of the New Framework for the US-India Defence
Relationship, the government sought to play down
somewhat the implications of the recently signed
document, claiming that it is only a ‘framework’
that simply supersedes the 1995 Agreement on
Defence Relations and whose content has still to
be filled out. The prime minister on the eve of
his trip to the US declared that the country would
not be sold cheap and that the Congress party, as
the historical leader of the freedom movement,
needed no lessons from the Left about its
patriotic commitment. But this dissimulation will
not work. Like the agreement it replaces, this one
outlines the areas of defence and security
cooperation for the next 10 years on the basic
presumption that both countries are entering a
newer phase in the fulfilling of the NSSP (Next
Steps in the Strategic Partnership) thereby
sanctioning and promoting the very principle of a
‘strategic partnership’.
Indeed, the accord that was subsequently signed
during Manmohan Singh’s state visit to Washington
in late July in which the US promised to clear the
non-proliferation barriers both within the US and
internationally (the Nuclear Supplier’s Group
regulations) so as to help India develop its
civilian nuclear energy sector, was clear
confirmation of the political-strategic
significance that must be attached to this defence
Framework Agreement.1 The real meaning
and importance of this agreement becomes clear
once one goes beyond outlining its particular
features and situates it in the wider historical,
political and strategic context that emerges and
evolves in the post-cold war situation – of a US
out to establish an informal global imperium and
most certainly looking for ‘partners’ to fulfil
this project.
The Specifics
The agreement lists the fields where the two
countries can cooperate more closely. These range
from issues of trade in defence equipment and
transfer of ‘sensitive’ technologies to matters of
co-production, R & D, consultation and
collaboration in various security-related areas
with obvious strategic ramifications. These
include involvement in the US Ballistic Missile
Defence (BMD) system and its associated Theatre
Missile Defence (TMD) systems; ‘multinational’
operations, i e, US-led military-imperial schemes
whether sanctioned by the UN or not; naval
military operations in the Indian Ocean and
beyond; collaboration in ‘countering’ terrorism,
i e, joining hands with the US as it wages its
selective and hypocritically defined ‘war on
global terrorism’, a ‘war’ that specifically
exculpates its own terrorist behaviour and that of
its allies and friends, and whose most important
feature is the ideological cover it provides for
the US pursuit of empire. Indeed, prime minister,
Manmohan Singh during his trip to Washington
endorsed this cover-up by publicly applauding the
US role in ‘countering terrorism’ and assuring it
of Indian support. This far outweighed the very
mild statement he also made about the attack on
Iraq being a “mistake”.
Since defence cooperation with the US is part
of an ongoing process initiated (after the end of
the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union)
by the Narasimha Rao government, there has been
progressive institutionalisation of this process
of extended and deepened cooperation. The latest
addition to the string of committees and
programmes that were created from time to time –
from joint steering committees for naval and air
force cooperation to the International Military
and Exchange and Training (IMET) programme to the
organisation of joint military exercises – is the
Defence Procurement and Production Group to
oversee defence trade and a joint working group to
carry out a mid-year review as part of the
US-India-Defence Policy Group.
What the actual material outcomes of the two
deals with Washington for the defence ministry and
the department of atomic energy might be and how
useful they will prove (e g, excessive reliance on
imports of nuclear energy equipment, outdated
F-16s, etc) remains uncertain. This uncertainty
thus provides room for criticism from those who
otherwise defend the necessity of an Indo-US
alignment but worry that India may be selling
itself too cheap. However, these reservations are
of relatively minor consequence for they do not
threaten to alter the main trajectory of India-US
relations, now consecrated by the welcome given to
the Washington accord in the mainstream ‘national’
media.
Wider Context
While September 11, 2001, and the rise of a
neo-conservative cabal in the White House has
affected the pace, manner and tactics of the US
pursuit of an informal global empire, the
strategic commitment to a ruthlessly aggressive
pursuit of this near-century long ambition emerged
as the keystone of US foreign policy behaviour
only after 1991 and the collapse of its most
important systemic and geo-political challenger,
the former Soviet Union. On the Indian side, the
same collapse was decisive in promoting both a
neo-liberal turn in economic policy and an
abandonment of non-alignment in foreign policy
behaviour. The way was cleared then for the two
governments to begin a process of establishing
strategic friendship, even strategic partnership.
