Changing Strategic Realities in India’s Immediate Neighbourhood

Dr Ashok Kapur

26 Feb , 2015

Despite Nehru’s optimism and high profile in international conference diplomacy in the Far East, Indo-China and in Geneva and New York regarding nuclear, disarmament and peacekeeping issues, India’s position in the South Asian region was affected negatively by regional events and developments. These events were beyond the control of Nehru and his colleagues. The strategic initiative lay with forces outside India’s borders which nonetheless affected Indian interests. But did they alter the thinking and policies of the Indian government? What was the rate of change on the Indian side in response to these developments?

I argue that the Indian responses showed the reality of India’s subordinate state system position. In this position leadership and elite knowledge of external forces is incomplete and policy making is vulnerable to external intelligence inputs; internal checks and balances to correct faulty information and decision-making do not exist, and inertia prevails and leads to reiteration of the known policy lines and preferences. Table below lists the external developments which affected Indian security interests and position in the early 1950s.

Rapid Changes in India’s Environment and Slow and Partial Indian Responses (1947-1956)

The rate of change was rapid in India’s environment during 1947-56 which was adverse to Indian strategic interests and which reduced India’s ability to manoeuver diplomatically in regional international relations. 1. India became an active field of regional and international power politics.

Jinnah’s decision to allow the tribal invasion of J&K in 1947-48 made the northern border state a point of serious threat to Indian interests.

It showed that following Partition Jinnah wasted no time to take the strategic initiative against India and to mobilise the Western world to his side. His actions had multiple effects. It nourished separatism in Kashmir among the Muslim majority. It encouraged communalism in India. It complicated the governance of J&K, particularly with the population in the Srinagar valley. It enabled Pakistan’s political and military leaders to maintain the view that Pakistan as a territorial state and Islam as a religion was under permanent threat from the Hindu majority India. It enabled Pakistan’s leaders to maintain Pakistan’s territorial claim to Kashmir and it was a tool to fragment India’s territorial unity and cut it to size. Its position on Kashmir dispute was also a way to promote the position of Pakistan as the guardian of Islam in the subcontinent and the guardian of Indian Muslims residing in India after 1947.

…following Partition Jinnah wasted no time to take the strategic initiative against India and to mobilise the Western world to his side.

The start-up of Islamist militancy and terrorism in the 1980s was a logical corollary of the Pakistani belief – shared by the population and the elites – that Kashmir belonged to Pakistan by virtue of religion and the historical pattern of trade and economic geography.

By virtue of her population, geographical size, political organisation, democratic values, secular views and internationalist outlook, India was supposed to be the rising new power in the third world and in East-West, North-South affairs. Indian Muslims had been the dominant power in India as the Mughal Emperors who ruled India before the ascendency of the East India Company.

Pakistan’s policies after 1947 indicated that it sought a return to former Muslim glory by a policy of cutting India to size by unilateral warlike campaigns and/or by organising international pressure – through their alliance with USA and the combined use of Pakistani, American and other Western diplomatic efforts at the UN to accommodate Pakistani claims to regional security in Kashmir. Here Pakistani strategic and diplomatic interest was to align itself to Western concerns with the threat of the spread of Russian communism into the Middle East and South Asia; the second interest was to align her diplomacy and military policy to her cultural belief in the cultural superiority of the Muslims of the subcontinent.1

It manifested itself in two ways: one, that it was intolerable that Hindus should rule the subcontinent and the Muslims; two, it was desirable to restore Muslim glory after 1947 by policies of military interventions and diplomatic alliance building activity with Western (and later Chinese) powers. These attitudes and policies of Pakistan indicated that it viewed itself as a re-emerging power in the region, given its strategic location for participants in the Cold War and great power politics in the early 1950s.

…Pakistan, the geographically smaller state in relation to Indian resources, emerged as the strategic trigger vis-à-vis India that placed India’s leadership and government in a reactive and defensive mode.

Here Pakistan, the geographically smaller state in relation to Indian resources, emerged as the strategic trigger vis-à-vis India that placed India’s leadership and government in a reactive and defensive mode. Chapter 5 of the book “India’s Strategic Problems“ explains the pattern of Pakistani-Indian interactions and the respective worldviews that underlined the inherent antagonistic relationship between the two countries.

