Indo-US Relations - Changing Perceptions

Dr. Francine R Frankel

National interest is commonly accepted as a fixed reference point for all states in setting their policies towards one another. But I think that in circumstances when facts are ambiguous and subject to interpretation, perception is sometimes more important in determining policy outcomes because it draws on a framework rooted in previous historical experiences. In the case of India-US relations, where the two countries have never achieved a level of trust on either side adequate to support a close partnership, I think that perceptions are particularly critical to understand the relationship.

I will refer to the evolution of changing mindsets of policy makers in both countries, but I will concentrate somewhat more on US perceptions of India and their historical roots. I hope some of these comments will spark discussion of converging or diverging changes in India's perceptions on similar issues.

My remarks will be organized around three main themes, interspersed as relevant, with references to the rationale for a US-Pakistan relationship during the Cold War and post-9-11 because this still provides an important reference for influential sections of the foreign policy making communities in both countries.

The first subject is the changing perception on the US side of India as a dominant power in South Asia which dates to the second Clinton administration. The second topic would be the higher salience assigned to India by the Bush administration after its 2002 strategic review, which envisaged India as important beyond South Asia for the maintenance of Asian stability. And third, I will speak of the issues arising from the strategic partnership embodied in the July 18, 2005, India-US Joint Statement at the end of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's visit to Washington and especially of the issue of entering possibly into nuclear energy cooperation.

I would like to start with the Clinton administration's South Asia policy review carried out in 1996 during a time when Pakistan was regarded as a failed state and Pakistan was considered to have a dangerous military mindset, i.e. the Generals in Pakistan were believed to consider nuclear weapons as weapons of war and not as a deterrent. By contrast, India seemed to have entered a period of sustained high growth after economic liberalization and it was also thought that India might be persuaded to join the CTBT and help stabilize the non-proliferation regime.

The biggest conceptual breakthrough in US policy for South Asia was the Clinton administration's decision to separate US policy towards India and US policy towards Pakistan and in particular to abandon the policy of parity that had been in place from the earliest years of India's independence. The practical expression of this change was the distinction made between Pakistan as a regional power and India as a potential global power. This distinction was given substance by President Clinton's role in reining in Pakistan during the Kargil conflict, plainly telling Nawaz Sharif in July 1999 that he would have to withdraw Pakistani troops from Indian territory in Kashmir. Secondly, at the same time, the US formulation was that neither Pakistan nor India should violate the sanctity of the Line of Control and that the two countries should peacefully settle those issues bilaterally.

As often happens, when a change in policy is announced, there is resistance in various bureaucracies across the government. The Clinton administration's attempt to reshape the perception of India's higher priority relative to that of Pakistan came up against decades of ingrained attitudes in the American bureaucracy, going back as far as Great Britain's tutelage of the US State Department about the presence of two nations in the sub-continent and the natural desire of predominantly Muslim Kashmir to join the dominion of Pakistan. I would also like to mention that the notion of two co-equal powers in the sub-continent persisted for as long as it did during the Cold War period because it was reinforced by the geo-strategic consequences of partition. In practice, India lost its own geo-strategic advantage in location overnight. It lost to Pakistan its location on the southern border of Afghanistan, its western flanks adjacent to the Gulf and the Middle East and the eastern boundaries bordering Southeast Asia. The United States, believing that it was engaged in a global conflict with the Soviet Union to save the American way of life, adopted the well known policy of containment, dependent on worldwide alliance systems. In particular, the US wanted a foothold in the oil rich strategic area adjacent to the Middle East and the Persian Gulf. The 1954 agreement with Pakistan followed an acrimonious internal debate and it was a default decision in response to India's non-aligned policy. But over the decades, it created a mindset that has not completely changed.

When Nixon, as Vice President, visited South and Southeast Asia and the Middle East in 1954 to make the final assessment on a formal recommendation of military ties with Pakistan, he reported that Nehru was not pro-Communist or pro-USSR. He was only pro-India. Nehru's non-alignment, according to Nixon, meant in practice that India would follow policies strictly considered to be in India's interest. It could never be relied upon to do anything for the United States. From a US perspective it sometime seemed that India opted for policies that were detrimental to India's own interest, but this could be just a gap in perception. This notion of India's unwillingness to accommodate the United States on issues of American concern was reinforced among the US foreign policy community at several junctures after that.

