A New Cold War | After 1971: The Marginalization

A New Cold War is a collection of critical essays examines the impact, consequences and legacy of Henry Kissinger’s first, door-opening visit to China in 1971 and how it has shaped world order. Read an excerpt:

India signed a peace and friendship treaty with the Soviet Union on 9 August 1971, barely three weeks after President Nixon announced in July 1971 that his National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger had made a secret visit to China. On the face of it, the move seemed a decisive geopolitical response to the shifting great-power landscape. But a more compelling factor was India’s immediate need for support from the Soviet Union in preventing the United Nations Security Council from intervening in India’s planned liberation of East Bengal from Pakistan. The Soviet Union gave just enough support in the December 1971 by delaying the UNSC call for a ceasefire and Nixon ordered the USS Enterprise to sail into the Indian Ocean, to save Pakistan. India’s success in liberating Bangladesh solidified two geopolitical narratives in New Delhi—the reliability of the Soviet Union and the hostility of the US. India’s decision to conduct a nuclear test in May 1974, so soon after the liberation of the Bangladesh, and the treaty with the Soviet Union, seemed to reinforce the image of a new India that had shed its Nehruvian idealism and was ready for a confident and pragmatic realpolitik on the world stage.

The reality, of course, was far more complicated. Three factors shaped the reduction of India’s geopolitical room for manoeuvre in the 1970s. First was India’s marginalization in the great-power dynamics. Having opened up to China, the US enhanced its leverage with both Beijing and Moscow. In countering the Soviet threat, Mao sought to weaken the Soviet influence in Asia and divided Left movements around the world. While fending off the Chinese challenge, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was more than eager to consolidate the new détente with the US. For Moscow the symbols of parity with Washington—strategic nuclear arms control, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and, more broadly, the sense of joint management of the world order—became ever more important. By convincing itself that the Soviet Union was the most important external partner, New Delhi neglected the importance of finding sufficient common ground with the US and the West. As the distance between New Delhi and the West increased, and the relations with China remained frozen, India’s marginalization in the major power constellation began to grow.

Kissinger’s visit to India in 1974 offered the means to reconstruct the relationship with the US after the bitter legacies of 1971 and the harsh US response to India’s nuclear test. But India’s ability to do so was undermined by the deepening suspicion of the US and an inability to understand Kissinger’s realpolitik premised on power. For India, new wariness of the US had become so intense as to prevent taking a more differentiated view of realists like Kissinger and the ideologues of liberal internationalism in the Democratic Party. Nor was it willing to see the new constraints operating on Nixon and Kissinger—the strains on the Bretton Woods system, domestic political turmoil triggered by an increasingly unpopular and costly intervention in Vietnam and the weakening US alliance system. India was overly obsessed with the fear of the US or the United Nations somehow separating Kashmir from India. While the story of the Cold War was mostly about the United Nations being largely powerless, New Delhi could not shed the fear of ‘internationalization’. As New Delhi prepared to host Kissinger, Indira Gandhi ostentatiously flew to Kashmir to signal Indian resolve. Kashmir was probably the last thing on Kissinger’s mind. He was trying to reposition the US amidst the quagmire in Vietnam. New Delhi’s lack of realism was also evident in calling its first atomic test a ‘peaceful nuclear explosion’ and believing that the rest of the world would believe this deception. To make matters worse, New Delhi was engaged in self-deception. It did not follow through with additional tests or call itself a nuclear weapon power. India provoked the world into reacting—for example, China’s atomic assistance to Pakistan—and invited sanctions without actually exercising the nuclear option. If there was a chance of using Kissinger’s realism to close the nuclear dispute with the US and reframe the relationship, New Delhi seemed utterly unwilling HarperCollins Publishers India 206 Kissinger and India’s Geopolitics to explore such a possibility. When New Delhi tested nuclear weapons again a quarter century later in 1998, Kissinger would be the first to call for an atomic accommodation between Washington and New Delhi.

Second, India’s changing ideological orientation in the 1970s made its geopolitical position even worse. At home, India’s economic turn to the Left steadily eliminated the possibility that commercial cooperation could compensate for political differences with the US and the West. India’s turning to ‘socialism’ and greater state control of the economy steadily limited the possibilities for engaging the Western capital. India threw out IBM and Coca-Cola from the country and rejected the offer of Siemens to transform India’s power plant production capacity. As China was preparing to open its economy by the end of the 1970s, India moved purposefully towards closing it. India’s relative economic decline now seemed irreversible and reinforced India’s geopolitical marginalization. As anti-Americanism became politically correct, reversing productive academic and scientific collaboration with the US, which flowered in the 1950s and ’60s, became politically correct. Anyone who talked of engaging the US was automatically dubbed a ‘CIA agent’. Visas for US academics became ever more difficult to obtain. Just as China was warming up to the US and Chinese studies were beginning to take off in the US, New Delhi did all it could do make the pursuit of Indian studies in the US rather hard. Indira Gandhi’s declaration of Emergency in 1975 snapped the Western empathy for India as a struggling democracy. The radicalization of India’s foreign policy led to an intense diplomatic focus on opposing the US and the West in the name of championing the Third World (now called the ‘Global South’), represented by a more radical Non-Aligned Movement. At the United Nations, India was voting more often against the US than even the Soviet Union. At the global level, India demanded for a change in the global rules (the New International Economic Order) while shunning all possibilities for taking commercial advantage of the existing order. Third, any power political analysis would have shown there was no way the Soviet Union could compensate for the declining cooperation with the West. But the imagery of symmetry between the East and West and a sense of self-righteousness in denouncing the US at every opportunity left no room for self-doubt or credible internal criticism of the policies adopted by New Delhi. The liberal opposition was too weak to challenge New Delhi’s new orientation. The Jan Sangh, which seemed to offer a conservative criticism of India’s Left turn at home and abroad under Indira Gandhi, made peace with that drift. At home it moved towards adopting ‘Gandhian socialism’ and discovered the virtues of economic populism. The Jan Sangh and the parties that came together to form the Janata Party that captured power in the 1977 elections, criticized Indira’s tilt towards the Soviet Union, denounced the friendship treaty and called for genuine non-alignment. While the Jan Sangh’s Atal Bihari Vajpayee got charge of foreign ministry in the first non-Congress government in New Delhi, he did not really challenge India’s Soviet drift. The attempted correction eventually came from Indira and Rajiv Gandhi in the 1980s, but it was not decisive enough to construct a more realistic geopolitical framework for India.

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