For most of the 1990s, however, efforts in this
regard did not quite match the rhetoric of both
countries being ‘natural allies’. The reason was
simple. Even during the cold war era south Asia
was never as important geo-strategically for the
US as the Far East (controlling Japan, confronting
North Korea/USSR/China, and later aligning with
China against the USSR) and west Asia (oil).
Indeed, south Asia’s importance was essentially
derivative – as yet another third world site of
extended rivalry between the US and the USSR and
then between the USSR and China.
Moreover, even after the end of the Cold War
and the progressive transformation of the social
character of the Indian state – the rising
strength and weight of business groups and a
middle class perceiving real benefits to itself
from neoliberal integration into the world economy
and therefore desiring greater accommodation with
the West and the US in particular – there remained
an enormous asymmetry of power between India and
the US. This has always meant that the actual
terms of ‘friendship’ or ‘partnership’ could only
be forged on terms established by, and clearly
favouring, the latter. The story of Indian foreign
policy since 1991 has therefore been one of how
state elites, dominant classes and their middle
class support base could convince themselves that
such an unbalanced alliance was highly desirable
and (to use that hoary and usually quite
meaningless phrase) in the ‘national interest’. It
is a story of progressive Indian accommodation to
the US, not the other way around. Through the
1990s up to Pokharan II (and even afterwards)
successive Indian governments sought to persuade
the US government that it should move away from
supporting Pakistan towards itself. After all,
India was the bigger and more powerful country and
its interests should be given preference as well
as priority over those of the Pakistan government.
The US has never seen things this way though
obviously it has to recognise India as the bigger,
more powerful country and its usefulness as an
ally. If the 1998 nuclear tests caused a temporary
hiccup to improvement of India-US relations, this
was smoothed over within the reign of the Clinton
administration itself. The latest US declaration
has finally crowned the logic of that process of
accommodation. For the US, neither Pakistan nor
India is to be put in the same category as a
nuclearised Iran, Iraq or North Korea, though
India, especially, should confine itself to being
and remaining a small nuclear power (SNP). The
Strobe Talbott-Jaswant Singh talks – the most
sustained series of high level foreign policy
discussions between the two countries – convinced
the US that the BJP government was its kind of
government, one that was more than willing to bend
over backwards to appease the US in return for an
end to isolation on the nuclear issue and
acceptance of India as a ‘responsible nuclear
power’, i e, a country willing to join as a
rule-abiding member of the very same international
non-proliferation regime led by the US that it had
earlier condemned as hypocritical and
discriminatory in order to justify its acquisition
of the bomb. Then, New Delhi had in the course of
these talks signaled its willingness to join the
CTBT regime that the Clinton administration was
keen on. When the Bush administration, which
rejected ratification of the CTBT, came to power
this particular issue was dropped from the
bilateral agenda.
But the game has remained the same. The BJP led
government, and now the Congress-led one, want de
facto acceptance as a nuclear power and at least
informal membership in the nuclear club and are
prepared to make the concessions that the US might
want in return. These range from the issue of
imposing safeguards on parts of its nuclear energy
sector to accepting the kind of nuclear restraints
that will put some kind of an admittedly loose and
fairly commodious ‘cap’ on the quantitative and
qualitative development of its nuclear arsenal
(arousing the ire of that section of the Indian
bomb lobby which wants India to rapidly go well
beyond SNP status) to obedience on the lead that
the US may wish to take on non-proliferation
matters to accepting the kind of military and
strategic relationships the US wants from India.
Hence, there is not just the acceptance by India
of the legitimacy of the US ‘war on global
terrorism’, quiet endorsement of the BMD-TMDs
issue in return for some technology crumbs through
participation in the setting up of this project.