In the 1962 India-China war, India requested large scale military assistance from the United States. Nehru's initial letter to President Kennedy asked for US planes to fly sorties over Chinese occupied Indian territory which could have triggered a China-US war. At the same time, Nehru remained unwilling to negotiate with Pakistan over Kashmir or to abandon non-alignment. The second incident was during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, when India was dependent upon the United States for food aid, but as you will remember Mrs. Gandhi refused to make any public statement that could be interpreted as supporting the United States in Vietnam. Third, during the Bangladesh War, India seized the opportunity to dismantle Pakistan. The US initiated the China opening after India signed the Treaty of Peace and Friendship with the Soviet Union, which included language that made it impossible for India to assist the US in the event an American conflict developed with the Soviet Union.

In 1979, the US approached India before Pakistan, because Pakistan was already suspected of trying to illegally acquire the components of a nuclear bomb, asking Mrs. Gandhi to vote with the UN majority in denouncing the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan. Mrs. Gandhi declined to do that. Not surprisingly, the US again fell back on Pakistan. Looked at from Washington's perspective, by virtue of long association which built personal connections and also, very importantly, of strategic necessity, Pakistan was the reliable partner. India was viewed with suspicion.

I am well aware that it is easy to present the same history from the Indian perspective as a mirror opposite of changing perceptions that began in the 1950s with the formulation by Nehru that the US was deliberately building up Pakistan and building down India, because its non-alignment policy denied allies to the United States. After the Bangladesh War, by the mid-1980s, India's policy makers on credible evidence believed that the CIA was actively involved in destabilizing India to prevent it from exercising its natural leadership in the region as well as to emerge as a major power. Against this historical perspective, it was virtually impossible to establish a modicum of trust between the two countries. An example from my own experience, well into the 1990s and even after the 1996 policy review by the Clinton administration, was the reaction of the Clinton administration to the May 1998 nuclear tests. Although India and the US had played leading roles in negotiating the CTBT, it was India which defied US pressure to sign fearing the effects of losing its nuclear option. The entire US government was completely blindsided by India's five underground explosions at Pokhran. President Clinton himself said that he had always been able to understand or instinctively comprehend the rationale of major world events, but he had absolutely no way of putting the test in any context that made sense to him from a global or even an Indian perspective. From his point of view, the biggest danger of the tests was that they would start an arms race between India and Pakistan and inadvertently or otherwise risk a war that could escalate to a nuclear exchange.

The Kargil conflict seemed to bear this out once US intelligence reported that the Pakistani army was moving nuclear missiles within striking distance of India's cities. A futile US attempt on imposing sanctions and the failure again from the US perspective of the Jaswant-Talbott talks did not dissuade the Clinton administration from following a new approach of separating policies between India and Pakistan. The Clinton administration in principle never gave up the provisions of the Non-Proliferation Treaty as well as its commitment to liberal institutionalist and multinational approaches to strengthening international norms or the debate on human rights which India often interpreted as efforts to curb national sovereignty in general and India's foreign policy in particular and therefore was unfavourable to India's national interests.

We move forward to the Bush administration and the 2002 strategic review that the Bush administration carried out. We find an interesting contrast. This was perceived as a much more favourable opportunity by India to strengthen US-India relations in part because President Bush came to office with what was described as his big idea of improving relations with India. He was receptive to the formulation announced during Prime Minister Vajpayee's visit in November, 2001 that the United States and India were natural allies and then began consultations. After September 11, the US renewed its alliance with Pakistan as a frontline state in the war against terrorism. Some senior American officials reverted to language asserting the need to balance pressure on India and Pakistan to resolve differences over Kashmir and prevent war between the two nuclear capable states. It became difficult to spell out the policy content of the concept that the US and India are natural allies. Washington extended lavish patronage to President Musharraf despite the fact that Pakistan had become a home base of Al Qaida, the patron of cross border terrorism against Kashmir, as well as the source of nuclear technology and fissile materials through the A Q Khan network. As of now Pakistan has received a three billion dollar economic and military assistance package from the US, designation as a non-NATO military ally and in March 2005, approval of the sale of 60 to 80 F16s, which can be upgraded and used to deliver nuclear weapons.

