Sino-US and Indo-US Relations: Contrasts and Commonalities 9789811372759, 9789811372766, 9811372756

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Sino-US and Indo-US Relations Contrasts and Commonalities Pinaki Bhattacharya

Sino-US and Indo-US Relations

Pinaki Bhattacharya

Sino-US and Indo-US Relations Contrasts and Commonalities

Pinaki Bhattacharya (Deceased) Independent Strategic Security Researcher and Analyst Kolkata, West Bengal, India

ISBN 978-981-13-7275-9 ISBN 978-981-13-7276-6  (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-7276-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover image: © Alex Linch/shutterstock.com Cover design by eStudio Calamar This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

Contents

1 Introduction 1 2

Progress Towards Common Ground 13

3

‘Vietnam Syndrome’: Looking for an Honourable Exit 53

4

China, US Elite Politics on Sino-US Rapprochement 65

5

Consolidation, the US and Beginning of Economic Transformation 85

6

India in Vanishing Bipolar World: Begins Negotiating Choppy Waters 107

7

Now, I Am Become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds 131

8

China, India Should March to Their Own Drummers 155

9

India’s Grand Strategy and Exceptionalism 177

10 Is ChiNdia Possible? 199 Index 219 v

About

the

Author

Pinaki Bhattacharya had been a journalist for about three decades, working with various publications and a news television channel. He covered various ministries, agencies and the armed forces related to the issue of Strategic Security. He was also East-West Centre fellow of the Asia Pacific Leadership Programme over 2007–2008, successfully completing a certificate level graduate programme from the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. He contributed to various specialised journals like Strategic Analysis and Aakrosh. He wrote for Observer Researcher Foundation (as an external consultant/analyst), besides Society for Policy Studies, and Vivekananda International Foundation (as Contributor). Mr. Bhattacharya passed away in March 2019.

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

A bright summer day in early July 1971. The skies were clear. Beijing’s morning haze was still a few decades away. Ye Jianying, a Marshal of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) of China, and his associate Huang Hua, a rising star of the Foreign Ministry, were waiting at the Beijing airport to receive a special guest. The guest’s country had requested complete secrecy to be maintained about the visitor. It suited the Chinese leadership of Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai. They were not greatest of friends of the media anyway. But at the beginning, the two had wanted wide publicity of the trip. They were told to save it for later—a bigger, grander guest. Soon, the Pakistan International Airlines plane landed on the tarmac. The welcoming party advanced to receive the newcomers. Henry Kissinger came down the stairs, along with a group of aides from the US National Security Council (NSC). Kissinger headed the NSC as President Richard Nixon’s National Security Adviser (NSA). The newly arrived were quickly bundled into cars and whisked through the streets of Beijing to their lodgings. Riding in one car of the cavalcade was John Holdridge, the China expert in the NSC with Huang Hua. Huang, who would later become China’s Foreign Minister, broached the topic first. Would Kissinger shake Zhou Enlai’s hands, he asked? The question encapsulated more than 20 years of Sino-US relationship, ever since the 1949 takeover of the country by the communists under Mao. China’s new leaders had to soon embroil themselves in a war on the Korean Peninsula, fighting the US and allied forces. The latter © The Author(s) 2019 P. Bhattacharya, Sino-US and Indo-US Relations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-7276-6_1

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2  P. BHATTACHARYA

had just returned victorious over the Fascists and Nazis in the Second World War. But soon the Cold War loomed. So in 1954, when the US’s top diplomat, then Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had confronted China’s legendary Zhou at the Geneva conference on IndoChina, he had refused to shake the hands of the Chinese premier. Huang was ensuring that history would not repeat itself. History of that period was marked with diplomatic strife and implacable hostilities. Even Kissinger called it the ‘regress(ive) Dulles era’.1 Dwight Eisenhower was the President of the US when Dulles was the Secretary of State. The administration had concluded that at the end of the Korean War and the French defeat in Dien Bien Phu, Asian communism was at a vigorous phase. And China was at the vanguard of that. They were afraid that if they adopted a softer line with China, the trend of communism in Asia would catch an irreversible momentum. A flexible China policy would lead to a loss of the US’s structural power.2 Plus, they were afraid that they would lose the support of the right wing of the US Congress. For the US to maintain hegemony, it was important letting the countries of Southeast Asia think that what was good for America was good for them. And, in that matrix a theoretical tenet of the realist school, propounding balance of power as a way for global order, fell by the wayside. To deter what was then the USSR; the US did not seek to join hands China, as the experts would have liked. Instead, Dulles allowed the negotiations in Geneva to languish on piffling issues. How soon China would release the Prisoner of Wars (POWs) of the Korean War became a sticking point that blocked all negotiations on lifting a US-led trade embargo on the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Or what would be the status of Formosa (Taiwan)—an island where Chiang Kai Shek and his men had fled after losing to Mao Zedong’s Red Army. The PRC claimed Taiwan as one of its provinces. While America fuelled the myth that Chiang’s Kuomintang (KMT) were the real Chinese government. They even backed the rump government to hold China’s permanent member seat at the United Nations Security Council. John Foster Dulles did not stop at just stonewalling Mao’s government from getting international recognition. He even propounded the theory that if PRC was pushed towards the USSR, the proximity would breed contempt. Richard H. Immerman, one of Dulles’s biographers’ details what he calls his subject’s ‘creative solution’.3 Dulles calculated that the Chinese government would turn to the Soviet Union for relief

1 INTRODUCTION 

3

and discover that Moscow was not up to the task. The resulting disillusionment, he believed, would eventually lead to the severing of SinoSoviet ties and to the collapse of Communism in China.4 Florid imagination apart, the main American strategy applied to China till the Nixon era was of ‘containment through isolation’.5 Even the short and truncated John F. Kennedy administration that failed to take any major initiative about China made it difficult for the latter to enter the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) as a member. They persuaded other members of the UNGA to elevate the China issue as an ‘important question’, requiring two-thirds of the members to vote to change the status quo.6 The slain John F. Kennedy was substituted by Lyndon B. Johnson as the President in Washington in 1963. His major problem in the initial years of his government was managing the growing perception in world capitals that China needed to be vigorously engaged. In 1964, the French recognised PRC. The same year China exploded its atomic bomb. It was on Johnson’s watch the Vietnam War was ‘Americanised’. That meant American armed forces were engaged in battles with North Vietnamese forces, resulting in Johnson administration looking at China through the Vietnam prism. North Vietnam shared a border with China. And it shared ideology, besides strategic depth with the country. The Soviet Union soon realised that America could be engaged in a proxy Cold War battle in this Southeast Asian battleground. They routed huge amounts of war materiel through China to Hanoi. This complicated China’s engagement with the US even more. On top of these, internally China was going through convulsions with Mao and the Communist Party seriously beginning nation-building and state-making. The ‘Great Leap Forward’, which was to transform the agrarian, peasant-based Chinese economy into an industrialised powerhouse, had ended after causing huge miseries to the common Chinese. And tensions were being felt within the Chinese leadership with Mao losing some of his grip on the top leadership. Liu Shiaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, two of the Communist Party of China (CPC) stalwarts seemed a threat to Mao’s dominance. Lin Biao, a Marshal of the People’s Liberation Army and someone who had kickedoff the Mao cult by tagging ‘Mao Thought’ with Marxism-Leninism, and Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, came up from the ‘left’ with a visceral antipathy towards the US.

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This is also the time when the Soviet Union and China got embroiled in an ideological battle for the leadership of world Communist movement. Stalin’s death and the rise of Nikita Khrushchev as the leader of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) gave China an opportunity to contest some of the formulations of the CPSU about ‘peaceful coexistence’ with the West; and collaboration of the Asian communist parties with the national bourgeoisie of their countries. There were more realpolitik reasons too for the rift. China was deeply unhappy about the way the Soviet leadership delayed and eventually stopped cooperation with the country on transfer of nuclear technology. Beijing was also worried that the Soviet Union under Khrushchev would trade on the China’s national interests, in its phase of intensive engagement with the US. The Cultural Revolution that Mao launched to gain control on an increasingly divided Polit Bureau unleashed forces of partisanship that virtually ripped apart the country. Not only did the rampaging Red Brigades—unrestrained youth committing violence—challenged and in many cases, overturned established State institutions, they drove out of office leaders like Deng or even then Foreign Minister and Vice Premier, Chen Yi. The same Chen Yi was called upon by Mao to undertake a very important task a few years later. But for Johnson administration, much of what was happening inside China was quite incomprehensible. On the one hand, they wanted to take policy initiatives that were designed to catch the attention of ‘second generation leaders’, on the other, they were apprehensive about the prospect that Vietnam War could escalate into a full-scale Sino-US war. So Johnson tried to calibrate the bombing runs of US air force in Vietnam, so that the bombs did not hit Chinese targets.7 While the Geneva talks between the US and China, begun by the Eisenhower administration had languished as Dulles allowed himself to be persuaded that it needed to be downgraded to below the ambassador level, a new approach was made with the Chinese in Warsaw. Johnson’s Secretary of State Dean Rusk took a decision in 1965 to communicate to the Chinese side that the US wanted ‘peaceful relations’ with the country. The message was communicated in Warsaw.8 Warsaw again became the stage for next climactic scene in Sino-US relation. That was when Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger sent a message to the Chinese they were eager to send a high-level emissary to

1 INTRODUCTION 

5

Beijing for wide-ranging talks. But that is getting ahead of the story; a narrative which unfolded sequentially till now. To Nixon’s eternal regret, his China initiative has not got recorded in history as his own individual initiative. For, in so much that has been written about it, writers have invariably hyphenated the historic embrace of the Chinese dragon by the US as a Nixon-Kissinger affair. This is truly galling considering that Nixon had tried so hard to not have to share the credit for what he considered ‘the greatest diplomatic watershed since World War II’. But much of that hyphenation is not quite accurate. It was Nixon, and not Kissinger, who had first thought up the China move. Politician Nixon upstaged the academic, Kissinger, when he wrote in the Foreign Affairs journal, September 1967, ‘Any American policy toward Asia must come urgently to grips with the reality of China….Taking the long view, we simply cannot afford to leave China forever outside the family of nations, there to nurture its fantasies, cherish its hates and threaten its neighbours. There is no place on this small planet for a billion of its potentially most able people to live in angry isolation…’.9 The highfaluting language hid shrewd political and strategic calculations. Kissinger wrote a few years later about the perceptions that underlay the decision to make overtures to China for establishing relations, including an alliance. He noted that for the US, opportunity was combined with necessity. The expansion of the Soviet military power and constant Soviet pressures on the international equilibrium had been a challenge for them. But only in the late 1960s that the US began to sense the limits of its power and to recognise the need for associations beyond our traditional allies. ‘The process was given an impetus by a sophisticated president to whom an unsentimental perception of power relationships was congenial rather than an anathema’. Hans Morganthau, one of the main US pundits of classical realist school of international relations believed that, ‘Alliance formations are defensive actions of weaker states to check the dominance of the greatest power’.10 The Soviet Union seemed unstoppable in the late 1960s. Western economies were in severe economic crisis. Long stretch of capitalist economic resurgence led by the post-war economic reconstruction was tapering off. The baby boom generation, in its youth then, was disillusioned by the naked pursuit for power of the political class in their countries. Vietnam War had focused the world’s attention on the

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phenomenon. And the Czech revolt in 1968 showed the ruthless side of the Soviet imperial power that reflected the inherent weakness of the capitalist world on the face of an onslaught. So Kissinger wrote, ‘There were powerful incentives for a rapprochement with China: to balance the Soviet Union, either to restrain it or to induce it to negotiate seriously; to isolate Hanoi to give it an incentive to end the Vietnam War; to maintain American self- assurance and our messy withdrawal from Indochina by demonstrating our continuing capacity for major positive initiatives’.11 On both empirical counts, Washington DC was on the defensive. Ever since Nixon attained office, his administration had been telling Anatoly Dobrynin, Moscow’s longtime envoy in the US, to ask his masters for scheduling a superpower summit. But the Soviet leaders remained evasive. In the late 1970, more than a year after Nixon had assumed presidency, Moscow continued to stonewall requests for a summit. Andrei Gromyko, the Soviet foreign minister, told Nixon on 22 October that Moscow was not ready to meet him. Kissinger too was rebuffed by Dobrynin when he told the American NSA that giving him a word on a proposed summit by 30 October was ‘premature’.12 Nixon was desperate to meet the Russians as he wanted to get a handle on the Vietnam War. Moscow was the primary support to the Hanoi government. And Nixon had been elected on the promise to the American people that he would end the war. A small window of opportunity for Nixon emerged in September 1969 when Ho Chi Minh died. A man who had once volunteered his services to the CIA during the Second World War, only to later pick up the cudgels against the colonial French and then the imperial US, breathed his last before seeing his homeland fully liberated and unified. Even his funeral was marked by high drama. From China, the premier Zhou Enlai was attending. These were dangerous times in the communist camp because China and the Soviet Union were involved in a shooting war on Ussuri River, in China’s northern borders. Alexei Kosygin wanted to talk to Zhou at the funeral. But the latter avoided running into him. Kosygin even waited for days to meet the Chinese leader. Finally, after he flew out of Hanoi, over the skies passed India and the Himalayas into Soviet Central Asian skies, he received a word that Zhou would meet him at the Beijing airport. The two met and Kosygin extracted an assurance out of Zhou that the two countries would get back to the negotiating table to stabilise the border.13

1 INTRODUCTION 

7

To much of Nixon’s relief, the two capitals did not stop making warlike statements about each other. Indeed, just before Ho’s funeral, the Soviets were sounding the Americans about what their reaction would be if they bombed nuclear sites in China at Lop Nor. The rift between the two great communist countries was now out in the open. Earlier, in 1966, the Tokyo embassy of the US sent an airgram to the State department in which an official wrote an estimate. It was a translation of a Japanese government study of the prevailing international situation. The American official paraphrasing the Japanese wrote, ‘…the Soviets are out to eliminate Chinese Communist influence in Asia and increase their own influence in the Afro-Asian world, and that the USSR is not likely to undertake any great risks in South Vietnam…’.14 The Japanese paper, titled, ‘Forecast of the International Situation in 1966’, had explicated, ‘The US-China confrontation in Asia, with Vietnam as the focal point, will probably grow more and more intense this year inasmuch as Communist China is believed to be unshakable in its basic attitude. Developments (in this US-China confrontation) will determine the over-all tone of the international situation in 1966. All the other developments in international affairs, it can be said, will be conditioned, to varying degrees by developments in the Vietnam situation, which is so directly linked with the US-China confrontation’.15 The Nixon initiative changed the course of history of the Asian continent and the planet. This book claims to provide a template for a strategic relationship between the US and India. The reason this introduction went into such detail to lay down the background of the Sino-US rapprochement, begun in 1971, was because this book would lay down the circumstances and the nature of the most important strategic relationship of the twentieth century. That much travelled path would hopefully throw up tenets for the Indian strategic experts and analysts that could guide their efforts at forging an equally historic relationship between two great peoples. As many may know, the Sino-US relationship had India in its peripheral vision. Now it is gaining centrality. Prof. Han Hua, a leading South Asia specialist of the Beijing University, told this writer in an informal talk in 2007, just after the conclusion of the 17th CPC Congress, that India now is a country of ‘secondary’ importance to China. The semantic play hides much as it says. Stephen P. Cohen, the celebrated South Asia specialist, writes, ‘In American calculations, India has

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assumed at best a secondary place, although it did seem very important during stretches of the Cold War such as the years before, during, and immediately after the 1962 India-China war. Some Americans saw this rivalry as one of the armatures around which the Cold War revolved and expected India to become a showcase of noncommunist development’.16 In the aftermath of July 2005, ‘Joint Statement’ issued in Washington DC by the US President George W. Bush and the Indian Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, a predominant section in India arose that extolled the virtues of a strategic relationship between the two countries. This elite, as all elites drive foreign policies of nations, explicitly failed to explain to the country what this ‘strategic relationship’ with the US would entail. Instead, what they posited were a loose value-laden analysis of India through the decades of the 1990s that witnessed Indian capitalism turning from the path of State capitalism, evidenced by giant public sectors to private investment driven development. That private investment included foreign direct investment also. For example, one of India’s leading strategic experts, C. Raja Mohan, writes, ‘Fundamental changes in foreign policy take place only when there is revolutionary change either at home or in the world. In 1991 India confronted just such situation. The old political and economic order at home had collapsed, and end of the Cold War removed all the old benchmarks that guided India’s foreign policy’. Can a change, facilitated by a transformed phase of economic development, be called a fundamental change? Can the disappearance of a polarity for languid foreign policy initiatives be called a seminal moment? And, can unarticulated desires of the elite frame a strategic initiative that could shape a nation’s world view for decades? A superpower’s desire to put pieces in place for the century ahead cannot be the simple driving force of an emerging power’s global policies. A strategic relationship of the kind of Sino-US relations needed to have an empirical basis that transcends historical quirks, which the demise of the Soviet Union can be called. For the dissolution of the Soviet Union did not signify the end of an ideology based upon empiricisms of history. It merely showed that history does not tolerate anachronisms. As recent history has shown, be it in Latin America, parts of Europe or even India, people have risen against exploitative relationships that failed to account for popular resurgence. Much in the same way, Mao had turned to Zhou and Deng Xiaoping and the relationship with the US as a manner of deliverance

1 INTRODUCTION 

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from the excesses of his Cultural Revolution. After the 2014 General Election in India, the people demand policies that account for them. Chapter 2 of the book details elements that influenced Sino-US relations before the opening up of the relationship. That would mean what kind of impact the issue of Taiwan had on the policies of both countries; the Korean War, the Cold War, Japan and the Sino-Soviet split. Chapter 3 is an examination of the circumstances of the Vietnam War and how it shaped the politics of the US, China and the world. The search for an honourable exit had been a campaign promise of the Richard Nixon campaign for the presidency. Henry Kissinger found the way; even though the final departure was not so honourable either especially for the optics during the first televised war of the world. In Chapter 4, the book explores the mores of Chinese leadership; the interplay of the pragmatists like Zhou and Deng on the one side, and Lin Biao and Jiang Qing on the other; and most importantly it would relate how Mao maintained his control over the flow of events. Chapter 5 documents the period of consolidation and growth of relationship punctuated by the turn of China to ‘market socialism’, led by Deng; the impact of the end of Cold War; and its influence. It describes how the Chinese have leveraged the relationship that grew during the long war to grow not just economically but politically. Next Chapter 6, is about what are the imperatives from which India is addressing the issue of a strategic relationship in the context of its past roles in world politics, while the chapter will also detail what the country means to both the US and China. How important is the ‘unipolarity’ of world politics in India’s and China’s world views. Chapter 7 will reflect on the interplay of politico-economic forces in India that led up to the conclusion of the Civil Nuclear Agreement with the US and the acceptance of India as a NWS. Chapter 8 will demand responses to India’s play as a hedge to Chinese growth, as originally crafted by the Bill Clinton-George W Bush-Barack Obama administrations. The roles Japan, Australia and ASEAN play in this matrix. Chapter 9 will map the reprising of non-alignment (Non-alignment 2.0) as a policy option; the rise of BRICS and contours of Sino-Indian relationship since 2010; the dynamic within the Congress party, the BJP and the official Left. The rising divisions among the elite. With the re-emergence and the personalised politics of Narendra Modi, how will Indian strategic vision shape up?

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Chapter 10 includes the lessons to be learnt from the Chinese experience with the US, the so-called Asian century and India’s more limited venture.

Methodology The research for this study is largely qualitative with literature survey being the dominant feature, especially for the chapters on Sino-US relations. While Sino-US is well documented in terms of historical narrative account; application of lenses for interpretation to specify its inherent nature of being a composition of hard-core realist positions of international relations theory. The presumption here is that the American attempt of wooing China is to establish a new form of balance of power out of the debris of post-World War II US policies when tested on the simmering cauldron of the Cold War. There was an even ambitious attempt by Kissinger/Nixon team to create a structural element out of the United Nations Security Council, where the proxy wars of the superpowers could be brought to global scrutiny, despite the absence of a decisive global consensus in favour of either camp. Because such was the polarising power superpower competition and thus the resultant failure of a global consensus, anarchy remains the ruling theme. In that scenario, promise of economic growth could be the only factor that stabilise Asia. Sino-US relations to that rationale also had a concomitant impact on rest of East and Southeast Asia. Coupled with cementing the break in the communist block, the net result of Dengist turn from the Cold War hedge to an economic aspirant in the capitalistic mode, had to be State-centred, to explain the world (dis)order. Chapters on Indo-US relations too are State-centred. The matrix of economics and trade driving the relationship towards the present positivity—that for decades had remained uneasy—was largely topdown. And at present, when the post-Cold War ‘world order’ unravels itself, the rise in India’s importance in world politics is not just fortuitous but is crafted through a process of careful calibrations. Research methodology in these chapters is different from the previous portions relating to Sino-US relation, in so much being a product of witnessing many of the seminal changes in policies, personnel and personalities. Besides, there have been many interviews with actual participants in the process of change. And there is literature survey, besides many actual documents that have been accessed from largely American dumps.

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But the main judgement is of the reader who is urged to take a deep dive.

Notes

1. Kissinger, Henry, “Mr Shultz Goes to China,” in Observations: Selected Speeches and Essays 1982–1984 (London: Michael Joseph and Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1985), p. 144. 2. Foot, Rosemary, “The Eisenhower Administration’s Fear of Empowering the Chinese,” Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 111, No. 3 (Autumn, 1996), p. 506. The Academy of Political Science, USA. 3. Immerman, Richard H., John Foster Dulles: Piety, Pragmatism, and Power in U.S. Foreign Policy (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1999), p. 119. 4. Yaqub,Salim, “Review,” China Quarterly. 5. See Foot, Op. cit., n. 2 and Michael Lumbers, “The Irony of Vietnam: The Johnson Administration’s Tentative Bridge Building to China, 1965–1966,” Journal of Cold War Studies, Vol. 6, No. 3 (Summer 2004), pp. 68–114. 6. Lumbers, Michael, “The Irony of Vietnam: The Johnson Administration’s Tentative Bridge Building to China, 1965–1966,” Journal of Cold War Studies, Vol. 6, No. 3 (Summer 2004), p. 70. 7. Ibid., p. 80. 8. Ibid., p. 94. 9.  Nixon, Richard M., “Asia After Vietnam,” Foreign Affairs (October 1967), pp. 121–123. 10. Morgenthau, Hans, Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1973), pp. 167–197. 11. Op. cit., n. 1, p. 142. 12. Tyler, Patrick, Six American Presidents and China: The Great Wall, An Investigative History (New York: Century Foundation, PublicAffairs™, 1999), p. 87. 13. Ibid., pp. 70–71. 14. Airgram, DOS, Amembassy (Tokyo), A1152, Japanese Foreign Office Forecast of Developments in 1966, April 1, 1966, Declassified 30/10/00, p. 2. 15. Ibid., Enclosure one, p. 2. 16. Cohen, Stephen, India: Emerging Power (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 1.

CHAPTER 2

Progress Towards Common Ground

Less than a fortnight after his first meeting with Zhou Enlai, Henry Kissinger appeared before the US media. The day was a Monday, 19 July 1971, in the evening. Meant to be a deep-background briefing that entailed simply ‘no attribution’—not to government sources; not official sources; not even phrases like ‘it has been learnt’ or ‘it has been revealed’. As Kissinger’s minders for the briefing told the assembled presspersons, this meant they were bound by rules of ‘compulsory plagiarism’. Kissinger urged the journalists to ‘[l]ook at History. There are two basic issues between us and them [China]. One is ideology and the other is Taiwan. But except for those, which are formidable, it is no accident that historically the United States and China have had friendly relations, because we have no [conflicts] – if you look at it simply from the point of view of national interest, of the country China vis-à-vis the country United States, their norms and principles are not in conflict with ours and never have been in history’.1 When Kissinger met Zhou Enlai for the first time on 9 July 1971, at a Chinese Government Guest House, the meeting went on from 4:35 in the evening till 11:20 at night. Kissinger masterfully wanted to get the issue of the ideological differences out of the way. He told Zhou that both sides should show prudence in leaving the judgement about the superiority of their rival ideas, in the hands of history, ‘[W]hile in the interval we cooperate on matters of mutual concern on a basis of mutual respect and equality and for the benefit of all mankind’.2 © The Author(s) 2019 P. Bhattacharya, Sino-US and Indo-US Relations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-7276-6_2

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He had then proceeded to lay down the substance of their meeting and that of Richard Nixon’s, which was to follow, ‘….Taiwan, which, from the exchange of notes between us, we know to be our principal concern in relations between us. Mr Premier, you have defined this as the withdrawal of US forces from Taiwan and the Taiwan Straits. I am prepared to hear your views and to discuss the matter practically’. Besides, he wanted to discuss the following major issues: a. Indochina, the major area of conflict and tension in Asia. b. Relations with major countries, for example the Soviet Union and Japan, which, of course, would affect the world. c.  The situation in the South Asian subcontinent, involving many outside countries. d. Issues of arms control, such as the recent proposal for a five power conference. e. Any other topic which the Chinese side would care to raise.3 Zhou Enlai listened with undivided attention: he had already conceded that according to Chinese custom, the guest should speak first. When his turn came, the Chinese leader did not blanch from talking about the past. Zhou recalled how during the Bandung Conference of 1955 he had favoured dialogue between the US and China. When the meetings followed, the two sides eventually met on 136 occasions over 16 years. Zhou attributed to a lack of ‘results’ in the meetings, ‘(N)ot solely because the negotiations were official [meaning, bureaucratic engagements], because these [meetings] today are official too; it is whether there is an intention to solve problems’.4 There were differences in what to negotiate. The US approach was to settle the smaller issues first through the negotiations, while the Chinese side wanted to deal with the fundamental problems right away. And in the Chinese perspective, fundamental issue for Sino-US relations was Taiwan: its status and attendant US troop presence in that territory. During the 18-month period when Nixon administration of the US and Mao’s China conducted their mating dance openly and covertly, the final terse message had come from Beijing. On 27 April evening, Pakistan’s ambassador to the US, Agha Hilaly had delivered a two-page handwritten note to Kissinger. It had read, ‘…[I]f the relations between

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China and the US were to be restored fundamentally, the US must withdraw all its armed forces from China’s Taiwan and Taiwan Straits area. A solution to this critical question can be found only through direct discussions between high-level responsible persons of the two countries. Therefore, the Chinese government reaffirms its willingness to receive publicly in Beijing a special envoy of the President of the United States (for instance, Mr Kissinger) or the US Secretary of State or even the President of the United States himself for a direct meeting and discussions’.5

Taiwan—‘Status Undetermined’ Though Taiwan has a long history in terms of imperial China, its recent history was dominated by the conflict between the Chinese Communists and the Guomindang (KMT), led by Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. During the Chinese Civil War, the US government gave the KMT massive amounts of funds and materiel, but no combat support. During the World War II, the US had initially sought to bring the two sides together and turn them towards the common enemy, the Japanese. But Chiang and his troops—the Nationalist Chinese—massacred the CPC Polit Bureau and much of the other leadership at Jiangxi in 1933. The remnants of the leadership, which left Mao at the helm, and the recently returned (from Paris) Zhou decided to embark on what is famously known as the ‘Long March’ between 1934 and 1935. On the way, they gathered a peasant army and continued to defeat the Guomindang forces. Washington tried to negotiate a truce between the two forces. It sent a mission to Beijing, led by General George C. Marshall in 1945. Having failed to reconcile the two sides, Marshall was withdrawn in 1947. The KMT forces retreated on the face of onslaught of the Chinese Communist Red Army, and in January 1949, Beijing fell to the latter. Between April and November that year, the rest of the country came under the control of the Chinese Communists. Gen Chiang and most of his armed forces along with two million refugees belonging to the government and business communities retreated to Taiwan, overwhelming the original Taiwanese. The martial law KMT

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government instituted in Taiwan continued for the next forty years. Taiwan also became a conduit for the successive US government to maintain a wedge against Chinese dominance and Asian communism. In 1951–1952, the World War II allied powers and Japan concluded what was called the San Francisco Peace Treaty. By that treaty, Japan relinquished its claim over Taiwan. And the treaty contended, ‘…the future status of Taiwan will be decided in accord with the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations’. This created a myth that the people of Taiwan could decide about their own sovereign status through ‘self-determination’6 and that some day Chiang Kai-shek and his men would gain control of mainland China, thus amalgamating the two territories. But that was not to be. On the other hand, the US President, Dwight Eisenhower’s Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles put immense pressure successfully on Gen Chiang to return to the mainland some of the islands closer to the mainland that were considered ‘stepping stones’ to his attack on mainland, as a sop to Mao. And Chiang’s unwilling acquiescence at the bidding of Dulles did not stop the Americans turning Taiwan into what an American journalist wrote to be, ‘an unsinkable aircraft carrier’. This institutionalised US interest in Taiwan as an anti-communist outpost. At one point in time, over a 1000 National Security Agency (NSA) personnel—the US’s technical intelligence gathering agency—were in Taiwan with a forest of antennas and trans-receivers, capturing all the electronic signals emanating from China. And the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was helping the Taiwanese launch operations inside mainland China, airdropping personnel at night.7 Earlier, both US President Harry Truman and his Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, had a tacit acceptance of Chinese sovereignty over Taiwan.8 They worked to actively attempt and not have a military and political conflict with People’s Republic of China (PRC) over the island. Even though the US had stayed its hand from according diplomatic recognition to PRC, the Truman administration had taken a ‘hands-off’ policy towards Taiwan. The CIA had predicted in October 1949 that without American help Taiwan would fall to the Chinese Communist regime by the end of 1950.9 On this passive Taiwan policy, the Truman administration was staving off pressure both from the armed forces’ leadership like the US Joint Chiefs of Staff and also key Senators, besides some of the individual generals like Gen Douglas MacArthur. The JCS had even argued that unless

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the US moved to secure Taiwan Straits and Taiwan proper, a threat prevailed on the country’s interests in Japan, the Ryukyus Islands, the Malay Peninsula and the Philippines.10 However, the Truman administration stuck to its decision. On 29 December 1949, the US State Department sent a confidential ‘information’ paper to its diplomatic missions abroad detailing the Taiwan ‘hands-off’ policy and that the fall of Taiwan to the communists was imminent. This paper talked of the island as ‘politically, geographically and strategically’ a part of PRC. It also advised the diplomats to downplay the importance of the event of Taiwan’s fall to the Chinese Communists and drive home the point that Taiwan’s loss, when it occurs, would not seriously affect American interests.11 An idea was mooted by a section of the American establishment that Taiwan was still a Japanese holdover, following its annexation by them after the first Sino-Japanese War in 1895. Thus, after the World War II, the US had the rights to exercise military control over the island as it was under the ‘occupying power’ of Japan. But Truman refused to countenance such a notion. On 5 January 1950, he told the press that, ‘The United States has no desire to obtain special rights or privileges or to establish military bases in Formosa at this time. Nor does it have any intention of utilising its armed forces to interfere in the present situation. The United States government will not pursue a course which will lead to involvement in the civil conflict in China. Similarly, the US government will not provide military aid or advice to Formosa’ (12). In terms of the legal status of Taiwan, Truman said that, ‘In keeping with (the Cairo and Potsdam) declarations Taiwan was surrendered to Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, and for the past four years, the United States and the other allied powers have accepted the exercise of Chinese authority over the island’.12 Secretary of State Acheson even declared on 12 January 1950 that Taiwan and Korea were outside of the US security umbrella in Southeast Asia. But these positions of Truman administration underwent a dramatic change after the outbreak of the Korean War. Soon after the US committed troops to the war on 30 June, Truman made a statement saying, ‘The determination of the future status of Formosa must wait the restoration of security in the Pacific, a peace settlement with Japan, or consideration by the United Nations’.13 The US Seventh Fleet was interposed between PRC and Taiwan on the Taiwan Straits.