That this very project is aimed at establishing US
military-nuclear dominance in space as a way of
ensuring its unilateral global dominance over all
other countries is no longer something to be
mentioned let alone criticised. Nor is it a matter
of any consequence that the US’s BMD project (or
its research into the development of battlefield,
mini- and micro-nuclear weapons) is all a form of
nuclear insanity that guarantees a continuous
nuclear arms race by threatening not only
non-nuclear weapons states but also some existing
ones.2
If the 1998 nuclear tests meant, in US eyes, a
heightened though somewhat negative salience to
South Asia (the dangers associated with a nuclear
face-off between India and Pakistan) two other
developments gave a more positive salience to the
place of India and the region as a whole in the
US’s wider geo-political and strategic thinking.
India, despite its poverty, but because of its
sizeable middle class (actually in absolute
numbers a mass elite and not at all a broadly
median category as is the case with the middle
classes in advanced industrialised societies), is
not only one of the ten most important ‘emerging
markets’ for foreign capital but given its
neo-liberal lurch one that is willing (unlike
China or South Korea) to forego the kind of
protection for, and encouragement of, domestic
capital formation that both China and South Korea
have insisted upon in the course of their own
development. US economic interest in India is
general while it is merely selective in the other
smaller countries of South Asia including
Pakistan. Geo-economically then, India is the key
country in the region.
But geo-politically, India and Pakistan serve
non-substitutable US interests. This means India
cannot turn the US against Pakistan in any serious
way and in fact has had to accommodate itself to
the US perspective which aims to utilise alliances
with both countries separately and not to take
permanent sides with one against the other. The
importance of Pakistan to the US was spectacularly
reinforced after September 11 for reasons going
well beyond the ostensible one of fighting Muslim
terrorist groups hostile to the US. Before
September 11 the US had no geo-strategic entry
into central Asia. The assault on Afghanistan
provided the key for it to make just such an
entry, including within its ambit a host of other
countries from Kyrgyzstan to Tajikistan to
Kazakhstan to Uzbekistan and Georgia. Most of
central and west Asia is Muslim populated. The US
need for Muslim client regimes is therefore
paramount. Pakistan’s new importance as a base for
US pursuit of its ambitions in central Asia more
than compensates for its declining relevance for
the US (after its direct entry via the 2003 Iraq
invasion) in west Asia where its relationship with
Saudi Arabia helped strengthen one of the four key
legs (the other three are Egypt, Turkey, Israel)
of the strategic stool on which US power has
rested.
By contrast, India’s geopolitical importance
for the US lies southwards and eastwards towards
the Indian Ocean and as a junior partner in
strategic perspectives concerning the possible
containment of China. As a Hindu-majority country
there is no way that India can substitute for what
Muslim client regimes can provide the US in west
and central Asia. And of the 54 Muslim majority
states, it is Pakistan that has the widest pool of
skilled, scientific personnel and educated elites;
the most professional and battle-hardened army;
the one country with the nuclear bomb; and whose
military dominated governments have been more or
less reliable allies of the US for decades – all
assets the US will not casually discount.
For all the justified relief that one may feel
at the defeat of the BJP-led NDA and its
replacement by a Congress-led UPA government,
significant change for the better has taken place
only in certain areas of domestic policy such as
partial repeal of draconian legislation, promises
to secure and carry out a National Employment
Guarantee Act, some de-saffronisation of
education, and so on. As far as the basic contours
of neo-liberal economic policies and of foreign
policy behaviour go, there is no change of
direction from the past. On the contrary, on the
economic front the pace of liberalisation may have
slowed slightly (debatable) while a few more sops
have been offered to the Left. In the domain of
foreign policy the ideological fervour that lay
behind the BJP’s desire for alignment with Israel
is missing but the commitment of the Congress to
strategic partnership with the US and to
sustaining, even deepening, the relationship with
Israel remains intact, despite Left pressure. The
new defence framework agreement and nuclear accord
are proof enough of that.
