History of US-India Ties

[Riaz Haq]

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's decision to skip the upcoming Non-Aligned Summit in Venezuela sends a powerful signal of his Hindu Nationalist government's growing commitment to India's partnership with the United States.

The latest logistics deal allowing the US forces to use Indian military bases is an indication of how the Americans intend to play the India card against China after the Cold War,  just as they played the China card against the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

The US-India deal is part of the  US “pivot” to Asia designed to check rising China. The U.S. Navy plans to deploy 60 percent of its surface ships in Asia in the near future. Instead of having to build facilities virtually from the ground up, as in Afghanistan and Iraq, the U.S. has the benefit of simple arrangements for the tremendous Indian facilities, according to Forbes magazine. This deal will accelerate the unfolding post Col-War realignment taking place in South Asia.

Massive Western Aid to India:

US-India ties are not new. India has been the number one recipient of US aid since 1947, according to the US government data.   The country India's first Prime Minister turned to for help during the 1962 China-India war was also the United States.

India has received $65.1 billion in US aid since its independence, making it the top recipient of American economic assistance. Pakistan, with its $44.4 billion, is at number 5 on the list.  US data also shows that Pakistan is not among top 10 for military or total economic and military aid.

More recently, the US aid to India has been replaced by massive US investment in the country that keeps its economy afloat. Massive western money inflows help India, with its huge trade deficits, pay for its imports and help maintain significant foreign exchange reserves. U.S. investment in India has jumped 500% in the past two years, according to the Wall Street Journal.

US Help in 1962 Indo-China War:

Indian Prime Minister Nehru sought significant US material aid and diplomatic help as the Indian troops were in full retreat in the 1962 China-India war.  A former US intelligence official Bruce Riedel in his book "JFK’s Forgotten Crisis: Tibet, the CIA and the Sino-Indian War" notes that President John F. Kennedy played a “decisive role” in “forestalling a Pakistani attack” on India, even as
Islamabad then was fully capable of going to war with India to wrest the disputed territory of Kashmir.

India's Pakistan Obsession:

The US efforts to partner with India are clearly aimed to check China's rise. However, India's actions and statements suggest that it expects to use this partnership to against Pakistan.

Anticipating questions about US-Pakistan ties during his India visit, here's what Carter told Council of Foreign Relation in Washington D.C. before leaving for New Delhi:

“I’m sure I’ll be asked about it in India, but I think the first thing one needs to say from an American policy point of view, these (India and Pakistan) are both respected partners and friends.”

"Pakistan is an important security partner", Carter added.

Pakistan-China Ties: 

While US is courting India to check China's rise, the China-Pakistan ties have now moved well beyond “higher than Himalayas and sweeter than honey,” as officials on both sides say. Chinese strategists openly talk of Pakistan as their nation’s only real ally. And China is investing heavily in Pakistan to build the Gwadar deep sea port as part of a much more ambitious and strategic China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) that India is attempting sabotage.

The result is that Pakistan is drawing closer to China, a rising superpower, while its rival India is partnering with the United States, a superpower in relative decline on the world stage.

Let me conclude with a quote from from Brookings' Stephen Cohen on India-Pakistan power equation:

“One of the most important puzzles of India-Pakistan relations is not why the smaller Pakistan feels encircled and threatened, but why the larger India does. It would seem that India, seven times more populous than Pakistan and five times its size, and which defeated Pakistan in 1971, would feel more secure. This has not been the case and Pakistan remains deeply embedded in Indian thinking. There are historical, strategic, ideological, and domestic reasons why Pakistan remains the central obsession of much of the Indian strategic community, just as India remains Pakistan’s.”


Here's a video discussion on the subject:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sfliv7KJVM




http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x45590s_pak-leaders-in-london-us-i...



Pak Leaders in London; US-India Defense Deals... by ViewpointFromOverseas

https://vimeo.com/163190180



Pak Leaders in London; US-India Defense Deals; Trump vs GOP from Ikolachi on Vimeo.



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China-Pakistan Economic Corridor

Gwadar: Hong Kong West for China?