18  P. BHATTACHARYA

Beijing reacted with sharp anger and outrage. Mao Zedong called it ‘an open exposure by the United States of its imperialist face, and US aggression in Asia will only arouse the extensive and resolute resistance of the people of Asia’ (15).14 Zhou Enlai declared that the ‘American actions constitute armed aggression against the territory of China and are a gross violation of the United Nations Charter and no matter what obstructive action US imperialists may take, the fact that Taiwan is part of China will remain unchanged forever. All the people of our country will certainly fight as one man to the end to liberate Taiwan from the grasp of the US aggressors’.15 The US set up armed forces liaison offices in Taiwan and began directly providing training and supplies to the Chiang forces in the country. But this action also threw up a legal dilemma. John Foster Dulles, then an adviser in the US State Department, commented that if the US considered Taiwan an integral part of PRC, then it could not send the Seventh Fleet to Taiwan Straits to defend it.16 So the US proposed to Japan that it concludes a separate agreement with Taiwan renouncing its claim over the island according to the provisions of the San Francisco Treaty.17 But this, in turn, put Chiang Kai-shek government into a quandary. If it concluded that treaty, then its rule of the island under the 1946 constitution became illegal, while rejecting US proposition would entail losing American military support. Ultimately, the Taiwanese government chose American security pledges over legality and concluded the agreement. It was signed in 1952. One of the provisions of the treaty explicitly stated that Japan gave up its rights and claims over Taiwan, without naming the ‘rightful’ claimant to the Japanese legacy. In the process, the US brought in the separation of the issue of ‘recognition’ and ‘legal status’ of Taiwan.18 However, sections of the US administration continued to propose belligerent action against the PRC. The recently declassified American government documents show a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) advocating limited operations against the PRC. The actions range from limited insertion of Chiang’s forces to causing depletion of military resources of the PLA in Korea. At the end of the Korean conflict, no rationale remained for the US to continue its militarily intervention in Taiwan. So, in 1953, Chiang suggested that the US signed a Mutual Defence Treaty—the like it had signed with all the countries of the region. In 1954, that treaty was

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concluded. Chiang Kai-shek and his men were very pleased with this US action that put them on par with sovereign nations of the region.19 Zhou denounced the treaty from Beijing. He said in a statement, ‘The US imperialists were trying, by means of this treaty, to legalise its armed seizure of the Chinese territory of Taiwan, and make Taiwan a base for further aggression against China and preparation for a new war’.20 But Dulles contradicted him. He talked about the island being without any sovereign authority after the Japanese renunciation of its rights, and KMT being only an occupying regime. By signing the Mutual Defence Treaty with the KMT regime, the US merely acknowledged its ‘right to self-defence’ mandated under the charter of the United Nations.21 Early in 1955, when the US-Taiwan Mutual Defence Treaty was waiting in the Congress for its ratification, PRC armed forces seized the island of Yijang—one of the ‘stepping stone’ islands. President Eisenhower, who succeeded Truman, felt that the action did not pose a strategic and a political challenge. So instead of retaliating, the US instead decided to assist the KMT in evacuation of the island. But Dulles pointed out to the US president that this could be considered a ‘retreat’ by the Chinese Communists—hence a signal needed to be sent that the US would not countenance an attack on the more significant islands like Quemoy and Matsu on the Taiwan Straits. Thus, the US president sought an explicit authorisation from the US Congress to use US armed forces for defending Taiwan and the related territories. This became known as the Formosa Resolution.22 Sino-US diplomatic engagement began in right earnest from the time of the Bandung Conference of 1955. The talks took place at the ambassadorial levels, first at Geneva and then at Warsaw. In the talks, the US proposed that both countries pledge not to use force over Taiwan and agree to resolve the issue by peaceful means. But China found that idea unacceptable since Beijing decided that the KMT would never negotiate in good faith as long as it was protected by the Mutual Defence Treaty. The upshot of all the distrust was US’ unbending stance on ‘use of force’ condition, resulting in the Eisenhower administration rebuffing all of Beijing’s initiatives to normalise relations. The US intransigence pushed Beijing closer to the Soviet Union till it realised that the latter was not willing to go out on a limb to help PRC on issues that were crucial to them. So China took a strategic decision to become ‘self-reliant’. In 1964, China exploded its own nuclear device.23

20  P. BHATTACHARYA

And, once the US-Vietnam War began, China took a hard-line position that before any accommodation could be made to the US, the Taiwan issue would need to be resolved first. Clearly, the stakes for China in Taiwan were fairly high and not just limited to territorialism. In an article published in Kuingtzo Dong-hsun (Work Correspondence), a secret journal for the PLA members above the regimental level, an author wrote that if ‘Communist China, newly emerging socialist country’, should yield to the US and allow imperialist forces to hold her territory, Taiwan, ‘her international prestige would drop ten thousand feet’.24 While refusing a compromise with the US and ‘by keeping the Sino-American relationship in a stalemate’, ‘we can keep the anti-imperialist banner, freely support the national liberation struggle in the colonial and semi-colonial countries, preserve our ability to attract political support, and stimulate our morale’.25 Richard Nixon was a vice president to Gen Eisenhower’s presidency. He was considered the Republican Party’s ‘hatchet man’ during the 1952 election campaign questioning the assumptions on China of the US President, Harry Truman, and his Secretary of State, Dean Acheson. He would argue that Truman and Acheson’s failure on China had caused the Korean War. In a radio and television address in 1953, for example, the US vice president stated, ‘As we look at China on the map, we can see that China is the basic cause of all our troubles in Asia. If China had not gone Communist, we would not have had a war in Korea. If China were not Communist, there would be no war in Indochina, no war in Malaya’.26 From the beginning, Nixon had consciously positioned himself as the champion of the Republican reactionary right. Addressing the US war veterans in 1955, Nixon upheld the US decision to not recognise Communist China or allow its entry to the UN. He quoted the UN Charter which stated that membership was open to all peace-loving states who accept the obligations imposed by the charter. Nixon blamed China for the death of American soldiers in Korea; the division of Korea, ‘insurrection, rebellion, and subversion in every free country of Asia’, and its refusal to renounce use of force against Taiwan.27 Quemoy and Matsu were two islands much in the news during the 1960 presidential race in the US. These were two of those ‘stepping stone’ islands in the control of Chiang Kai-shek’s forces that could be used during a possible KMT invasion on the mainland. The two islands were barely offshore from the Chinese coasts, and in 1960, the Chinese began shelling these outposts to have the KMT vacating them.

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The US had the Formosa Resolution of the Congress which entailed that if Taiwan was attacked, the US would retaliate. A debate broke out in the US government circles about what Washington should do. John F Kennedy, the Democratic Party candidate, was of the opinion that the islands were not essential for Taiwan’s defence, and they were ‘strategically indefensible’.28 Nixon, the Republican candidate in the poll retaliated sharply. He retorted, ‘the question is not these two little pieces of real estate—they are unimportant… . It’s the principle involved. These two islands are in the area of freedom’.29 Even though Nixon had fared poorly in the debate with Kennedy, his own private poll, after the debate, told him that his hard-line position had resonated with his own constituency. Between the 1960’s election campaign and Kennedy and Johnson administrations, China was engulfed by the Cultural Revolution. This began as Mao’s attempt at gaining control of the ‘errant’ sections of the party. Deeply divisive and factional, the Cultural Revolution destabilised the institutions of the country, including the PLA. At the apex of the movement were CPC stalwarts like Marshal Lin Biao and Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing. Even foreign policy circles were not spared by the feared Red Guard—a marauding band of radicalised youth—as party bureaucrats in the ministry were targetted, denounced and on occasions removed from their posts. But ever since China had the communist takeover, Mao had been at the helm of foreign policymaking. Even though premier, Zhou Enlai was the designated foreign minister. But he was entrusted as the manager of the daily chores of the ministry. The five-member CPC secretariat, which was later designated as the Standing Committee of the larger Political Bureau or Polit Bureau (PB, from now on), was to merely provide legitimacy to major policy decisions taken by Mao. For Mao, the full-scale PB meetings were a sounding board and a filtration exercise for major foreign policy initiatives.30 In case of Sino-US rapprochement, the basic structure of foreign policymaking did not deviate from this pattern. About a month before Henry Kissinger was to land in Beijing for his secret talks, in late May 1970 the CPC PB met. Appraising the US, Zhou at Mao’s bidding told the PB that American power has declined after the intervention in Vietnam. The American government has even lost the support of its own people. They were now having to decide whether to continue with their ‘going all-out’ strategy or reduce their international involvement.

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As a first step towards that, they were finding it necessary to establish contact with China. Zhou thus laid down the opportunities, which this new initiative has thrown up for China. He told the PB that a favourable Sino-American relation ‘will be beneficial for the struggle against imperialist expansion and hegemonism, beneficial to the maintenance of peace in Asia as well as in the world, and beneficial to our country’s security and to our efforts to unify the motherland in a peaceful way’.31 Taiwan was clearly at the top of the agenda. The PB members, the CPC officials who were at the pinnacle of power, pronounced in their turn the possible parameters of the country’s dialogue with the US. This was later distilled into a report by Zhou, entitled ‘Report on Sino-American Talks’. The first point in that report stated, ‘All American armed forces and special military facilities should be withdrawn from Taiwan and the Taiwan Straits region within a fixed time. This is the key question in the restoration of relations between China and the United States. If no agreement can be reached on this matter in advance, it is possible that Nixon’s visit will be deferred’.32 The next four points on that list were also on Taiwan. They were: 1.  Taiwan is China’s territory, and the liberation of Taiwan is China’s internal affair. No foreign intervention should be allowed. Vigilance towards the activities of Japanese militarism in Taiwan is essential. 2. We will try to liberate Taiwan through peaceful means, and efforts concerning Taiwan affairs should be carried out conscientiously. 3. Efforts to create ‘two Chinas’ or ‘one China and one Taiwan’ will be resolutely opposed. If the US wants to establish diplomatic relations with China, it must recognise the People’s Republic of China as the sole legitimate government representing China. 4. If the above-mentioned three terms [1, 2, and 3] are not fully realised, it will not be suitable for China and the US to establish diplomatic relations, but a liaison office can be established in each other’s capital. Though all this might seem very hard line, in reality, they were a climbdown by China from many of its traditional positions. While the Chinese demanded that US withdraw all its troops from China, the nation no longer insisted that the US severe its relations with the island. Second,

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though China would not give up its claim of ‘liberating’ Taiwan, it would do so with ‘peaceful means’. And third, the CPC PB prescribed that even if the US and China could not reach an agreement on these lines, diplomatic liaison offices could be established in respective capitals.33 While these constituted the framework within the dialogue between the US and China could be conducted, the latter part of the report was also important. The eighth point in that list was particularly revealing. For the first time, it dealt with the Vietnam War—the topmost item on the agenda of the US. In fact, it ascribed the whole region. The eighth point read: The Chinese government maintains that U.S. military forces should be withdrawn from the three countries of Indochina, from Korea, from Japan, and from Southeast Asia to ensure peace in the Far East.34

There is an interesting exchange between Kissinger and Zhou towards the end of their first conversation together. Kissinger had begun by saying, ‘On the narrow issue of US troops in Korea, a great deal depends on the general relationships in this area and on the wisdom with which both of us handle the transition from one phase of international relations to another phase of international relations. Sometimes even correct things must be done gradually’. He then goes on to add that by the end of Nixon’s second term, the US would withdraw most, if not all, troops from Korea. To that, Zhou responded, ‘I would like to make an observation on this matter. You have such heavy burdens and military expenditures, but what are the results?’35 The question remains hanging in the pall.

Korea—‘The Forgotten War’ It has been variously dubbed: The ‘internationalised civil war’. ‘First shooting war of the Cold War’. ‘Forgotten war’. Korean War began on 25 July 1950. And ever since experts, analysts, academics and diplomats alike have speculated about many key questions. Who began the war? Was it North Korea or South Korea? Why did Josef Stalin of then Soviet Union accede to the demand by Kim II

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Sung, the North Korean strongman, to try and unify Korea forcibly, risking a direct confrontation between the USSR and the US? And, why did China join the war? This is not the place to detail the history of the war. But it is important to understand the political dynamic that drove the nations to war, especially the US and China. It left its own imprint on the relations between the two countries. In 1949, the Russians vacated their World War II occupation of the northern part of 38th Parallel and soon after were followed by the American forces who vacated the southern part. Korea remained divided under the iron control of two strongmen—Kim in the North and Syngman Rhee in the South. Both harboured notions of reuniting the country. And both had patrons who were emerging as the two contending leaders of the world’s balance of power. Many scholars believe that the two Koreas were on the brink of a civil war in 1949 itself. When the US left Korea, Kim had urged Stalin to help the Korean People’s Army (KPA) of Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) to attack the Republic of Korea and unify the country. But Stalin stalled. He was not sure whether the KPA was strong enough to defeat the ROK Army. But that reticence changed next year. One of the key elements for this transformation was a speech by Dean Acheson, the US President Harry Truman’s Secretary of State, delivered on 12 January 1950. Acheson had, in that speech, drawn the American security perimeter in the AsiaPacific region tighter, excluding the two Koreas and Taiwan from the areas covered.36 Many scholars believe that this was America’s way of removing the reason for China to seek a closer relationship with the Soviet Union. On the other hand, some also believe that Stalin had his own way of d ­ riving a wedge between China and the US and their possible coalescence of interest. In a conversation with Andrei Gromyko on 17 November 1957, then a junior foreign minister of the Soviet Union, Mao Zedong, recalled one of his meetings with Stalin when the latter organised a ferocious attack on him by Mao’s critics. They had alleged, ‘In China communism was nationalistic’, that ‘In China there emerged its own Tito’, and that ‘Chinese communists were Titoists and pro-American’.37 Stalin had not forgotten how the Chinese Communists had refused to accept his proposition that they make peace with Chiang Kai-shek and

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rule in conjunction with the KMT. He had even implored with them that they do not cross the Yangtze from the south to the north. In crucial Manchuria, the Russians had even allowed the KMT forces to occupy positions before they vacated at the end of the World War II.38 But despite the distrust between the Russian and the Chinese Communists, Mao strove for a strategic relationship with Stalin’s USSR. Even at the end of 1947, still two years away from China’s liberation, Mao considered ‘the role that the USSR might play in defending and building China’. Mao was worried that the US might join the Chinese Civil War in favour of the KMT during the penultimate period. Between 1947 and 1949, Mao made repeated attempts to meet Stalin. The latter finally decided to dispatch a Soviet Polit Bureau member, Anastas Mikoyan, to China for talks with the Chinese leadership. Between 31 January and 8 February 1949, Mikoyan boiled down the areas of cooperation and disagreements between the Chinese and the Russians with Mao.39 After Mikoyan returned to Moscow to report to Stalin, Mao moved to get CPC sanction for his move. So at the second plenary session of the seventh CPC Congress, Mao laid down that without the USSR and the other socialist forces engaging Washington’s attention, it would be impossible for the CPC to win the civil war against the KMT.40 Mao ‘leaned to one side’. This was his formulation written on 30 June 1949 in an article entitled ‘On the People’s Democratic Dictatorship’. Written in response to a proposal by a senior negotiator of the KMT that called for the party to take a neutral position between the US and the USSR, Mao was of the opinion that none can take the middle road in a polarised world.41 Soon, Mao sent a senior leader of the CPC, Liu Shaoqi, to Moscow with a delegation. They met Stalin a number of times. Stalin tried to remove some of the misgivings of the Chinese about his policies. He also agreed that the USSR would recognise PRC as soon as it is constituted. Liu also got a promise from Stalin that the USSR would support the PRC with material, financial and personnel aid. Finally, Stalin showed keenness to meet Mao as soon as the CPC gained control of China.42 Mao visited Moscow from December 1949 to February 1950. The high point of the visit was signing of the Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Alliance and Mutual Assistance. Besides the provisions of the treaty, the treaty itself was a major breakthrough of sorts because it replaced the 1945 treaty between Stalin’s Russia and KMT China, led

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by Chiang. The new treaty signalled the fact that Communist China is not bound by the treaty obligations of those signed by Chiang Kai-shek’s government with other countries like the US.43 Abrogation of the KMT agreement by the Soviet leadership was a problem in terms of the ‘spheres of influence’ arrangement arrived at earlier by the victorious powers of World War II at Yalta and Potsdam. Stalin took the final plunge into developing a strategic alliance with Communist China on the basis of his new hard-line turn against Europe and the US after the Cold War firmly set in and the Soviet Union exploded its atomic weapon in 1949. Stalin wanted Mao to bear the burden of communist revolutions in the East. He urged Mao to provide more active military support to the peoples of Korea, Burma, Indonesia and Indochina. In turn, the Soviet Union was ready to help with military, economic and technical support (48). He was clearly challenging the established balance of power in the region, in favour of a new arrangement of bilateral relationship with China. This also laid the foundation of China’s involvement in the Korean War. But Stalin was not about to relinquish control over North Korea on the most crucial decision, Kim II Sung was about to take. Kim went to Moscow in mid-April 1950. And he met Stalin on 15 April. Stalin wanted to be convinced whether KPA can accomplish ‘liberation’ of the South in one swift manoeuvre like a German blitzkrieg. Kim told him that was possible. But he still did not get Stalin’s unqualified assent. The latter told him that he needed to visit Beijing and convince Mao about his decision and his abilities. Only after Mao signs on to the plan would Stalin give his final nod. That would come with Soviet ‘help’ of its generals who would work with the North Korean military officers to develop an operational plan. So Kim returned to Pyongyang and promptly left for meeting Mao in May. When he told Mao, he replied that the Chinese leadership needed to confirm what Kim told him from Stalin. The same night Zhou Enlai met the Soviet ambassador and sought the approval of Stalin. Moscow messaged back the next day saying, ‘In their conversation with Korean comrades, Filippov (one of the aliases Stalin used in his communications with Mao and Kim) and his friends (fellow members of the Soviet Polit Bureau) expressed an opinion that because of a changed international situation they agreed with a proposal of the Koreans to begin unification. At the same time, they made it clear that this question must be finally

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decided by the Chinese and the Korean comrades jointly. In the event that the Chinese comrades disagree, the resolution of the question must be postponed until new consideration’.44 This passed the ball to Mao’s court. Mao now became responsible for approving a plan for expansion of communism in the Asian continent. A refusal to grant Kim’s wish now would have meant that Mao would have become in the eyes of history responsible for stonewalling progress of communism. Stalin’s reference to the ‘changed international circumstances’ referred to an opportune moment, which Mao would have been hard-pressed not to have grasped. Mao told Kim that the KPA strategy should be based on speed and mobile warfare. Mao was apprehensive about the prospect of US intervention. He was initially of the view that Washington would not exert itself to save a tiny Korea and risk global conflict. Now when the conflict appeared to mature in short order, Mao seemed worried about the US. So he told Kim, ‘If Americans were to take part in the hostilities, the PRC would assist North Korea with its own troops’. Mao knew, ‘Since the Soviet Union was bound by a demarcation agreement on the 38th Parallel with the US, it would find itself in an uncomfortable position. For its part, China was not bound by any such obligations, and could therefore rather easily render military assistance to North Koreans’.45 Mao, therefore, acquiesced with Kim’s plan. But still it would take six months for Mao to join the Korean War. This was despite the fact, as soon as the hostilities ensued between the North and the South Koreans, the US Navy blockaded the Taiwan Straits—a provocation by any standards for the Chinese. Mao still waited for the American forces under Gen Douglas Macarthur to push through across the 38th Parallel and the Yalu River in October 1950, before joining the war. By then, Kim’s blitzkrieg strategy had failed and six months had elapsed of the Korean War. But in the initial days of preparation for the war, Mao had repatriated 30,000 Korean troops in the PLA to North Korea between end of 1949 and early 1950. However, he was kept in the dark about the operational plan of the war, because the North Koreans distrusted the loyalties of Korean officers who had been transferred from the Chinese PLA. Kim had earlier also refused material help from the Chinese, because he felt that his Soviet masters would not take that with great amount of sympathy.

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The Korean War was fought to stalemate. Though by December 1950, the Chinese forces had brought to a standstill the advance of the US and allied forces near the 38th Parallel. The next year the communist forces in turn were thwarted and turned back by the US and allied forces, from across south of the Yalu River. By early 1953—almost three years since the initiation of hostilities— the communist position in Korea remained in the same state of defensive offense, with which China had joined the campaign. A CIA National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), published on 3 April 1953, estimated that the Soviet global interests, which could be generalised as the global interests of the whole communist block, indicate that it gains by the dissensions between the US and its allies. Tying down US and allies’ considerable resources was also marked as a gain. But it espoused the view that the USSR was not ready to extend its global interests by escalating the Korean War to global general war.46 On the Chinese side, the NIE believed that some internal pressure existed on the CPC regime in 1950–1951. But, for the past year or more, the situation has stabilised and the economic and political grasp of the CPC increased. In the current situation (current to the period of the NIE), the Chinese were quite capable to continue with the present war effort or a mild expansion, since the Soviets continue to supply all it needed in terms of military and civilian necessities.47 The Korean armistice issue was stuck on the prisoners’ war issue as the communist insisted on complete repatriation of the POWs, while the US, South Korea and their allies had an irredentist position on the subject. The NIE thus analyses that the communists were quite happy to continue with the stalemate in the Korean War and were unlikely to make any concessions for an armistice on the POW issue.48 Three months after the NIE was published, an armistice was concluded on 27 July 1953, allowing the US President, Dwight Eisenhower, to fulfil a campaign promise. But the Cold War had firmly set in Asia.

Cold War Chill Barely three years after then British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, had spoken about the ‘iron curtain’ being wrung down on Europe—in a speech delivered at the Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri—China’s communists evicted the West-Backed KMT forces under Chiang Kaishek in 1949.

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This had a profound impact on the minds of the Americans. Considering that China had been home to a large population of American missionaries, the surge of the ‘godless’ communists in the country had left them dumbfounded. To American legislators and other power elite alike, this seemed a failure of the policies of the Truman administration. The situation was particularly grim in America domestically. The country was rent with cries of ‘anti-communism’ launched by Senator Joseph McCarthy from Wisconsin. He had launched a searing attack on the American government, believing and propagating that it was infested by communist agents. Truman’s Democratic Party underwent a devastating defeat in the hands of the Republicans in the elections of November 1950. A young political science researcher, Robert Mann, wrote in 2001, ‘The carnage of November 1950 was, in large measure, the first electoral reaction to a series of unfortunate political and foreign policy developments that began in the late summer of 1949. In September (that year), Truman had stunned the American public when he announced that the Soviet Union had recently detonated an atomic bomb. Since the end of World War II, America’s sole possession of the bomb had been regarded as the most effective deterrent to another world war and had firmly secured the nation’s status as the world’s most powerful military force. It was a distinction that comforted an American public still weary from the turmoil and sacrifice of nearly four years of world war’. The paranoia of the Soviet’s new ownership of the weapon of mass destruction (WMD) was compounded by the fall of China in the hands of the communists. American public opinion blamed Truman and his Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, for it. Henry Luce, the publisher of the influential publication Time, was born to evangelist parents in China. His magazine wrote in August 1949, ‘At no time in the long chronicle of its failure (in China) had (Truman’s administration) displayed a modest fraction of the stamina and decisiveness which had checked communism in Europe’.49 China, in turn, had to willy-nilly join the Cold War on the side of the Russians and their allies. A quantitative analysis of the three dyadic relationships—US-Soviet, US-China, Sino-Soviet—shows that ‘…US-Chinese relations, the data show persistent hostility with intermittent crises from 1949 through the 1960s, with particularly hostile periods around the Korean and Vietnam Wars. In the 1970s these relations became more cooperative. Meanwhile, Sino-Soviet relations appear consistently

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cooperative in the 1950s (Sino-Soviet alliance), then turn hostile in the 1960s (culminating in the border fighting of 1969), and gradually stabilize at a modest level of hostility in the 1970s and early 1980s’.50 But this reality could have been different. Many analysts believe that the US and China did not have any conflict of strategic interests, at least in the 1950s and 1960s, while both had reasons for worry from the Soviet Union. Thus, many realists of the international relations school failed to understand why the Sino-US relation was so fraught with tension. One explanation is this: ‘During the Chinese Civil War from 19451949, the CPC (Chinese Communist Party) believed that the US had supported the KMT against them, convincing the CPC that America was the enemy. The subsequent Korean War turned East Asia into a fiercely contested front of the Cold War. China’s decision to enter the Korean War, despite a strong opposition within the decision-making Beijing Polit Bureau, was based mainly upon national security and the negative perception of America that the CPC had acquired during the Civil War. It was meant to guard against a perceived American military advance through Korea as Japan had done 56 years ago’.51 On the American side, there was almost a desperate necessity to see the triumph of the CPC in China as manifestation of the ‘monolithic’ communist expansionism around the world. No US policy could build in the Chinese Communists’ nationalist sentiments as an overwhelming response on the face of the USSR factor. Indeed, some researchers have recognised the policy confusion and commented, ‘The CPC would accept anyone, including the US in some capacity, so long as it renounced the (sic!) Chiang’s regime. As flexible and pragmatic as the CPC was, the US could have, between the end of 1946 and August, 1949, established a working channel with the PRC, as it did in Paris in 1955, only two years after the two countries engaged in one of the bloodiest military confrontations in Korea’.52 In January 1954, John Foster Dulles, President Eisenhower’s Secretary of State, met Vyacheslav Molotov, Stalin’s foreign minister at Berlin. Dulles telegrammed to the president after the meeting, in which he said that during the after-dinner tete-a-tete, Molotov had pressed him for recognising China. Dulles notes that the hour-long conversation was ‘intensively’ on China. He wrote, ‘(Molotov) said our policy (on China) was bankrupt, would never succeed in overthrowing Chinese

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Communists. They were proud people who demand a rightful place. (The) US policy merely forced China closer to Soviet Union, which was not to US advantage… …I said US was unwilling to enhance moral and political stature of hostile regime… …I said we were negotiating in fact with it Panmunjom. Molotov said this only “low level”’.53 This ‘eyes only’ communication between Dulles and Eisenhower is particularly revealing of the politics of the time. Here was the veteran foreign minister of the USSR candidly telling his superpower competitor that their policies were driving a major country towards more rivalry! But Molotov’s ardent urging for a superpower accommodation was thwarted by an implacable Dulles weighed down by history and arrogance. He did not want to enhance the ‘moral and political stature’ of China—a country of then 600 million people. End of the first hot war of the Cold War in Korea did not change the perspective of the US about China. A recommendation to the US National Security Council (NSC) made by the NSC Planning Board listed as a proposed ‘statement of policy’: 1. An armistice in Korea would not indicate that Communist China had abandoned its basic objectives or its willingness to seek these objectives by armed forces. The danger of aggression would continue, particularly in Southeast Asia, while the communists would attempt to exploit the armistice as a tactical device to weaken and divide the free world. 2. After an armistice, the major allies of the US would be increasingly unwilling to support the US in maintaining political and economic pressures against Communist China. As a result, existing differences between the US and its major allies over policy towards China would be intensified, and this might lead to a serious breach between the US and its major allies over the Far East. 3. It is important for our national security, as well as to the objective of obtaining an acceptable settlement in Korea, that political and economic pressures against China be developed and maintained during the immediate post-armistice period, and that the expected opposition of our major allies to such pressures be overcome. This philosophical framework led the US into Vietnam War. There was a sense of inexorability built into America’s passage into the war from being earnest ally of the French colonialists seeking to re-establish its rule

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in Vietnam, to one who was a direct participant in the war. Researchers have noted that by 1950, with China in communist bag, the debate in the policy circles of Washington—that meant the executive and the legislature—was at best ‘perfunctory’. Mao’s China border now stretched to the boundaries of Indochina. On top of that, the USSR and China formally recognised the Ho Chi Minh government in the north. To Dean Acheson, then US Secretary of State, and under attack from the fire-breathing anti-communists like Joseph McCarthy and Richard Nixon for ‘losing’ China, ‘Kremlin’s action proved that Ho was more communist than nationalist’. He thus declared, ‘(the Soviet and Chinese action) reveals Ho in his true colours as the mortal enemy of native independence in Indochina’. Adding to this paranoid assertion was the assessment of the US Consul in Saigon, George Abbott, that Vietnam was the ‘advance bastion against (the) Bolshevist tide in Southeast Asia’.54 Another frontier of the Cold War was thus opened in an area, much of which was alien to the American policymakers. Here in Asia they had to contend with China, a country that had historically considered itself to be the ‘centre of the globe’. The Mandarin language name of China in Pinyin is Zhong Guo or ‘Middle Kingdom’ and that meant all the other states were at its periphery. Though China had been colonised by the British in the nineteenth century, and later again by the Japanese, the ‘Middle Kingdom’ dreams of the Chinese elite had not disappeared. After the communist takeover of the country in 1949, this part of history was not obliterated, but on the other hand, nurtured. With Vietnam, which had a tributary relationship with Beijing for much of its history, China developed a close bondage. This was only strengthened when the independence struggle of the country was led by a communist party in Vietnam, which sought close ‘fraternal’ relations with PRC. As has been seen above, China was one of the first countries to diplomatically recognise the Ho Chi Minh regime. Huge flows of commodities began from China to North Vietnam by 1953; Vietnamese engineers, technicians, and students made a beeline for China; the nation even established a postal union with North Vietnam, opening a window for it to the rest of the world. But the crucial element in all this was the military cooperation between the two countries. Two major military training camps were established in PRC—in Yunnan and Guangxi—for training and indoctrinating North Vietnamese soldiers. China also provided arms and

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ammunition for equipping the North Vietnamese armed forces.55 China truly became the vanguard communist country leading revolutions in the ‘orient’, as Stalin had told Mao in 1950. The French part of the Vietnam War wound down after defeat of the colonial forces in Dien Bien Phu in 1954. At the Geneva conference that year, accords were signed granting Vietnam independence. However, the country was divided between the north and the south, and promises were made about foreign involvement in the internal matters of Indochina. Another promise was made about the eventual unification of the country through an election to be held in July 1956. Significantly, the US refused to participate in the conference and recognise the accords. Instead, America began to get sucked into the war it did not begin. The second part of the war in Indochina (because it no longer remained restricted to Vietnam but spread to Laos and Cambodia—the latter two were initially a battleground of the US special forces) began in right earnest when Lyndon Johnson assumed office after the assassination of the US President, John F. Kennedy. Kennedy was a part of that section of the Democratic Party, which had made anti-communism their badge of honour. He never condemned even the worst excesses of ‘reds under the beds’ Joseph McCarthy and was absent when the US Senate eventually censured the Senator from Wisconsin (63). Many of his associates believed that he thought that the rising tide of monolithic communism needed to be stopped anywhere in the world, be it in Latin America, Southeast Asia or Europe.56 Kennedy janissaries were management and law school recruits from universities like Harvard and Yale. They believed the world was their oyster, and all it needed was tending with higher allocation of funds and personnel, and smart management. They were also ardent Cold Warriors who liked to move men and material to their designated hot spots around the world where communism was rearing its head. It almost was like a chess game to them, with the added advantage of enormous US power under their command. The next chapter would deal more comprehensively with America’s Vietnam War and its influence on the US policymakers’ minds. It would take a measure of the impact that led the latter to seek a normal relationship with China. This space would deal with just the basic ingredients of the war that contributed to the larger Cold War. Kennedy’s defence secretary, Robert McNamara, was one such Ivy League Cold Warrior. He instituted a task force in his department to

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take stock of the Vietnam situation. He tasked them to develop a ‘program of action to prevent Communist domination of South Vietnam’. They returned in a fortnight with a report that reinforced all the worst US nightmares about the communist forces, the South Vietnamese insurgent group, dubbed Viet Cong by the Americans. They recommended a widespread escalation of the US war effort. And the task force proposed that the Kennedy administration begin ‘a series of mutually supporting actions of a military, political, economic, psychological and covert character designed to achieve this objective’. They sought an immediate increase in US funding for an expanded South Vietnamese military of 200,000 men; induction of 3200 US military ‘instructors’; and a new team of 400 specially trained US Marine ‘Green Berets’ to train the South Vietnamese special forces. Kennedy accepted most of the task force’s suggestion. And as if in an indication what he was thinking the US’ eventual policy direction would be, he asked his advisers to estimate the size of an US force commitment in Vietnam.57 After his assassination in 1963, Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson did not just inherit the presidency of the US but Kennedy’s kitchen cabinet also. Johnson had to win his spurs—following the legacy of his intensely charismatic predecessor—in fighting the Cold War. Kennedy’s advisors like McNamara and Dean Rusk, the Secretary of State, now decided to guide Johnson. They convinced him the place he could make his cut is in Indochina. On 2 August 1964, a few torpedo boats of North Vietnam attacked a US warship in the Gulf of Tonkin, which was Vietnamese territorial waters. Two days later, the Americans claimed that a few more North Vietnamese torpedo boats attacked two of their destroyers. On 5 August, American Navy and Air Force planes began an air attack on the North Vietnamese coastal cities. But this military action was nothing compared to the tectonic shift that took place in US legislative history on 7 August. On that day, the US Congress in its joint session adopted a resolution which allowed the US administration ‘to take all necessary steps, including the use of armed force, to assist any member or protocol state of the Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty requesting assistance in defense of its freedom’. This was the widest possible war-making power the US Congress ever granted to any president of the US. It took the Congress less than nine hours of deliberations to allow the US administration wreak untold death and destruction, thousands of miles away from Washington, in Indochina.