Fundamental Contradiction
But there remains a deep incoherence in the
strategic perspectives of those who make up the
overwhelming bulk of the Indian ‘foreign policy
establishment’ and who, with whatever
reservations, believe that India must move towards
partnership/friendship with the US. This arises
not because they do not share the justified Left
hostility and opposition to the imperialist US. It
arises because there is a fundamental
contradiction within what the Indian government
and strategic community claim they want to achieve
in the long term and their actual foreign policy
behaviour. They say that they are committed to the
creation of a more ‘multipolar’ world order yet
are endorsing policies that move away from rather
than towards such a goal. The language of
unipolarity and multipolarity are for the most
part crude simplifications that have never done
much conceptual justice to the task of grasping
the actual complexity of global politics. But
leaving this aside and accepting their widespread
and common use, it should be clear that unipolar
domination is what the US imperial project is all
about. The US ambition is not the creation of a
global equilibrium through power balancing but the
establishment of its global hegemony through a
worldwide system of alliances that would accept
its undisputed and indisputable leadership. Behind
the rhetoric of wanting to help India become ‘a
major power in the world’ lies this crystal clear
ambition.
The emergence of multipolarity therefore
requires a very substantial political and
strategic weakening of the US. The US needs to be
politically defeated in places like Iraq, in
central and west Asia, and elsewhere, e g, in
Latin America where resistance to neoliberalism is
strongest and where Venezuela is proving to be a
growing irritant. For it is such defeats that will
tame it internationally, subdue and erode its
confidence, and significantly moderate its
ambitions. What then becomes the role of foreign
policy statecraft by other countries vis-à-vis the
US if the achievement of multipolarity is their
stated longer-term goal? Should this goal not
determine the diplomatic strategy, and therefore
the associated tactics, that should be adopted by
these countries? Of course, it should but it does
not. Therein lies the incoherence.
There are four possible strategic perspectives
that a state can pursue through appropriate
diplomacy and statecraft when faced with an
aspiring hegemon like the US. It can seek to
balance against it. It can bandwagon on it. It can
try to hide i e, be neutral. It can try to
transcend, i e, insist on abiding by international
laws so as to excuse itself from not aligning with
the hegemon. There is also a fifth strategic
posture, which a power can adopt with respect to
another threatening power. This is co-binding or
seeking to institutionally so lock in the
potentially threatening power with one’s own
country that mutual constraints are imposed, thus
obviating the potential threat. This is what
France did with Germany after second world war. It
is what China wants to do with the US but the US
being much stronger country has less compulsion to
adopt such a policy towards China. It is what
India could try and do with Pakistan, but not what
it can try and do vis-a-vis the US. Of the four
other strategic perspectives, three either work
against the US ambition to dominate the world
order or at least do not act to help it in this
respect. The fourth – bandwagonning – is what the
US most wants because such a strategic posture on
the part of other countries is precisely what it
most needs to fulfill its ambitions. Of course,
such is the complexity of the world order that
contrary to the assumptions of most foreign policy
or strategic experts much more than the foreign
policy behaviour of major states determines the
shape and trajectory of world politics. For that
we can be eternally grateful. But the US is
perfectly correct in seeing bandwagonning by other
states as the best guarantee of its efforts to
become and remain the global hegemon for as long
as possible.
What the Indian state is currently doing is
precisely bandwagonning and therefore exactly what
the US wants. But India is also pretending to
itself that this is in its national interest. The
end result is that India merely pays lip service
to the striving for multipolarity and does not at
all see the contradiction in what it is doing and
in what it says it ultimately wants. There is a
profound disjunction at the level of diplomacy and
foreign policy behaviour between the claimed
strategic goal that it believes it must pursue
because it would give it greatest relative
autonomy and authority in the system of
nation-states – promoting multipolarity – and its
actual practice of statecraft as embodied in the
policies and diplomatic stances it pursues and
adopts. This is hardly surprising.
In the final analysis there is no ‘natural’
law, no compulsion of so-called national interest
that determines which of the four strategic
postures a country pursues. Even the
transnationalisation of elites through economic
neo-liberal globalisation does not determine the
distribution of relative gains and power between
different national states. It is ultimately the
social and moral character of the political
leadership in each country that is decisive in
determining the direction taken.