Having said that, at the same time India has recognized that the US war on terror has served its own vital interest by pressuring Pakistan to cut back on support for jihadi groups including cross border terrorism in Kashmir. There has been apparent progress on the India-Pakistan composite dialogue started in January 2004 with both President Musharraf and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh asserting that the peace process is irreversible. The Bush administration's redefinition of US strategic doctrine in 2002 underlined US freedom to carry out unilateral foreign policies and to wage pre-emptive war. Unilaterally we know that the US withdrew from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty to develop national missile defence and theatre missile defence, it rejected the Kyoto Treaty and expressed scepticism about the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The US was sceptical that it could indefinitely contain the spread of nuclear weapons to other states under conditions of growing spread of technological expertise and illegal transfers of fissile materials. These policies created shock waves in the United States as well as in Europe, and it was interesting that among the few countries in which they have been well received, one of the most important is India, which saw an opening for an understanding with the Bush administration in its willingness to carry out unconventional forms of foreign policy.

The Bush administration began thinking in terms of a strategic partnership with India, rooted in changing realities of converging US-India interests across a broad spectrum. The pivotal issues are the so-called Long War against terrorism that has now been articulated, the need to contain Islamic fundamentalism, efforts to prevent hostile powers acquiring nuclear capability, and less openly spoken out, the effort to create a balance in Asia that prevents China from establishing its threat as the dominant power. These geo-strategic goals are buttressed in the discussion of a partnership between India and the US by the increasingly close ties US companies have established in India's services sectors and the growing outsourcing of R&D to access India's very talented core of highly motivated and well-trained computer scientists, engineers and professionals.

There is broad gauge cooperation between the two countries in information sharing relating to terrorism and transnational crimes and a high frequency of visits at the highest levels elevating the importance of the relationship from Washington's perspective and also from New Delhi's perspective. On June 28, 2005, the new framework of the US-India defence relationship was signed by Minister of Defence, Pranab Mukherjee and Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld. It sets in general terms an ambitious agenda for conducting joint and combined exercises, increasing opportunities for technology transfer, collaboration, co-production, research and development, and establishing a mechanism of a defence policy group and a new defence procurement and production group to guide the principles and objectives of the US-India strategic partnership.

Yet, until the July 18, 2005 joint statement at the end of Manmohan Singh's visit to Washington, each country was engaged in endorsing broad generalities of cooperation and employing policies that each considered in its own interests, and which happened to converge without requiring any formal accommodation to the preferences or national interests of the other. This has sometimes been described as a natural flow of events which would on its own create a stronger Indo-US partnership.

So, the question that I want to ask and which will end the presentation essentially has to do with the implementation and implications of the July 18, 2005 joint statement. What is at stake? The central issue of trust between the US and India and their ability to become strategic partners has not been tested by the increased level of cooperation between these two countries if one takes seriously the natural flow hypothesis. Trust however is a critical factor in the period since Secretary of State Rice's visit to India in March 2005 and a subsequent statement that the United States wanted to assist India to become a great power in the 21st century. Of the comprehensive bilateral ties mentioned under that statement, the ones receiving the greatest emphasis are cooperation in commercial space and satellite exploration and launch and civilian nuclear energy cooperation. The headline making news in both capitals was that the US could work with Congress to adjust the 1978 law restricting trade and commercial transactions in civil nuclear energy cooperation with India and also negotiate with the 44 member Nuclear Suppliers Group to lift similar restrictions.

As is now clear, this agreement was reached by both sides literally after the midnight hour, and without consultation with important foreign policy and scientific constituencies. Yet the initial reaction in India was that President Bush - maybe more broadly the executive branch of the US Government - was once again taking a unilateral initiative that was crafted to meet India's interests without requiring India to pursue economic and strategic policies aligned with US interests. So, the United States was making a major concession without requiring anything in return. This was the understanding in India.