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But in the process, the US Congress also allowed the Johnson administration to indulge in a creeping escalation of the American involvement in the Vietnam War. The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution came back to bite the Congress’ hand, in the longer run. By the end of the administration’s term, almost half a million American troops were deployed in Indochina, and the body bags on their way back to the US had begun piling up. The PRC had reacted sharply after the US bombing of North Vietnamese cities. It said, ‘[a]ggression by the United States against the Democratic Republic of Vietnam means aggression against China. The Chinese people will absolutely not sit idly by without lending a helping hand’. Soon after that, Chen Yi, then China’s Foreign Minister, gave an interview in which he said that if the US invaded North Vietnam or northern Laos, China would militarily intervene. The country also launched a full-scale Vietnam War public campaign based on the ‘heroic struggle of the Vietnamese people against the US aggressors’.58 China was North Vietnam’s main source for logistical, maintenance and technical support. It even kept a squadron of 25 MiG-21s on rotating duty in North Vietnam.59 Chinese technicians helped to sort out ammunition shortages caused by transportation problems; they kept the weapons, ammunition, grenades, mines and bombs in working order. In 1966, 40,000 Chinese railway engineering troops were in North Vietnam to maintain and repair railways—the lifeline of war.60 They also helped to lay temporary airstrips and took control of the anti-aircraft batteries alongside the rail routes.61 China waged an ideological struggle with Soviet Union on North Vietnam’s war with the US. Post-Stalinist Soviet Union under Nikita Khrushchev espoused the line of ‘peaceful coexistence’ with the capitalist world. This precluded the predominant communist power from actively supporting and abetting ‘wars of national liberation’ around the world, especially in Asia. China, on the other hand, was of the opinion that these wars needed to be fought and they need to be provided sustenance. The PRC even disapproved when the North Vietnamese went to the negotiating table in Paris, because it was of the opinion that the issue needed to be resolved on the ground. When the Johnson administration ‘recognised the need to draw the line against Communist aggression, so as to permit the countries of East Asia to build foundations for stability, democracy and economic

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growth’, the US government was acutely conscious of China. It noted, ‘Communist China loomed in the background, a country of incalculable influence on the fate of the weaker nations surrounding it’.62 Finally, it regretted that, ‘Japan was a potential tower of strength for the Free World, but was not yet playing its full constructive role in Asia or beyond’.63

Japanese Renewal In 1964, the French organised a trade fair in China. A word was sent that Mao was ready to receive a small French delegation. So a team of six people including the French ambassador to China Lucien Paye and an American reporter went to meet the Chinese leader in Hangchow on 11 September. The US State Department got hold of a copy of the conversation they had with Mao.64 During the meet, Mao had recounted a story: Recently, a Japanese merchant came to see me, and he said, “I very much regret that Japan invaded China.” And I said to him, “You haven’t used the right word. To be sure, the aggression was not right, either. But there is no need for excuses.” I said to him, “If the Japanese had not occupied half of China, it would have been impossible for all the Chinese to rise up and fight the Japanese invader. And as a result of that, our army became a million strong, and in the liberated areas the population amounted to 100 million. That is why I said to him: “Should I thank you?”65 This parable caught the quintessence of the way Communist China looked at post-World War II Japan. The Chinese expected the US to rearm Japan and leave it strong when it left Asia. The country was in a mood to brace itself for the occasion. Japan, however, took a highly calibrated approach towards mainland China. On the one hand, it followed a China policy in close conjunction with the US, and it had diplomatic relations with Taiwan, besides a peace and cooperation treaty with the territory. On the other hand, it had a growing trade relation with mainland China based on private conduits, besides close links between its intellectuals and journalists with their Chinese counterparts and such like. A 1964 CIA study stated, ‘The ties that link Japan to China are so deeply rooted in history that the great majority of Japanese are inclined to view communist control of the mainland as merely a temporary phase

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of Chinese political development, not a matter of fundamental importance to Japan’s relationship with China’.66 The paper had noted that the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) in Japan was divided on the issue of close relations and eventual recognition to China. It said that two wings of the LDP, politicians who were aligned in the left of the political spectrum and the ‘bureaucrat’ members of the LDP, who were rightwing products of the US occupation of Japan, straddled the two sides of the China issue. The former wanted increasingly closer relations with PRC, a popular opinion, while the latter wanted a hard-line approach towards China. But neither could ignore the economic basis of better relations with China.67 The PRC was leery about Japan’s security treaty with the US. It did not consider the treaty a bilateral issue between the two countries. Nor did it consider its own denunciation of the treaty as interference in Japan’s own affairs. Because the Chinese believed that it was the target of the US military bases in Japan and Okinawa. Contrarily, the Japanese were convinced that its close relations with the US was the ‘foundation’ of its own foreign policy and thus, unalterable.68 Yet, China valued its trade relationship with Japan. It is evident in one statement of Mao on 5 January 1963 in a meeting with a Japanese Communist Party leader. This was also the time when Sino-Soviet relations had touched a new nadir. Mao had said ruefully, ‘We have ­ diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, and we are two countries in the socialist camp. But Sino-Soviet relations are not even as good as the relations between China and the Japanese Liberal Democratic Party’.69

Sino-Soviet Splitsville The Ussuri River clashes between China and the Soviet Union in 1969 dramatically marked the severe decline in the relations between the two communist giants. The differences had festered through the previous decade. The downward spiral had begun almost around the time the CPC gained control of China. Stalin had serious reservations about the communist defeat of the KMT. He had even asked Mao not to cross the Yangtze River and chase the Chiang Kai-shek’s men. Stalin even refused to meet Mao the first few times the latter sought an appointment. Mao harboured all those resentments.

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When Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in 1956, Mao found an opening to vent his spleen. On 24 March, Mao made a concerted attack on Stalin after much deliberation within the party. He mentioned four notable occasions when Stalin had politically created problems for him. One, Stalin supported Wang Ming, Mao’s major rival in the 1930s, and supported his ‘leftist opportunism’. Those were the days when Wang worked and lived in Moscow as Director of the CPC’s delegation to the Comintern. He also considered himself an orthodox communist as opposed to Mao’s pronounced nationalistic streak. The second moment came when Mao recalled Stalin wanted him to indulge in ‘rightist opportunism’ during the anti-Japanese War during the World War II. That was when the CPC forces collaborated with the KMT to oust the Japanese from China. Third was when Stalin asked Mao not escalate the civil war against the KMT forces of Chiang Kaishek in the late 1940s. And the last example was when Stalin ‘mistreated’ Mao when the latter visited Moscow soon after the CPC gained control of China.70 Finally, Mao commented on Khrushchev’s ‘secret speech’ at the 20th Congress, ‘It destroyed superstition, and helped us think. Socialist construction does not have to completely follow the Soviet formula. (We) can propose lines and policies in accordance with our own national conditions’.71 This statement was a key because it was a precursor to the main reasons for which the CPSU and the CPC split on issues of ideology. The iron control of the CPSU under Stalin relaxed under Khrushchev. This enabled Mao to begin pushing the CPC leftwards. It began in 1956 when he launched the ‘Hundred Flowers’ programme. That was when he advocated that partymen, teachers, students and intellectuals should all speak up openly about ‘socialist reconstruction’. The Soviets had consternation about the pace of the programme. They wanted him to go slow. But Mao was in a hurry. He wanted to compress the time taken to traverse from socialism to communism, as many believed Marx had actually intuited. He battled within the party between 1956 and 1958 to accelerate the pace of economic development of the country. Mao argued that while learning from the Soviet Union his Chinese comrades also internalised some of the weaknesses of the Soviet model. He said, ‘Then by the time they were swelling with pride over what they learnt, it

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was already being discarded by those countries [that had developed it]… We must learn with an analytical and a critical eye and avoid the tendency of copying everything foreign indiscriminately or transplanting things mechanically’ (82). He went one step further after Khrushchev launched his de-Stalinisation and asked his colleagues, ‘The Soviets have taken a detour. Do you still want to follow it?’72 He did not stop at just that. Mao even issued a warning, ‘…I would like to talk about the problem of having “illicit relations with foreign countries.” Do we have people in China who are giving intelligence to foreign countries behind the (Party) Centre’s back?’ Mao led a senior-level delegation of CPC members to Moscow attending the International Conference of Communists’ and Workers’ Parties. He delivered a speech in the conference in which he said that while Khrushchev had set a target of surpassing the US in fifteen years, China would surpass Great Britain in the same period.73 In March 1958, Mao organised a party conference at Chengdu. By then, he had been able to stymie most of the opposition in the party towards his plan for rapid advancement in economy. ‘Great Leap Forward’ became the ruling adage for the party. He did not stop at delinking China’s economic relations with the Soviet Union. Mao began advancing the new trait into military affairs. At the Chengdu Conference, he insisted that the PLA rid itself of ‘dogmatism’. He told his colleagues, ‘the military system also suffered similar catastrophe, as seen in many rules and regulations copied by those training departments [from the Soviet Union]’.74 He even said, ‘The Soviet Union defeated the intervention of 14 imperialist countries, which was long ago. The Soviets have experience in the Second World War. We defeated Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kaishek), the Japanese imperialists, and the American imperialists. We have rich experiences, more than the Soviet Union. It’s incorrect to under-value our own experiences’.75 Khrushchev’s Soviet Union watched with increasing apprehensions that the agricultural cooperatives were transformed into amalgamated people’s communes. After two years of continuous battle to keep the Chinese economic planning in line with their modest expectations, CPC leaders like Zhou Enlai, Liu Xiaoqi, Deng Xiaoping gave in. The party adopted a resolution in August 1958, named the Resolution of the Central Committee of the CPC on the Establishment of People’s Communes in the Rural Areas.

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It stated, ‘The basis for the development of people’s communes is mainly the all-round, continuous leap forward in China’s agricultural production and the even rising political consciousness of the five hundred million peasants… the fundamental policy to guide the peasants to accelerate socialist construction, complete the building of socialism ahead of time, and carry out the gradual transition to communism’.76 The steel output for 1958 was fixed at 17 per cent over the 1957 output of 5.35 million tonnes. At the Chengdu conference, the target was raised another 12 per cent to seven million tonnes. In June, Mao raised the steel output target for the year to 10.7 million tonnes, double the figure for 1957.77 To meet that target, Mao called for every household backyard to build furnaces for producing steel across the country.78 The party even patted its back at the achievement of such targets. For the next year, it again set sky-high limits. The eleven million tonnes of steel supposedly produced in 1958 was increased to 18 million tonnes, and grain production target was increased from a supposed 375 million tonnes in 1958 to 525 million tonnes the next year.79 Earlier, an account was taken of Mao’s directions to the PLA to de-link itself from the precepts of the Russian advisers. But in 1958 he became involved in a more direct tussle with the Soviet Union on an issue of security and foreign policy. In early 1958, the Soviet Union submitted a proposal to the PRC for building a long-wave radio station and a joint submarine fleet. Longwave radio station was needed to keep contact with the new Soviet nuclear submarines, which could now traverse the waters of the Far East. And, the Russians wanted a joint submarine fleet to be stationed in China so that they could counter more effectively American influence in the region. Mao erupted in rage when he heard about the proposals, especially about the joint submarine fleet. He first railed at the Russian ambassador, Pavel Yudin in Beijing, ‘First, we should make clear the guiding principle. [Do you mean that] we should create [the fleet] with your assistance? Or [do you mean]80 that we should jointly create [the fleet], otherwise you will not offer any assistance?’ Later in this diatribe, Mao became even more direct, ‘You just don’t believe in Chinese, only believe in Russians. Russians are superior. The Chinese are inferior and clumsy in handling things’.81 To add to the accusation that Russians indulged in racism slur, Mao told Yudin the next day, ‘How dare you suggest such a thing! This

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proposal is an insult to our national pride and sovereignty!’82 He then went on to recount the history of Soviet ‘big power chauvinism’ and said ‘You may accuse (me) of being a nationalist or (being) another Tito, but my counter argument is that you have extended Russian nationalism to China’s coast’.83 The Soviet government was sufficiently worried about Mao’s reaction to their seemingly innocent proposal. Khrushchev decided to visit China and meet the leader. The reception he got was chilly, and Mao seemed to him intractable. Khrushchev told Mao: ‘Comrade Mao Zedong, we will give you the money to build the (wireless radio) station. It doesn’t matter to us to whom the station belongs, as long as we can use it to keep in radio contact with our submarines. We would even be willing to give the station to you, but we would like to have it built as soon as possible. Our fleet is now operating in the Pacific Ocean, and our main base is in Vladivostok. Comrade Mao Zedong, couldn’t we come to some sort of agreement so that our submarines might have a base in your country for refuelling, repairs, shore leaves, and so on?’ (96) Mao refused to budge on the joint submarine fleet issue. On the wireless radio station, he said that the Chinese would fund and build it, but allow the Soviets to use it.84 Even after that, the Soviets agreed to help the Chinese build nuclear submarines of their own. An agreement was signed between the two in early 1959. Some researchers argue that Mao’s unhappiness with Moscow stemmed from their opposition to the former’s radical programmes like the ‘Great Leap Forward’. Russian communist leadership expressed their apprehensions by not commenting on the programme at all. The Soviet media kept quiet about it. The leaders in Moscow felt that Mao’s current strategy was to compete and beat them. So they decided to withhold crucial military technologies from China. This included even atomic technologies. China’s nuclear research was totally dependent on the Soviet Union. It provided the material, technology and training to the Chinese, generously from the days of Stalin. But in 1959, all of this was about to change. According to Sergei Khrushchev, Nikita’s son, in 1958 the Chinese acquired an American Sidewinder missile. The Soviets were keen to get their hands on the same, as they wanted to learn from its technology. They repeatedly asked the Chinese to allow them to take a look. The Chinese fobbed them off. Finally, Nikita Khrushchev intervened. The Chinese still hesitated; eventually, when they handed over the missile, it

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had some key parts missing. Sergei writes, ‘For the first time, he (Nikita Khrushchev) wondered whether it made sense to transfer the newest military technology and teach the Chinese how to build missiles and nuclear warheads’. He began to worry whether the Chinese would turn the advanced Soviet missiles R-12 against them, in the proximate future. Sergei has written that the missile incident played a rather important role when his father reassessed the Soviet attitude towards China. It was a key factor in the change in the Soviet posture. By May 1959, Khrushchev decided that nuclear secrets must not be shared under any circumstances.85 For the Chinese, this still came as a shock. Mao’s first reaction was defiant. He tasked his scientists to master the technology and prepare for the first nuclear weapon test explosion at the earliest. He even sought to make the nuclear quest a part of the ‘Great Leap Forward’, because there were questions whether the nation should try to undertake as expensive a programme as like the nuclear programme during the time of a grave crisis like a famine. Such had been the impact of the Soviet ‘betrayal’, that the Chinese accorded the number 596 to their first atomic bomb tested in 1964. The number denoted the June 1959 abandonment of the Chinese nuclear programme by the Russians. Chinese even named a key nuclear facility at its Southwest Institute of Nuclear Physics and Chemistry located in Chengdu with the number 596. The facility now houses the ‘Fast Burst Reactor’, which simulates the neutron particles and gamma-ray emission of a nuclear explosion. The main ideological element in the Sino-Soviet split was born from the CPSU’s 20th and 21st Congresses. The two party congresses led to the evolution of the line of ‘peaceful coexistence’, ‘peaceful competition’ and ‘peaceful transition’. Translated into intelligible English, this meant the end of the jaw-jaw of the Cold War. ‘Peaceful coexistence’ with the Capitalist West entailed that the Soviet Union would no longer support wars of national liberation across the world, or even actively support communist movements in nations around the world. ‘Peaceful competition’ was to negate the frenzied pace at which the US and the USSR competed each other, be it in the realms of arms, space technology or economic development. And, ‘peaceful transition’ negated the need for a revolutionary transformation of societies from capitalism to socialism.

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Mao believed that Khrushchev had made mistakes in the 20th Party Congress line. He thought that Khrushchev’s soft attitude towards the US and India (in the perspective of the Russians perceptions about Sino-Indian dispute) was based on Khrushchev’s poor understanding of Marxism and Leninism. In May 1960, Mao told the Korean and Danish communist leaders that ‘peaceful coexistence’ was about ‘non-existence’. There could not be ‘peaceful coexistence’ with imperialism. There was only Cold War existence, he said. Also, if capitalism could transit to socialism without violence, where was the foundation of Marxism and Leninism? He told the foreign delegations that the Chinese would now openly talk about these differences. Vietnamese leader, Ho Chi Minh tried hard to bridge the increasing gap between the two countries. But each of these attempts failed. On each occasion when the Chinese negotiated with the Russians on the ideological issues, they worked on the assumption that Khrushchev was ready to meet them under the pressure of the fraternal parties, a compulsion they themselves were facing. So their strategy used to be to concede on minor points, but stick to their positions on critical issues. They were even ready to relaunch their polemics in the case of the differences of the Soviets becoming apparent.86 The Chinese general line was that the international communist movement should be that the proletariat of the whole world would unite with the oppressed peoples and nations to oppose imperialism and reactionaries of various countries; to strive for world peace, national liberation, people’s democracy and socialism; to expand and consolidate the socialist camp; to gradually achieve complete victory of the proletarian world revolution; to construct a new world without imperialism, capitalism or exploitation.87 This was also the pathway that led Mao to Cultural Revolution. Even Zhou Enlai was not spared from the wrath of the Red Guards. He had to ‘self-criticise’ a number of times; resign from the position of a foreign minister; and bow down to Mao completely for survival. But by the end of the Cultural Revolution and China’s policy transformation in terms of responding positively to US’ overtures for a courtship, Zhou had made a comeback and was at the helm of China’s US policy. So when Richard Nixon met him on 22 February 1972, he was receptive to US view of the China’s strategic environment. Nixon told Zhou,

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‘[A]s I look at the situation with respect to China….the Soviet Union has more forces on the Sino-Soviet borders than it has arrayed against the Western alliance’. He continued, ‘Now as I see China, and as I look at China’s neighbours, this is what would concern me. I believe Chairman Mao and the Prime Minister (Zhou) when they say that China does not seek to reach out its hands, and that while it will support forces of liberation, it does not seek territory around the world. However turning to what others may do, and looking to the South, a far as India is concerned, China could probably handle India in a month in the event they went to war. India is no threat to China, but India supported by the Soviet Union is a very present threat to China because China’s ability to move, to deal with respect to India and to take military action would be seriously in question if the Soviet Union, its northern neighbour, was supporting India’.88 Zhou, in his opening remarks in the meeting, indicated that Nixon’s paranoid notion was not far from his own imagination. He said, ‘The worst possibility is what I told Dr Kissinger in the records of our proceedings, that is to say the eventuality that you all would attack China – the Soviet Union comes from the north, Japanese and the US from the east, and India into China’s Tibet….Of course, that’s talking only about the worst possible contingency’.89 The strategic possibility the two leaders discussed in 1972 did not seem all that remote for one very important reason. China and the Soviet Union had indulged in an intense border clash in 1969. The earliest known statement by any Chinese leader on the Sino-Soviet border was by Mao. He told a delegation of Japanese Socialist Party members on 10 July 1969, ‘About hundred years ago, the area to the east of (Lake) Baikal became Russian territory, and since then Vladivostok, Khabarovsk, Kamchatka, and other areas have been Soviet territory. We have not yet presented our account for this list’.90 What happened on the Ussuri River islands in March 1969 was the culmination of a long process of the breakdown of fraternal relations between the two leading communist nations over the past decade, even as the world was witnessing fighting between communist forces and those of the ‘imperialist’ US in the Cold War hot spot of Vietnam.

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45

Notes

1. Off-the-record conversation with Dr Henry Kissinger, Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, Monday, July 19, 1971, at 7:20 PM, Tarrow House. 2. Memorandum of Conversation, Participants: Prime Minister Chou EnLai, People’s Republic of China; Yeh Chien-ying, Vice Chairman, Military Affairs Commission, Chinese Communist Party, PRC; Huang Hua, PRC Ambassador to Canada, Chang Wen-chin, Director, Western Europe and Americas department, PRC Ministry of Foreign Affairs; One other Chinese official; Deputy Chief of Protocol; Tang Wen-sheng and Chi Chao-chu, Chinese interpreters and Chinese note takers; and Dr Henry Kissinger, Assistant to the President for the National Security Affairs; John Holdridge, Senior Staff Member, NSC; Winston Lord, Senior Staff Member, NSC; W Richard Smyser, Senior Staff Member, NSC; Place: Chinese Government Guest House, Peking; Date and Time: July 9, 1971, Afternoon and Evening (4:35 p.m. and 11:20 p.m.), p. 4. 3. Ibid., p. 5. 4. Ibid., p. 7. 5. Tyler, Patrick, A Great Wall: Six Presidents and China: An Investigative History, PublicAffairsTM, member of the Perseus Books Group, 1999, p. 93. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid. 8.  US National Security Council, “The Position of the United States with Respect to Asia” NSC48, December 23, 1949, contained in US Congress, House Committee on Armed Forces, United States-Vietnam Relations 1945–1967, Book 8 of 12 (Washington, USGPO, 1971), p. 245, Quoted in Yufan Hao, Solving the Dilemma in China Policy: 1978– 79. A Case Study of Normalisation of US-China Relations and the Taiwan Relations Act, a PhD dissertation at the Johns Hopkins University, 1989, © Hao, Yufan, p. 23. 9. Hao, Yufan, Solving the Dilemma in China Policy: 1978–79. A Case Study of Normalisation of US-China Relations and the Taiwan Relations Act, a PhD dissertation at the Johns Hopkins University, 1989, © Hao, Yufan, pp. 23–25. 10. NSC48, December 29, 1949, Statement by Acheson, in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1949, p. 463, Quoted in Yufan Hao, Solving the Dilemma in China Policy: 1978–79. A Case Study of Normalisation of USChina Relations and the Taiwan Relations Act, a PhD dissertation at the Johns Hopkins University, 1989, © Hao, Yufan, pp. 24–25.

46  P. BHATTACHARYA 11.  Department of State Bulletin, Vol. XXII, No. 550 (January 16, 1950), p. 79, Quoted in Yufan Hao, Solving the Dilemma in China Policy: 1978–79. A Case Study of Normalisation of US-China Relations and the Taiwan Relations Act, a PhD dissertation at the Johns Hopkins University, 1989, © Hao, Yufan, p. 27. 12. Ibid., pp. 79–80, quoted in pp. 27–28. 13. American Foreign Policy, 1950–55, Basic Documents, vol. 2, p. 5, Quoted in Yufan Hao, Solving the Dilemma in China Policy: 1978–79. A Case Study of Normalisation of US-China Relations and the Taiwan Relations Act, a PhD dissertation at the Johns Hopkins University, 1989, © Hao, Yufan, p. 32. 14. Chinese People’s Institute of Foreign A. Ibid., pp. 5–6, Quoted in Yufan Hao, Solving affairs, ed. Oppose US Occupation Taiwan and “Two Chinas” Plot (Beijing: Foreign Language Press, 1958), p. 3, Quoted in Yufan Hao, Solving the Dilemma in China Policy: 1978–79. A Case Study of Normalisation of US-China Relations and the Taiwan Relations Act, a PhD dissertation at the Johns Hopkins University, 1989, © Hao, Yufan, p. 33. 15. Ibid., pp. 5–6, Quoted in Yufan Hao, Solving the Dilemma in China Policy: 1978–79. A Case Study of Normalisation of US-China Relations and the Taiwan Relations Act, a PhD dissertation at the Johns Hopkins University, 1989, © Hao, Yufan, p. 33. 16. Record of Conversation between Ambassador Wellington Koo and Dulles concerning the Japanese Peace Treaty, October 20, 1950, in Hungdah Chiu ed., China and the question of Taiwan: Documents and Analysis (New York: Praeger, 1973), p. 236–237, Quoted in Yufan Hao, Solving the Dilemma in China Policy: 1978–79. A Case Study of Normalisation of US-China Relations and the Taiwan Relations Act, a PhD dissertation at the Johns Hopkins University, 1989, © Hao, Yufan, p. 36. 17.  Treaties Between the Republic of China and Foreign States 1927–1957 (Taipei Commercial Press, 1958), pp. 248–259, Quoted in Yufan Hao, Solving the Dilemma in China Policy: 1978–79. A Case Study of Normalisation of US-China Relations and the Taiwan Relations Act, a PhD dissertation at the Johns Hopkins University, 1989, © Hao, Yufan, p. 37. 18. Hao, Yufan, Solving the Dilemma in China Policy: 1978–79. A Case Study of Normalisation of US-China Relations and the Taiwan Relations Act, a PhD dissertation at the Johns Hopkins University, 1989, © Hao, Yufan, pp. 36–37. 19. National Intelligence Estimate, Communist China, by the CIA, 1951, p. 3. 20. Ibid., p. 42.

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47

21. Renmin Ribao (People’s Daily), December 8, 1954 Quoted in Yufan Hao, Solving the Dilemma in China Policy: 1978–79. A Case Study of Normalisation of US-China Relations and the Taiwan Relations Act, a PhD dissertation at the Johns Hopkins University, 1989, © Hao, Yufan, p. 42. 22. Exchange of Notes between Dulles and Foreign Minister George K. C. Yeh (December 10, 1954) in United States Treaties 1955 (Washington; USGPO, 1956), vol. 6, part 1, pp. 450 and 454; cited from Gene Hsiao, “Legal Status of Taiwan,” p. 39; Quoted in Yufan Hao, Solving the Dilemma in China Policy: 1978–79. A Case Study of Normalisation of USChina Relations and the Taiwan Relations Act, a PhD dissertation at the Johns Hopkins University, 1989, © Hao, Yufan, p. 42. 23. United States Statutes at Large, Vol. 69 (1955), p. 7; Quoted in Yufan Hao, Solving the Dilemma in China Policy: 1978–79. A Case Study of Normalisation of US-China Relations and the Taiwan Relations Act, a PhD dissertation at the Johns Hopkins University, 1989, © Hao, Yufan, p. 43. 24.  Sutter, Robert G., China Watch: Toward Sino-American Reconciliation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 1978), p. 63; Quoted in Yufan Hao, Solving the Dilemma in China Policy: 1978–79. A Case Study of Normalisation of US-China Relations and the Taiwan Relations Act, a PhD dissertation at the Johns Hopkins University, 1989, © Hao, Yufan, p. 63. 25.  Work Correspondence, no. 8 (February 2, 1961), p. 25; Quoted by Tang Tsou and Morton H. Halperin, “Mao Tse-Tung’s Revolutionary Strategy and Peking’s International Behavior,” The American Political Science Review, Vol. 59, No. 1 (March, 1965), American Political Science Association, p. 83. 26. Ibid., p. 24; Quoted by Tang Tsou and Morton H. Halperin, “Mao TseTung’s Revolutionary Strategy and Peking’s International Behavior,” The American Political Science Review, Vol. 59, No. 1 (March, 1965), American Political Science Association, p. 83. 27. Bostdorff, Denise M., “The Evolution of a Diplomatic Surprise: Richard M Nixon’s Rhetoric on China, 1952–July 15, 1971,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs, Vol. 5, No. 1 (2002), p. 33. 28. “Rolling Out the Lines,” Time, June 7, 1954, 18; Richard M. Nixon, “Address in Philadelphia,” October 19, 1954, U.S. News & World Report, October 29, 1954, 100; Quoted in Denise M. Bostdorff, “The Evolution of a Diplomatic Surprise: Richard M Nixon’s Rhetoric on China, 1952–July 15, 1971,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs, Vol. 5, No. 1 (2002), p. 33. 29. Nixon, Richard M., “Excerpts from Speech to Veterans,” p. 109; Quoted in Denise M. Bostdorff, “The Evolution of a Diplomatic Surprise: Richard M Nixon’s Rhetoric on China, 1952–July 15, 1971,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs, Vol. 5, No. 1 (2002), p. 35.

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30. Quoted in Denise M. Bostdorff, “The Evolution of a Diplomatic Surprise: Richard M Nixon’s Rhetoric on China, 1952–July 15, 1971,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs, Vol. 5, No. 1 (2002), p. 36. 31. “Second Debate, October 7, 1960,” The Great Debates: Background— Perspective—Effects, ed. Sidney Kraus (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1962), pp. 387–388; Quoted in Denise M. Bostdorff, “The Evolution of a Diplomatic Surprise: Richard M Nixon’s Rhetoric on China, 1952–July 15, 1971,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs, Vol. 5, No. 1 (2002), p. 36. 32. Ambrose, Stephen E., Nixon, vol. 1 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989), pp. 579–580; Quoted in Denise M. Bostdorff, “The Evolution of a Diplomatic Surprise: Richard M Nixon’s Rhetoric on China, 1952–July 15, 1971,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs, Vol. 5, No. 1 (2002), p. 36. 33. Ning, Lu, The Dynamics of Foreign-Policy Decision-Making in China, 2nd ed. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000), pp. 161–162; Quoted in Yafeng Xia, “China’s Elite Politics and Sino-American Rapprochement, January 1969–February 1972,” Journal of Cold War Studies, Vol. 8, No. 4 (Fall 2006), p. 4. 34. Xia, Yafeng, “China’s Elite Politics and Sino-American Rapprochement, January 1969–February 1972,” Journal of Cold War Studies, Vol. 8, No. 4 (Fall 2006), p. 17. 35.  Mingwei, Yang, and Yangyong, Chen, Zhou Enlai waijiaofengyun [Diplomatic Winds and Clouds of Zhou Enlai] (Beijing: JiefangjunWenyiChubanshe, 1995), pp. 247–248; Quoted in Yafeng Xia, “China’s Elite Politics and Sino-American Rapprochement, January 1969–February 1972,” Journal of Cold War Studies, Vol. 8, No. 4 (Fall 2006), p. 18. 36.  Central Committee Politburo’s Report on the Sino-American Meeting (drafted by Zhou Enlai), 26 May 1971: quoted in Gong Li, Kuayuehonggou: 1969–1979 NianZhongmei Guanxi de Yanbian [Across the Chasm: The Evolution of Sino-American Relations, 1969–1979] (Zhengzhou, China: Henan Renmin Chubanshe, 1992), pp. 103– 104; Quoted in Yafeng Xia, “China’s Elite Politics and Sino-American Rapprochement, January 1969–February 1972,” Journal of Cold War Studies, Vol. 8, No. 4 (Fall 2006), p. 18. 37. Ibid., pp. 17–18. 38. Op. cit., n. 2 in Chapter 1, pp. 37–38. 39. Department of State, Bulletin (January 23, 1950), p. 111; Quoted in Wanli Hu, Mao’s American Strategy and the Korean War, a PhD dissertation at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, 2005, © Hu, Wanli, p. 150. 40. Alexandre Mansourov, Communist War Coalition Formation and the Origins of the Korean War, a PhD dissertation at the Columbia

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University, 1997, © Mansourov, Alexandre Yourievich, n. 7, p. 261 from B. Kulik, “The PRC During the Formative Years (1949–1952),” Problems of the Far East, Moscow, No. 6 (1994), p. 77. 41. Hu, Wanli, Mao’s American Strategy and the Korean War, a PhD dissertation at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, 2005, © Hu, Wanli, pp. 119–121. 42. Ibid., p. 170. 43. Ibid. 44.  Zedong, Mao “On the People’s Democratic Dictatorship,” Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung, Vol. IV, pp. 414–415; Quoted in Wanli Hu, Mao’s American Strategy and the Korean War, a PhD dissertation at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, 2005, © Hu, Wanli, p. 170. 45. Hu, Wanli, Mao’s American Strategy and the Korean War, a PhD dissertation at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, 2005, © Hu, Wanli, p. 171. 46. Ibid., p. 173. 47. Minutes of the Meeting of Comrade Stalin with the Chairman of the Central government of the People’s Republic of China, Mao Zedong, December 16, 1949 PARF. F. 45. op. I. 14; Quoted in Alexandre Mansourov, Communist War Coalition Formation and the Origins of the Korean War, a PhD dissertation at the Columbia University, 1997, © Mansourov, Alexandre Yourievich, p. 267. 48. Vyshinsky (Russian general) to Roschin (Soviet ambassador to Beijing), containing a ciphered telegram from Filippov to Mao Zedong, May 14, 1950, PARF.f.45.op.I.d.331. I. 55; Quoted in Alexandre Mansourov, Communist War Coalition Formation and the Origins of the Korean War, a PhD dissertation at the Columbia University, 1997, © Mansourov, Alexandre Yourievich, p. 315. 49. Mansourov, Alexandre, Communist War Coalition Formation and the Origins of the Korean War, a PhD dissertation at the Columbia University, 1997, © Mansourov, Alexandre Yourievich, p. 320. 50. Communist Capabilities and Probable Courses of Action in Korea, A National Intelligence Estimate, Central Intelligence Agency, NIE-80, Published 3 April, 1953, Declassified on 2 August, 1977, p. 8. 51. Ibid., pp. 8–9. 52. Ibid., p. 10. 53. Mann, Robert, The Cold War Origins and Legacy of the Vietnam War, California State University, Dominguez Hills, 2001, © Robert Mann, p. 7. 54. Time, August 15, 1949, Quoted in Robert Mann, The Cold War Origins and Legacy of the Vietnam War, California State University, Dominguez Hills, 2001, © Robert Mann, p. 11.

50  P. BHATTACHARYA 55.  Goldstein, Joshua S., and Freeman, John R., “U.S.-Soviet-Chinese Relations: Routine, Reciprocity, or Rational Expectations?” The American Political Science Review, Vol. 85, No. 1 (March, 1991), p. 24. 56. Liu, Zhigang, Sino-American Relations, 1945–1950, With Emphasis On The Outcome of China’s Entry to the Korean War, a PhD dissertation at the Boston University, 1996, © Liu, Zhigang 1995, p. vi. 57. Ibid., p. 142. 58.  Dulles, (John F.)- (Christian) Heritier series, Incoming Telegram, Department of State, January 30, 1954, 6:43 AM, Dwight D Eisenhower Papers, President of the United States, 1953–1961 (Ann Whitman File), Declassified 12.9.81. 59.  NSC 154, A Report to the National Security Council by the NSC Planning Board: United States Tactics Immediately following an Armistice in Korea, June 15, 1953, National Archives of the United States, Declassified on 24 April, 1975. 60. Op. cit., n. 37, p. 32. 61. Ou, Hsin-Hung, Communist China’s Foreign Policy Toward the War in Vietnam 1965–1973, a PhD dissertation at the Southern Illinois University, 1977, © Ou, Hsin-Hung 1977, p. 18. 62. Kennedy was not present on the day the US Senate censured McCarthy because he was ill. Op. cit., n. 37, p. 62. 63. Ibid., pp. 61–62. 64. Ibid., pp. 71–72. 65.  Peking Review, no. 30 (1964), p. 7, Quoted in Hsin-Hung Ou, Communist China’s Foreign Policy Toward the War in Vietnam 1965– 1973, a PhD dissertation at the Southern Illinois University, 1977, © Ou, Hsin-Hung 1977, p. 34. 66.  New York Times, August 10, 1964, p. 7, Quoted in Hsin-Hung Ou, Communist China’s Foreign Policy Toward the War in Vietnam 1965– 1973, a PhD dissertation at the Southern Illinois University, 1977, © Ou, Hsin-Hung 1977, p. 133. 67. “PRC Technicians Reportedly Help Vietcong,” Singapore AFP, February 23, 1966, as reported in FBIS: Far East February 23, 1966, p. 16, Quoted in Hsin-Hung Ou, Communist China’s Foreign Policy Toward the War in Vietnam 1965–1973, a PhD dissertation at the Southern Illinois University, 1977, © Ou, Hsin-Hung 1977, p. 142. 68. “Most of 40,000 Chinese Do Railway Repair,” Paris AFP, August 17, 1966, as reported in FBIS: Far East, August 18, 1966, p. 24, Quoted in Hsin-Hung Ou, Communist China’s Foreign Policy Toward the War in Vietnam 1965–1973, a PhD dissertation at the Southern Illinois University, 1977, © Ou, Hsin-Hung 1977, p. 142. 69. Ibid.