The second source of the rapid rate of change lay in China’s military expansion into Tibet in 1950. It made it a part of China, and although Nehru was uncomfortable with the turn of events he acquiesced in China’s decision urging it however, to respect Tibetan autonomy and culture. Many countries in the Western world deferred to Nehru’s judgement on Tibet and Nehru himself sought to slow the process of Tibet’s integration as a part of China by working diplomatically with Chinese premier Zhou Enlai. The history of China’s push into Tibet is well known but less known is the role Nehru played in diplomatically facilitating China’s position in the region and in undermining the position of the Dalai Lama and the Tibetans.

Chapter 6 of the book “India’s Strategic Problems” provides the unpublicised story of the Nehru-Zhou collaboration between 1950 and 1959 in this respect. American writers familiar with Tibetan affairs of the period have published materials on the subject but Indian archives are still closed to academic research. There are two stories involving Nehru. One, that Nehru worked with Zhou in the hope that Chinese rationality would let them act humanely in Tibet. Two, when the Chinese military juggernaut could not be stopped in pushing aggressive political and cultural activities along with military pressure to marginalise the Tibetan spirit and to build a domineering Han presence in the region, then Nehru agreed to support covert American action in Tibet.

The US-Pakistan military pact created a strategic triangle between India-Pakistan-US because bilateral Indo-Pakistani talks occurred with the backdrop of UN and Western pressures on India to accommodate Pakistani interests…

In both instances Nehru failed to stop China in her Tibetan venture and by 1956 her decision to build the Aksai Chin road through Ladakh was convincing proof that strategic calculations in the Tibet and Xinjiang frontier region were the foundation of Chinese policies, and these were related as well to Chinese fear of Soviet activities in the Xinjiang region and later in the 1950s there was fear that Nehru had tilted towards the ‘Anglo-American imperialists’ in checking China desire for security. Clearly China did not desire to be the field of international power politics after 1949 as it had been the object of British and Russian activities in Central Asia and it sought instead to be a player in the promotion of the Central Asian and Himalayan region as the object of China-led and inspired regional power politics.

The third rapid change that adversely affected Indian interests was the development of the military pact between Pakistan and USA in 1953.

Washington justified this pact as a response to the danger of spread of communism in the region and to insure that Pakistan stayed on the American side and to reject a policy of neutralism, this was deemed to be against the American interest and it was a point of objection by Washington of Nehru’s policy of non-alignment. Pakistan was glad to align its policy with the West to acquire modern arms and diplomatic support so as to balance India’s power (real or potential) by bandwaggoning with the West, and to be seen as a moderate Muslim country which could help Western interests along with Iran and Turkey in the Middle East. The US-Pakistan military pact created a wedge between American anti-communism and Nehru’s drive to build links with the communist world, and it drew a wedge between Nehru’s non-aligned policy and the Western belief that India ought to be on the American side in the global struggle between communism and democracy. This Pact also consolidated the dominant position of the Pakistani military in domestic politics; it quashed the movement within Pakistani politics to develop democratic and civilian political institutions and to move towards a neutral stance in the Cold War struggle.

Pakistan was glad to align its policy with the West to acquire modern arms and diplomatic support so as to balance India’s power…

These rapid changes in India’s strategic environment in the early 1950s had two important messages. First, that the strategic initiative to alter the South Asian environment lay in foreign hands: Pakistan, China and USA. Having insisted on the Partition, to form a Muslim homeland, Jinnah altered the military balance on India’s western and northern front by militarissing and internationalising the Kashmir region; and Nehru’s reference of the Kashmir dispute to the UN reinforced its internationalisation. China’s takeover of Tibet removed the historical position of Tibet as the northern buffer between China and then British India and now between China and India.

The US-Pakistan military pact created a strategic triangle between India-Pakistan-US because bilateral Indo-Pakistani talks occurred with the backdrop of UN and Western pressures on India to accommodate Pakistani interests for the sake of regional security and bilateral peace. The second message was that the foreign players conducted their diplomacy and their military policy according to their views of their national interests and also with a view to align themselves strategically with like-minded countries.