Indian Agent Kulbhushan Yadav's Confession

[Riaz Haq]

#JFK hosted Pak President Ayub Khan at Mount Vernon when #Pakistan was an important partner for #UnitedStates in 1961. In 1962, #Kennedy asked Ayub to stay out of #India-#China war. In 2021, #Biden has yet to speak with #ImranKhan https://brook.gs/3AuERV8 via @BrookingsInst

It was First Lady Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy who conceived of the summit at Mount Vernon between her husband John F. Kennedy and Pakistani President Mohammad Ayub Khan. She was inspired by the Kennedys’ visit to the Habsburgs’ Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna earlier in the year. She quietly approached the managers of the Mount Vernon estate, who eagerly agreed to host the Pakistanis. She also arranged for the jewelry store Tiffany’s to provide the flowers and decorations for the dinner.

Pakistan was an important partner for the United States in 1961, linked by treaty to the containment of the Soviet Union and China. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) flew U2 surveillance flights from Pakistani bases to monitor China’s emerging nuclear arsenal. The CIA also secretly supported Tibetan rebels fighting for independence from an airbase in what was then East Pakistan (now Bangladesh).

Ayub Khan had just suspended Pakistani cooperation with the Tibet covert operation because Kennedy had promised India a large economic aid package and signaled that a closer relationship with New Delhi was coming. The Pakistani dictator was against a closer American relationship with India. Shutting down the Tibet operation was a quiet behind the scenes way of expressing unease with Kennedy’s tilting towards India.

At the request of Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles, JFK took Ayub Khan for a private one-on-one stroll in the mansion garden and asked the Pakistani leader to reopen the airbase for secret resupply flights to the rebels in Tibet. Ayub Khan agreed but asked for a commitment that no American military equipment would ever be provided to India without prior consultation with Pakistan. Kennedy agreed.

The dinner was a great success. The best and brightest of the new administration were there. The main course was poulet chasseur made in the White House and then reheated in a portable army kitchen in the grounds of the mansion.

The next spring Mrs. Kennedy traveled to India and Pakistan. It was the first trip abroad alone by a first lady in the television age. She dazzled viewers everywhere, including back home.

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The 1962 crisis set in train the dynamics that would lead decades later to the geopolitics of today with the United States aligned with India and Pakistan aligned with China. It helped spark the nuclear arms race in Asia. The crisis resonates throughout Asia today.

Today Pakistan is the fifth most populous country in the world, with one of the most active nuclear weapons programs. It is China’s closest and most important ally. Relations with India remain tense. Most immediately, Pakistan is supporting the Taliban offensive designed to topple the Afghan government in Kabul after the American withdrawal, though it publicly says it wants a political solution, not a Taliban military victory. The Pakistani army gives the Taliban safe haven, arms, training, and logistical support which are crucial to their ability to operate.

President Joe Biden has yet to talk to Prime Minister Imran Khan once since taking office. Imran Khan has recently spoken publicly about Islamabad’s close ties to Beijing, praising it as a role model and defending its oppression of its Uyghur Muslims. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin has spoken with Pakistan’s Chief of the Army Staff General Qamar Javed Bajwa more than once but has yet to meet with him in person. For the Afghan withdrawal, it is probably too late to change Pakistan’s policy to back the Taliban. The puzzle is why the administration is not engaging more actively with this important country.

[Riaz Haq]

#US-#India #military #tech collaboration: #Raytheon to invest $100 million in setting up production/research facilities in #India. #Boeing interested in Maintenance, Repair and Overhaul hub for systems like the P8I maritime reconnaissance #aircraft. https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/defence/india-shares-docu...

New Delhi: India has shared a document with the US outlining emerging areas where military technology cooperation can be undertaken by the two nations and specialised teams are likely to conduct visits in the coming weeks to take the proposals forward, highly-placed defence ministry officials have told ET.

The document, which specified the emerging technology areas where joint development and production would be beneficial, was shared during the recent two plus two dialogue in the US,with officials saying that it was greeted positively and with enthusiasm.

Describing the dialogue as "very warm, receptive and cordial", officials said several areas of mutual cooperation have been identified that are set to be taken ahead in the coming months. US defence companies, including those which met Defence Minister Rajnath Singh, are also likely to invest in India, officials said, adding that India's commitment to self-dependence has been received well.