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51

70. A note by the Lyndon Johnson administration on its policies towards East Asia, p. 2, Declassified on February 22, 1994. 71. Ibid. 72. The meeting was attended by the French ambassador to Beijing, Lucien Paye, a radical Deputy of the French National Assembly, Jacques Duhamel, and his wife, chief organiser of French fairs, Guillaume Georges-Picot, Bernard de Gaulle, a nephew of General de Gaulle, who was also a managing director of an electronics firm exhibiting in the fair and the Paris-based American journalist, Edward Behr, a contributing writer of the American, Saturday Evening Post, who was in Beijing as part of the current affairs programme on French TV then, called the Cinq Colonnes A La Une. 73. A note by the US State Department official, Benjamin N Reed, prepared on 31 October, 1964, p. 2. Declassified on June 31, 1991. 74. A note by the US State Department official, Benjamin N Reed, prepared on 31 October, 1964, p. 2. Declassified on June 31, 1991. 75.  Special Report, The China Problem In Japanese Politics, SC No. 00617/64B, Copy No. 2, Central Intelligence Agency, Office of Current Intelligence, May 1, 1964, p. 1. Declassified on April 5, 1976. 76. Ibid., p. 4. 77. A report on the Kosaka Delegation’s visit to Communist China, August 30–September 24, 1966, p. 2. Declassified on June 28, 2000. 78. The Chinese Communist Party Central Committee Documents Research Institute and Chinese Foreign Ministry, eds, Mao Zedong waijiao wenxuan (Selected Documents of Mao Zedong on Foreign Affairs), pp. 507– 508; Quoted Mingjiang Li, Turbulent Years: Mao’s China and Sino-Soviet Split, a PhD dissertation at the Boston University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, 2007, p. 165. 79. Lengxi, Wu, Shinianlunzhan (Ten Years of Polemics) (Beijing: The Central Documents Press, 1999), p. 13, Quoted Mingjiang Li, Turbulent Years: Mao’s China and Sino-Soviet Split, a PhD dissertation at the Boston University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, 2007, p. 45. 80. Lengxi, Wu, Shinianlunzhan (Ten Years of Polemics) (Beijing: The Central Documents Press, 1999), p. 15, Quoted Mingjiang Li, Turbulent Years: Mao’s China and Sino-Soviet Split, a PhD dissertation at the Boston University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, 2007, p. 46. 81. Leung, John K., and Kau, Michael Y. M., ed., The Writings of Mao Zedong 1949–1976, pp. 59–60; Quoted Mingjiang Li, Turbulent Years: Mao’s China and Sino-Soviet Split, a PhD dissertation at the Boston University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, 2007, p. 64. 82.  The CCP CC Documents Research Institute, ed. Mao Zedong wenji (Documents of Mao Zedong), vol. 7 (Beijing: People’s Press, 1999),

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p. 23; Quoted Mingjiang Li, Turbulent Years: Mao’s China and SinoSoviet Split, a PhD dissertation at the Boston University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, 2007, p. 64. 83.  Leung, John K., and Kau, Michael Y. M., ed., The Writings of Mao Zedong 1949–1976, p. 165; Quoted Mingjiang Li, Turbulent Years: Mao’s China and Sino-Soviet Split, a PhD dissertation at the Boston University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, 2007. 84. Li, Mingjiang, Turbulent Years: Mao’s China and Sino-Soviet Split, a PhD dissertation at the Boston University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, 2007, p. 68. 85. Rui, Li, Dayuejinqin li ji (A Personal Account of the Great Leap Forward) (Shanghai: Far East Press, 1996), p. 167; Quoted Mingjiang Li, Turbulent Years: Mao’s China and Sino-Soviet Split, a PhD dissertation at the Boston University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, 2007, p. 74. 86.  Yunhai, LI, “Yi jiuwunianzhonggongzhongyangjunweikuodahuiyi” (The expanded meeting of the CCP Central Military Commission), Dang Shi Bo Lan, (Knowledge of Party History), vol. 3, 2005; Quoted Mingjiang Li, Turbulent Years: Mao’s China and Sino-Soviet Split, a PhD dissertation at the Boston University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, 2007, p. 76. 87. Selden, Mark, The People’s Republic of China: A Documentary History of Revolutionary Change (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979), p. 402; Quoted Mingjiang Li, Turbulent Years: Mao’s China and Sino-Soviet Split, a PhD dissertation at the Boston University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, 2007, p. 97. 88.  Teiwes, Frederick C., with Sun, Warren, China’s Road to Disaster (Armonk, New York: M. E. Sharpe, Inc, 1999), pp. 100–106; Quoted Mingjiang Li, Turbulent Years: Mao’s China and Sino-Soviet Split, a PhD dissertation at the Boston University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, 2007, p. 98. 89.  Union Research Institute, ed. Documents of Chinese Communist Party Central Committee, vol. 1, pp. 114–116; Quoted Mingjiang Li, Turbulent Years: Mao’s China and Sino-Soviet Split, a PhD dissertation at the Boston University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, 2007, p. 100. 90. Han Nianlong et al., DangdaiZhongguowaijiao (Foreign affairs of contemporary China) (Beijing: China Social Science Press, 1988), pp. 113– 114; Quoted Mingjiang Li, Turbulent Years: Mao’s China and Sino-Soviet Split, a PhD dissertation at the Boston University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, 2007, p. 80.

CHAPTER 3

‘Vietnam Syndrome’: Looking for an Honourable Exit

In the aftermath of the war on Iraq following its Kuwait invasion, a theory that took hold in the US armed forces: that it has emerged out of its ‘Vietnam syndrome’. The network-centric aerial bombardment with aircrafts and missiles (Tomahawk got its branding as a potent land attack cruise missile in this war) had brought Saddam Hussain’s ragtag army to its knees. Hussain was already sending diplomatic feelers for peace. But Bush wanted a ground war. Famous US journalist, Robert Parry, who gained fame by breaking the story of the Iran–Contra scandal of Ronald Reagan administration wrote in 2011, ‘On 28 February, 1991, just hours after the fighting stopped [George H. W.] Bush gave the public a fleeting glimpse of his secret agenda when he celebrated the ground war victory by blurting out the seemingly incongruous declaration, “By God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam Syndrome once and for all”’.1 Understanding the Vietnam War and what was called the ‘Vietnam Syndrome’ requires appreciating what it did to the US institutional mind and its public philosophy. How the US Constitutional institutions—the Presidency, the Congress, Pentagon and the armed forces—functioned under various, often contradictory, influences are worth a deeper understanding? And where did China fit in terms of Vietnam? When the French left Indochina in 1954, after the defeat in Dien Bien Phu, the fear of communist Sinification of the region made the US to get involved. John Fitzgerald Kennedy ran the 1960 presidential poll campaign against Eisenhower government on a supposed ‘Missile Gap’ © The Author(s) 2019 P. Bhattacharya, Sino-US and Indo-US Relations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-7276-6_3

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between the US and the USSR. This naturally translated into proving Eisenhower being incapable of handling the so-called second and the emergent third world—Soviet Union, China, North Korea etc. Almost as a derivative, it was also made to seem that Eisenhower was incapable of tackling the Cold War. His Vice President, Richard Nixon, was tarred by the same brush, especially after the Republican Party pitted him against Kennedy. Kennedy administration’s key aides in his promised battle with the communist regimes were his brother and US Attorney General Robert Kennedy, CIA chief Allen Dulles and most importantly a fellow Harvard University don, Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defence. While Dwight Eisenhower sought to stave off increasing Chinese influence in the region after the Korean War by sponsoring the Southeast Asian Treaty Organization—in lines of NATO—and sent 700 ‘military advisers’ to Saigon, the US involvement was still minimal till the end of the 1950s. Kennedy had raised that figure to 17,000 US troops by the time he was assassinated in 1963. Before that, the American policy elite had eliminated the South Vietnamese President, Ngo Dinh Diem, who had instilled a degree of efficiency in the fighting what was till then a civil war between the South and the North. But his sister-in-law and his sibling, Ngo Dinh Nhu, were neck deep in corruption. Both Presidents Diem and Nhu were also persecuting the Buddhists. And the situation came to boiling point when one of the Buddhist monks burnt himself to death in protest on a Saigon street, in a widely covered incident by the Western media. Lyndon Bains Johnson, the burly Texan, who succeeded Kennedy increasingly got sucked into the Vietnam War. The infamous Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1963—a staged attack on an American warship ostensibly by the North Vietnamese Army (NVA)—led to a Congressional legislation that empowered Johnson to continue with the war virtually without any oversight by the US Congress. The Tonkin Resolution was rescinded only in 1970, after it was revealed that Nixon was waging an ‘illegal war on Cambodia’. A note by the US Department of State on PRC stated one crucial point that was highlighted for Johnson and the likes of his National Security Adviser, McGeorge Bundy and McNamara. This was the fear of Vietnam War expanding into a direct military involvement of the Chinese. At least till the end of 1963, the US government searched for ‘deniability’ of their role in operational terms. A National Security Action

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Memorandum issued by Bundy, in November 1963 stated: ‘Planning should include different levels of possible increased activity, and in each instance there should be estimates of such factors as: A. Resulting damage to North Vietnam, B. The plausibility of denial, C. Possible North Vietnamese reaction, D. Other international reactions’. The other international reactions included both China and the Soviet Union. Henry Kissinger says in one of his recent books (2011), ‘On China’ that the problem with the US campaign in Vietnam was a wide gulf between the strategic objectives of the two contending powers— Vietnam and the US. Americans wanted to bring back the status quo of a peaceful regional order by supporting South Vietnam and allowing North Vietnamese to exist. Hanoi, however, wanted outright victory. This difference between the two fighting blocks led to the continuance of war almost indefinitely, till April 1975. At dawn of one April day, the last Marines of the force guarding the US embassy lifted off. Only hours later, looters ransacked the embassy, and North Vietnamese tanks rolled into Saigon, ending the war. In 15 years, nearly a million NVA and Vietcong troops and a quarter of a million South Vietnamese soldiers had died. Hundreds of thousands of civilians had been killed. But the war’s history was also recorded from the keen analytical faculties of some of the best researchers of the US of that time, belonging to the RAND Corporation—that was tasked by the US government to set up a Combat Development and Testing Center (CDTC) in Saigon, South Vietnam. ‘The CDTC’s mission was to test weapons already in existence or new weapons being developed in American laboratories, including herbicides, and such equipment as communication gear for their usefulness in counterinsurgency’, recorded the RAND’s official historian for its decade-long involvement in Vietnam, Mai Elliott.2 In January 1961, the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam was formed. Their goal was to liberate southern part of the country and join up with the north—already being led by the communist regime of Ho Chi Minh—to have a Vietnam that for the first time would be free of foreign colonial powers. Almost immediately after the formation of NLF, Nikita Khrushchev, the leader of the Soviet Union pledged support. The Chinese leadership did the same. Mao Zedong, known as the chairman, and the unquestioned leader of People’s Republic of China, went a step farther.

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He declared that it was the duty of all communist nations to support the South Vietnamese party in their effort.3 But Henry Kissinger writes in one of his more recent books ‘On China’, quoting an exchange between Mao and his first important American contact, the noted journalist Edgar Snow in 1965 on the edge of the Cultural Revolution that, ‘…conference might be held, but United States troops might stay around Saigon, as in the case of South Korea’. From that point on Kissinger had averred that Mao was really hinting at the existence ‘of two Vietnams’.4 Earlier, in the US government National Intelligence Estimate of 1961, the authors had noted that China with its growing population and growing military power had an inordinate effect on the ruling elites of Southeast Asia. The existential question that confronts them is whether to take the proximate power more seriously or the distant Western powers.5 The China story of the Vietnam War really began as a throwback to the Korean War. Mao’s Edgar Snow comment came in the light of his experience with the Koreas. With US President Johnson in 1964, the Vietnam War has been rather evocatively called the ‘Mission Creep’. That is, the escalation in the US military involvement in the area increased such small increments that none of the institutions of governance of the country did actually notice that they were walking into a ‘quagmire’, a word first used in 1766 in the context of ‘difficult situation, inescapable bad position’. The ‘swamp’ or the ‘marshy land’ that the American troops went into—at Johnson’s and his war enthusiast Cabinet member, Robert McNamara, then Secretary of Defence’s bidding—literally and figuratively into a bog. In fact, the word ‘quagmire’ was not much in use through the nineteenth century until 1965 and Vietnam. When the US president desired a greater role in Vietnam, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was passed by the US Congress without much ado.6 In the wake of these alleged South China Sea incidents, the American legislatures allowed Johnson administration to begin a full-scale invasion of Vietnam focused on saving the south from the north’s communist regime. A RAND study by researcher Joseph Jeremiah Zasloff argued that the main lifeline of the South Vietnamese communist guerrillas had was the rear area they enjoyed in the North Vietnam, which poured in large amounts of resources, including war materiel. Zasloff wrote in a

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report that ‘Much of the strength and sophistication of the insurgent organisation in South Vietnam today is attributable to the fact that North Vietnam plans, directs and coordinates the over-all campaign and lends material aid, spiritual leadership and moral justification to the rebellion’.7 Then US Air Force Chief of Staff, General Curtis LeMay, took that study and recommended extensive bombing of North Vietnam. Mai Elliott writes in her history of RAND Corporation’s engagement in Vietnam that, then US department of defence honcho, the secretary, Robert McNamara and the Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Asia, William Bundy, wanted to coordinate and calibrate the aerial bombing of North Vietnam as coercive measures, backed by diplomacy.8 The reason behind this civilian management of military operations is Johnson’s deep-seated fear that if the armed forces were given a free rein, they could trigger a military riposte from the Soviet Union and/or China. Johnson’s paranoia about a possible expansion of the Vietnam War into a global conflagration with the Soviet Union and China on the same side made him seek to micromanage the military operations. In 1965, Johnson in a speech in Baltimore, Maryland, gave expression to his fear of communism spreading like prairie fire all across Asia. He told his audience, ‘Over this war —and all Asia — is another reality: the deepening shadow of Communist China. The rulers in Hanoi are urged on by Peiping. This is a regime which has destroyed freedom in Tibet, which has attacked India, and has been condemned by the United Nations for aggression in Korea. It is a nation which is helping the forces of violence in almost every continent. The contest in Vietnam is part of a wider pattern of aggressive purposes’.9 But contrary to the belief of the Johnson administration, the Chinese leadership was busy trying to keep itself apart from militarily getting involved in the war. Still at the same time, they were seeking to send publicly coded messages to the communist and newly liberated nations that they were steadfast in their support of the Vietnamese guerrillas and the North Vietnamese regime. This duplicity of Mao was evident from the beginning. Vietnam historically was a part of imperial China’s suzerainty (derived from a French word that meant sovereign in the seventeenth century) and had been culturally hugely influenced by the latter. But Vietnamese nationalism was still the nettlesome cause for the Chinese.

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In an internal memorandum of the Department of State, a senior staffer wrote to the Secretary of State Dean Rusk that the ‘…[B]asic discord between the two states must be the traditional ethnic antagonisms that have existed between China and the Annamese of North Vietnam, which even showed through to some extent during the years of combat with the US forces. The Annamese have for hundreds of years felt threatened culturally and politically by their oversized neighbour, and they have instinctively turned to outsiders for counterbalancing forces’.10 Be that as it may, the Chinese were sensitive about its paucity of influence on the North Vietnamese regime by 1965, after the Sino-Soviet split had put the two giant ‘communist’ countries in opposing camps. A telegram from the US Consul in Hong Kong to Rusk in April that year decoded the Vietnam resolution of then recently concluded National Peoples’ Congress. The consul focused on three points, ‘(the NPC sought to) publicize widely recent DRV (North Vietnam) statements on Vietnam situations such as Ho Chi Minh’s……address……NLF (South Vietnamese National Liberation Front) appeal and relevant Chicom (sic!) response, in order to “carry out patriotic and internationalist education campaign, and together with people throughout the world, to launch a mighty mass movement to compel us aggressors to get out of Vietnam”’.11 Clearly, the still embryonic global student and working-class uprising against imperial aggressions of the Americans, French and British were militating the strategic minds of the Chinese leadership. They wanted to connect with this ‘revolutionary’ force against the aggressors and take leadership position—‘launch’—in those mass movement. The consul’s telegram had second and third points. The NPC— Chinese legislature—exhorted its people to ‘Heighten vigilance, strengthen national defense, take an active part in labor, increase production, study hard and work hard, and use actual deeds to assist Vietnamese people…’.12 And, finally to make, ‘Full preparations to send their own people to fight with Vietnamese people……in event US imperialism continues to escalate its war of aggression and Vietnamese people need them’.13 Therefore, the Hong Kong consul of the US government rightly read the resolution as not being a call to arms by the Chinese Communist Party to the global proletariat, but only a nuanced understanding that ‘if’ there was ‘escalation’ by the US imperialists, the Chinese should get

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directly involved. Otherwise, at the ‘present level of fighting’, Beijing or Peiping—as it was called then—could live with.14 Mao took a serious note of the ‘secret speech’ of Khrushchev to the Central Committee of the CPSU at the 20th Congress of the party. He called the new Khrushchev line ‘revisionist’. He sought to turn it around to his and the CCPs own advantage. A sudden opening up of the Chinese society was heralded by the let ‘Hundred Flowers Bloom’ programme. This was when, as Kissinger writes, ‘[P]opular criticism quickly moved beyond suggestions for tactical adjustments into criticisms of the Communist system’.15 A keen and an interested observer like Kissinger thinks that an invisible line was crossed when students set up a ‘Democracy Wall’ and exhorted comparisons of well-being between the first decade under the CCP and Nationalist rule of Chiang.16 This act resulted in a counter-revolution led by Mao. Automatic reprisals followed. These included prison time for the protesters, besides re-education and internal exile. To top it all, Mao launched a far more intense campaign of the ‘Great Leap Forward’. The period when the Chinese people lurched from the effects of Mao’s ‘continuous revolution’ theory, he himself was aware of the geopolitics. He knew he had taken on the Soviet Union. He could not have taken on the US at the same time. So Mao, who had debunked Confucius, turned to another classical strategist, Sun Tzu. One of the adages of Tzu: ‘The way to avoid what is strong is to strike what is weak’, is similar to Mao’s own theory of ‘protracted war’. What was Mao’s dilemma during the expansion phase of the Vietnam War? As I mentioned before, the Vietnam War is being viewed here through the lens of RAND specialists. The view in the cognitive world of two of the California-based institution’s experts was of a Lin Biao article that had actually substantiated the analysis of the Hong Kong consul. But a later study showed that towards 1967, more than halfway through the Johnson escalation, Mao was getting worried that the Chinese might have to get involved, for it might be attacked by the US. And that attack would have to be encountered by nuclear weapons. ‘An early large scale nuclear war’, was how the Chinese leader had speculated with an ‘associate’. As Mao feared ‘encirclement’ and an existential challenge, Johnson administration was trying to not be asked by historical forces: ‘Who lost

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East Asia?’ As the Vietnamese fought for their homeland, communism reared its head in Indonesia, Malaysia and Burma. The insurgents were facing national armies who were being helped by the former colonial masters with training, equipment and morale issues. For many of these countries, Bandung Conference of newly liberated countries of AfroAsian regions, held in 1955, was a distant memory. On the other hand, despite Mao’s ambivalence towards supporting the North Vietnamese regime, the Johnson administration was itself reticent about having a repeat of the Korean War. This was when Gen Douglas MacArthur reached the North Korean side of the Yalu River and brought China directly into the conflict. But Lin Biao, one of the later acolytes of Mao delivered a speech on 2 September 1965, about Mao’s concepts of fighting a ‘people’s war’. He talked about a ‘protracted war’, ‘raising a people’s guerrilla army first and later transforming it into a People’s Liberation Army’, and the ‘concept of rural areas (geopolitical Periphery)’ encircling the ‘cities of the world’ (Metropolitan Powers)17—something he dubbed rather sycophantically ‘Mao Thought’. Lin’s speech was printed in full by the People’s Daily and was widely disseminated. He said: ‘The most convincing example of a victim of aggression defeating U.S. imperialism by a people’s war’ and predicted that although Vietnam was ‘weak and small’, it would render America’s technological superiority ineffective and defeat U.S. imperialism.18 This speech divided the Johnson administration into two groups. One shade of opinion was that of McNamara, who, ‘interpreted the speech as bellicose and aggressive, signaling an expansionist China’s readiness to nourish “local” forces across the world and to give a helping push when the time came’. To them, Lin’s remarks seemed to indicate a firm Chinese commitment to world revolution and, therefore, validating the Asian domino theory. In an interview with ‘Jack Raymond of The New York Times at the time, McNamara said that the most important challenge for America was to become more proficient at fighting “wars of national liberation,” because it was “perfectly apparent that we will be facing more such wars in the years ahead.” To him, the United States was fighting for a “just cause,” and America had the duty to use its power to contain Chinese expansion’.19 The other opinion that emerged out of RAND Corporation’s own precincts, from its two young China-watchers David Mozingo and

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Thomas Robinson, was radically different. They interpreted Lin’s speech as a strategic signal to the Vietnamese and the Soviet Union, they would go only a distance without intervening in the battles on the South Vietnamese side and no farther. Mozingo and Robinson wrote a monograph in which they stated: ‘Lin’s message to the Vietnamese could be summarised as, “Your tactics are wrong and you had better come around to our way of thinking if you expect to win”’. Lin told the Vietnamese that the main enemy of the Vietcong was now the US, not the Saigon government, and the Vietcong therefore should adopt different political and military strategies. On the political side, they should forge a broad-based alliance with other sectors of South Vietnamese society to defeat the Americans in unison; on the military side, they should abandon mobile warfare and adopt a ‘strategic defense’ posture by retreating into ‘revolutionary bases in the countryside and carrying on smaller-scale but protracted guerrilla warfare’. Backdrop of the Sino-Soviet split holds some important facets of the Vietnam War. In terms of the Cold War, the US under Johnson and his successor and former political rival Richard Nixon the US decided to take advantage of the fissure. An internal memo of the Johnson administration noted, ‘Some among us have long felt that given firmness and will on our part in handling communist aggressiveness, forces would develop within the Soviet dominated bloc that would ultimately break the bonds holding it together. Present Sino-Soviet relations give solid ground for greater emphasis on this possibility and we would seem to owe it to ourselves to act accordingly’.20 While this memo had outlined the possibilities of a Sino-US rapprochement, the real reason had to be more than just a cleavage between the two communist giants. Soviet troop mobilisation on what Mao had called the ‘three norths’—North, North–East and the North–West of the nation—had reduced the pressure on Europe from the USSR. This was duly noted in Washington. A Harvard University Asia Centre monograph in the International History series edited by three authors William C. Kirby, Robert S. Ross and Gong Li pointed out, ‘In the late 1960s, the United States was on the defensive against the Soviet Union in the struggle for hegemony. The United States’ intention to withdraw from the Indochina war and scale down its presence throughout East Asia created the possibility for a reconciliation and an improvement in bilateral relations between China and the United States’.21

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Richard Nixon picked up the signal early. In the now famous article for the Foreign Affairs journal, he wrote while being a presidential candidate, ‘Any American policy toward Asia must come urgently to grips with the reality of China…..Taking the long view, we simply cannot afford to leave China forever outside the family of nations, there to nurture its fantasies, cherish its hates and threaten its neighbors’.22 This rather dim view was reflective of not just classical realism but as the world would later witness, a deep characteristic of Nixon’s personality. If Kennedy’s joie de vivre style of policymaking resulted in the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Nixon’s careful calibration of bombing North Vietnam coupled with the peace talks, or secret escalation of the war into Cambodia as a cynical ploy that somewhere appealed to Henry Kissinger’s world view. Henry Kissinger was not exactly a neophyte in the application of artifice in his diplomacy. His first touchdown in Peiping had a strong South Asian connection, as any student of diplomatic history would know. While India was confronting a humanitarian crisis of more than a million refugees crossing over into the country from East Pakistan— and was being slowly drawn into a conflict with West Pakistan– Kissinger donned the mien of an honest broker supposedly to defuse the tension. But as the world witnessed, in reality he flew secretly to the Chinese capital from Islamabad, after hoodwinking all, including the accompanying American media. It was stated that Kissinger was not being seen in public because he had developed an ‘upset stomach’. The secrecy was necessary not because of any big diplomatic reason but essentially for helping a slowly declining fortune of Richard Nixon to look up, by which when he visited Peiping, he could hog all the attention of the global media. His targets were the people at home in the US and his insistent detractors, and of course creating history. Elite politics of both sides created a narrative that was at once fascinating in its scope and in the similar vein, sometimes churlish. That little competition between the US president and his secretary of state had its own background. For New Delhi, while Kissinger’s drama was piquant to say the least, it was also an object lesson in big power politics, in the realist sense.

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Notes













1. The Chinese Communist Party Central Committee Documents Research Institute and Chinese Foreign Ministry, eds., Mao Zedong waijiao wenxuan (Selected Documents of Mao Zedong on Foreign Affairs) (Beijing: The Central Documents Press and the World Knowledge Press, 1994), pp. 322–323; Quoted Mingjiang Li, Turbulent Years: Mao’s China and Sino-Soviet Split, a PhD dissertation at the Boston University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, 2007, p. 80. 2. Strobe Talbott, ed., Krushchev Remembers: The Last Testament (Boston: Little, Brown, 1974), p. 258; Quoted Mingjiang Li, Turbulent Years: Mao’s China and Sino-Soviet Split, a PhD dissertation at the Boston University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, 2007, p. 81. 3. Zhang, Shuguang and Chen, Jian, CWIHP Bulletin, No. 6–7 (Winter 1995/1996), pp. 155–159; Quoted Mingjiang Li, Turbulent Years: Mao’s China and Sino-Soviet Split, a PhD dissertation at the Boston University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, 2007, p. 81. 4. Strobe Talbott, ed., Khrushchev Remembers (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970, pp. 472–473); Quoted Mingjiang Li, Turbulent Years: Mao’s China and Sino-Soviet Split, a PhD dissertation at the Boston University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, 2007, p. 83. 5. Mingjiang Li, Turbulent Years: Mao’s China and Sino-Soviet Split, a PhD dissertation at the Boston University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, 2007, p. 86. 6.  Khrushchev, Sergei N., Nikita Khrushchev (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), pp. 269–271; Quoted Mingjiang Li, Turbulent Years: Mao’s China and Sino-Soviet Split, a PhD dissertation at the Boston University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, 2007, p. 106. 7. Mingjiang Li, Turbulent Years: Mao’s China and Sino-Soviet Split, a PhD dissertation at the Boston University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, 2007, pp. 132–133. 8. Ibid., pp. 182–183. 9.  Memorandum of Conversation between President Richard Nixon, Dr. Henry A. Kissinger, John H. Holdridge and Winston Lord; and Prime Minister Zhou Enlai, Ch’iaoKuan-Hua, Chiang Wen-chin, Wang Haijung and Chao Chi-hua, two Chinese interpreters and two Chinese note takers on February 22, 1972, between 2:10 p.m. and 6:00 p.m. at the Great Hall of the People, Beijing, pp. 10–11. 10. Thomas W. Robinson, “The Sino-Soviet Border Dispute: Background, Development, and the March 1969 Clashes,” The American Political Science Review, Vol. 66, No. 4 (December 1972), p. 178.



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11. Op. cit., n. 9, p. 18. 12. Elliott, Mai, RAND in Southeast Asia: A History of the Vietnam War Era, © Copyright 2010 RAND Corporation. 13. Ibid., quoting George Tanham, Trip Report—Vietnam (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, October 6, 1961) (not releasable to the general public). 14. Op. cit., n. 12. 15. Ibid. 16. Kissinger, Henry, The Road to Reconciliation (Allen Lane, an imprint of Penguin Books, 2011). 17.  Outlook in Mainland Southeast Asia: National Intelligence Estimate, 50–61 (redacted), Sanitised in 28.3.90, accessed in 2007. 18. The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution of the US Congress, supposedly revolved around two incidents that took place in quick succession on August 2 and August 4, 1964. On August 2, 1964 the American destroyer USS Maddox, while performing a signals intelligence patrol in the South China Sea, reported being attacked by three North Vietnamese Navy torpedo boats of the 135th North Vietnamese Torpedo Squadron. Maddox spent over 280 3-inch and 5-inch shells in what was dubbed a sea battle. One US aircraft was damaged, three North Vietnamese torpedo boats were allegedly damaged. There were no US human casualties. 19.  On August 4, the second Gulf of Tonkin incident was engineered as another sea battle, but instead evidence was found of ‘Tonkin ghosts’ (false radar images) and not actual North Vietnamese torpedo boats. 20. Zasloff, J. J., The Role of North Vietnam in the Southern Insurgency (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, RM-4140-PR, 1964), quoted in Mai Elliott, Op. cit., n. 12. 21. Op. cit., n. 12. 22.  Drew, Col Dennis M., Rolling Thunder 1965: Anatomy of a Failure. Reprinted from CADRE Paper, Report No. AU-ARI-CP-86-3, October 1986, 59 pp. by Air University Press, accessed on October 28, 2015 at http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/readings/drew2.htm.

CHAPTER 4

China, US Elite Politics on Sino-US Rapprochement

The mating dance between Washington and Beijing (then Peiping) was comparatively long, stretching from 1960s till Henry Kissinger landed in China in 1971. This was followed by Richard Nixon, the US president, who had planned this exercise of realpolitik to trump the USSR at a time that has often been called a period of ‘No War, No Peace’—the Cold War. The Americans wanted to break the Communist block that seemed to them to be a monolithic competing ideology. They were handed this gift—of Mao’s China—by Joseph Stalin. Nixon-Kissinger team signed the famous Shanghai Communique but could not make Mao agree to full restoration of diplomatic relations—something that they had with Chiang Kaishek. Full diplomatic relations had to wait till a peanut farmer from Georgia became President of the US, James Earl (Jimmy) Carter Jr and his Harvard University don-turned-National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski in 1979. Much had changed in the world between 1971 and 1979. Vietnam War had ended; Nixon had to resign to avoid impeachment; Kissinger had to turn into a common citizen; Mao had died; his fourth wife who desperately wanted absolute power in the sense Mao was in, Jiang Qing, and her three associates, had been imprisoned as Gang of Four—dubbed as ultra-left, and Deng Xiaoping, though a vice premier to Chairman Hua Guofeng, the premier of PRC, had become the real power behind the thin veil. © The Author(s) 2019 P. Bhattacharya, Sino-US and Indo-US Relations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-7276-6_4

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Deng went to Washington in 1979. By then, he had the Polit Bureau (PB) pass his immediate reform agenda. The US was a key component of that agenda. The fascinating play of elite politics in Beijing and the US that went on behind the key Cold War drama, most times in the background, only sometimes with the panoply of power in full glare of public, is worth retelling as an object lesson of history that gives an inkling of how once a regional heavyweight is now pitching for global power. It had all begun with the split within the Communist camp. Stalin’s treatment of Mao as a poor cousin and ignoring PRC’s needs for high technology and guaranteeing its security even at times of crisis like the Korean War had left the latter in the lurch. On the contrary, the armies of both the fraternal party states had been militarily confronting each other at the national boundaries like the famous Ussuri River incident. Soviet strategic weapons were partly targeting China. There was a real war scare in Beijing, amongst the regime members. Mao, who had turned from Confucius to Sun Tzu for a guide in choosing strategic manoeuvres, realised he could not take on both superpowers at the same time. So, he formed a cohort of four former Red Army stalwart Marshals—Chen Yi, Ye Jianying, Xu Xiangqian and NieRongzhen. He asked them to sequester themselves and study PRC’s geo-strategic situation and make recommendations for its future foreign policy strategy. The four Marshals did not take too long to come up with their formulations. They proposed that instead of waging ‘a tit-for-tat struggle against both the United States and the Soviet Union’, the PRC should use ‘negotiation as a means of struggle against them’. Their prescription was that the Sino-American ambassadorial talks should be resumed ‘when the timing is proper’.1 Since 1955, the PRC ambassador in Warsaw was holding talks with his US counterpart. The two sides had 136 meetings till 1970, without any concrete détente formula that could be implemented between the two countries. Nixon assumed office with a clear idea for engaging PRC in a constructive way to bring it in what he called the global mainstream. Its UN seat at the Security Council that was occupied by the supposed Nationalist China—now on a retreat in Taiwan—could have been one such result. On the other hand, if he was able to drive a permanent wedge between Beijing and Moscow, it would be of immense value for Washington.

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So Nixon asked his Secretary of State, William Rogers, to instruct the ambassador in Poland, Walter Stoessel to establish contact with the PRC representative in Warsaw. Meanwhile, Kissinger began working on the backchannel. Messages were delivered to Nicolae Ceausescu, the Romanian tyrant, and Gen Yahya Khan of Pakistan to tell the Chinese whether they would be ready to receive a special representative of the US president. Both Ceausescu and Yahya Khan returned with positive messages. Khan’s message was more detailed in its content. He related to the Americans that PRC has responded by saying they are ready to receive any representative of the US president provided he accepts that, ‘Taiwan and the Straits of Taiwan are an inalienable part of China, which have now been occupied by foreign troops of the United States for the last fifteen years. Negotiations and talks have been going with no results whatsoever. In order to discuss this subject of the vacation of Chinese territories called Taiwan, a special envoy of President Nixon’s will be most welcome in Peking’.2 This triggered a historic event of the twentieth century and began the process of transformation that has today made the PRC a power to reckon with. But politics of the power elite (a term first used by the American sociologist C Wright Mills) of competing interests in both the countries, China and US, is a rivetting tale. When Mao met Nixon in 1972 for the first time, he told the US president that his former anointed successor, Lin Biao, had been against this engagement with Washington. Lin and his family were wiped out in an air crash in 1971 as his plane in which he was travelling, ostensibly to the Soviet Union, had crashed in Outer Mongolia. Mao’s contention was Lin had been conspiring to sabotage the effort from the beginning.

