Superpower and I

India has always acted with circumspection in dealing with transgressions of superpowers. We refused to condemn the Soviet Union when it invaded Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan. We voted against a Security Council resolution that sought to condemn the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary. While the then Foreign Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee strongly criticised the Chinese invasion of Vietnam in 1979, he did not ask the Indian Parliament to pass a unanimous resolution condemning China for its actions. He may not have got such a unanimous resolution passed because we have political elements in our country that have not even condemned the Chinese invasion of India. These elements have not even condemned China’s transfers of nuclear and missile technology to Pakistan that have enabled Islamabad to acquire the capability to target Calcutta and Trivandrum with nuclear weapons.

The American-led military invasion of Iraq has provoked public condemnation across India. Hans Blix recently stated that the invasion of Iraq was planned a long time in advance and that the US and UK are not primarily concerned with finding any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. He has accused the US of “fabrications” to establish that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction. The 1998 Iraq Liberation Act proclaimed “regime change” in Iraq as an objective of American foreign policy. General Tommy Franks aims to achieve this objective with military force. But the US could never have hoped to achieve this objective if Iraq’s neighbours did not share it.

The US today has overt or covert support from nine of Iraq’s Arab and Islamic neighbors — Qatar, Oman, Bahrain, Kuwait, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iran and Turkey — in its effort to secure “regime change” in Iraq. Apart from Pakistan, there has been no instance of any Parliament in Asia that has condemned, or even criticised the American action. The pragmatic Chinese have been circumspect and avoided being perceived to be making common cause with Russia, France or Germany.

Just before the Lok Sabha passed its resolution deploring the American action in Iraq, German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer proclaimed that he hoped that the Saddam Hussein regime “will collapse as soon as possible”. President Putin, meanwhile, averred that Russia was not interested in seeing the defeat of the US in Iraq.

The unanimous resolution was passed on the day viewers across the world were seeing television images of American soldiers being welcomed in Baghdad. While past resolutions of our Parliament on the Chinese aggression of 1962, or about Jammu and Kashmir in 1994 are viewed seriously by the international community as reflecting our national commitment and will, the resolution on Iraq will fetch us no diplomatic gains and merely serve as an irritant in our relations with the US. It will have an adverse affect on the painstaking, but successful diplomatic effort we have undertaken for over two decades to build strong pro-India lobbies in the US Congress.

We have sadly made our relations with the US excessively Pakistan-centric. In the process, we have overlooked the fact that for the first time the Bush administration views us as a valuable partner in guaranteeing peace and stability across the entire Indian Ocean region. We no longer have to listen to lectures from Washington about nuclear proliferation.

Washington did make an effort last year to pressurise General Musharraf to permanently end cross-border terrorism. The Bush administration has lauded our efforts to restore peace and normalcy in J&K through the recent elections. It has supported the efforts of the Mufti Mohammed Syed government to meet the peoples’ aspirations. But, at the same time, the US feels that the army establishment and General Musharraf are its best options in Pakistan in the post-9/11 scenario and its war on terrorism. If peaceful persuasion and American pressure do not compel General Musharraf to change course the options for pressure and measured retaliation are always available to us. Sadly, our overblown rhetoric and inability to match words with deeds have eroded our credibility, leading influential international circles to conclude that we are incapable of matching our rhetoric with resolute action.

New Delhi should not overlook the fact that just as the State Department’s South Asia Bureau headed by Robin Raphael ensured the first six years of the Clinton administration were characterised by a noticeable anti-India tilt, even today sections of the State Department have prejudices and predilections about India that can undermine the larger strategic vision of the White House. This was evident not only from Richard Boucher’s remarkably insensitive statement after the Nadimarg massacre, but also from a number of other actions like efforts to curb our presence and influence in Afghanistan, curbing our defence cooperation with Israel and efforts to get China to act as some form of umpire on South Asian developments.

One hopes that as the winter snows melt on the Himalayan heights, Washington will show a more realistic understanding of Indian imperatives, especially when General Musharraf unleashes his jihadis across the Line of Control.