Major US arms manufacturer Raytheon is likely to invest $100 million in setting up production and research facilities in India, while Boeing is exploring the possibility of creating a Maintenance, Repair and Overhaul hub for systems like the P8I maritime reconnaissance aircraft that are used by both nations. Plans by Raytheon could result in the creation of over 2,000 jobs in India.

Co-production of military systems was a key component of the talks, with emerging technology areas including artificial intelligence, cyber defence and space cooperation on the table. "There is now a clear understanding by both sides that jointly working on futuristic technologies is the way forward. It's a major step above a simple buyer-seller relationship," officials said.

The Indian side also pitched its shipyards for upcoming purchases planned by the US Coast Guard, showcasing their capability to deliver low cost, high quality products as well as a proven track record on delivery.

US teams are also expected to visit India soon to take forward a proposal to utilise Indian shipyards for repair and overhaul of American warships in the region. Such an arrangement, where US warships can be quickly turned around at Indian facilities, would be a key signal on the level of strategic partnership achieved.

"Closer military-military cooperation, increased engagement, information sharing and possible joint patrolling were discussed, with a focus on high end technology sharing," officials added.

On the strategic front, the security scenario in the Indo-Pacific was discussed, with both sides sharing their commitment to peace and open access to all. The importance of the Quad initiative was appreciated during the talks and enhanced cooperation discussed. Defence Minister Rajnath Singh is likely to visit the remaining quad nations -- Japan and Australia -- in the coming months.

On the Russia front, officials said that India's position on the matter was explained in detail and has been understood by the US. All official statements regarding the talks remained positive and constructive.

[Riaz Haq]

America Has Never Really Understood India
The two countries conceptually seem destined to be partners, yet for decades have held remarkably divergent worldviews.

By Meenakshi Ahamed


https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/05/joe-biden-narendr...

Partly as a result of all these factors, India came to rely heavily on the Soviet Union for its military equipment. The Pentagon, suspicious of the Indo-Soviet relationship, refused to sell India sophisticated weapons or computers and continued to strengthen Pakistan’s military. Nor would the U.S. permit India, which was keen to be an independent actor, to manufacture arms domestically through joint ventures or cooperation agreements. The Soviets were more accommodating to India’s goals and soon became the country’s primary arms supplier. India has long worried about its military dependence on Moscow, but though it has made recent moves to diversify its suppliers, Russian military equipment still accounts for the majority of India’s total defense stock.

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On the surface, this apparent distance between Washington, D.C., and New Delhi will seem odd. For more than a decade, the U.S. has sought to build a strategic partnership with India, and the two countries have much in common, including their democratic political systems and their shared concern over China’s rise. Analysts have largely attributed India’s unwillingness to turn against Russia to its reliance on Moscow for military equipment and energy exports. These are undoubtedly significant factors, yet they underplay just how uncertain and shallow the U.S.-India relationship remains.

In fact, the U.S. and India—two countries that conceptually seem destined to be partners—have for decades held remarkably divergent worldviews, finding themselves all too often pursuing conflicting objectives.

To make sense of the course India has taken in 2022, it is helpful to understand India’s relations with the U.S. during the Cold War.

When India became the world’s newest and largest democracy in 1947, its relations with the U.S., the world’s most powerful democracy, should by all accounts have been friendly. Both countries subscribed on paper to the same set of values—a commitment to a rules-based international order, a belief in free and fair elections, the rule of law, civil liberties, and free speech. Yet time and again, they saw things through very different lenses, misunderstanding each other’s goals in the process, ultimately leading to periods where they worked at odds with one another.

[Riaz Haq]

America Has Never Really Understood India
The two countries conceptually seem destined to be partners, yet for decades have held remarkably divergent worldviews.

By Meenakshi Ahamed


https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/05/joe-biden-narendr...



