million people is now well integrated in American politics, administration, and business, with an Indian-origin candidate in the running for President.
However, the last few months have seen a carefully orchestrated narrative in the United States , to which American policy makers, civil servants and intelligentsia are parties, that projects India to be an enemy country that is after the lives of American citizens. India is being projected as a country where democracy is doomed. So much so that American courts would not mind now arresting India’s National Security Advisor if he visits the U.S. And getting the clue, American satellite Canada expels Indian diplomats on the spurious ground that they were in the killing mission of “Canadian nationals”.
Who are these “citizens”? They are a bunch of hard core terrorists who want to break India’s unity and integrity and establish a separate country called Khalistan. Their leader, one Guruwant Singh Pannun ( a dual citizen of the U.S. and Canada), has threatened to bomb Air India flights and kill non-Sikh Indians and diplomats.
If for the United States ( or for that matter Canada), lives of Khalistanis ( who are said to be facing manufactured, not real, threats by ‘Indian agents”) are dearer than the partnership of a country like it, then let it be. They need to be given a message that India can do business with Russia and China, who the Americans perceive to be their existential threats. And India seems to have been pushed by them to do it.
By Prakash.Nanda
( prakash.nanda@hotmail.com )
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