“Turkestan, Afghanistan, Transcapia, Persia – to many these words breathe only a sense of utter remoteness, or a memory of strange vicissitudes and of moribund romance. To me I confess they are pieces on a chessboard upon which is being played out a game for the domination of the world.”
-Lord Curzon, Viceroy of India, 1898
George W. Bush, former US President in a reversal of his earlier thinking, has declared he is in favor of a UN Security Council seat for India. At the recent Hindusthan Times 2009 summit in New Delhi, Bush stated, “India has arrived as a strong democratic country in the world. It is a tolerant, peaceful and multi-religious democracy.” The US needs India’s help to win the war on terror, but for decades the United States ignored a democratic India, preferring to support some of Asia’s worst dictators merely for their anti-Communist rhetoric. Will America heed Sir Olaf Caroe, political strategist of the British Raj and a key player in America’s early Middle East strategy, who after Indian independence had warned, “it is impossible to see the Gulf’s problems in correct perspective unless the view includes an India which, despite partition still stands at the centre of the ocean that bears its name.” Does India need the US as much as the US needs India today?
During the Cold War, the US armed and strengthened China to obstruct the Soviet Union. In turn China armed and strengthened Pakistan to pin India down in the subcontinent. “This second phase was never explicit US strategy, but the powerful interest that the US and China had developed in sub-continental affairs, reflected in their heavy investment in Pakistan,” observed Sunanda K. Datta Ray, in his book Waiting For America, (Harper Collins 2002): Nine years ago Ray, former editor of The Statesman was blunt when he wrote, “Bush will have to rethink his South Asian imperatives if he wants to engage a strong, secure, confident India that promises to develop the world’s biggest market and could provide Americans with both strategic and commercial support. He must end the farce of genuflecting at the altar of democracy while contriving to prop up a military dictatorship that opposes the world’s biggest democracy.” Pakistan’s dictators maybe out of the picture for now but the US still does not display a proper understanding of the balance of power in the subcontinent.
R. Jagannathan writing in DNA, notes, “We have never been in this situation before. Just a couple of years back, in the last years of the Bush regime, it seemed as if an Indo-US geopolitical alliance was all we needed to move up to the big league. But enter Obama and all bets are off. The US embrace is no longer as warm as we imagined it to be. Meanwhile, the India-China relationship is fraying at the edges; Pakistan is getting into a Talibanesque mess; Nepal is ambivalent, and the Maoists positively hostile to us; Sri Lanka is cocky after subduing its Tamil Tigers; and Bangladesh is unlikely to do anything to keep its people from spilling over into India or turn overtly jihadi. In short we have no real friends anywhere -- neither in the neighbourhood nor in the wider world of power blocs. How then are we going to protect our national interests?”
It was Rudyard Kipling who popularized the term ‘the Great Game,’ in his novel Kim, describing the 19th century contest for mastery in Asia. More recentlya book called The Future of the Great Game, by Peter John Brobst (Akron 2005) expands on Kipling’s concept. At this moment in history what are the main issues for India that significantly impact the country internally and externally? The blood and gore of politics in Pakistan and Afghanistan aside, the fact is India too is a battlefield, dormant for now perhaps, in a game where the machinations of the power hungry in the region employ strategic chessboard moves. Political paradigms are shifting as India calibrates the balance of power in the region, to gradually outmaneuver competing powers with its growing influence.
Externally, India is one of three possible flashpoints in the world – the other two being the Middle East, and North Korea. The greater danger could be on India’s turf because the common denominator for all is operating in our backyard. America the common foe in all three regions has roped in unwilling partners, India being one of them. In realpolitik the guiding principle of every country is Lord Palmerston’s famous dictum that every nation has “permanent interests, not permanent friends.” Strategy is the name of the Great Game, there are no friendly matches with any country – so is America playing with or against India? Ray points out that historically US State Department strategy has favored Pakistan because India was seen as having “negligible positive strategic importance,” while Pakistan was considered, “one of the most strategic areas in the world.” It could provide, “a staging area for forces engaged in the defence or recapture of Middle East oil areas.” That is obviously still an important consideration for the US, evident in its ongoing sizable investment in Pakistan.
How does all this affect us as concerned Indian citizens? Outside India is it something of mere academic interest unless one decides to relocate back home? Too many people adopt rabid “anti” positions without adequate information – anti-America, anti- Pakistan, anti-China etc. Ray categorically makes the point that, “India’s need for the US transcends oil, strategy and power politics. First, the great adventure of taking a billion people into the economic prosperity of the twenty-first century calls for American technology and investment and the US market. Second, America alone can help India defend itself. It is not only a question of sophisticated arms. No other power can pressure the forces of evil that are attacking India from without and within.”
The Diaspora offers some choices, life is relatively untouched by political or religious ideology unless one chooses to get involved or happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. But in India many ideologies operate and impact people’s lives without giving them a choice. Not everyone is comfortable in an environment where quite often ‘mobocracy’ better defines how India functions. If it’s the Maoists and Naxalites today, it will be someone else tomorrow. Internal dissent is not the focus of this column, but Arundhati Roy’s comment in Outlook is worth noting. In her article on, ‘Mr. Chidambaram’s War,’ she asks the Home Minister, “A math question: How many soldiers will it take to contain the mounting rage of hundreds of millions of people?”
Amartya Sen in his book Identity and Violence warns us that, “The neglect of the plurality of our affiliations and of the need for choice and reasoning obscures the world in which we live. It pushes us in the direction of the terrifying prospects portrayed by Mathew Arnold in ‘Dover Beach.’
And we are here as on a
darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms
of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash
by night.