Besides all this, there is the issue of China.
The future evolution of US-India relations is
connected to the future evolution of US-China
relations, which will be essentially shaped by the
stronger country, the US. Currently, amidst all
the conflicting pressures that operate within the
US, it has, in effect, adopted a dual posture
seeing China as a potential strategic partner or
friend and as a potential competitor or rival.
Accordingly, it pursues policies of preparation
and development towards both possible outcomes.
China welcomes the first approach since this would
leave it space and time to further modernise and
to do so in ways that could make eventual
co-binding of both countries a real possibility.
On foreign policy the two dominant currents in
Chinese strategic thinking are nationalist and
pro-American.3 Regardless then, of
advances made towards resolving the border issue,
the parameters of the future India-China
relationship will be decided by the evolution of
the US-China relationship. This is the price that
both these Asian countries pay for tying
themselves so strongly to the desire for a
strategic friendship or relationship with the US.
The absence of a sufficient distance today from
the US and of a coherent, consistent and subtly
coordinated diplomacy in pursuit of multipolarity,
makes the adoption of a genuinely independent
foreign policy by India tomorrow much more
difficult, risky and painful.
The Left’s Response
The CPM’s new general secretary, Prakash Karat,
is to be congratulated for leading a Left-led
resistance to this Congress-led UPA government on
economic and foreign policy issues. But as the
accord in Washington shows, this has been far from
enough. But at least the resistance has provided
the main pole of political opposition to the
government – much more so than the BJP/NDA out of
power. This is something to be grateful for and
something to build upon. But the main bastions of
this Left (i e, CPM and CPI) have certain
weaknesses that have been further revealed in
their response to the Washington nuclear accord.
It has to develop an alternative geopolitical and
‘national’ foreign policy perspective to
counterpose those of the Congress and BJP and then
seek to mobilise public opinion around it. But it
is hampered by weaknesses of understanding and
perspective in three areas.
First of all, it continues to defend the
nuclear energy civilian sector when there should
be a straightforward demand for closing it down
completely. It has been a disaster on all counts –
efficiency-wise, safety-wise for both humans and
the environment, lack of transparency and
accountability, costliness and wastefulness. This
is not the place to take up the issue of why we
should get rid completely of this sector and shift
resources massively into the research and
development of renewable energy sources.4
Suffice it to say that since the Left does not
take such a categorical stand, it is reduced to
partially echoing the criticisms of sections of
the right, the centre and of sections within the
DAE establishment. Hence, the litany of complaints
that the accord signed in Washington is
secretively arrived at, has only limited benefits,
is hedged in by too many hampering restrictions
for the independent development of India’s nuclear
energy sector, was achieved at too high a price,
and so on.
Second, the Left has not enunciated any clear
or accurate perspective on China. Contrary to the
statements that have emanated from H S Surjeet and
A B Bardhan (usually after a visit to Beijing – P
Karat’s observations are now keenly awaited),
today’s China is not a non-capitalist or socialist
country with which the Left in India can seek a
‘natural’ alliance. Both the Chinese and Russian
governments pursue a foreign policy strategy and
practice vis-à-vis the US that is shamefully
supine, and they consistently punch below their
actual diplomatic, political and strategic weight
in world affairs, as does India. If this Left is
going to develop a more coherent strategy of how
best to fight (at home and through activity
abroad) the US efforts to establish an informal
global empire then it must have a much clearer
idea at the level of states and non-state actors
of who are its actual and potential
anti-imperialist allies, who are the opponents,
and who are the bystanders in this struggle to
shift the global relationship of forces against
the US. Besides, the Left will itself have to
stand firm and unequivocal in its opposition to
both US imperialism and to global and regional
nuclearisation, including India’s. It is time that
the very notion of even strategic friendship or
the language of pursuing ‘friendly relations’ with
the US is rejected and directly attacked. You
cannot hope to build opposition to US imperialism
in India and abroad without calling the beast by
its name and without highlighting its ugly
character. The kind of relationship that the
Indian government should be seeking with the US is
not strategic nor friendly but formal, routine,
and functional. As a democracy, formal courtesies
of language at the diplomatic state-to-state level
can accompany complete freedom of criticism
outside it.