America’s transactional approach to aid also disappointed Indians. Nehru felt that begging for assistance was demeaning, but he had hoped that as the richer, more established democracy, the U.S. would offer India a helping hand. The U.S. Congress was governed by different sentiments. Some lawmakers argued that any country receiving American aid should show gratitude and were irritated that India had not supported American positions at the United Nations on Israel and the Korean War. “Our relations with India are not very good, are they?” Tom Connally, the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said in 1951. “Nehru is giving us hell all the time, working against us and voting against us.” The same year, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge asked, “What are the Indians going to do for us?” His conviction that India would show no appreciation for American help was shared by many on Capitol Hill.

Beyond aid, economic relations were fraught. Nehru had embarked on an ambitious plan after independence to industrialize India and make the country self-reliant, a key Indian goal, but a lack of capital and expertise required the country to partner with others. As part of these efforts, the U.S. held protracted negotiations with India to build a large steel plant in the eastern-Indian city of Bokaro, a project that had become a symbol of Indian national pride, but fundamental differences in economic ideology ruptured negotiations. In the end, the Soviet Union stepped in to rescue the plans.

After Nehru’s death, other disagreements over aid and economics exacerbated the distrust. When Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, Nehru’s daughter, traveled to Washington, D.C., in March 1966 to request food aid in the middle of India’s worst famine since independence, the World Bank and the White House put pressure on her to devalue the rupee as a precondition. Three months later, she did just that, though against the wishes of several members of the government who accused her of auctioning the country. The aid promised to India in return was slow to arrive and it wasn’t the economic success that she had hoped for. Domestically, the entire episode was a political disaster, and to recover support from the left, Gandhi criticized U.S. policy in Vietnam, which enraged then-President Lyndon B. Johnson. He responded by delaying food shipments to India that had already been approved by Congress. Indians were appalled that Johnson was using food aid as a weapon and began to sour on America.

Relations between the U.S. and India have warmed considerably in the past couple of decades. By 2000, India’s economic reforms had propelled growth, which, combined with the country’s military strength and nuclear capability, made it an attractive counter to China’s rise. George W. Bush, who sought to cultivate India as a potential strategic partner, undertook the herculean task of getting congressional approval for a special nuclear deal with India, and relations improved further when Modi was elected India’s prime minister in 2014: He made good relations with the U.S. a cornerstone of his foreign policy.

[Riaz Haq]

Handle the India-U.S. Relationship With Care
The world’s largest democracy often sees things very differently than America.

By Walter Russell Mead

https://www.wsj.com/articles/india-handle-with-care-modi-china-russ...


Superficially, the U.S.-India relationship looks like a success. With both countries focused on China, business ties steadily deepening, and U.S.-Pakistan relations in a deep freeze, many of the old obstacles to the relationship have disappeared.

But an intense week of meetings in Bangalore and Delhi with politicians, think tankers, religious leaders and journalists made clear that while Americans and Indians share strategic and economic interests, and we both value democracy, we remain divided by important differences in values and perceptions. Unless managed carefully, these differences could derail U.S.-India cooperation at a critical time.

Americans and Indians often see the same problem in very different ways. India, for example, does not see Russia’s attack on Ukraine as a threat to world order. While Americans have been disturbed by India’s continued willingness to buy oil from Russia, Indians resent the West’s attempt to rally global support for what many here see as a largely Western problem in Ukraine. Pointing out that Europeans scarcely noticed China’s attacks on Indian frontier posts in 2020, Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar told a conference in Bratislava, Slovakia, last week that “Europe has to grow out of the mindset that Europe’s problems are the world’s problems.”

More generally, Indians bristle when they sense Americans and Europeans getting together to write global rules. The more that American Wilsonians talk about a values-based international order, the more that Indians worry about Western arrogance. Many Indians want a strong Russia and, within limits, a strong China precisely to help guard against the kind of world order President Biden and many of his advisers want to build.

This is more than the postcolonial suspicion of Western intentions that India has long shared with many other non-Western countries. The Hindu nationalist movement that has replaced the long-ruling Congress Party with a new political system built around the Bharatiya Janata Party and its charismatic leader, Narendra Modi, has brought a new dynamism to Indian foreign policy. This new nationalist India wants to increase and develop Indian power, not submerge Indian sovereignty in Western-designed international institutions.