Breakthrough However, Chinese scholar Yafeng Xia did not find any evidence of Lin trying to come in the way of Mao-Zhou’s initiative to open up to the Americans. On the contrary, Lin had been one of those few in the Chinese hierarchy who received the reports that Zhou Enlai prepared for Mao about the progress of the diplomatic exercise. And the Marshal of the Red Army, who was then wearing three hats of Vice Premier, Vice Chairman and Defence Minister invariably used to write the note on margins of documents, ‘Do whatever the Chairman (Mao) says’.3

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But elite politics on Sino-US rapprochement really became vicious after Lin got killed, as Mao wound down the Cultural Revolution. But the Chairman of the CPC and supreme leader of the world’s most populous nation had fulfilled his plan: of getting an iron grip over both his charges. The Cultural Revolution which Mao had unleashed to isolate what he called the ‘capitalist roaders’ can also be described as an attempt on getting a personal lock on the PB of the CPC. As a result, when the roving bands of Red Guards went home at, again, Mao’s command, and their virulence ebbed, the Ninth CPC Congress held in April 1969, threw up a PB that was divided in terms of members on their ideological and material circumstances during the Revolution. One may recall, even as the future leader of the nation Deng Xiaoping was purged, one of his three sons (he had five children) was not spared. He was thrown from the top floor of the Beijing University, by which his spine was broken and he became a paraplegic. Premier Zhou had to go through the ignominy of denouncing himself at a meeting of the Central Committee, and the Foreign Ministry that was under the stewardship of the hapless Chen Yi was raided periodically by the Red Guards for cleansing it off ideological ‘deviants’. The PB elected by the Ninth CPC Congress had a ‘radical’ group who took their directions from Mao. The members of this group were Marshal Lin Biao, the defence minister, Jiang Qing, Mao’s fourth wife, Yeh Chun, Lin’s wife, Mao’s speech writer, Chen Boda, Mao’s security czar, Kang Sheng, Leftist propaganda specialist, Yao Wenyuan and QangQunqiao, the Shanghai political boss. Interestingly, the new PB had a large representation of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). Some of the inductees of the PLA in the PB had got the wrong end of the stick during the Cultural Revolution. This was quite a departure from the previous PBs that were more symmetric as each member headed a government department.4 The PLA was not totally inured from the influences of the Cultural Revolution—the division in uniformed forces being between conservatives and radicals. However, most of the PLA seniors who were elevated to the PB, elected by the Ninth CPC Congress, were those who could be instrumentalised by Mao to rein in the rampaging Red Guards. It is interesting to note that the CIA report quoted above had a rather dim view of Mao’s heir-apparent then, the vice chairman of the CPC and the Defence Minister, Lin Biao. For, the last section of the paper was

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headlined ‘After Mao, the deluge!’ The section went on to say that if Lin were to take over power, he would try to follow Mao’s policies. But he did not have the political heft required to quickly slip into Mao’s shoes. On the other hand, it was clear that the CIA did not know about Zhou Enlai’s affliction of cancer that would entail his death soon after Mao in the same year, 1976. And interestingly the report did not mention Deng Xiaoping even once. Clearly, the American agency considered the purges of the Cultural Revolution to be irreversible. History proved them wrong. It was most evident in the area of foreign and security policy. A recently declassified CIA estimate says, ‘Peking recognises the limits of the revolutionary line, however, and has accepted and developed a policy of peaceful coexistence for application where this suits its needs. Analogous to the domestic united front policy which served the communists well in the Chinese Civil War, the peaceful coexistence line was originally intended to be a temporary accommodation to the norms of international conduct which would be replaced as other countries followed China’s revolutionary path’.5 Implementation of the policy package for establishing a relationship with the US fell on Zhou Enlai. Mao was last seen at the Tiananmen Square, in front of the Great Hall of the People in May 1971. He however triggered the process of normalising relations with Washington with the help of Edgar Snow, the American journalist close to him. Then there was the episode of ‘Ping Pong diplomacy’. Lin was still alive when the last event took place. But he was completely in the dark.

Mao’s Control Panel On the other hand, each time a kink appeared on the tapestry of the budding Sino-US relationship, Mao would unleash the ‘Gang of Four’ led by his wife Jiang Qing against Zhou. For example, a much-delayed talk between the US and the USSR was reported in Chinese Foreign Ministry’s internal publication called New Information titled, ‘A Preliminary View on the Talks between Nixon and Brezhnev’, and Mao concluded that Zhou had made a mistake in his talks with Kissinger in 1973. Meanwhile, Zhou had been complaining about ‘Ultra-left Trend of Thought and Anarchism’, a shorthand for the ‘Gang of Four’s’ interference in foreign policymaking. The US-Soviet Union talks were the pretext they were seeking. Jiang Qing and her three accomplices sought to

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get Zhou purged. Mao berated him for his comment about ‘ultra-leftism’ but realised the essentialist argument that Zhou was important for the embryonic Sino-US relations. Thus, Zhou survived this time around.6 But many scholars, Chinese and American, believe that Mao was behind the attacks against Zhou, the premier. He disliked the praise western media heaped on Zhou for China’s diplomatic successes following the normalisation of Sino-US relations. From the Western world, Canada first gave recognition to PRC in 1970. The next big event next year, 1971, was PRC replacing Taiwan as the United Nations member. By 1972, Nixon had shaken hands with Mao, and the famous Shanghai Communique had been signed by both sides. One of the most important points of the document was a freezing of the status of Taiwan as a non-sovereign entity. The salience of the Taiwan issue was evident in the first meeting between Zhou and Kissinger in 1971. That Taiwan’s status is the most important issue, in the normalisation process of the Sino-US relations was clearly stated in the letter that was delivered by Gen Yahya Khan to the Chinese leadership, where they had welcomed the visit by a special representative of Nixon or he himself visiting China. Notwithstanding Zhou’s attempt at getting the best deal on Taiwan out of the Shanghai Communique, he was attacked by the ‘ultra-left’ Gang of Four. They took the strategy of calling the dead Lin Biao as ‘Left in form, and right in essence’. This was Mao’s line as a response to Zhou’s formulation of ‘ultra-leftism and anarchism’. When Jiang Qing made a long statement in Maoist line, the canny Zhou with a talent for organised thought—often mistaken as bureaucratic—decided to relent and remove the categorisation of the ‘ultra-left’.7 But he insisted that Mao’s other statement that derided ‘anti-greatnation chauvinism’ be included in the PB resolution When NixonBrezhnev summit took place on Strategic Arms Limitations in June 1973, the Chinese leadership considered the bonhomie between the ‘imperialist and socialist imperialist’ powers a perfidy on China. Zhou was first off the block with a research article on the subject to be prepared by the department of America and Oceanic affairs in the PRC’s ministry of foreign affairs. The research paper for volume number 153 of the New Information journal of the ministry of foreign affairs was to say that the talks and the deal (SALT I) were more ‘deceitful’.8 Zhou was even more combative when the Nixon administration sent a comparatively younger State Department official, David Bruce,

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stationed in the ‘liaison office’ to brief Zhou about the US-USSR summit and deliver a letter from the American president. Zhou scorned the Washington leadership, at Mao’s behest.9 By then, Mao had developed another set of eyes and ears in the foreign ministry, besides his wife Jiang and her informants. Incidentally, Jiang did not have direct access to Mao as she did not live with him. Wang Hairong, a grand niece of Mao, was elevated to the position of an assistant foreign minister. She reported on the goings-on of the ministry and especially how Zhou Enlai, the premier met the foreign officials as the Chinese premier. His directives to the ministry were also considered sacrosanct even though in the post-Chen Yi period, an obscure Ji Pengfei had become the foreign minister. She, along with Tang Wenshang, a daughter of a former fallen comrade, was an interpreter of both Zhou and Mao. They were called the ‘Young Mistresses Club’ and were totally loyal to Mao. By end-1973, Nixon had to go (fallout of Watergate and a Congressional attempt at impeachment). The rest of his term was to be filled by Gerald R. Ford, a leading light of Republican Party. The changeover had also witnessed the dismissal of William Rogers, the Secretary of State, who was constantly short-changed by both Nixon and Kissinger for the PRC-related diplomacy. Kissinger, a German first-­ generation émigré, got what he wanted: to become the secretary of state. One of his first visits after taking over Foggy Bottom was to Beijing. (More of the US elite political tussle later in the chapter.) In his conversation with Mao, the latter realised that the American stakes in the PRC relationship has been devalued considerably. Reason: Vietnam War had ended and the US was out of that bog.10 But the Cold War adversary of the American superpower remained. And that was the primary reason why Nixon presidency had sought to build relations with PRC. So as the raison d’ etre remained valid, there was no reason for a supreme realist like Kissinger to advise Ford anything to the contrary. Excepting Ford was merely holding the fort; for the Republican Party was mortally damaged by the Watergate saga. Kissinger had described his last meeting in 1975 with Mao thus, ‘You know that I am a showcase exhibit for observers’; the man who had ruled the most populous country of the world for close to four decades had described himself (11). The Ford Presidency, however, could not institutionalise US-PRC relations. But Ford did visit China in the same year 1975: a rather damp squib.

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Notwithstanding Kissinger’s recounting of Mao’s morbid rumination, the Great Helmsman still had a last roll of dice on the wei qi board of international relations that he saw as the ultimate game of strategy. His first move was in domestic affairs. Zhou was on his death bed with urinary bladder cancer. He needed a Zhou-like pliant man at the top who would reflect his thoughts which showed, what Kissinger had rightly diagnosed as, a conflict area where long-held ideology clashed with hard-core realist geopolitics and strategy. First, Mao had to find that man. He was advised by Zhou and a few others to think about Deng Xiaoping again. Some Western sources claim that Deng was one of the two anointed successors of Mao along with Lin Biao. But a CIA study of the period or Chinese authors do not mention this. Deng was sent to Jiangxi province as a factory worker during the Revolution. He just had his wife for company. A keen watcher of political movements taking place in the north, Beijing, he was keeping a check on the headwinds. At one point in 1973, he realised that the Cultural Revolution—the great disruptor which made Mao seem like Trotsky who had his own theory of permanent revolution—had lost steam and Mao wanted it wound down. So Deng wrote a letter recalling the ‘positivities’ of the gains he had in his exile, to the General Department (GD) of the Central Committee. He used the language Mao would like in that letter: re-education, being amongst the people, etc. And he knew that the GD in-charge would show the letter to Mao. They did. One should keep in mind at this stage that though Deng had to undergo the exile and a son who was turned into a paraplegic, his comrade Liu Shaoqi was treated more harshly, which eventually led to Liu’s death. Deng’s comparatively easy treatment by the Red Guards was due to Zhou’s— despite his own problems—attempts at tempering their viciousness. By the time Mao made up his mind to bring Deng back—Mao’s logic being that he was not all that unacceptable to the left wing of the party and instead could also keep a check on their excesses. Enter Zhou Enlai on the scene, and he recalled Deng to Beijing. Almost immediately after his return, he was given the position of a first vice premier. Deng’s return to political power in 1973 was almost in conjunction with the deterioration of Zhou’s health. He began his apprenticeship by accompanying Zhou to the Beijing airport to welcome and see-off

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important dignitaries from various countries including Mali and Nepal and other such nations. He still was not allowed to hold discussions with those visitors but he could sit in the meeting. In August that year, the 10th CPC Congress made him a CC member and elevated him to the PB by Mao.11 The tenth CPC Congress did two things, besides of course elevating Deng. The first was to bring the future ‘Gang of Four’ on the same page under the leadership of Jiang Qing. The other members became Wang Hongwen, Zhang Chunqiao and Yao Wenyuan. The second was an incapacitated Mao—for the first time he did not speak at a Party Congress— raising Wang Hongwen, young at 38 years and true blue radical to the position of a vice chairman of the CPC. The two most important speeches of the Congress were by Zhou and Wang.12 Those at the elite level of PRC could read the tea leaves. They saw in Wang’s rise an anointment of a successor to Mao, even though Zhou was the official number two. Zhou had often been very careful in not being seen to be a threat to Mao. But he could not avoid being targeted by Mao’s vituperation for alleged deficiencies in his work. In 1973, for example, he became a victim of the Gang of Four’s pernicious attack for being what Mao’s wife, Qing, described as a ‘capitulationist’. As has been mentioned above, the main issue was the US-Soviet summit and the SALT I negotiations. The real causality was occasioned by the continuing leadership struggle to create an answer for ‘after Mao, who’. Mao himself led a series of PB meetings at the iconic Great Hall of the People, which took to task Zhou, at the hospital then. Deng’s position was uniquely hanging in balance at that time. Though he was a PB member because of Mao, he was an acolyte of Zhou. But he had the task of denouncing him for proving his loyalty to Mao. Deng handled the challenge rather well. By one source (literature survey), when his time came to speak, Deng just made a single sentence reference directly at Zhou, ‘You are only one step away from the Chairman (seat). Others could hope for such a position, but it would be unattainable; for you it is attainable. I hope you will take this as an adequate warning’.13 Couched in such language, it could have meant that he was a well-wisher of Zhou and thus warning him for lurking danger, or it could also be interpreted as reflecting Mao’s menace that was exhibited in the Lin Biao incident. Then Deng moved on to the issues of current status the Party finds itself. While doing that he knew his statements at the PB meeting

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would be reported to Mao. This happened exactly in the way Deng had thought. Mao took Deng’s second interpretation as truth. He was happy that Zhou was denounced—well, sort off—by one of his protégés. That opened doors for Deng Xiaoping. This was the time when Mao had expounded his ‘Three Worlds’ theory. The first world consisted of the US and the USSR. The second world comprised Europe, Canada and Japan. And the third world included newly liberated countries of Africa, South America and most of Asia excepting Japan. Deng was made to sell Mao’s this formula. And the occasion was a special session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA). When the severely ailing CPC chairman asked Deng to represent PRC at the world stage, he became the first representative of China to visit the portals of the world body. Deng delivered a speech prepared by the foreign ministry in a fortnight’s time that Mao had given them. Deng gave a brave performance. Returning to Beijing, Deng was rewarded with the top job of the PLA. He became the chief of staff of the two million plus force—with a nascent navy and an air force. Cheng Chanchua, a leading Cultural Revolutionist was made the political commissar. By this act, Mao once again established the fact that the ‘party controls the gun’—a dictum that Mao had propounded during the days of Liu Pocheng, who led the 8th Group Army during the anti-Japanese War. But by 1975, while Mao had rolled his last dice to keep control of the PRC, a part of that strategy was to launch a ‘anti-Confucius’ movement led by his fourth wife, Jiang Qing and her accomplices, who were considered the ‘left wing’ of the CPC, a familiar act of Mao to keep the second-rung leadership unsettled. Deng committed an act that in retrospect helped him to create a coalition of the PLA top ranks and the CPC CC civilian members. In 1975, ‘at the height of his power’ under Mao, Deng made the big mistake of being consumed by the desire to modernise PRC; in the process criticise the Cultural Revolution.14 He had even begun to rehabilitate his purged colleagues in the 1960s. Mao was informed about his doings. In the immediate aftermath, he was purged again as Mao wanted to keep control of the Party hierarchy. He had to be quickly replaced with Hua Guofeng as heir-apparent, who had been brought up from the Hunan province—found to be a pragmatist in contrast to the ideologues—and was elevated to the CC and the PB.

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At this stage, recall the summer of 1973 when Zhou was denounced for his handling a talk with Kissinger, who was in Beijing. Zhou was not just attacked the Gang of Four, as surrogates of Mao, but the leader himself. That was just preceded by the CIA detecting the first sign of exertion of ‘pressure’ on the Sino-US relationship, by the so-called left faction. There were overt and covert bids by the Gang to sabotage the nascent relationship of China with the US.15 A cultural and scientific delegation that visited America was criticised for being ‘too impressed with what they had seen there’. The foreign ministry that was being overseen by Zhou and Deng was told Left faction did not approve of the US Marines guarding the liaison office in Washington. As the US Congress finally put some limits on presidential power for war-making in the wake of the ‘secret bombing of Cambodia’, a story broken by the New York Times—for the first time since the sweeping ‘Gulf of Tonkin resolution—and closed the tap for funding the Indochina wars, PRC reneged on the deal to broker a negotiated end of the Cambodian war. Even the August 1973 visit by Kissinger had to be put on the back-burner at the behest of his Chinese interlocutors. The Chinese leadership used backchannels to US decision-makers for expressing its displeasure about the US-Soviet détente talks.’16 However, returning to the narrative of the Gang of Four, the ‘anti-Confucius’ campaign was not allowed by Mao to become another Cultural Revolution. Jiang Qing was made responsible by Mao. But since he had been using them as a sledgehammer for controlling the PRC’s elite politics, he could not dispose them off like he was alleged to have with Lin Biao. Meanwhile, as his illness progressed, he needed to get Hua Guofeng become the premier. That happened in 1976, after Zhou’s death in March. Hua Guofeng became the chairman of the CPC in September that year after Mao’s death. Significantly, this was also the time of the rise of the PLA in the post-Lin period in the party hierarchy. Hua knew that he had to build a coalition of the conservative members of the CC and PB, along with the PLA senior echelons. His biggest support was Marshal Yeh Chienying, one of the leading lights of the revolutionary Red Army. Hua, meanwhile, had a more tough task ahead. He had to rehabilitate Deng Xiaoping, purged for his speeches that were a critique of ‘Cultural Revolution’. He had to be brought back in 1977 as the Vice Chairman of the CPC under pressure of the older members of the CC and the PB. Considering the personality cult of Mao, PRC elite politics always

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seemed like feudal court of intrigues, with each member of the PB and its apex Standing Committee kowtowing at every mention of the Great Helmsman. Because of that even a nodding acquiescence to Marx and his scientific ideology of socialism was often ignored. This, on the Left, gave rise to the crude political ambition of the ‘Gang of Four’ and on the right, Deng could adopt capitalism’s once-removed cousin, pragmatism as the ruling credo. Marx had a great belief in human ‘consciousness’ rising above Young Hegelian’s, belief, for example, in chains that binds humans. Hence, he could eventually envision a free society where the State withered away. Unfortunately, in the two countries (the USSR and PRC) where his principles were believed to have been implemented grew into hard States and personality cults.

Nixon’s Search for Redemption Nixon wrote in his famous article in the Foreign Affairs journal of 1967, ‘The “people,” in the broadest sense, have become an entity to be served rather than used. In much of Asia, this change represents a revolution of no less magnitude than the revolution that created the industrial West, or that in the years following World War II transformed empires into new and struggling nations. It is precisely that promise of this reversal that has been at the heart of communist rhetoric, and at the heart of the popular and intellectual appeal which that rhetoric achieved’.17 In the next paragraph itself, he drew the contrast with the non-‘communist’ neighbours of China. Nixon wrote: ‘Not all the governments of non-communist Asia fit the Western ideal of parliamentary democracy—far from it. But Americans must recognize that a highly sophisticated, highly advanced political system, which required many centuries to develop in the West, may not be best for other nations which have far different traditions and are still in an earlier stage of development’.18 This became the bedrock of Nixon-Kissinger’s policies towards the Asia-Pacific region. Seldom has an American president been to office with such clarity of thought, while acknowledging the US is a Pacific power.19 Clearly, Nixon too had to face hurdles in the way he had to deal with ‘PRC’—he, for the first time amongst US presidents, used the official name of mainland China—and of course, orderly exit from Vietnam.

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Though Kissinger’s trip to China in 1971 was strictly secret, as the press briefing and the concomitant news stories were what the White House designated as ‘Compulsory Plagiarism’, once the story was out, there were two groups amongst the American political class decided to pick a fight with the administration. First, there was the Taiwan lobby of Congressmen some whom believed that Chiang was the best friend of the US across the Straits, thus would allow the soil of his nation to be used as a staging post, if the push comes to shove between PRC and the US. More Congressmen of the Taiwan lobby were actually fattened on much of the material resources that came their way. So they too picked up the cudgels. In Nixon’s travelling entourage, there were two people who hated the president’s seduction of the Chinese leadership—and in turn MaoZhou’s own—being beamed across the US television networks. Nixon’s main speechwriter Patrick Buchanan and his private secretary, Rose Mary Woods, cautioned the president about the message going ‘home’—one that of the two main communist countries feting an American president, and he actually enjoying the hospitality. Nixon visit had come after very intense debates in the various American state-related organisations like the US Congress, the Department of State, Department of Defence and of course, the White House. The question was ‘who lost China (PRC)?’ That was soon after PRC went into Maoist hands. And the man, Chiang Kaishek, who had been given periodic hearings by the trio, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin in the post-World War II conferences was ousted from the mainland and moved across the Straits, where his military removed the original Taiwanese leaders and captured power to station themselves in Taipei. The American policy debate was mostly dominated till the end of the 1950s by hard-core Sovietologists like George F. Kennan, Charles Bohlen, Llewellyn Thompson, Foy Kohler, etc.20 General Dwight Eisenhower administration even had to come under the same fire from the John F. Kennedy campaign on that account. This is the same Kennedy when in government took on the mantle from the French to continue the imperialist war against Vietnam—then divided in communist North Vietnam that came into being after the French rout in Dien Bien Phu, and a plutocratic South propped up by the largesse of the Anglo-American combine. By the time the US President, Lyndon Bains Johnson, decided not to seek a re-election in 1969, Richard Nixon, a hard-core conservative of

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the Republican Party, decided to ‘normalise’ the relations with PRC. He used Henry Kissinger, a Harvard academic-turned one of the shrewdest strategic thinkers and actors, to open a channel with Mao-Zhou team. By 1972, Nixon had made his pilgrimage to Beijing, met Mao and had formalised the break with and the hedge against Soviet socialist imperialist behaviour. The year of 1973, just before Nixon’s re-election, a burglary at the Democratic National Committee office at the Watergate Hotel had taken place; and its connection to White House was being established. In fact, the talk of an impeachment was gaining credence in the corridors of the American national legislature, the Congress. In 1974, Nixon finally threw in the towel. Gerald R. Ford was nominated by the Republican Party to finish the Nixon term. Kissinger, of course, got him to do what he himself pined for long—a presidential cabinet position—as the secretary of state. This short blip aside, the train of US Congressmen had begun their journeys to the shores of the PRC. While the vexed issue of Taiwan was sort of papered over in the famous Shanghai Communique, the US strategy appeared to be that during the time was to soften the Chinese leadership on the issue. Besides of course the usual freebies that Congressmen think to be their entitlement when they go visiting, a report about the visit of a group of 12-member team consisting of two Senators with their spouses and the staffers appears an important document, considering it was to create a milieu for the US President, Gerald Ford’s visit due later in the year. In a memo written by an NSC staffer to Kissinger and the NSA, Brent Scowcraft, the House Speaker, Carl Albert and the Minority Leader, John Jacob Rhodes, laid down the plan of their impending PRC visit. The note appended the proceedings of a closed door conference organised by National Strategy Information Center, Inc on the issues that the legislators could engage with the PRC leadership.21 The issue was Taiwan and the closely related issue of full diplomatic relations with the PRC. The conferees discussed two solutions to the problems. One, maintain the status quo of an embassy at Taipei and a liaison office in Beijing, while allowing a few trade and cultural connections to mainland China. Or two, de-recognise Taiwan and extend full diplomatic relations with the PRC, while offering some ‘anomalous’ (sic!) words of friendship and trade, if not protection, to the people on the islands of Taiwan.22

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Participants at the conference discussed a third option that by then had come to be known as ‘Willy Brandt option’. He had come up with the possible praxis about divided Germany: one nation, two governments. The idea was based on the following, that is: – There is one Chinese nation. – Two Chinese Governments respectively rule in two geographically separate parts of this nation, each according to its own system. – It is hoped that some day the Chinese nation may be peacefully reunited. Clearly, the ranking Congressmen were to sell the idea as a preferred option for the US. But the American power elite had fears that were they to concede too much, the Asian dominoes like Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, etc. will fall shortly to the suzerainty of the communists mainly of PRC.23 But the previous year, the US-Soviet détente militated the mind of Mao. So when Deng became the first high PRC official to address the UNGA since 1971, as China’s seat went to Beijing once Taipei lost it, he also met Kissinger. Kissinger found him to be extremely ‘direct’ on the verge of being vituperative. Deng told him sharply, though courteously that Mao thought the US stood on the shoulder of PRC and established ‘peace’ with the USSR. The cynicism of the Cold War had a long history of real shooting wars and secret assassinations by proxies of either side. Both Deng and Mao were aware of the reality. He thus talked about Beijing’s fear that the US no longer regarded the Soviets as its key adversary and might encourage China to fight the Soviet Union, thus weakening both ‘socialist’ adversaries. Kissinger realised that Deng’s message was more Mao’s than his own.24 Deng still had one more battle to fight to gain ultimate power. Hua Guofeng, who had been chosen as Mao’s successor, and became the chairman of the CPC and the premier of the nation did not really want Deng to return from the doghouse. He had earlier landed in a soup because his own ambition to replace Zhou after his death had made him overplay his hand; in other words, on the Chinese Memorial Day in April 1976, his supporters made a strong show of popular mobilisation at the Tiananmen Square.

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Gang of Four led by Qing wanted to thwart the popular show of force for Deng. They mobilised their Cultural Revolution thugs and major clashes took place in Beijing. That made Mao to step in and the CC to oust Deng. But this time, he remained at hand in the capital and not exiled to the outbacks. So after Mao’s death in September that year and after Hua took care of the Gang and jailed them, there was no option left for the newly minted Chinese premier to pave the return of Deng early 1977. Initially, a low key Hua Guofeng tried the strategy of humility by keeping a low key style of functioning and gaining the support of the Party stalwarts. But the same leaders knew China left denuded by the Revolution needed stronger leadership. Open warfare for power did not break out between the two leaders immediately. But eventually, the obvious had to happen. Deng relegated Hua to the background. A coalition that Deng crafted with senior conservative Party officials on the one hand, and more of the PLA leading lights on the other, held. They wanted a complete elimination of the Gang of Four acolytes right down to the provincial level and the PLA, if not further below. But Hua instead was wary of the moves. So the Party programme slowed down Deng and his supporters. Eventually though he succeeded. This came in the form of the CPC appointing its first Secretary General. It chose Hu Yaobang for the job. Hu was a prominent understudy of Deng. Finally during the third plenum of the 11th CPC Congress in December, Deng took control of the Party and the government, without any change in his official nomenclature though. Immediately after that, the 74-year-old Deng decided to visit the most important Cold War ally, the US, instead of the 57-year-old Hua on account of the fast progressing economic reform programme in early 1979. The stage was set for Deng to indulge in transformative change in his country. He had to wait for long to unpack his tool box. The US played a pivotal role in Deng’s change agency. The main role played by Washington for China’s reform and opening up came with a lot of pushing and shoving from the policy wonks who peopled the Jimmy Carter administration. They sought to prioritise between a relation détente with the Soviet Union and the newbie PRC. In case of the first, they wanted to build on the Nixon initiative of striking the Salt I Treaty. Carter wanted that kind of a big-ticket foreign policy success at the beginning of his tenure. His NSA Brzezinski though

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wanted to follow Kissinger to Beijing and strengthen the ties. He was so obsessed by the idea that Carter felt he was consumed by it. On the other hand, Cyrus Vance who was the Secretary of State was on the same page with Carter about putting the USSR first.25 He visited Moscow in 1977 soon after the inauguration of the new Democratic Party inauguration. His counterpart in the Russian capital was Andrei Gromyko. The reception was cold as Russia seemed to be in a wait and watch mode. For they felt that after the Vietnam defeat and the other less important dominoes like in the Latin American region of the US appearing wobbly they had the upper hand. The leadership of the Soviet Union including the General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev went on a tangent. He was more worried about the heat Soviet Union was taking on account of human rights violations (26). Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had already written his ‘Gulag Archipelago’ in 1973. It revealed much about the Stalinist purges, incarcerations and exiles. When in August 1977 after his visit to Moscow, Vance went to Beijing, he told the story to Deng. The Chinese leader told him that the reason that he was given that treatment by the Russians was because the Soviet leadership believed that America was on the defensive and the Soviet Union was posting along an offensive path. That truly shocked Vance that he exclaimed the US had all the power to devastate the USSR. Negotiations with Deng in the meanwhile were in a logjam because of Taiwan. Vance wanted that the Americans would like to continue their contacts with Taiwan. Deng would have none of that, and he said so. In fact, he said that the Americans were retreating from their previous promises of having a ‘one China’ policy.26 This logjam on Taiwan continued through Vance’s visit. The b ­ ottom line for the US on the Chinese leadership’s position was clear: they wanted a complete understanding with the US that there can be no full diplomatic status with Taiwan. For the US, this was a reality check because the Carter administration had thought that China would be more flexible in the post-Mao phase. They found a little or no that on the issue of cross-strait territory.27 In 1978, when serious negotiations between the Chinese and American delegations began, Deng in an internal memo stated that the US was in a hurry for normalisation of relations with Beijing. Deng interpreted that as a show of weakness on the part of the Americans and thus an advantage for China. Meanwhile in a November 2 meeting, it was clear about that the Americans were moving fast for a final solution

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to the problem. So they came up with the draft joint communiqué that consisted of 12 paragraphs.28 At a work conference in 1978 at the CPC held between the November 10 and December 15, Deng told the party men that they should concentrate on economic reconstruction and development. His view of Sino-US relations at its infancy was predicated on the economic aspect. So both the parities of the relationship were looking for compromises by which they could establish and maintain a stable and a strong connection. In January 1979, they finally reached an agreement for which both sides had to make concessions and compromises. The Chinese side wanted the abolition of the US-Taiwan Mutual Defense Treaty, when the PRC established official consular relationship with Washington. But they agreed that the Taiwan treaty would be terminated one year later after the PRC and the US had established embassies in each capital. That was a big gift by the Chinese. On the US side, they wanted Deng to state that the cross-strait relationship will be sorted out in a peaceful manner over time. But the Chinese leadership did not agree to this. They decided that both sides will record their stated positions in the joint communiqué and leave it at that. That was the point at which the final seal of the Sino-US relationship was put on paper. Carter in 1979 had the Chinese establish full diplomatic relationship the US.29

Notes

1. Parry, Robert, Kicking the Vietnam Syndrome, Consortiumnews.com, February 28, 2011, https://consortiumnews.com/2011/022811.html, accessed on September 13, 2015. 2. Elliott, Mai, “RAND in Southeast Asia: A History of the Vietnam War Era,” (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2010). 3. Ibid., quoting George Tanham, “Trip Report—Vietnam,” Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Corporation, October 6, 1961 (not releasable to the general public). 4. Op. cit., n. 2. 5. Ibid. 6. Kissinger, Henry, The Road to Reconciliation (Allen Lane, an Imprint of Penguin Books, 2011). 7. The Gulf of Tonkin resolution of the US Congress, supposedly revolved around two incidents that took place in quick succession on August 2 and August 4, 1964. On August 2, 1964, the American destroyer USS

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Maddox, while performing a signals intelligence patrol in the South China Sea, reported being attacked by three North Vietnamese Navy torpedo boats of the 135th North Vietnamese Torpedo Squadron. Maddox spent over 280 3-inch and 5-inch shells in what was dubbed a sea battle. One US aircraft was damaged, three North Vietnamese torpedo boats were allegedly damaged There were no U.S. human casualties. On August 4, the second Gulf of Tonkin incident was engineered as another sea battle, but instead evidence was found of “Tonkin ghosts” (false radar images) and not actual North Vietnamese torpedo boats. 8. Zasloff, J. J., The Role of North Vietnam in the Southern Insurgency (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 1964), RM-4140-PR, quoted in Mai Elliott, op. cit., n. 2. 9. Op. cit., n. 2. 10. Drew, Col Dennis M, 1986, Rolling Thunder 1965: Anatomy of a Failure, Reprinted from CADRE Paper, Report No. AU-ARI-CP-86-3, October 1986, 59 pp. by Air University Press, accessed on October 28, 2015 at http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/readings/drew2.htm. 11. US Department of State, Roles, Gains and Losses of Vietnam, China and Soviet Union in the Vietnam-Kampuchea Conflict, Briefing Memorandum, January 8, 1979. 12.  ChiCom (sic!) National People’s Congress Standing Committee Resolution on Vietnam, Incoming Telegram, US Department of State, April 21, 1965. Declassified in March, 1977. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid. 15. Op. cit., n. 6. 16. Ibid. 17.  Zhai, Qiang, China and the Vietnam Wars, 1950–1975 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), quoted in Mai Elliott, op. cit., n. 2. 18. Op. cit., n. 2. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid. 21. Zhai, Qiang, China and the Vietnam Wars, 1950–1975 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), quoted in Mai Elliott, op. cit, n. 2. 22. Op. cit., n. 2. 23.  US Policy Re; Sino-Soviet Conflict, US Department of State (INR) Memorandum, Declassified in December, 2000. 24. Normalization of US-China Relations, 2005, Ed. William C. Kirby, Robert S. Ross, Gong Li, Harvard University Asia Center, © the President and Fellows of the Harvard College.











84  P. BHATTACHARYA 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid. 29. Mann, James, About Face: A History of America’s Curious Relationship with China from Nixon to Clinton (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999).