Finally, what is the vision that this Left has
for its kind of India? In particular, if this Left
opposes as it does and must do, this kind of
defence framework agreement, then what perspective
does the Left have for the nature of India’s
military power? Does the Left want to chase the
chimera of India becoming a ‘major world power’?
What is this supposed to mean if it is not just
the usual code phrase of Realist inspiration for
trying to make oneself a regional or global bully
and to play what Realism considers the eternal
game of states dominating or being subordinated by
others? There are two directions that military
preparations of a state, big, medium-sized or
small, can take. One is to insist that the level
of military preparations must be sufficient to
protect one’s territorial boundaries. The other is
to tie the notion of military-national security to
the notion of power projection well beyond one’s
territorial boundaries. In the latter case, there
is no end to the supposed needs of power
projection. It is this perspective that dominates
the thinking of countries like the US, Russia,
China and India but not Brazil or South Africa. It
dominates the thinking of countries like Britain
and Israel but not Vietnam and Sweden. There is
thus an inescapable normative dimension to
strategic political thinking and ambitions. The
vision of the world that progressives want is tied
to their vision of the potential for good that
humans have. It is not the least a coincidence
that subscribers to economic neo-liberalism are
usually subscribers to conventional realist
thinking in the field of international relations.
In both cases there lies a deeply inadequate
understanding of the character, motivations and
potentials of human beings. For the first credo,
humans are marked above all by the will to
consume. In the second credo, humans are marked
above all by the will to power. This may well be
an accurate characterisation of the nature of
neoliberals and realists. But how fortunate we are
that there remain so many humans who are neither
so morally debased nor so intellectually
impoverished.
Email: pamela@del3.vsnl.net.in
Notes
1 In return for the US trying to
ease the way for the further expansion of the
Indian civilian nuclear energy programme, India
will have to separate the programme into its
civilian and military parts and put the former
under international safeguards. To now be accepted
de facto as a “responsible nuclear power”
alongside other so-called responsible nuclear
powers in the existing club of five (who are also
de jure nuclear powers) India is committing itself
to various forms and schemes of
political-strategic cooperation that signal a
definitive end to any idea that India will either
stand up to the US’s basic global ambitions
(indeed it is committing itself to be a junior
partner in promoting this project) or that it will
attempt any serious role in promoting global
nuclear disarmament.
2 The BMD-TMDs are an integrated programme aiming
to provide the US with the capacity to destroy
‘enemy’ nuclear missiles in all three phases of
its flight pattern (boost, in space, and on
re-entry) and which in conjunction with its
offensive nuclear capacities can promise the US an
altogether new kind of “full-spectrum dominance”.
It is specifically directed against Russia and
China and in forcing the latter to move towards
the development of capacities to ‘overload’ this
defence system will have knock-on effects
elsewhere. One way of forcing an ‘overload’ will
be for China to make more missiles, more warheads
on each missile and bigger megatonnage of warheads
so that the impact would be greater if any to get
through the US defence shield. So to counter
China’s enhanced capacities for a potential
first-strike on India, the latter will have to
increase its missile and warhead strength thereby
pushing Pakistan to do the same.
3 See the excellent study of different
intellectual currents in China today by Wang
Chaohua, One China Many Paths, Verso,
London, 2004.
4 A Gopalkrishnan’s article (“Indo-US Nuclear
Cooperation: A Non-starter?” in EPW, July
2, 2005 issue) is inspired by a nationalist
determination not to allow the country’s civilian
nuclear energy to become dependent on the US. It
does not address the fundamental issues in the
case against nuclear energy production, nor does
it aim to provide the kind of critical and
comprehensive historical account of the Indian
civilian programme that the public needs to have.