This was the burden of Manmohan Singh's statement in the Lok Sabha - concentrating on cooperation in civilian nuclear energy and the separation of civilian and military facilities which he asserted would be voluntary and require India to have the same rights and responsibilities as any other nuclear weapon state including the United States. What we have seen since then is the emergence of criticism to this agreement by the very important constituencies that were not consulted either by President Bush or by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. The emphasis has shifted to those aspects of the agreement that appear to put obligations upon India and those obligations are to separate civilian and nuclear facilities, to put its nuclear reactors under IAEA safeguards and to do that in perpetuity. This is something that the United States does not have to do and when India and the US quietly began a negotiation about an acceptable Indian plan, this again brought into question what voluntary meant, if it was being subject to negotiation. Added to this was what appeared to be US pressure on India in the IAEA to support the referral of Iran's plans to develop a nuclear capability to the UN Security Council. All of this revived the underlying feeling of distrust among important groups in both countries.

In Washington, the non-proliferation community, which was not consulted, has been well organized and very vocal in protesting against the agreement as Indian exceptionalism to the NPT for which the US has received nothing in return. From their perspective the question arises therefore of bringing Indian into the NPT regime as a way to convince Congress that there is good reason for the US to endorse this agreement. Otherwise, according to our own non-proliferation experts, the agreement will encourage other nuclear weapon states to make exceptions for their own favoured countries. The consequences would be to completely unravel the treaty at a time when the United States is struggling to contain weaponization by North Korea and anticipates incipient proliferation by Iran.

In India, important constituencies were not consulted or equally upset. The BJP and leading members of the scientific community fear that the US seeks safeguards on the fast breeder research program in order to cap India's production of fissile material and the size of its nuclear deterrent. The Left has a different set of worries. It is not committed to having a very large nuclear deterrent but is very concerned that pressure exemplified by the Iran vote is simply the first of unending numbers of cases, in which the United States will demand that India vote according to American strategic interests and this would rob India of its autonomy in foreign policy.

The main issue and the major benefit to India of this agreement has to some extent been sidelined in the debate. That is the supply of uranium to India for its power reactors to meet a crippling shortfall in indigenous fuel in the nuclear power sector as well as easy access to new reactors on the internal market and the removal of restrictions of licensing and approval to make possible important gains in Indo-US cooperation in space and dual use technologies as well as similar cooperation with other NSG countries. It is emblematic of the trust deficit that less than two weeks before President Bush's visit, the CII, the Indian Development Foundation and the Aspen Institute held a Round Table on the subject, Is a strategic partnership with the US in India's national interest?, and focused on the basic question of whether the US is truly seeking to partner India as distinct from dominating. Can 50 years of bilateral mistrust be replaced by trust? What should be India's future strategy towards the US?

I end by saying that both the US and India have important interests in this agreement and in working out a compromise. The US interest in increasing India's profile abroad is considered beneficial to growing US concerns about the balance of power in Asia. One projection by the CIA National Intelligence Council is that India when ranked by composite indexes of national power - weighted combinations of GDP, defence spending, population, technology growth and so on - will possess the most capable concentration of national power after 2030. Clearly a balance in Asia, which includes India, is going to help the United States retain its primacy for a longer period of time in business, science and technology, defence and trade. Similar calculations are made by Indian policy makers when they consider the benefit of a partnership with the United States. If India's energy needs can be met and the growth rates of the next decade or two are sustained at 8% annually or higher, India will begin to close the gap with China. From India's perspective the impact of the proposed cooperation in civil nuclear energy, space and advanced agricultural technologies will assure rapid growth and secure India's future as a major global power. Without this agreement, India has to consider the possibility of becoming a junior partner of China in Asia. If in fact the stakes for both countries are high, what should be the difference in practice between the strategic partnership between the US and India and the many strategic partnerships that India has now accumulated? Should India consider and come to grips with what seems to be the reality that it cannot simply expect to be recognized as a de jure nuclear weapon state? The pressures against this are overwhelming. It is an interesting time to reflect on where the two countries can reasonably expect to converge.