CHAPTER 5

Consolidation, the US and Beginning of Economic Transformation

Emergence Deng was purged in 1976 in the wake of the ‘anti Lin, anti-Confucius’ programme. Launched by Mao as his last gambit to retain power, Deng was sought to be sent to the far outbacks of China during the Cultural Revolution. The perpetrators were the Gang of Four, who wanted to turn the Maoist programme into a second edition of the Revolution. But this time there was a change in the script. The PLA stepped in. They put Deng and his family in a secure location at what was once the foreign legations’ area in Beijing, called the Dong Jiaomin Hutong. Mao too was more empathetic towards him as he was allowed to retain his basic party membership though he was evicted from all his offices— the vice premiership, the Chief of the General Staff of the PLA and the Polit Bureau Standing Committee membership, indeed the Central Committee itself. Mao died in the last quarter of 1976. Deng made a comeback in 1977. The process of his integration into the decision-making circles of the party state was slow and painstaking. During the Third Plenum of the 11th CPC Congress, the backdrop was of incarcerations of the Gang of Four. One of Deng’s biographers, Ezra Vogel, mentions that everyone knew in the top tiers that it was a Gang of Five, but the plenary did not vilify Mao, main backer of the four. Instead, it attacked the concepts like ‘permanent revolution’, theory, the Cultural Revolution in its entirety and even the personality cult of a supremo of the CPC, in the form of its © The Author(s) 2019 P. Bhattacharya, Sino-US and Indo-US Relations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-7276-6_5

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chairmanship. This last move clearly targeted not just Mao, but his protégé, Hua Guofeng. The new mantra was ‘modernisation’. In 1963, Zhou had marked out four areas: agriculture, industry, ­science and technology and the PLA, for a complete overhaul. In 1978, Deng called these ‘Four Modernisations’ and launched it nationwide. Kissinger recalled a conversation in one of his more recent books, ‘On China’ with Deng at a banquet in Washington during the Carter regime. They had just formalised the relationship of the US with PRC by turning the respective liaison offices to full-scale embassies the same year, 1979. During that banquet, Kissinger was seated with Deng on a circular table. Between enjoying the fare laid out, Deng had outlined some of his vision for his country. And the man who had created the opportunity for the two nation states to come together was listening to a post-Mao enumeration of the path China would walk on. Kissinger related that as Deng spoke, the other tables fell silent. The Chinese leader knew that without the help of the West, in effect, the US, the PRC will not be able to rise as a modern nation. Deng and his cohort of reformers, consisting of Hu Yaobang, Zhao Ziyang and Chen Yun, etc., were clear in their mind that they needed knowledge and material resources from those countries of the Western Hemisphere. So as a first step, PRC decided to send their best and the brightest in thousands to those countries, for education. This brought in a fundamental change in theoretical studies of Maoist tenets that segued with Marx and Lenin. Deng’s post-Mao strategy had begun working by 1978 as Lenin’s formulation of ‘Imperialism is the highest form of Capitalism’ came under fire. It had come under attack from a large section of the Marxist scholars of China. By 1984, many of them rejected it outright. The majority took a less doctrinaire and more flexible attitude towards socialism/communism.1 Having said that, a realist Deng sought to leverage the Cold War politics of triangular diplomacy between the US-China-USSR for bringing economic and technological benefits to the country. It also put to rest a policy debate between three groups of strategists in the US, who sought to examine the relations. There was one group that thought a US rapprochement with China was a zero-sum game as the Soviet Union would automatically see the relationship adversely and quite correctly, read it to have been forged against itself. There was another group that sought a balanced relationship of Washington with Beijing and Moscow.

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The third group comprised those who believed that the US should not hurry to bring Beijing around to the policy preferences of Washington establishment. They wanted a steady growth in the bilateral relationship that would organically push Beijing to support the US in its agenda of getting the USSR to accommodate American extra-regional interests. The remarkable bipartisan consistency and continuity witnessed in Washington about Sino-US relations was evident first during President Jimmy Carter administration. Early in 1979, along with establishing full diplomatic relations, the US Congress passed on a series of legislative and non-legislative programmes that held enormous promise for economically benefitting PRC.2 ‘In August 1979, just prior to Vice President Mondale’s departure for China, administration officials informed the press that President Carter would now allow China to receive U.S. technical services under the terms of Section 607(a) of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, as amended. This would allow any agency of the U.S. Government to furnish services and commodities on an advance-of-fund or reimbursement basis to China’, a Congressional Research Service report recorded.3 Possibly the most important development of the time was extending ‘Most Favoured Nation’ (MFN) status. Carter administration signed a bilateral trade agreement with China in July 1979 and submitted it to the US Congress in October the same year. Yet, that was not enough. Then President, Jimmy Carter, had to issue a waiver to back up the agreement. For, a statute inserted in the Trade Act of 1974 stated, ‘Under the Jackson-Vanik amendment the MFN status may not be presented to any nonmarket economy (i.e. Communist) country that denies its citizens the right or opportunity to emigrate, or imposes more than nominal exit fees or taxes on documents or individuals’.4 The US Congress passed the status agreement in January 1980. Many doors to the US institutions meant for economic cooperation opened after this development. That included US Exim Bank credits and signing on the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) that guarantees private investment. Thus began a new journey for the Sino-US relation that was not just contingent on Cold War politics, but on a genuine desire on the part of the Americans to share with the PRC their scientific and technological expertise, besides fresh investments in industrial sector. It helped that Deng did not have the oversized ego of a Mao. And of course,

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the architect of post-Mao PRC that began its march towards catching up with the advanced part of the world was helped greatly because of the large Chinese diaspora, by investing some of their vast wealth in the mainland. Their numbers included even those who had fled to the West in fear of the communists. This is getting ahead of the story. Deng had a successful trip in 1975—from a Maoist viewpoint. The visit by Cyrus Vance, the Vice President to the US President, Jimmy Carter, the Democratic Party poll victors, really showed the bipartisan consensus on America’s China policy. And as written above, the Carter administration gave China the full diplomatic recognition. Besides, the slew of economic, trade and commercial measures legislated by the US federal legislature gave a huge boost to the Deng-led transformation being triggered just about then. Deng had come up with a plan to clean the Augean stables of ultra-left factions that ruled the CC and the PB. Thus, it can be said that in 1979 Deng kicked off the PRC modernisation plan. It began without any specific CC discussion or a PB resolution to commence the process. In June 1981, at the Sixth Plenum of the CPC’s 11th Party Congress Deng began the process of implementing the personnel changes—moving his acolytes upwards and antagonists down and out—and setting the stage for de-Maoisation of the Party, and thus the State. It had to be carefully calibrated and cautiously implemented as a set of measures that, while bringing in major ideological reset, did not undercut the party state’s underpinning legitimacy. Identified with the resolution titled, ‘On Certain Questions in the History of Our Party since the Founding of the People’s Republic of China’, Deng had the majority of party Congress attendees lined behind what was called ‘Left deviationism’. This had within its ambit the Cultural Revolution, the excesses of the Gang of Four—their highly divisive trial going on simultaneously—and what Deng called 30% mistakes of Mao, while he being right on 70% of situations.5 Earlier, the Third Plenum of the CPC 11th Congress in December 1978, Deng had the Party declare ‘an end to the period of class struggle’.6 This had cut the ground from under the feet of Hua Guofeng. He had positioned himself as Mao’s political inheritor. That was evident in the theory of governance he had propounded of the ‘Two Whatevers’; ‘We will resolutely uphold whatever policy decisions Chairman Mao made’ and ‘Unswervingly follow whatever instructions Chairman Mao

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gave’. Coupled with a critique of Mao’s ‘leftist’ turns witnessed in the activities of the Gang of Four and Deng’s manoeuvring for rehabilitating old comrades who had been put to pasture during the Cultural Revolution, it had created a groundswell for support in favour of the Deng Xiaoping line. He engineered the removal of Hua from the premiership of the nation. He was replaced by a Deng protégé, Zhao Ziyang. But not until the sixth plenary session of the 11th CPC Congress did the physically diminutive Deng gain the full control of the party state. He appointed Hu Yaobang the chairman of the Party, ousting Hua. Hu also replaced him as the chairman of what was then called the Military Commission or currently the Central Military Commission. This is the apex committee that controlled the PLA—the Maoist principle being the ‘gun’ subordinated by the Party. However, Deng had to also tone down his rhetoric and economic targets, because the PLA representatives within the Party committees were not supportive fully of his pragmatism. For example, he had plans to provide ‘incentives’ to the PRC mandarins. But the PLA representatives were eager too for the same hike. Their claim was that since the PLA did not produce anything, they would be denied the ‘bonus’, thus creating resentment in their ranks. Deng had to retrace his steps.7 The other opposition from the conservative members in the plenum was sharper favouring reduction in Deng’s public spending plan. They pointed at the inflation rate hovering around 10 to 15 per cent. So creator of modern China had to withdraw his public investment proposals. On foreign policy, however, they were all on the same page. The resolution drawn up stated, ‘We must maintain our national dignity and confidence and there must be no slavishness or submissiveness in any form in dealing with big, powerful, or rich countries’. While that could imply the main adversary, the USSR and also the new friend, the US, the nationalistic jargons that could trigger memories of the people of PRC went beyond the resolution. In a series of articles published in the wake of the plenum, the CPC made it clear their opposition to the Taiwan Relations Act. A CIA memo described how, ‘These articles reject what the Chinese see as attempts by some in the United States to use the Act to introduce “officiality” into the relations with Taiwan’.8 In the Third Plenum of the 12th CPC Congress, Deng got the ‘economic reform plan’ officially ratified. The plan was called A Decision of the CPC Central Committee on Economic Reform, and was presented

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as not of Deng’s creation, but Mao’s own rethinking the progress of the Chinese modernisation. The strategy was not to project the movement towards increasing marketisation—the propagation of ‘family farms,’ more autonomy for SOE managers etc.—were presented. The other tactic that the new supremo of the CPC, Kissinger, however, argues that Deng was into self-abnegation9 was to have various younger acolytes come up with new ideas for the reform, and then collate and present them as a part of the whole project. This was a double-layered insulation for Deng. One, he sought to disarm the Left opposition within the party through the invocation of Mao’s name; and two, by making the younger generation of leaders to frame the actual principles of the economic plan, he left the opportunity for himself to disavow some parts of the reform process if they raised the hackles of any section. Even as Deng was presenting the reform plan to the 12th CPC Congress’ Sixth Plenum, a major element of that was coming under a cloud. William (BiIl) Casey was the CIA director of Ronald Reagan’s first administration. He wrote a letter to George Shultz, the second Secretary of State, of the Reaganite first term. With that correspondence, Casey informed Shultz that he was forwarding an examination of official communications by various American agencies. Casey, of the ‘IranContra scandal’ fame, wrote at the beginning of his mail, ‘In the past we have discussed the possibility that American officials have made commitments to the Chinese that were not subsequently fulfilled’. The appended list of an audit of the documents exchanged between the US government agencies and personal papers of former president, Jimmy Carter, former secretary of state, Cyrus Vance, the NSC, Defence, Commerce, Treasury, and State departments. He ended the official letter that, said, ‘…[A]ccounting shows that the Chinese had good reason to expect that the USA would licence more high technology than has been the case’.10 A summary of appended notes stated, ‘Beijing’s major complaints to the US deal with an alleged failure to honor promises in the area of licensing technology exports. Cases such as the IBM census computers, the Western Geophysical package, and the Landsat D ground station have dragged on for years, despite assurances from top-level US officials, including Secretary Haig who told Deng Xiaoping in June 1981 that China would be treated like “any other friendly, non- allied state” on trade and technology transfer’.11

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This letter and the attached audited documents were important for two reasons: (a) Dual-use technology and the US advance in science and technology. A problem in terms of Washington’s much known reticence was a constraint on smooth trade amongst the two countries; and (b) technology transfers to China were also a subject of the Congressional approval process that needed the legislature to surmount its bias for Taiwan. In fact, Deng had observed, ‘There has been some improvement in Sino-U.S. relations recently. However, those in power in the United States have never given up their “two Chinas” or “one-and-a-half Chinas” policy. The United States brags about its political system. But politicians there say one thing during a presidential election, another after taking office, another at mid-term elections and still another with the approach of the next presidential election. Yet the United States says that our policies lack stability. Compared with its policies, ours are very stable indeed’.12 The architect of what many China-watchers have called the ‘Second Revolution’,13 Deng had said these words. The political side of Sino-US relations became more difficult after the departure of Nixon and Ford. More importantly was the exit of Henry Kissinger. Nixon-Kissinger combine had developed a finely balanced relationship between their large emergent interest in PRC and the traditional support to Taiwan. With the advent of Jimmy Carter in Washington, the issue of formalising relations with PRC got tied up in knots. The issue was put in the backburner first because of the Panama Canal status. The US was retrenching its ownership of the Canal. US Congress was supposed to vote on the issue. Carter and his first secretary of state, Cyrus Vance, thought in 1977 that if they were to grant the PRC ambassadorial recognition, they could have the very powerful Taiwan lobby on their back, and in the Congress, it could stop the more immediate issue of the Canal. Next came negotiations with the USSR for finalising the Strategic Arms Limitations Talks (SALT I). Vance took the position that if they were to bring PRC to the front-burner during this time, Moscow could at the very least stall the agreement that was more important for striking a détente. Deng in the meanwhile was also busy with putting CPC house in order. At the 12th Party Congress, he began a Party membership ‘rectification’ programme. This was translated as the reformers fellow-travellers

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being brought into the CC fold. By then, Hua Guofeng has come to know his future: political oblivion. The two rising stars in the party and the state were Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang. The reformers wanted to reach more from one radical programme, to another. Yet, Deng’s biggest problem was social order—or losing it. In his view, he could never get the ‘golden mean’—the Greek philosophical term from the time of Aristotle—by which he could tell, along with his peers ‘Council of Elders’—that economic freedom could lead to demands for political liberty. So in certain ways, he held the reforms back. This was where communism, equated with less democratic political systems and more controls, came in handy. The CPC expanded in his time and reached every corner of lives of Chinese people. Small wonder, his choice to replace Zhao Ziyang for shedding ‘actual’ tears with the students during what can be called ‘Occupy Tiananmen Square’ proved the point, albeit in a way that saw Zhao expelled from the Party. The Tiananmen Square incident is coyly described by party apparats, who call the day of PLA’s removal of the occupiers, the ‘June 4th incident’. But the ferocity of the CPC’s reaction to this youth movement was evident in the way Zhao was arrested by the police and kept in house arrest till his death. Jiang Zemin, then the provincial chief of Shanghai, was elevated to the PB. Eventually, he opened the door for the first time the membership of the CPC to Chinese billionaires, who could be called out as those indulging in ‘guanxi’ (cronyism). This aspect of China’s modernisation—the ‘second Chinese revolution’ as the American elite described Deng’s programme—became so overwhelming that corruption became rampant and widespread. It percolated from the top where even senior functionaries of the government of level of premiers, including Jiang, were believed to have amassed wealth beyond what their official salaries could accord. The marauding private sector of PRC, however, did not enjoy public confidence even after so many decades of the liberalisation programme. To frame the issue in a perspective, a first-time visitor of China would do well to travel down the mighty Yangtze River from the point where the Three Gorges Dam has been built. One of the fellow-travellers on the boat I was sailing, Harry Chang (a Westernised version of a Chinese name for the benefit of the foreigners)— he called himself a tour guide who worked out of Chongqing, the former

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capital of the so-called Nationalist Chinese government—talked about the massive urbanisation that one witnesses on both sides of the river. He talked about how the people of Chinese would rather buy properties from the government than the builders of the private sector—a refrain the people of India can relate with. But setting that aside for the time being, let’s dial back to how China under Deng found its smooth stride with the US. The answer will be ‘never’. Because after eternal delay that marked the formalisation of the Sino-US relations during the Carter administration, the man to succeed him, Ronald Reagan was an old school Republican Party conservative. He was also equally or more pliable by the Taiwan lobby. He restarted the sale of arms to Taiwan. That became a major diplomatic row between Beijing and Washington. One of Deng’s major gripe against Reagan was his pronouncements during the presidential race campaign that he would like to establish full diplomatic relations with Taiwan. This riled Deng no end. George Herbert Walker Bush, who was once a liaison officer in Beijing and then running mate of Reagan, visited Beijing to mollify Deng. But the CPC supremo could not be softened up, despite Bush saying that it was ‘mere’ campaign rhetoric. Deng made a big issue about the advanced arms, like F-16 fighter planes to Taiwan. But Reagan was initially oblivious of Beijing’s rising ire. On the other hand, Reagan’s main agenda issue was to give the Soviet Union a body blow during his regime. In that matrix, China was important. Deng knew that fact: and on the sidelines of the North– South dialogue at Cancun, Mexico, General Alexander Haig, the First Secretary of State of Ronald Reagan, met Huang Hua, the Foreign Minister of China. Huang told Haig that the US should wait with the arms sales to Taiwan for a time only after it concluded its arms supply talks with PRC. And, Haig told Huang that the quantity of arms sales to Taiwan would not exceed the limits set by the Carter administration.14 The following agreement with Taiwan for arms sales was preceded by a Sino-US agreement that reflected the Deng-Bush conversation during the presidential campaign of Reagan-Bush ticket. The communiqué issued on 17 August 1982, ‘United States-China Joint Communiqué on United States Arms Sales to Taiwan’. The Sino-US accord that put restrictions on US arms sales to Taipei recorded that the seller ‘has no intention of infringing on Chinese

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sovereignty and territorial integrity, … or pursuing a policy of “two Chinas” or “one China and one Taiwan”’.15 The agreement stipulated that the sales ‘will not exceed, either in qualitative or in quantitative terms, the level of those supplied in recent years and that it intends to reduce gradually its sales of arms to Taiwan, leading over a period of time to the final resolution’.16 This became the third foundational document of the Sino-US bilateral, along with the Shanghai Communique, and the 1979 establishment of full diplomatic relationship communiqué. Even as the kinks in the relations were being removed, the economic relations between the two countries were developing apace. This is evident from the first trade surplus that China registered in 1982—a modest $2 million—but a harbinger of what was to happen in future. By 1990—two years before his death—when Deng had more or less removed himself from official positions excepting the chairmanship of the CMC, the negative trade balance of the US was of the order of a little less than $12 billion, with the dollar computed at 2013 price. The last of the Zhou-Deng ‘Four Modernisations’ was the modernisation of the armed forces. In 1985, Deng opened the gauntlet with the PLA. He wanted two issues to be resolved by the leadership of the PLA: (a) he wanted the gerontocratic leadership of the PLA to retire, and; (b) Deng wished the PLA to engage in commercial activities from the defence industrial base they had built ever since the USSR began denying them proprietary technology. One must recall that Deng had the support, albeit qualified, from the PLA for his upending of the policies of Mao that appeared from the Left of communist spectrum. The armed forces—especially those who belonged revolutionary Red Army—were concerned about social unrest. When Deng sought their retirement, these leaders feared that they would lose their perks of office and their legacies. A CIA note prepared for the consumption of internal US government agencies like the NSC, Department of State, Departments of Defence and its own various divisions noted, ‘Deng Xiaoping is stepping up the pressure on the People’s Liberation Army to support more fully his economic and political reforms’.17 The note also said that he wanted to hand over the chairmanship of the CMC to Hu Yaobang in a fluid and peaceful transition process. He didn’t want the CMC burdened by funding the modernisation of the PLA through the State’s resources alone. He was the first Chinese leader

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to push the PLA into setting up its commercial ventures18—a policy that was not necessarily welcome in the formative decades of a young State. But his calculation was also based on the geopolitical environment, with a hostile Soviet Union becoming greatly enmeshed in a ‘no-win’ competition with the other superpower. Moscow was also deeply enmeshed in its own ‘Vietnam’—Afghanistan. Reagan, based on capitalist model that had more depth than Soviet state capitalism, was bent on bringing down the Moscow-based regime by outspending them in the strategic weapons and bleed it dry in the Northwest Asia country of ferocious tribal war-fighting. With Bill Clinton administration, China had a different problem. As Clinton’s grand idea for his presidency was his early dalliance with Wilsonian vision of the world, he sought to impart lessons on human rights to all and sundry. Thus, when the Tiananmen Square uprising took place, even as Deng’s chosen leaders like Hu and Zhao did the firefighting, and Reagan’s Washington sought to dabble in the boiling cauldron seeking to find out whether another ‘communist’ regime can be brought to heel, with his successor, Clinton, Tiananmen created an overhang. Deng might have thought after the 12th CPC Congress that with Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang in place, he would be able to take a back seat, knowing that his place in Chinese history and his policy legacy were safe. In fact, he told an insistent and incessant visitor, Henry Kissinger in 1982, ‘Our criteria to select those to be responsible cadres are as follows: They must be revolutionaries. They must be younger. Better educated. Professionally competent. As I said, the 12th Party Congress has not only shown the continuity of the new policies but also insured continuity and the personnel arrangements have also assured continuity’.19 The smugness of that statement born on believing in Confucian ‘excellence’ was severely challenged in 1987, when Hu Yaobang had to be removed from his office for a ‘heart condition’. Hu was hailed by many Chinese, especially the youth for his ‘liberalism’. For example, Hu refused to take on the task of CMC chairman because it had older leaders, who were largely what can be called ‘conservatives’. He wanted them to retire before he took over. He even pressured Deng to leave the office he held as vice-chairman of the party and a member of the Standing Committee of the PB. Hu Yaobang also allowed the media debate the reforms programme.20 Even as Deng eventually got rid of him in an ‘extended’ PB in mid-January 1987, the signs of the impending doom

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for Hu were present in 1986, when Zhao was made the chair of the ‘Political Reforms Leading Group’. Hu had a huge cardiac arrest in a PB meeting in April 1989. His comrades in the apex committee revived him, took him to the exclusive hospital for the highest echelons of the Chinese power-elite—Peking University First Hospital (also known as the Beida Hospital). But Hu was beyond repair: he died. Mikhail Gorbachev, the man who had introduced a sweeping reform programme through liberal policies, specially in terms of politics, as in the USSR by calling them Perestroika and Glasnost was due in Beijing in May. The students of Beijing University, on the other hand, first began by placing floral wreath and elegiac poetry in the memory of Hu. His body was placed at the Monuments to the People’s Heroes at the Tiananmen Square. He was hailed as a liberaliser and a man who had saved the students from a crackdown in 1986 during the cycle of agitations. The contrast was clear to the students: Here was Gorbachev, the reformer, visiting Beijing, even as an ousted liberaliser Hu Yaobang lay dead. The students, largely based in Beijing, began what can be called in today’s counterfactual world, an ‘Occupy Tiananmen Square’ movement. The resultant crisis showed up the deep confusion amongst the political elite of China—those who held high office. After Zhao was made the general secretary (the terminological changeover from the Party chairman to Party general secretary as the top-most job had occurred during the latter part of Hu Yaobang’s days at the apex), the position of the Premier had opened up. Li Peng, considered a hard-liner, was raised to the position. Returning to the story of the Tiananmen Square movement, the most important volume on those days of turmoil is Tiananmen Papers, a collection of primary source material like official papers, memoranda of conversations and documentation of what had happened on the night of 4–5 June 1989, compiled by a still unknown Chinese ranking official who took the pseudonym of Zhang Liang and was edited by Andrew J. Nathan and Perry Link, published in 2001. A close reading of the compilation shows that till late May 1989, Deng had been taking the students’ agitation rather casually. He certainly wanted to avoid the embarrassment of a foreign dignitary like Gorbachev not witnessing the spectacle of the occupied Tiananmen Square, teeming with ‘unwashed’ students. But he thought in the aftermath of the only peace deal—since the demise of Khrushchev—with the Soviet leader could kick off a nationalist upsurge that could drown out dissent.

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That was not to be, partly because of Deng’s own reform and removal of restrictions on a visit to PRC had opened up the once-reclusive nation to all visitors. This included the Anglo-American news media representatives and those from West European nations, who had a notion that Beijing could be witnessing a Prague Spring or a Hungarian Revolution or even a Warsaw Uprising. They had a ready excuse: covering Gorbachev’s historic visit. So, the Tiananmen Square students got the oxygen of publicity and they decided to ratchet up the movement. A leading group of protesters decided to sit on a hunger strike. That created the ground of potentially incendiary situation. That chaos threatened the brotherhood of the PRC’s political elite with, at worst a permanent loss of levers of power. Deng convened a meeting of a group of senior politician-generals—those who peopled the CC and the PB, and even the Standing Committee of the PB. The meeting of course included Zhao and Li. Earlier, soon after Gorbachev left, on 20 May Deng wanted martial law to be declared in Beijing municipality. On a previous 17 May meeting at age 82 years, Deng took hold of the clean-up operation at the Square that was overseen by the Great Hall of the People, by the PLA. The leader who opposed it was Zhao. He found merit in the arguments of the students who wanted a corruption-free and transparent government. He also wanted a softer approach with the students. But Zhao and a few of his accomplices were outnumbered by the hardliners. Li Peng was the frontman of the group. Yang Shangkun, who later became the president of PRC in 1988, was Deng’s liaison to the CMC. Deng had restricted access to himself to only a few senior partymen. Ezra Vogel, the Harvard University don, who was one of the biographers of Deng, mentions in his 700+ page book that the primary concern of the students was freedom to choose their careers. For, there was a skill-shortage at that time in the nation. And the government was assigning jobs to the passing-out pupils. Additionally, even that was dependent on reports (of loyalty!) the various Party apparatchiks filed, who mingled amongst the students. That was clearly too much for them.21 On top of that when Hu Yaobang was purged, popular teachers like the physicist like Fang Lizhi was interned. Zhao, meanwhile, knew his days were numbered. The day of the 17 May meeting, he told his assistant to draft a resignation letter. In the evening, he spoke to his wife and other members of his family, including his two sons. He was put on house arrest, never to be heard again.

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Meanwhile, the massed PLA troops—by Western estimates to be 50,000 in number with battle tanks and assault rifles—who had come to clear out the Square, confronted many obstacles put up by the students and sympathetic citizens of Beijing. In some cases, the students even talked to the young soldiers of the PLA to provide them the rationale of the ‘occupation’ of the Square. But in the intervening night of 4–5 June, they broke through the barriers. The firing by the PLA forces at the students’ was more en route, than at the location. Interestingly, when this author had visited Beijing at the invitation of the Beijing Foreign Studies University (Beiwai) via the East–West Centre, Hawai’i, virtually none of the current students or the previous ones would actually talk about the incident. It almost did seem that there were more Chinese dissident students in the West than in China. What was evident otherwise was the high level of nationalism amongst the youth, including amongst the school children. What was incredible was the realist attitude of the Bush I administration in the US and the British government led by the ‘Iron Lady’ Thatcher. Almost within a week of the 4 June 1989, Tiananmen Square incident, first Thatcher sent her envoy, Percy Cradock, a civil servant and a sinologist who had been the Crown’s ambassador to PRC. Even the Bush I government sent General Brent Scowcroft, who was his National Security Adviser, the fulminations on violation of human rights apart. The subtext of these visits was the signal, ‘business as usual’. But in the US, specially the pressure of the Congress was challenging the White House from both the Left and the Right. On the Left of the political spectrum, Nancy Pelosi, then a young Democratic Party House Representative wanted State Department and the presidency should send an unequivocal statement that the US is appalled and express ‘outrage’ to the leaders. Considering President Bush I was a Republican Party stalwart and who had dealt with China first as a liaison officer in Beijing and the director of the CIA, he staved off the pressure by stating, ‘[W]e could not look the other way when it came to human rights or political reforms but we could make it plain our views in terms of encouraging their strides of progress (which were many since the death of Mao) rather than unleashing an endless barrage of criticism…’.22 William (Bill) Jefferson Clinton succeeded Bush I with Wilsonian vision of the world. His activist foreign policy wanted to hold the nations of the world to a standard of ‘human rights’ that even the United States’ law enforcement authorities had a problem implementing. If the Chinese

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leadership jailed and exiled Fang Lizhi and a few of the student activists, the US had amongst its convicts the largest African-American population in its jails. Deng was quoted telling his understudies, ‘Cross the river by feeling the stones’. This has been variously interpreted by the Western observers. To this author, it appears to say that when one negotiates an uncharted path, one needs to have high tactility and the sensitivity to get across without causing too many ripples in the society at large. In fact, this has been the primary condition for the Zhongnanhai residents—that under no circumstances should there be uncontrollable turmoil in China. Tiananmen Square occupation was one such instance. It could be managed because the PLA had developed high stakes in the economic progress of the nation. The fact remains that the PRC economy grew by ten per cent or so consistently for two decades. Despite high levels of corruption, the people benefitted. In one generation, the CPC raised three hundred million people above abject poverty and destitution. This inured the population from the ‘less’ important misgivings of losing a few liberties. Even Clinton, with his missionary zeal understood that. In purchasing power parity (PPP) terms, PRC’s gross domestic product (GDP) is larger than America’s. Still, the leadership of China has targeted that only by 2020, they should become a middle-income country. Till the 1999 embassy bombing in Belgrade by the NATO forces, China had used its veto power at the UNSC only twice. Clearly, it did not wish to raise its profile abroad, beyond its ‘quiet’ means. But the kind of wealth the Chinese have garnered cannot but translate into national power. Also its own population—not quite taken in by Mao thought or Marxism—has turned intensely ‘nationalistic’. This feeling of the people has been often fanned by the CPC as it talks about ‘Hundred Years of humiliation’ or a ‘Chinese Dream’ framed by Deng himself. He had famously stated ‘It doesn’t matter if a cat is black or white; as long as it catches mice’. That pragmatism was still often challenged by the corrupt and free-loading CPC leaders and the party and state bureaucracy. In 1987, the Chinese leadership at the top launched an ‘anti-bourgeois’ campaign. By then, special economic zones (SEZs)—trade unions of any kind except the CPC’s labour arm (All-China Federation of Trade Unions) were banned in PRC—had come up. Guangzhou, the dominant southern Chinese town, by then became the hub of the economic transformation the nation was undergoing. The

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‘anti-bourgeois campaign’ launched in 1987 had a unique impact in the region. Corruption amongst the vast sections of leadership had already begun eating away at the vitals of the Party structure. Two senior Party leaders-cum-officials were actually thrown out of the Party and incarcerated through the process of Central Discipline Inspection Commission (CDIC). One of them was the party state boss of Guangzhou. Ezra Vogel again has written in his exhaustively detailed biography of Deng, nothing really changed in the region. In fact, a CIA intelligence report stated, ‘(In Guangzhou) entrepreneurs told reporters that they ignored the leadership changes in Beijing and that the campaign had not affected business there. One entrepreneur reportedly said “the only freedom we want is the freedom to make money”’.23 If Mao ruled PRC on the basis of fear and his ability to coerce the population and even his own cadres, Deng manipulated the levers of power through economic management. In the post-Deng phase of ‘China now seeks a more balanced mix that also uses “idea power”’.24 An Australian scholar has tested a fit for the rise of PRC in the context of ‘offensive realism’. Professor John Mearsheimer, a US-based international studies expert is often quoted as the propounder of this formulation. He challenges China’s Hu Jintao principle of ‘peaceful rise’.25 ‘Offensive’ realism holds that States in global system are always in a conflict of attrition. Each of them competes for power in the world— some times to secure themselves and sometimes to have accretion in their national power that could lead to hegemonistic goals. Mearsheimer opines that the ‘offensive capability’ of each State based in their militaries is not so much to defend themselves, but, on the contrary, to extend the reach they have in their ability to increase their influence over global developments.26 Having said that, conventional wisdom describes that the Chinese leadership belonged to the exercise of ‘State-centred Realism’. 27 A theory most well enunciated by Fareed Zakaria states that when the locus of political power shifted from the US Congress to the presidency, an essentially isolationist political elite of the country began to build its military, its diplomatic corps and began to intervene in global affairs. This made it an important global power by the end of World War I and to a pre-eminent superpowerdom at the end of World War II. Chinese political elite—both Nationalists and the Communists— quickly understood that they have a role to play in global politics. It can be argued that the Chinese communists did not change the Chinese

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name of their country which in Pinyin reads as Zhong Guo—the Middle Kingdom—is illustrative of their notion of the nation’s ‘manifest destiny’. That destiny first came into play in its own neighbourhood: Korea, Vietnam and India. In two of these three instances, a leadership used to military confrontations closer home—and of a nature that was familiar in terms of military sophistication, took on the might of the more modern forces like that of the US. One can argue, how an ideology that had such a prominent element of globalism and even professed unity amongst the international proletariate—the ones who people the lowest ranks of these armies—jettison idealist principles or of the constructivist school of international relations. It would have been normal for a Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai to militate for creating strong, equitable international institutions. But instead, Mao more than Zhou proved to be a supreme realist: he wanted a disunited Vietnam, a Korea divided in such a way that it would play a buffer state against a land invasion to Chinese mainland or just teach India a ‘lesson’ and then withdraw after superficially changing the ‘line of actual control’. That early realism of the Maoist State was nothing but belonging to not just the realist school but Zakaria’s ‘State-centred Realism’. A short, few lines on realism is important at this stage for the non-specialist students of politics. Realism in international studies borrows its epi­ stemic roots from Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes believed in the venal nature of the Homo sapiens: a characteristic defined by self-centred pursuit of interests, violent anarchic behaviour and an unhealthy disregard for regulations that safeguards the structure of civilised action. ‘Classical realism’ of Hans Morganthau, Reverend Reinhold Neibuhr or the ‘neo-realism’ of Kenneth Waltz argues that the absence of international institutions that impose and uphold global order is a major threat. This theory underlines the lessening, if not negating the effect of an anarchic world, the global order needs an ideological construct that would circumvent the deleterious impact of disorder. But classical realism is based on the characteristics of individual actors, who happen to be leaders, while Waltz’s neo-realism is based more on international relations’ structural failures. Which theory then is the perfect fit for Chinese leaders and their power based on their personal acceptability amongst the people in general. That is normally based on their capability to deliver material comfort they can deliver to the population. On the other hand, the PRC’s

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State-building exercise reflected in the accretion in national power. This is most visible in the fourth element of Zhou’s and Deng’s modernisation process, i.e. the PLA. There have been reports that the PLA-Navy is on the verge of commissioning its second aircraft carrier, indigenously built. The PRC has undertaken serious reorganisation of the PLA ground forces, t­ ransformed the Second Artillery Corps that solely handled the nuclear weapons into a PLA Rocket Force that handles all missiles—conventional and nuclear. In terms of its order of battle, it is commanded directly by the CMC. The PLA-AF has already begun flying their stealth fifth-generation fighter aircraft, J-20. On top of the big inventory of PLA-N submarines—both conventional and nuclear—is supposed to corral off the large swathes of critical areas like the vast EEZ China has. Despite a steady increase in allocation of resources to the PLA, its reorganisation, etc., it still cannot support ‘offensive’ realism-based projection of military power, especially against the global hegemon, the US and its allies. But instead, a PLA-N-based strategy for the defensive-offence posture can seek to safeguard its growing interests in the South China Sea, East China Sea, parts of the Western Pacific and the Indian Ocean routes for its trade. The alternative sea- and land-based routes via Persian Gulf, Arabian Sea and then from Balochistan by road to Xinjiang are being created. These objectives may have been designed on the basis of contingencies that have appeared on the horizon. On the aspect of geostrategy, the US effort to encircle PRC by nation states that are either challenged by or fearful of China’s rise, Beijing instead has played its cards that can be fitted into the realm of neo-realism. For, it has sought to recast the world order dominated by Western powers. In the UN Security Council, where PRC is a veto-wielding permanent member, it had used the special power of veto only twice between the mid-1970s and 1999 when its embassy in Belgrade. Equally important, it was instrumental in setting up an alternative architecture of international financial institutions. Under the rubric of the BRICS nations, it set of the New Bank for Development—a challenger to the World Bank—and the Asian Infrastructure and Investment Bank (AIIB) for the G-20 nations. This clearly challenged the Asian Development Bank based in Manila, a post-Bretton Woods phenomenon but mainly controlled by Japan, at the behest of its Western allies.