The domestic agenda of the Hindu nationalist movement can also cause problems for the U.S.-India relationship. For Hindu nationalists, the rule of the Muslim Mughal emperors, some of whom destroyed ancient Hindu temples and built mosques on their ruins, was as much a disaster as British colonialism for Indian civilization. It is not enough to send the British packing; the liberation of India means placing Hindu civilization back at the center of Indian cultural and political life. Many BJP supporters want the Indian government to defend India’s Hindu civilization and culture from Islam, Christianity and Western secular liberalism.

This form of Hindu nationalism leads to controversial policy initiatives. Tough restrictions on the ability of foreign organizations to fund civil-society groups in India threaten to disrupt the activities of American charities ranging from the Ford Foundation to the Catholic Church. Anti-conversion laws put obstacles in the path of both Christian and Muslim missionary efforts, and Hindu women wishing to marry out of the faith sometimes face severe social and governmental pressures. Communal violence, a problem in India since the days of the British raj, has risen in recent years. Indian Muslims often express fears for their personal security.

[Riaz Haq]

New Order with a Blend of Western Liberalism and Eastern Civilizational Nationalism | Institut Montaigne


By Ram Madhav Founding Member of the Governing Council of India Foundation (Hindu Nationalist RSS)

"...no one wants the present world order to continue except the US and its [Western] allies."

https://www.institutmontaigne.org/en/analysis/new-order-blend-weste...

The conflict in Ukraine has begun reshaping the global order. Ram Madhav, Former National General Secretary of the Bharatiya Janata Party and Member of the Governing Council of India Foundation, questions the legitimacy of the Western leadership model for “Ukraine Shifting the World Order”. Shedding light on the increasingly heteropolar nature of our world, he advocates for a new world order based on 21st century realities: one where nationalism and liberalism can coexist and where the Global South is a primary stakeholder.



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The Western leadership model
Two important questions arise. Firstly, is a uniform world order wedded to those three principles mandatory for the world, or can there be diversity? Secondly, who is responsible for wrecking the current liberal order? The Western powers themselves or their recalcitrant challengers like Russia and China?

After the Second World War, Western leadership villainized national identity. Nationalism was blamed for the two wars and all modern nation-states were mandated to follow the same template: liberal democracy, open market capitalism and globalization. Other forms were condemned as retrograde. When India’s Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru mobilized nations to build a non-alignment movement, the Western leadership disapprovingly dubbed him a "neutralist". The Soviet Union finally collapsed in 1991, and a wave of enthusiasm engulfed the Western world. A unipolar world order based on Western liberal principles seemed inevitable and a fait accompli.

Fukuyama's 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man argued Western liberal democracies would become "the endpoint of mankind’s socio-cultural evolution, and the final form of human government". Samuel Huntington directly challenged Fukuyama with his provocative 1996 "Clash of Civilizations" thesis, stating that far from unipolarity, the ideological world had been divided on civilizational identities, the new source of conflict in the world, with "each learning to coexist with the others". Later years proved that the collapse of the Soviet Union had not moved the world from bipolarity to unipolarity, but to multipolarity. Several nation-states, with long cultural and civilizational histories, like China, Arab countries and India, have emerged as the new poles in the world. We also witnessed the rise of non-state poles - multinational corporations, social media giants, new age religious movements, non-governmental bodies like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Oxfam and CARE, and even terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda and ISIS. With influences beyond the national boundaries of the states, these created a heteropolar world.

The erosion of the liberal democratic world order is a Western failure
The hegemonic nature of the world order is eroding with the rise of the heteropolar world. Lofty ideals that it cherished - liberal democracy, open markets, human rights and multilateralism - have been facing severe scrutiny and challenge in the last two decades. Unfortunately, the institutions created for sustaining that world order have increasingly grown weak and ineffective. The world appears to be moving inexorably in the direction of anarchy. The Ukrainian-Russian war is the latest, not the first, in the sequence of events that have catalyzed the collapse of the old world order. The West wants the world to believe that Russia and Putin were the culprits for ushering in anarchy and attempting to destroy what they had built over the last seven decades. But the West cannot escape responsibility for the failure of its hegemony.