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Human rights is one of the sticks with which the US liberal intelligentsia would periodically seek to beat China, but since the departure of Bill Clinton from the US presidency, and with the West being mired in the twin crises of its War on Terrorism and the 2008 financial meltdown that eventually is showing its bite on the industrial sector—the Main Street as American media likes to call it. The deep recession has affected the economic growth of the Western nations, in the process, the world, and as a natural corollary, the PRC, which had an export-led growth model. The Chinese economy grew by 10% for almost two decades straight thus lifting by their bootstraps 300 million of its citizens above the poverty level. Today, only about 2.5% of the population earn less than one dollar a day. Now that the growth figure has come down to about seven per cent, the PRC leadership is having to switch the economic levers to domestic demand-led growth, thus reducing its phenomenal savings rate—close to 30-odd per cent—that continued for two decades. This never left the PRC party state short of cash for funding investments in such a way that the state-owned enterprises (SOEs) could grow to a level by which it can buy out the failing private industries. This mixed economy can never be called ‘mixed-up economy’ that became the basic line for fouling up the others of such nature by the libertarian media and market-oriented economists. For long, the same media have speculated about social disintegration in PRC on account of the slowdown. They based their argument on a supposed Faustian bargain the Chinese people had struck, the media said, by which the latter framed the message to their leaders thus: ‘You give us growth, we give you the power to rule’. It’s still early to pass the verdict on potential social unrest that can engulf the country, triggered by slower growth. But for close to a decade since 2008 crisis, while the societies in Europe and the US are in ferment—divided sharply between the extreme right and the left—the China shop has not been busted yet. Returning thus to geostrategy, one can paraphrase Charles Dickens, that for the Chinese, ‘This is the worst of times, this is the best of times’. This leads us to Kenneth Waltz and neo-realism. He in his seminal work, ‘Theory of International Politics’, ended with a question. The following is what the author found most relevant, ‘The costs of war now appear to be frighteningly high. Since the most impressive of large and complicated self-regulatory systems operate only within contrived orders, the effective

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management of the affairs of nations appears to be a crying need. With power internationally uncontrolled, is it reasonable to expect states to adjust their relations through their independent policies without war serving as a means of regulation?’27 There is this international structure that the victors of the World War II established. Recalling the Wilsonian mistake of establishing the League of Nations and the war reparations imposed on Germany following the Versailles Treaty pushed the country into the hands of the Nazis. This time the victors US, UK, France and the Soviet Union divided the world into areas of influence. They even divided Germany into west and east with Berlin being bang on the middle divided in the same way with a coming up as a pointer towards division of the world. For West Germany and the rest of Europe, mainland US was generous: they instituted the Marshall Plan meant to reconstruct all of Western Europe including West Germany. Plus, for the security of Western Europe, the US and its allies instituted the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). The Soviet Union on the other hand had most of Eastern Europe along with East Germany where they created an economic system of state capitalism. Moscow used the East European countries to provide raw material for Stalin’s gargantuan industrial production process. For security of its area of influence, Stalin created the Warsaw Pact. But to top it, all the victors created an organisation which could aim at global governance, the UN. Considering that this institution of international order had an apex body over and above the General Assembly called the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) in which the four northern hemispheric powers and the only Asian representative China enjoyed a veto, it meant no issue of substance could be resolved in the spirit of cooperation and brotherhood as idealist school of international relations had hoped for. On the contrary even as the US and the USSR became the two superpowers with all the other being camp followers, it so appeared that since they had the nuclear weapons that could destroy the world many times over, they didn’t dare fight each other directly. Instead, they outsourced much of the wars to their client states on the basis of whom they considered their success or failure. And, when Winston Churchill finally declared an Iron Curtain had descended over Europe in 1946, at Westminster College, Missouri, the US, the Cold War too began in right earnest. The first war was bang in the middle of Asia, in Korea, the days of proxy wars descended on the world.

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The policy paralysis of the UN was such that even after the end of the Cold War, when the first European War broke out in former Yugoslavia, the killing of non-Serbian communities began with a vengeance. The Clinton administration that was in power appeared powerless at this development, with the Serbs being backed tacitly by Russia. Eventually though the US had to get involved because the ferocity of the genocide, and new sociological term, ‘ethnic cleansing’ was added to the English lexicon. Thus as if to prove that Thomas Hobbs was right, the world was engulfed in a period of ‘Long War’ of anarchic nature. This matrix of international engagement that was so contentious could not have prevailed if the inherent nature of men (and women in power) was not saturated by violence. This was an axiom of classical realism. Variations of this theme constituted the later schools realist understanding of theoretic International Relations.

Notes





1. Shambaugh, David L., China’s America Watchers’ Images of the United States 1978–1986, a PhD dissertation at University of Michigan, 1988, © David L. Shambaugh, p. 63. 2.  Sutter, Robert G., China-US-Soviet Relations, Issue Brief Number IB79115, Congressional Research Service, Major Issues System, Date Originated, October 25, 1979, p. CRS-3. 3. Ibid., p. CRS-4. 4. Ibid., p. CRS-5. 5.  Vogel, Ezra F., Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China (Cambridge, MA and London, UK: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press), Copyright © 2011 by Ezra F. Vogel, p. 299. 6. Chief, China Division, Office of East Asian Affairs, The Chinese Communist Party’s Sixth Plenum: Deng Firms His Grip, Central Intelligence Agency, National Foreign Assessment Centre. Prepared in November, 1981, Declassified on July 14, 2005. 7. Op. cit., n. 5. 8. Op. cit., n. 5. 9.  Chief, China Division, Office of East Asian Affairs, China’s Economic Reforms: Charting A Risky Course, Central Intelligence Agency, National Foreign Assessment Centre. Prepared in November, 1984. Declassified on February 9, 2009. 10.  Directorate of Intelligence, “China’s Economic Reforms: Stretching Socialism,” Central Intelligence Agency, Prepared in July, 1983. Declassified on August 5, 2010.

11. Ibid. 12. Ibid. 13. Xiaoping, Deng, An Idea for the Peaceful Reunification of the Chinese Mainland and Taiwan, Excerpt from a talk with Professor Winston L. Y. Yang of Seton Hall University, South Orange, NJ, USA, Selected Works, Vol. III, June 23, 1983. 14. “Reform — dubbed China’s ‘Second Revolution’ — was one of the most common terms in China’s political vocabulary in the 1980s.” This is the first sentence of ‘Introduction’ to a volume of the Federal Research Division, Library of Congress, Eds.: Robert L. Worden, Andrea Matles Savada, and Ronald E. Dolan © 1988 United States Government as represented by the Secretary of the Army. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid. 17.  Chief, Domestic Policy Branch, Office of East Asian Analysis, China Division, Memorandum Titled China; Deng Pressures the Army Old Guard, Prepared on January 8, 1985. Declassified on October 13, 2009. 18. Ibid. 19. Kissinger, Henry, On China, Allen Lane, an imprint of Penguin Books, 2011, © Henry A. Kissinger, 2011. 20. Chief, China Division, Office of East Asia Along with Office of Leadership Analysis, Key Questions in the Fall of China’s Hu Yaobang: An Intelligence Assessment, Central Intelligence Agency. Prepared in May, 1987. Declassified in parts June 22, 2012. 21. Op. cit., n. 4 in Chapter 2, p. 177. 22. Op. cit., n. 5 in Chapter 1, p. 366. 23. Chief, Political Assessments Branch, China Division, Office of East Asian Analysis, CIA, China: The Anti-Bourgeois Liberalization Campaign in the Provinces, Prepared in July 22, 1987. Declassified in Parts June 20, 2012. 24.  Shrimpton, Rebecca, “A Problematic Paradigm—The Limitations of Realism as a Theoretical Framework for Understanding China: A Case Study of John Mearsheimer’s Approach,” Centre for Defence and Strategic Studies, Australian Defence College, September 2013 © Commonwealth of Australia. 25. Mearsheimer, J. J., The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), p. 3. 26. Waltz, Kenneth N., Theory of International Politics, Addison-Wesley Series in Political Science, Copyright © 1979 by Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc. Philippines copyright 1979 by Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc. 27. Ibid.



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CHAPTER 6

India in Vanishing Bipolar World: Begins Negotiating Choppy Waters

Political tectonics in the world was shifting since the days of President Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s. It took about a decade for all the chickens to come home to roost. The process began with what turned out to be USSR’s ‘Vietnam’. Even as General Boris Gromov crossed the Russia-built Friendship Bridge across the Salang Pass, along with the stragglers of the retreating Red Army from Afghanistan, the world was witnessing another chapter being written of the decline of the ‘socialist-imperialism’. The day was 15 February 1989.1 One did not need to read Paul Kennedy’s brilliant opus, Rise and Fall of Great Powers, to embellish what was happening on the ground. The misfortune of Najibullah, then president of the country—a Soviet protégé—was to continue for another three years based on daily Russian supplies, before he was felled by the swords of the murderous tribes led by homicidal maniacs like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Incidentally, Najib’s family was then under the care of New Delhi at a secret location. The same year, a continent apart the trade unionists of the Solidarity movement were challenging the same empire, despite being ruled by yet another military ruler, albeit supposedly a ‘communist’, General Wojciech Jaruzelski. Lech Walesa, the leader of the Gdansk port-based Solidarity movement was already enthroned by the opposing camp of the colliding superpowers as a peace laureate in 1985. But he had to take another four years to ascend to power, removing the vestiges of communism. © The Author(s) 2019 P. Bhattacharya, Sino-US and Indo-US Relations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-7276-6_6

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In neither of the cases the leader of the Non-aligned Movement (NAM), India had taken an independent position, outside of the ambit of Soviet expansionism. Though it is a matter of record that Indira Gandhi had privately chewed out Leonid Brezhnev, the then general secretary in one of their penultimate meetings, before he died in 1982. Maharaj Krishna Rasgotra, a foreign secretary during Gandhi’s second inning as prime minister recounted in his recent memoir, Brezhnev pleaded with Indira Gandhi, ‘I want to get out of Afghanistan. Please show me the way’. And Gandhi responded, ‘The way out is the same as the way in’! This exchange took place in September 1982.2 Gandhi had a bone to pick with the Soviet leadership. After the end of the internal emergency and in the 1977 general election Gandhi, and her younger son, Sanjay—someone who also had contributed to her downfall—along with her Party Congress (I) got wiped out electorally. Brezhnev’s otherwise somnolent administration acting with great alacrity had removed all mentions of Indira from even the textbooks of children of the USSR. She naturally was unhappy. In fact, during the 1980s when Gandhi returned to power, she began sourcing some of the military purchases from the West. For example, the Jaguar fighter aircraft contract went to Britain; so did negotiations begin with the French for the Mirage 2000 fighter aircraft in 1982. Result was when India began the weaponising its nuclear explosives during Indira’s successor, her elder son, Rajiv’s term as prime minister, those French aircraft became the only vehicle that could be called as the only delivery system. Rajiv was a moderniser: the prime minister surrounded himself with a young, similarly aged peer group. They were technologically savvy and were ambitious enough to try and make the country leapfrog and join the ranks of the top tier of developing nations. This was the time of American technology denial regimes, and the country did not have granular economic growth plans that could provide a platform for a take-off. But in the process, Rajiv emptied the coffers. Worse, he made the country borrow from the private short-term debt market abroad. So, when he was ousted from power, the following governments found foreign exchange reserves of the country at a level of about a fortnight’s worth for import of essential goods. Meanwhile, two events took place that opened the nation which led the NAM, towards Washington at the unipolar moment of a ‘new world order’. First, a Commander, US Army of the Hawai’i-based US

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Pacific Command, Lieutenant General Claude M. Kickleighter, now retired, prepared a proposal in 1990 that would be the first step towards military-to-military cooperation for who Ambassador Dennis Kux called, ‘Estranged Democracies’. Historically, Indo-US relations remained encumbered by the dynamic of the Cold War; in that order, India being a leader of the newly independent, post-colonial nations. The novelty of the Indian Union—based on an independence largely won by Gandhian non-violent means and a large democracy with full franchise for all—had a natural leadership amongst these nations. The country’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, loomed large like a colossus. Till John Fitzgerald Kennedy remained the president of the US, Nehru continued to seek to develop a working relationship with Foggy Bottom and the White House. But the department of defence at the Pentagon proved a hard nut to crack. At the frontlines of the Cold War battles for kinetic balance of power, Pentagon often showed being riled by the Indian moral posture in the NAM that often took the shape of grandstanding, in their opinion. So Kickleighter proposals were the harbinger of change the global situation had undergone even as the Berlin Wall was brought down, thus symbolically ending the Cold War in favour of the Western alliance, led by the US. Pacific Command’s commanding General of the Army suggested modest arrangements between the two armed forces: frequent exchanges between the Indian armed forces and the US counterparts; joint training and participation in military exercises; exchange of ideas and conferences. Visits by senior Indian and American officers followed, and in May 1992, the two navies conducted their first joint exercises. The acme of this collaboration was the Indian Ocean Tsunami Human Assistance and Disaster Relief (HADR) of 2004. But the tsunami operation was so huge in scope and content—a joint operation of 92 nation states’ navies of Southeast Asia, the US and India and many others—that it can be compared to the Vietnam War exchanges between Nixon administration and Mao’s China. And both operations were militaristic in nature at the beginning but then transcended it and became a bedrock of a longer, bigger engagement between the South Asian giant and the US. A senior naval official and a scholar, Captain Sarabjeet Singh Parmar has analysed the current disposition of India in terms of HADR. He wrote in a paper published in Journal of Defence Studies, ‘This is in

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keeping with the neo-liberal approach adopted by India post-1991, according to which its interests take priority over working within the postulates of NAM’.3 According to the observations of another Indian strategist, ‘Indo-US cooperation during the tsunami relief operations also showed that the latent doubts and suspicions of US initiatives in the region that had until recently preoccupied India’s foreign policy, were declining rapidly. About 40,000 military personnel from more than a dozen nations participated in aid of operations around the Indian Ocean. Close working relationships among the armed forces of a number of countries during the relief work opened further possibilities of cooperative security in the region’.4 While this was a culmination of the Kickleighter proposals, the close cooperation between the two navies also lifted the relations to a higher plane. But the US Pacific Command commanding general had read the tea leaves earlier; in 1990, when US President George H. W. Bush launched his first Iraq War, the Chandrashekhar government that lacked a legitimate mandate at the popular level offered refuelling for US fighter aircraft in Indian bases. This government was propped up the Indian National Congress (INC) then being led by Rajiv Gandhi. This is the same INC that had produced two prime ministers of the country—Nehru and Indira Gandhi—who had proved to be a bugbear for the Western alliance, with a few occasional exceptions like the Korean War or the Chinese border war against India. In the first case, Nehru sought to play the honest broker and ended up tasking the Indian Army for its first peacekeeping operation under the charge of the United Nations. As an interesting aside, a confidential and ‘restricted distribution to US personnel’ memorandum of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) noted on 11 July 1950 that the ‘Communist Party of India (CPI) would not be taking any aggravating action in terms of identifying the US as a belligerent in the Korean War for the fear of the police. On the other hand, independent Left intelligentsia is taking the approach of “Hands off Korea” position’.5 On a different plane, the party cadres were collecting arms through designated routes because they expected World War III ‘to be launched in the next three months’.6 What the CIA did not point out in this memo that the CPI had just ended and in fact, denounced an armed revolutionary movement in Telangana post-1949. Equally, this memo points out that the consistent attitude of the official communist party letting down its cadres, even back then.

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CIA of the US has a certain claim to omniscience. It has, however, been fooled at least twice in the Indian subcontinent: once in 1974, the time of the Peaceful Nuclear Explosion (PNE) and second, in 1998, when the country exploded a range of nuclear weapons from boosted fission bomb of megatonnage strength to sub-kilotonne tactical device. In  both these cases, the Langley ‘experts’, the Pentagon, the White House, and Foggy Bottom heard the events on television. However, in a pretentiously titled note ‘Psychological Background Study of India’ circulated in the early 1950s (actual date of writing the document was redacted when unclassified) gives a better view of the American policymakers’ minds. It can be concluded that the Americans had three points of worry with the newly independent nation: (a) influence of the CPI and other leftists; (b) in their opinion, the best of the worse options is India’s ‘neutrality’ in terms of both the superpowers; and (c) India’s ability to confront Sino-Soviet aggression against the country. The Langley boys were clearly not foreseeing the Sino-Soviet split that was to begin at the end of the same decade. But even in 1956, the hawkish John Foster Dulles, President Eisenhower’s secretary of state, had been calling ‘non-alignment’ immoral. However, from the viewpoint the CIA note expressed, a singular item is striking and most indicative of the prevailing political and social conditions immediately after independence. The note suggests: ‘One of the greatest assets of the communists is the marked absence, among a majority of Indians, of strong anti-communist sentiments. Despite these advantages the CPI seems not to have made as much progress since the election as initially appears even to have suffered reverses’.7 Having said that, the CIA did not have any doubts about India’s geostrategic location. The crucial note that had gone up the chain of command to White House to then president, General Dwight Eisenhower. Describing Indian subcontinent as a launchpad, the CIA stated: ‘[F]rom bases in India, military operations could be supported and conducted in East Africa, south west Asia, south-central USSR, and south east Asia. India is close to the oil fields of the Middle East and the industrial estate areas of Soviet Central Asia’.8 In 1962, when China unleashed a border war, albeit an opprobrium that India invited upon itself due to Nehru’s ‘Forward Policy’ and Defence Minister, V. K. Krishna Menon’s singular effort to dominate the armed forces and their decision-making, the prime minister sent frantic appeals to then US president, Kennedy for military matériel.

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In a historic paper, one of the early India-watchers of the US, scholar Selig Harrison, wrote a much reviled (in India) article on the country in which he described how fissiparous India was being so diverse and as a natural corollary of being under various invaders, who came across the Himalayas and across Hindukush mountains. The country was such a divided entity that only the colonial rule of the British gave birth to the ‘Idea of India’, to borrow the phrase unashamedly from Stephen Cohen—an important South Asia-watcher. Writing in 1965, in the Foreign Affairs journal an article provocatively titled ‘Troubled India and Her Neighbors’, Selig Harrison had described the ideal situation for a nationalist Indian as ‘Pakistan remains aligned [with the US] and India has the Soviet Union all to herself; and in which the Soviet Union and the United States both continue to be at odds with China indefinitely. India sees herself in a situation as the focal point of a grand alliance against Peking. So long as the Soviets, in particular, play their appointed part, India is spared the possible necessity of exclusively becoming dependent on the American nuclear umbrella’.9 This muted ‘strategic vision’ about India’s role in a global Cold War, as enunciated by Selig Harrison, contrasted with a more expansive vision detailed in the CIA paper prepared by its ‘directorate of intelligence (DI)’. The note, written earlier than the Selig Harrison article in the Foreign Affairs journal, had observed that India’s geostrategic location made it a good launch pad for battles to be fought by the Anglo-American combine in Northeast Asia, Northwest Asia, Southeast Asia and on the Indian Ocean. The agency believed that it did not need India as an ally; Washington could live with its nonaligned position.10 The roller-coaster relationship suffered a major setback in 1971 due to the Nixon-Kissinger infamous ‘tilt’ towards Pakistan when its yet another military leader, though designated as president launched a pogrom against Bengalis in East Pakistan. This action of Pakistan put paid its theoretical basis of partitioning India on the basis of religious identity. Because, out of the 1971 War, East Pakistan became a separate nation based on its people’s ethnic identity that was radically different from the people of West Pakistan. Returning to the main contention of this chapter—Indo-US relations—the ‘tilt’ exhibited by the Pentagon’s directive to USS Enterprise that sailed into the Bay of Bengal. Of course, the Soviets kept their eastern fleet warming up in case India wanted its help.

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Just before the December launch of the Indo-Pakistan war, Indira had signed the 20-year treaty of friendship and cooperation with Moscow, much to the delight of her leftist aides like P. N. Haksar, P. N. Dhar, etc. The somnambulist Brezhnev regime was happy too for netting India, a champion of non-alignment that can be considered the precursor of the present day ‘strategic autonomy’ as a basic foreign policy tenet. Once India won the war against Pakistan in conjunction with the guerrilla forces of Bangladesh, Nixon wanted to open a dialogue in 1972. But Indira had elephantine memory: she remembered how the US president had kept her waiting outside the Oval Office for 40 minutes when she had gone visiting Washington to tell Nixon administration, about India’s Pakistan-related refugee crisis. What changed between then and now? For one, everyone likes a victor. An amazing 4500 word section on South Asia in the State of the World speech delivered at the US Congress in February 1972 was possibly the longest span an US president had spent on the region till then. Nixon offered to talk peace with Indira while reminding her about the ‘non-alignment’ principle of the country as the requisite desire of the US policies.11 True to his style Nixon was trying to revise history too. For the first time, he acknowledged that forces of Pakistan had heaped tremendous misery over the Bangladeshis (formerly East Pakistan). He castigated them for these actions, post facto. Earlier, Henry Kissinger was reported to have shown a selected section of American journalists a redacted CIA report that talked of an Indian military plan to decimate the army of Pakistan entirely.12 Kissinger had told the journalists that the report about decapitation of the military forces of Pakistan was procured through a member of the Union Cabinet of Gandhi. Seymour Hersh had later identified this ‘CIA source’ as Morarji Desai—who had resigned his position in the Gandhi Cabinet in 1968. Of course, Hersh’s version was severely challenged both politically and the legal courts. Eventually, Hersh had to issue an apology. That aside, Indira gave another shock to the US-led Western alliance in 1974, soon after Nixon has had to leave the White House in disgrace and his successor, Gerald Ford, had barely settled down as US president. India exploded a nuclear device on 18 May 1974. Though not being a signatory of the Treaty on Non-proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) considered by New Delhi as discriminatory, Gandhi called Pokhran I a PNE. This was a category that was then allowed under the international agreement.

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But, the PNE brought upon the country various nuclear non-proliferation laws of the West. Yet it is a matter of interesting record that the French issued a congratulatory note right after the 1974 explosion of the nuclear device. But they later withdrew the communication. This in effect translated into a US-led Western sanction regime. Globally, this led to (a) formation of the Nuclear Suppliers Group and (b) international controls on the nuclear fuel cycle. The real impact of these decisions was felt at an inflection point in terms of supply of fuel to Tarapur atomic power plant, which required highly enriched uranium. Tarapur was set up under the ‘Atoms for Peace’ programme by the US, and they were pledged to supply fuel for the programme till 1993. This caused troubles during the remaining period of the Ford administration and its successor Jimmy Carter administration. Besides, the threat of more sanctions and technology denial regimes by the US, and some of its Western allies severely affected India’s relationship with the US. Moving forward, during then president, Ronald Regan’s regime the decision to trigger a proxy war in Afghanistan caused enormous animus between the two countries. Choice of Pakistan as the frontline state in this US-Saudi insurgency had a negative fallout for India. This, in a way, created a triangular association with the Nixonian ‘tilt’ still at play. India had to continue paying a high price for American policies of devolving most functions of the Afghan insurgency to the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and the Pakistan Army. This was felt most after the Soviets were ousted in 1989 and the president of Pakistan General Zia-ul-Haq deciding to reroute the US-Saudi war matériel to Kashmir and Indian Punjab. While Punjab insurgency has been put down effectively, Kashmir remains a bugbear till today. This triangular contestation caused serious harm to a warming of Indo-US relations. Having said that the Indian policymakers felt at sea with the breakup of the Soviet Union. And Russia failed to succeed the Soviet status of being the second superpower. This unipolar moment, though seeming to be short-lived now, had at that time seemed to overwhelm all other alternative ideas of Statehood. So, in 1990 when a Congress Party government was formed under the prime minister, P. V. Narasimha Rao—for the first time in the party’s history no Nehru–Gandhi family member was at the apex of the regime—a lot of the ideological baggage of the famous family could be shed.

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Rao decided that in 1992 he needed to initiate an outreach to the incoming administration of President Bill Clinton. For the first time, New Delhi sent a team of senior officers to Little Rock Arkansas for meeting Clinton’s transition team. There is an interesting tale that then director, foreign secretary’s office, Hardeep S. Puri recounts, ‘A team led by an Additional Secretary in the Ministry of External Affairs went to Washington, DC for the first round of the dialogue, if I recall correctly in November 1992. This dialogue took place shortly after Bill Clinton had been elected 42nd President of the United States. Since the president-elect was from Arkansas, the transition team established its headquarters in Little Rock, the capital of Arkansas’.13 The team that included Puri—now a Union Minister—and was led by Ambassador Chandrashekhar Dasgupta, additional secretary in the ministry of external affairs. They were directed to fly to Arkansas. It was rather unusual for so many Indians to be seen on a US local flight to any such less known location like Little Rock. So naturally, they attracted attention. This time with positive impact. Young Hardeep resplendent in his colourful headgear was sought out on the flight by an African American gentleman who later turned out to be Vernon Jordan—a prominent member of the group that came to be known later as FoB (Friends of Bill). This chance meeting opened doors for the Indian team with the senior members of Clinton’s transition team many of whom later became his Cabinet members. The former director of the foreign secretary’s office and later to become joint Secretary (Americas) Puri described the mechanics of how the trip played out ‘After clarifying the purpose of our journey, we were told that a member of the transition team would contact us at our hotel and invite us for dinner to discuss our interest in establishing contact. With the passage of time, 25 years is a long time, all I can remember is that the person who hosted us for dinner knew something about India, appeared keen to establish contact and, as the evening wore on, I also detected a desire on the part of our host to be the next Ambassador of the United States to India. This did not of course materialize. We also met a few other people in the office of the transition team which was literally working out of cartons (of loose papers). The rest is history’.14 Then Foreign Secretary J. N. Dixit who was famously known when he was the high commissioner of India in Sri Lanka as the ‘viceroy’ was a strong personality. Son of parents who were freedom fighters he was a staunch nationalist. He saw his job in the huge transition that the

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country was having to make in all its policies at the abrupt end of the Cold War was ‘(a) [T]o restructure the basic orientations of foreign policy in the context of totally transformed paradigms and terms of reference born out of the change in the international situation. This had to be done in a manner ensuring fulfillment of India’s national interests in every aspect. (b) To recast relations with each of the superpowers such as the US, Russia and China in the context of the end of the Cold War. (c) To cope with threats to India’s territorial integrity and stability generated by political developments and policies of India’s immediate neighbours’.15 This was a wide and vast portfolio. The early Clinton outreach did not produce much result. The new American administration decided to strike India with two sticks: (1) trade access and (2) human rights. At the beginning, the US government sought to impose trade restrictions out of the office of the US Trade Representative by imposing limitations in the form of various US domestic legislations like Super 301 or Special 301. These legislations sought to create tariff and non-tariff barriers on Indian goods and services. The man who had to deal with these contentious issues was Dr. Anwar Ul Hoda in the Union Commerce Ministry. Hoda told this writer in a conversation for this book that ‘In the 1980s and 1990s they tried to influence or even browbeat us into changes in the basic policies, including FDI, IPRs (patents, trademarks and copyright), government procurement, import tariffs, import restrictions, films etc. There were about 10 subjects that were hardy perennials on the bilateral trade and economic agenda. Because of our entrenched autarchic policies, no concession could be given by India and very little progress was made in these talks. The only concession that I can recall is an increase in the import quota for almonds. Then the US tried coercive tactics by recourse to Section 301, Super 301 and Special 301, but we did not budge and there was no option for the US but to give up. The launching of the Uruguay Round resulted in some softening of the US attitude as most of the issues of interest to the US were taken up in these talks. Nevertheless, the US maintained the pressure bilaterally by tightening up some benefits under the GSP’.16 In terms of human rights, the Clinton administration had Wilsonian baggage. They wanted to shape the post-Cold War world in lines of Camelot or a more modern Hegelian world view. This meant that Kashmir became the test case where this ‘purer than the purest’ way of

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business was put in practice. Kashmir the verdant valley was by 1993 a battleground between Pakistan’s ISI-led terrorist insurgency and the defence of the homeland by Indian security forces. Clinton who was a Rhodes scholar had done a stint in Oxford University. One of his classmates was a lady called Robin Raphael. In case of momentary madness, Clinton made her the assistant secretary of state in charge of South Asia. Now Raphael had a history in the subcontinent. Her first husband Arnold L. Raphael was an ambassador in Islamabad who happened to be flying in the same aircraft carrying Pakistan’s then military ruler General Zia-ul-Haq when a box of mangoes exploded. Everyone on board was killed. When Robin Raphael became the desk in charge of South Asia and a member of the FoB, she decided to go hammer and tongs at Indian authorities on the issue of Kashmir. As Dixit has recorded in his memoir, she questioned the legal basis of Jammu and Kashmir’s accession to India in October 1947 (and supported Pakistan’s standpoint)’. For the Indian establishment, this was like the sky falling upon them. A US assistant secretary of state is of the rank of a senior joint secretary in the ministry of external affairs. Her wild rhetoric about India, Kashmir and Pakistan ensured first, her disbarment from access to the senior-most levels of the Indian leadership, and second, a well-orchestrated Indian media campaign to discredit her and thus make her a virtual persona non grata. Hence, the wheel of history had to take a full turn. But then that’s a story for later. Meanwhile, pressure continued to mount on account of trade especially. Hoda remembers, ‘The USA opposed India’s proposals at the Uruguay Round as many of them reflected our objective to continue with our inward looking economic policies’. Rao’s seminal contribution to Indian history is the so-called economic reform programme. Euphemistically that meant liberalisation, privatisation and globalisation. When India launched this programme of marketising its economy, it warmed the cockles of hearts of the US and its Western Allies. They were taking advantage of the end of the Cold War and the competitive philosophy of socialism, Soviet Style. West was pushing for free market capitalism where the market determined the quantum of inputs like labour and capital. The crucial Uruguay Round of the Geneva-based General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) wanted a wholesale change in the way nations did business with each other. This round of straight talk was being led Arthur Dunkel. Dunkel circulated a draft text

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for agreement that had provisions on tariff and trade besides proposing an international body to monitor global commerce. The Dunkel Draft Text (DDT) was highly contentious and required major negotiations amongst trading nations. While the Uruguay Round was not ratified by many nations the World Trade Organization (WTO) came into existence in Geneva. Hoda was a primary negotiator on the highly complex and full of legalese DDT. Hoda recalls, ‘The real change in the US attitude was the result of the introduction of economic reforms in India in 1991–92. Following the reforms, as the economic policies in India began changing, the US representatives at Geneva began responding warmly to Indian proposals. The two specific areas I remember in GATT negotiations in which a positive response from the US helped us to secure our objectives are export subsidies on manufactures and balance-of-payments restrictions. The US also became more constructive in working out the eventual deal on the overarching dispute settlements procedures in the WTO’.17 The former chief Indian negotiator says India now has the same market access as China in the US. But he says, China is able to better exploit the opportunities of market access to the US because of its higher competitive value and better project management. The huge competitive advantage that China has in the US market is also a product of its political nurturing of its relations with the US. The relationship that began as a US hedge against then Soviet Union in Cold War terms transformed itself in a mutually beneficial economic relationship, when Deng Xiaoping began slowly transforming a state capitalist nation into one of mixed economy. The state-owned enterprises (SoEs) were not really privatised and parcelled out to be stripped of its assets as it happened in the Soviet Union when it broke up, and in a limited way in India. Deng’s economic moves were more socialist than his capitalist instincts could allow. He used the cheap labour power of China as the primary competitive advantage and attracted foreign direct investment in the special economic zones in the southern coast of the country also called the Pearl River Delta. India sought to follow the Chinese example in terms of establishing SEZs where the authorities sought to strip labour of its right. But the Indian entrepreneurs took advantage of the loose land laws in these SEZs and the restrictions on labour agitations to indulge in earning quick bucks by diverting the lands to real estate development. While

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this cannot be called the general principle of India’s capitalist class for translating the Chinese formula of economic growth but even a few bad apples sent wrong signals to the international market as this was in the first flush of the reform process. The Indian politico-bureaucratic personnel made the country to feature in the lowest rungs of the lists prepared by the Transparency International. The Foreign Services, on the other hand, incredibly small for a nation the size of India and its widespread national interests, do a competent job in safeguarding those interests. For example, when during the first Clinton Administration Kashmir kept popping up in the agenda of the UN Human Rights Commission (UNHRC) the foreign service officers undertook rearguard action for the sake of the integrity of the country. In Clinton’s first administration, Pakistan continued to raise Kashmir as a human rights disaster for India, New Delhi constantly focused on the role of terrorists sponsored by the ISI of Pakistan which was causing enormous trouble both in Punjab and Kashmir. The US on the other hand rather shockingly took the line that ‘your terrorist is my freedom fighter’. Clinton White House and the Pentagon took a soft line on Pakistan’s capability to cause mayhem in the neighbourhood. There was serious talk in the US policy circles whether India should be made to fall in line with what was called the Owen Dixon option developed in the 1950s. This option entailed trifurcation into Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh. There were times when Robin Raphael could convince some US senior officials to talk of ‘self determination’ in Kashmir. It took massive effort of both traditional diplomacy and public diplomacy by the ministry of external affairs to bring a slow change in the mindset of the Clinton officials. Though Robin Raphael was quickly dismissed, a change in the Clinton’s attitude towards terrorism was first witnessed in 1993 when an American naval ship USS Cole was attacked in the Gulf of Aden by Islamists. New Delhi began to get the ear of US government after this incident. On the same plane, the Taliban mess in Afghanistan, sponsored by Pakistan, began to gain the attention of Washington. The wheel of time was turning 180 degrees. The real test came in 1998 when the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government undertook Pokhran II—five plus three nuclear explosions—and declared India a nuclear weapons state. An important event especially for this book is the letter that subsequently Vajpayee wrote to President Clinton in which he claimed that

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the nuclear weaponisation by India was required for its security from threats by China. In that letter, he wrote ‘We have an overt nuclear weapon state on our borders, a state which committed armed aggression against India in 1962. Although our relations with that country have improved in the last decade or so, an atmosphere of distrust persists mainly due to the unresolved border problem. To add to the distrust that country has materially helped another neighbour of ours to become a covert nuclear weapons state’.18 To mark out China as its primary adversary as done by Vajpayee and his Defence Minister George Fernandes was not kosher politics. For China was a neighbour, while the US was the ‘far abroad’. They couldn’t have been an ally. But what it triggered was something interesting, especially in terms of Indo-US relationships. The orientation of the Indo-US relationship was changing ever since the end of the Cold War. Issue of non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction came up as an agenda item in the closing years of George H. W. Bush administration. On 31 January 1992 then prime minister, Narasimha Rao had met President George Bush in New York. They had discussed the issue. India had expressed, ‘[I]t (India) was willing to cooperate with the USA to further the cause of non-proliferation. Apart from the USA India has had a series of bilateral technical discussions on the subject with Germany, France, the UK, Japan, Russia, and Australia’. Not much happened on the front. Rao went out of office in 1995. After Pokhran II, India was keen to engage the US in a strategic dialogue. Most of the reasons for which India went into the Pokhran II blasts—an exercise to defy NPT whose permanent conference was looming on the horizon and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) that was being negotiated seriously as a constituent of post-Cold War rules-based order—were evident in Rao’s term itself. He was keen to make India a part of this architecture. In a similar vein, Vajpayee indicated that he wanted an intensive engagement with the US in the post-Pokhran II era. As Strobe Talbott, the former Time magazine columnist and then a deputy secretary of state who was a FoB from Oxford was chosen by Clinton Administration as the main interlocutor with India. From the Indian side, Vajpayee chose the stentorian Jaswant Singh to be Talbott’s counterpart. The negotiators had 13 rounds of meetings across various capitals. While the details of those meetings are still unknown, books by both Talbott and a currently ailing Jaswant Singh give a glimpse of what

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the two underwent. It was clear to the government of India that if they did not go for the nuclear tests before the CTBT was signed—a treaty again that India was not being a signatory to on account of discrimination—would close the window for nuclear weapons test for good. India that had promoted the Partial Test Ban Treaty in the late 1950s was chary of signing the CTBT. The reason for not signing on the dotted line by Vajpayee was the same set of reasons that guided India NPT. Now the window of opportunity was fast closing for a nation bent on having strategic autonomy and maintains its nuclear arsenal. This was the vow of the Vajpayee government in 1998. Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the ideological parent of the BJP had always—over decades—considered the efficacy of the nuclear arsenal, as inviolate. These facts mentioned above are underlined by a statement of Clinton’s the day after Pokhran II. President Clinton had opened a meeting in the Oval Office by saying, ‘[W]e’re going to come down on those guys like a ton of bricks’. But his rage soon turned into ‘distress and displeasure’,19 as Talbott wrote. By the time Clinton’s national security adviser Samuel (Sandy) Berger modulated the official reaction the statement from the US government, the mood in the US administration was more calm. ‘There is an enormous amount of common interests that we have (between the US and India). I think we have a better chance at de-escalating or atleast slowing these kinds of actions if we remain engaged than if we don’t’.20 Talbott had averred, ‘Nationalists of the sort who ascended under the banner of the BJP would have howled in protest at any suggestion that decisions on India’s defence were motivated by fear of a country (Pakistan) they disdained. China, by contrast, was a great nation and an ancient civilisation in its own right, a major player on the world stage and therefore worthy of inclusion in India’s strategic calculations as an arch-rival’.21 But that’s getting ahead of the story. Talbott was not the automatic choice as the key interlocutor. The strategy-making to tackle the twin nuclear weapon blasts by India and of the ‘me too’ type by Pakistan was raised to the level of a ‘crisis’ in Washington. Clinton wanted a special representative to engage India and Pakistan on the issues involved. The first name that came up from the various lobby groups was that of Senator Sam Nunn. But Talbott who was the deputy secretary of state thought it to be a bad idea. He argued with Clinton that, ‘[T]o pick someone of Nunn’s prominence for an assignment that would be as delicate and protracted as this one. A

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celebrity might be welcome to the Pakistani’s, since there it made much sense in wanting high profile American mediation. But for just that reason the Indians would be all the more resistant’. Result: Clinton ended up with Talbott as the primary negotiator with India.22 One must recall at this stage that Talbott was not entirely new to the India story. For he was a Sovietologist, by training. The first meeting of the Talbott–Jaswant Singh negotiating teams was at the Frankfurt airport stretched between 9 and 10 June 1998. This was an icebreaking meeting which meant to assuage global sentiment that the only superpower was engaging in aiding the new nuclear power in a dialogue. The next meeting took place ten days later when the two entourages met in New Delhi. According to Talbott, ‘As we saw it, if the Indians really wanted to move quickly to repair relations with the US while retaining the capability they had already demonstrated, they should have done so simply by accepting the benchmarks and collecting the reward in the form of sanctions relief and arousing presidential visit in the fall’.23 But the Indian side was recalcitrant; they simply refused to do someone else’s bidding ‘They found the word benchmark objectionable and since it implied that the Americans saw themselves as stern schoolmasters who would be grading their performance’.24 The convergence of interests between the US and India in geostrategic terms developed slowly over the 13 rounds of meetings the two teams undertook over a period of time till 2000. Pakistan meanwhile made a major mistake in 1999 by stealthily seeking to violate the Line of Control (LoC) and reaching the heights of Kargil. While this was planned at a time when Indian Prime Minister Vajpayee was seeking to normalise relations with Pakistan under Nawaz Sharif, it was a similar story like when Benazir Bhutto was informed by Robert Gates, then the deputy national security adviser at the George Bush I White House in 1990, that her army was planning a launch of nuclear weapons against India.25 Clearly, prime ministers are meant to be kept in the dark in Islamabad even as the ‘Establishment’— Pakistan Army—raised merry hell in the sub-continental neighbourhood. Lahore bus journey was the leitmotif of Vajpayee-Nawaz détente. Indian PM himself undertook the inaugural journey in 1999. He was received at Wagah by Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif of Pakistan. But no one from the GHQ of Pakistan was present and markedly was absent the Chief of Army Staff General Parvez Musharraf. This should have rung alarm bells but on the contrary what happened was the occupation of

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Kargil heights by the Pakistan light infantry in muftis by the end of the same year. It took a fair amount of military effort on part of the Indian armed forces to displace them from those heights and push them back to their side of the LoC. The sidelight of the story was how Nawaz Sharif made an emergency landing in Washington and beseeched Bill Clinton to help him to get his own army off his back and launch a ceasefire. This was followed by a trip of the US President Bill Clinton to New Delhi and a two-hour stopover on his way back at Islamabad Airport. This trip by the US president sent one signal alone: the end of the hyphenated existence of India and Pakistan in geopolitical terms for Washington’s grand strategists. Then followed 9/11 that shook the world and changed paradigms. Pakistan was marked out as the country that supported the Afghan Taliban regime which harboured al-Qaeda of Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri. It required a visit by the Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage who told Musharraf baldly ‘either you are with us or you are against us and if you are against us we’ll bomb you to the stone ages’. The barrel-chested retired US Marine general could not have been more clear with his message. Musharraf also calculated that he could do a Zia-ul-Haq: being a frontline state against the Afghan Taliban and al-Qaeda; sell them down the river, be a recipient of American largesse, have the ISI control supplies in terms of military equipment and finances. But he was wrong. The Americans launched a special operations manoeuvre with the help of the Afghan Northern Alliance that included Tajiks, Kazaks and Uzbeks who had formed an alliance at the departure of the Americans in the 1980s from the theatre and create an anti-Taliban coalition. India played a low profile role in supporting this alliance along with Russia. The free flow of money, materiel, manpower, etc., that Musharraf had expected never came. All the Americans wanted was a passage through Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas through to Afghanistan. Afghan war proved to be the longest US intervention in its military’s history and is still continuing to this day. On the other side, China became the largest financier of US economy owning three-plus trillion dollars of US treasury bonds and a positive balance of payments of more than 200 billion dollars. Thus, Beijing found a space for strategic autonomy in its neighbourhood consisting of Western Pacific, South China Sea and littoral nations like Japan, etc. Russia stopped on its tracks expansion

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of NATO to its frontiers by creating regime change in Georgia and in Ukraine. They themselves created an alliance between them for Russia’s Eurasian interests. In 2008, when the financial meltdown took place the US and its Western allies took most of the losses. Decline of Wall Street confounded successive US administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama. They thought they would be able to staunch the crisis by financial support in terms of actual cash transference and ‘quantitative easing’ by the Federal Reserve and other central banks, but the contagion effect could not be contained and instead reached the Main Street. In the case of advanced developing countries, the effect was absorbed by some kind of revived growth rates. Though lower than previous years, they were still healthy enough to hold up some of those economies. Organisations like BRICS, IBSA and G-20 are representative of a wider group of countries that could play a role for the first time in shaping the world order. Earlier it used to be the preserve of P-5, N-5 and G-7 and the like which were clubs of the major, almost overwhelming powers of the world. China, for example, was one of the countries seeking to break out from the limitations of strategic constraint imposed upon it, at least notionally, by the US and its allies. They sought to encircle China militarily but have miserably failed because of the sheer weight of the Chinese economy. In India’s case, the US and the West follow a different policy of cooption. India too seemed quite happy playing second fiddle to its primary patrons for the time being. But as China and Russia are beginning to emerge as moderately decision-making powers in a world when the West is in decline, India played a ‘balance of power’ waltz between the two camps that were shaping up in many crucial ways. A leading strategic thinker of the country Dr. C. Raja Mohan wrote in his widely acclaimed book on India’s ‘new’ foreign policy that, ‘For now atleast India is not being asked to resolve the apparent contradictions between emphasising strategic partnership with the US and promoting multipolarity in the world. As it pursues strategic partnerships with all major powers India’s aim is to merge as the indispensable element of future balance of power in Asia. There was a time when in the 90s that Kashmir had come so much to the front-burner of global geo-politics that it had almost seemed the Indian leadership then would not be able to contain the problem within the bilateral framework established by the Shimla Pact of 1972’.

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But when UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali stated that the issue of Kashmir plebiscite cannot be enforced upon India by force because the referendum by another name was promised under Chapter Six of the UN Charter that only allows persuasion and not force as an instrument of policy. Barring that, the logic of the illogic of two major wars of the world being waged in this continent—in fact in India’s areas of interest—at the behest of the US and its allies worked in favour of the emerging power of South Asia. The level of attrition has decreased in Afghanistan and Iraq. Yet, it cannot be said that the Eurasia, the USSR had abandoned on the face of internecine conflict in Afghanistan is any better. On the contrary, Northwest Asia and West Asia remained a cauldron of violence where the Western powers seemed mired. US President Barack Obama’s effort at pivoting out of the mess that was West Asia; and to the Indo-Pacific was seen as a major geostrategic and political abandonment of important regions of the world. But the advent of deeply flawed Donald Trump administration and his ambitious design to prop up Israel at the cost of the Palestinians and his commitment to set straight the Islamist violent ideologies being spread from countries like Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Egypt, etc., have drawn back the US and its allies to their old stomping ground in their Middle East. Trump is a believer in the military power of the Western alliance led by the US for solutions. But he was also one who sought to retrench, as much as possible, American politico-military involvement in vast swathes of the globe. But the anarchic international politics cannot bear a power vacuum. China, the new emerging big power, has stashes of cash that they are willing to spend on a Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). With the BRI, China has initiated not just an artery for goods and services to flow to and fro but it is also to shape a new rules-based world order as an alternative to the prevailing western model. The instrumentalised BRI promises a world order that is civilisational in the context of reaching back thousands of years when Arab and Chinese trade flowed through the Silk Route. As the caravans moved they left behind social, cultural and political mores, which contributed to the growth of human history. For the moment, India is on the cusp of history where its leadership cannot decide how the world order would shape up. The granular nature of this new world order—deeper as it seems to be digging in—is beyond the comprehension of many. On the way are the byplays of international geopolitics. And the proposals in character are still leaving a lot of the

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details in the balance of power context or as Russians say in more explicit terms, the correlation of forces. India also wishes to play a role as has been evident in the pronouncements of various national actors. But it has to be nimble footed to take advantage in developing situations. They are the ones that are being triggered in a world that is in transition. At issue is the top-line as the West—largely leaderless with Trump’s US upending many of its traditional relationships—obfuscating the desired bottom-line. The other, that is taking birth in the East. Fence sitting in times of uncertainty is certainly a good strategy in the short term. In the long term, the inability to commit can actually be deleterious and thus severely harm the manoeuvrability of India’s strategic autonomy. That this short-term fence sitting portents often dangerous results is viewed in the way the Sino-Indian relationship in panning out. Beijing is favouring Pakistan in a big way for engaging its territory in building the BRI, or rather that is presently called the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC). The CPEC has been keenly watched in India even though New Delhi has spurned an offer to join it by China. That the developments with the CPEC worries India no end is obvious. From the point of view of pure strategy, India is on the wrong side of the CPEC for that BRI’s physical run through the territories on the Pakistan side are actually those that are demanded by India. As in Pakistanadministered Kashmir and the tribal areas like Gilgit and Baltistan, India has raised the issue sovereignty in connection to these territories which China has sought to ignore. The Chinese elite is obviously playing the game of hide and seek. In a show of transparency, it is trying for India to be a seeker. But that message is not lost on New Delhi it wishes to take what is its due—and not seek to be over eager. Can it win the game when India also holds a few aces, the Dalai Lama being in exile to India, the Tibetan government in exile being in Dharamshala, Himachal Pradesh. As the current Dalai Lama, the 14th in line reaches an advanced age of an octogenarian the search for the new Dalai Lama can only begin after his death, as according to the Tibetan tradition the 14th will reincarnate into the 15th. However, a spanner has been thrown into the works just to stop Beijing from dictating terms to his Gelug sect: the current Dalai Lama is fearful that the godless Chinese Communists may decide any Tibetan child to be the 15th at the death of the 14th. This would vertically divide the Tibetan community. That would thus mean the end of the expatriate and exiled Tibetans losing in the movement for greater autonomy of their homeland.

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The fact that the 17th Karmapa, Ogyen Trinley Dorjee could also flee Tibet in the late 1990s to India reflected either a lax security apparatus of the Chinese or a desire on the part of the leadership elite of the CPC to let go a young leader of the Kagyu sect who could cause social and political trouble for them. On one level, the CPC has banished a limited resettlement of Hun Chinese in the Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR). On another level increased prosperity for average Chinese have also trickled down to the Tibetans. With a change in lifestyle and a limited absorption of ‘loyal’ Tibetans into the political power structure has created a certain level of stability and peace in the Tibetan Plateau. In Dharamshala, the Dalai Lama has also shown occasional sense of doubt about the future of his own sect. He has sometimes said that there won’t be any reincarnation of his. In other times, he has also said that his reincarnation could be a girl. The government in exile which he heads is virtually nonfunctional in terms of issuing edicts and directives for the Tibetans in PRC. As a result, even while the Tibetans of the Gelug sect in India follow the Dalai Lama, can it be said that those in Tibet continue to trust His Holiness! The Zhongnanhai leadership continues to show extreme jitters and sensitivity on the subject. After all, Chinese President Xi Jinping worked in Tibet! They may have their own reasons to be feeling the pressure a wee bit, despite some of the successes they have notched up in the transformation of the Plateau. But neighbouring Xinjiang is possibly more troubled than the TAR. With the rise in Islamist militancy globally, the Uyghurs as a community are more in ferment. Many Uyghurs are known to have joined the ranks of the al-Qaeda, ISIS and other terrorist organisations. While New Delhi recognises that this is the common ground on counter-terrorism the two nation states can meet, thus excluding Pakistan, the Indian policymakers have learnt it isn’t quite that pat. China’s geostrategic play is much broader than just boxing in Pakistan. Trump’s US, on the other hand, has been more forthright in pointing fingers with the Rawalpindi-Islamabad combine. A sense of instability of the relationship between New Delhi and Beijing is making the former to close ranks, albeit willy-nilly, Washington, DC. While the upside is clear: a line-up with the militarily strongest power in the world (at least theoretically so), the downside is that if the US decides to ramp up its encirclement and containment strategy of the PRC and India becomes a party irrespective of a national opinion, it could again cause turbulence domestically. For example,

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Exercise Malabar, the show-stopper of Indo-US relations in military terms had to drop Australia and Japan from the exercise in 2005 because the Left bloc which was supporting the UPA I from the outside wanted so. By 2018, the emblematic exercise was conducted between India, Japan and the ‘Indo-Pacific’ Command of the US. Change in nomenclature Pacific command of the superpower is a pointer to a direction the US is willing to take if the regional actors play ball. The goal of strategic autonomy or a revisit to the non-alignment strategy does not quite reflect across the board support for this embrace, at the basic level, which dictates supposed interoperability of the armed forces of US and India. The deep dive that the ministry of defence has to take to propitiate the Pentagon and the permanent establishment of the US is just not signing the BECA and an odd, COMCASA (Communications Compatibility and Security Agreement). But this is clearly the path that NDA I regime had laid the foundation for, in the wake of Pokhran II, with Atal Bihari Vajpayee writing that letter to then president, Bill Clinton, claiming that the nuclear weapons of the country are to deter China. Although this really tested deductive logic through which theory is tested, the following years since 1998 have given an impression of an inspired choice of an adversary.

Notes



1.  Bhattacharya, Pinaki, “Afghanistan: To Turn a Corner,” Aakrosh: The Asian Journal on International Terrorism & Conflict, Vol. 17, No. 64 (July 2014), p. 38. 2. Rasgotra, Maharaj Krishna, A Life in Diplomacy (Viking, June 2014), p. 400. 3. Parmar, Sarabjeet Singh, “Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief (HADR) in India’s National Strategy,” Journal of Defence Studies, IDSA, p. 91. 4. Sharma, Ashok, Indo-US Strategic Convergence: An Overview of Defence and Military Cooperation, CLAWS Papers No. 2, 2008, Centre for Land Warfare Studies, New Delhi in association with Knowledge World Publishers 2008, Centre for Land Warfare Studies (CLAWS), New Delhi, p. 22. 5. “Propaganda Policy of the Communist Party of India (CPI) with respect to the Korean Situation,” Central Intelligence Agency, a redacted report classified as ‘confidential’. Declassified on September 9, 1999. 6. Ibid.

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7. “Psychological Background Study of India,” Central Intelligence Agency. Declassified on December 17, 2004. 8. Ibid. 9. Harrison, Selig, “Troubled India and Her Neighbors,” Foreign Affairs, 1965. 10. Op. cit., n. 7. 11. Wells, Benjamin, “Nixon Offers India ‘Serious’ Dialogue on Relations,” New York Times, February 9, 1972. 12. Ibid. 13. Conversations with Hardeep Singh Puri, Minister of State for Housing and Poverty. 14. Ibid. 15. Dixit, J. N., My South Block Years: Memoirs of A Foreign Secretary (New Delhi: UBS Publishers Distribution Ltd, 1996). 16. Conversation with Dr. Anwar Ul Hoda, former Commerce Secretary and a current academic. 17. Ibid. 18.  “NUCLEAR ANXIETY; Indian’s Letter to Clinton On the Nuclear Testing,” New York Times, May 13, 1998. 19.  Talbott, Strobe, Engaging India: Diplomacy, Democracy and the Bomb (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2004). 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid. 25. Hersh, Seymour M., “On the Nuclear Edge,” The New Yorker, March 29, 1993.

CHAPTER 7

Now, I Am Become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds

Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the first nuclear weapon, had thought of Lord Vishnu in his destructive mantle when the famed scientist saw the overwhelming power of the device he built in the Nevada desert. In sharp contrast, the man who is considered the father of the first Indian nuclear weapon, Dr. Raja Ramanna thought of Lord Buddha, the man of universal peace, when he saw the destructive power of the nuclear device he built for his country, India. Two kilometres away from the site of the explosion in Pokhran the weapons test range in Khetolai village of Jaisalmer district, Rajasthan was a rickety rotary dial phone from which Atomic Energy Commission Chairman H. N. Sethna could call the then prime minister, Indira Gandhi, and tell her the ‘Buddha has smiled’. That was the previously decided code for the successful experimental ‘Peaceful Nuclear Explosion’, or PNE. Contrasting visions are so stark between the famous American scientist and his equally famed Indian counterpart. The occidental scientist could only think of the destructive power of the trinity of the Hindu religion. Ramanna could think of the apostle of peace when he saw the mound of earth arise in the desert of Rajasthan contrarily. This is the idealistic line of Indian political thought that has run through many decisions of national and international ramifications. Domestic politics of the bomb though had a constant streak of national consensus cutting across parties and personalities and public opinion. While Nehru was sending Homi J. Bhabha to the US to negotiate on the ‘Atoms for Peace’ programme that was born out of Bhabha’s own idea © The Author(s) 2019 P. Bhattacharya, Sino-US and Indo-US Relations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-7276-6_7

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of breaking the American monopoly over the nuclear fuel cycle technology. Franklin D. Roosevelt, the US wartime president, who ordered the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was nimbly adopting Bhabha’s idea to essentially have a cap on sharing nuclear power technology under what Roosevelt himself named as ‘Atoms for Peace’. He had survived for a few more years after few hundred thousands of Japanese were killed. At the same time, Nehru was telling Bhabha to continue research on nuclear technology that could be weaponised, in a crunch. When in 1963 Nehru died, a diminutive Lal Bahadur Shastri who succeeded him was considered a pacifist. But national interest guided him to take two key decisions that reflected a keen sense of statecraft, which go beyond the so-called political limitations within which he functioned. The first decision was to establish a Prime Minister’s Office (PMO), and the other was to tell Vikram Sarabhai, the successor of Bhabha, to continue with nuclear research. This line of thinking eventually matured in the 1974 PNE. Similarly, after Indira Gandhi was ousted from power in the wake of a much-reviled declaration of emergency, Morarji Desai who became the prime minister was an old school Tammany Hall party boss and an old school Gandhian. That did not stop the nuclear programme. Rajiv Gandhi, the quintessential moderniser, ordered weaponisation of the nuclear programme as soon as the hawks of the Atomic Energy Commission and the Armed Forces convinced him that it was necessary. Simultaneously, Gandhi became a part of a six developing nation group that would demand complete nuclear disarmament. Rajiv went a step further: he presented a five-point charter for nuclear deweaponisation at the UNGA which remains still the best plan for disarmament. By the time Narasimha Rao came to power in 1991, the Indian nuclear programme was already 27 years in the making. Many in the atomic establishment felt that a few nuclear test explosions were necessary to validate warhead designs and lock in the technologies involved. Rao gave an immediate go ahead even if his high-profile finance minister Manmohan Singh argued otherwise. At Pokhran, Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) and the personnel of the Military Engineering Service (MES) sunk shafts where the explosives could be placed. The word leaked and immense pressure was brought to bear upon Rao to not go ahead with the explosions. It was for this reason when Atal Bihari Vajpayee came to power with more permanence in 1998 than the 13-day government he had led

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earlier, caused two sets of nuclear tests on 11 and 13 May the same year. The decision to have Pokhran II was not even briefed to close associates like L. K. Advani, then home minister, and George Fernandes, then defence minister, who were also members of the all-powerful Cabinet Committee of Political Affairs (CCPA). There are various important issues that held up the background at the governmental level to Vajpayee’s action. Of course, it has to be said beforehand, that the mother lode of the BJP, the RSS, was always in favour of flexing the nuclear muscle. But a veteran of Indian politics like Vajpayee, who had a rather testy relationship with the Sangh, would not have been swayed by just ideology. From 1974 onwards, not only was India facing various trade and economic sanctions imposed by the West, it was also suffering from major technology denials that harmed key scientific programmes, including the space programme. The only two friends that India had in those days were Russia and France. India did not sign the NPT because it discriminated in favour of five nations who had tested nuclear weapons before 1968. The NPT entered into force in 1970 and was to remain unaltered for 25 years. The NPT had its crucial Article 6 stating the five nuclear weapon states (N-5) will strive for denuclearisation at the earliest date. But that was never attempted, till Rajiv picked up the thread. Yet, in 1995 when the NPT came up for review, enormous pressure was brought to bear on Rao government to sign the treaty in perpetuity. Rao balked, even though his regime was trying to create proximity to American positions. As this writer has mentioned earlier, Rao thought that the opportunity for nuclear weapons test was fast closing. He wanted the country to undergo a second set of tests in 1995. But when he began the discussions with a small group of officials within his government who were in the know of the issues, he discovered a vertical divider. On the one side were the scientists like R Chidambaram, P. K. Iyengar and A. P. J. Abdul Kalam, and on the other were Manmohan Singh with his cohort of financial managers. In any case, the idea of more tests got aborted. Clinton administration was promising Non-nuclear Weapon States (NNWS). And if Rao agreed for a perpetual NPT extension, his administration would push through Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). The Conference on Disarmament (CD) based in Geneva went into session in 1996 for negotiating the CTBT. That was the time when H. D. Deve Gowda was the accidental prime minister. Soon after he took office, Chidambaram and Kalam gave him a briefing about the

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country’s nuclear posture. Deve Gowda did not commit either way. But before he dictated a final ‘note’ on the subject, Deve Gowda consulted two of his cabinet colleagues. One was Inder Kumar Gujral and the other Palaniappan Chidambaram, the external affairs minister and the finance minister, respectively. Chidambaram took the Manmohan Singh line of health of the economy being a greater guarantor on national security than nuclear weapons. Gujral, on the other hand, took the middle path and decided to wait and see how the CTBT negotiations went. Deve Gowda government was too short-lived to take any path-breaking decisions on the issue as complex as the Indian nuclear programme. Then of course came the Vajpayee government and Pokhran II. This was followed by intensive engagement of strategic dialogue between Strobe Talbott and Jaswant Singh. Interestingly, as a sidelight it should be noted while the US was engaging India in a strategic dialogue, there was no such parallel move with Pakistan. Vajpayee, after marking China as a primary adversary in a letter to President Bill Clinton soon after the nuclear explosions of May 1998 and the country declaring itself a Nuclear Weapons State (NWS), he took a grand initiative to normalise relations with Pakistan by opening the Delhi to Lahore bus service in early 1999. Vajpayee undertook the journey himself on the first trip. This was an official visit of the Indian prime minister to Pakistan for the first time after declaring the country an NWS. Mian Nawaz Sharif the Pakistan prime minister received him at Wagah along with his full cabinet of ministers. This was to be a grand affair of rapprochement. Soon Kargil erupted. In fact, the indications that all was not well were evident to many, since no senior member of the Pakistan armed forces was present at Wagah to be at the receiving line for Vajpayee. The GHQ, Rawalpindi was making its objection to a possible détente, felt. That was also the time when the Chief of Army Staff General Parvez Musharraf and a close coterie of his military advisors were planning the Kargil incursion. It took about a month to vacate the Himalayan peaks. We all know the back-room diplomatic drama that took place which led to the final seal on dehyphenation of India and Pakistan in the strategic conception of Washington. This was soon followed by the military coup which displaced Nawaz Sharif and made Parvez Musharraf the dictator of Pakistan. The general political turbulence in Pakistan increasingly impacted on the decision-makers in Washington that their decades of investment in terms of

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conventional diplomacy, military diplomacy and material support in cash and kind have not produced any of their desired results. So, when George W. Bush became the president in 2000 the previous literature published in the US by various leading lights of the new administration like Condoleezza Rice and Nicholas Burns, soon to be National Security Adviser and undersecretary of state for political affairs were leaning towards India in terms of their plan to stop China on its tracks. Before all these thoughts could come into play 9/11 carnage overtook the administration. There was great consternation in India. For, the leadership and strategic experts were apprehensive whether there would be a replay of 1980s and Pakistan being made into a frontline state by the US in its military operations in Afghanistan. Taliban regime was on notice leading up to their military ouster because of harbouring al-Qaeda and its senior leaders like Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri. If one were to follow the script of the 1980’s Mujaheedin operation in Afghanistan to displace the Soviet forces, it would require a huge amount of money and materiel into Pakistan. This would have been in the control of Pakistan’s ISI and their army. But as the events unfolded it became clear that the Americans had learnt their lessons well through the 1980s and 1990s. Taliban was soon dethroned and disbanded even from their main base in Kandahar, south of Afghanistan, adjoining Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in Pakistan. India had volunteered support to the American forces in logistical terms. In India, meanwhile, a regime change had taken place through the general election of 2004. Vajpayee and NDA found themselves to be out in the cold as the Congress Party-led UPA government came to power. Manmohan Singh an American favourite was at the helm as the prime minister. Bush administration as it has been seen earlier was friendly towards New Delhi. They wanted a stronger strategic partnership with India. The US Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld made the first move of the administration towards a closer strategic relationship with India. Clearly, a traditional Pakistan votary in Washington, Pentagon had a change of heart. The first document to be prepared and signed by both sides was the Next Step in Strategic Partnership (NSSP) that was during the regime of NDA government and was signed in January 2004. This entailed incremental gains in defence technology exchanges along with some nuclear and space technology. The document made commitments for India to

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follow the nuclear technology safeguards put down by the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) and Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR). India under Vajpayee had also promised to sign on the dotted line for the Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty (FMCT).1 On its part in May 2005 after Singh-led UPA government came into power, India passed an act on Comprehensive Weapons of Mass Destruction (Prohibition Act). Earlier in March 2005 Condoleezza Rice, then the Secretary of State met Manmohan Singh. They talked about a ‘breakthrough’ in Indo-US relationship. One way of doing that was to explore the possibility of resuming civil nuclear cooperation. The new Indian prime minister who is one of the oldest members alive of the Indian establishment that came into place in 1970s and virulently against India acquiring nuclear weapons for supposed Fund-Bank reservations about rising defence expenditure was now looking for a legacy for himself. This is the point that Rice and her staffers had recognised. Hence, the talk about ‘breakthrough’ in the bilateral nuclear energy realm, which could become a bedrock for tight embrace of India and the US, began to be considered in earnest. Though a recent statistical study has shown that only 38% of the Indian youth wish to go to America to study and possibly work there; in Manmohan Singh’s mind, the US was the ‘promised land’. Unfortunately, for Manmohan Singh in the UPA I he was not leading a single party dominance of the Congress. The UPA was being supported by the left parties led by the CPI (M) from outside of the government in parliament. As it is wont the left was behaving like the moral compass of the government. While the coalition was being formed in the discussions undertaken with Left parties the Congress delegation led by Sonia Gandhi had negotiated a Common Minimum Programme (CMP). When asked for this book, Prakash Karat then general secretary of the CPI-M and one of the negotiators categorically said that there was no talk about a pact with the US on any issue, during the negotiation for formation of the government. Karat said the following No, there was no talk about a civil nuclear deal during the formation of the UPA government in 2004. There was no mention of this issue in the Common Minimum Programme that the UPA formulated. In fact, there was no reference even to a strategic alliance with the USA.

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The NSSP signed with India by Rumsfeld was raised to a level of Defence Framework Agreement. The agreement was signed by Pranab Mukherjee, then defence minister. In a high falutin’ language of one of the key provisions of the agreement, the following point was mentioned ‘preventing the spread of weapons of mass destruction and associated materials, data, and technologies’. This language though seemingly in tune with the normal non-proliferation trope was being included so that the two parties could get into a bilateral civilian nuclear agreement. Karat who was supporting the minority Congress Party with 59 Left MPs asserted again: The first time we came to know about it was during the visit of Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh to Washington in July 2005. In the joint statement issued with President Bush there was a reference to civil nuclear cooperation. Earlier, in June of the same year, the Defence Minister Pranab Mukherjee visited Washington and signed the Indo-US Defence Framework Agreement. We came to know about it only after the visit.

As in the case of the 1990s the way the economic reform programme was implemented almost by stealth, it appeared even the Civilian Nuclear Agreement of Manmohan Singh’s would follow the same route. But this was too big a deal which required changes in American laws and international non-proliferation regulations. There were dissensions about this close relationship with the US in the country both within the foreign service officialdom, rest of the bureaucracy, the political class and the ‘public sphere’, as enunciated by Juergen Habermas. M. K. Bhadrakumar who in 1993 was the joint secretary (Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan) had serious objections with the diplomacy around Kashmir problem being run to a triangular matrix that included US, contradicting the letter and spirit of the Indo-Pakistan Shimla Agreement of 1972. In the mind of many, this was a violation of the bilaterally seminal accord. However, he did not wish to go on record with that, in this conversation now, more than two decades later. On the other hand, then the man of the moment in the US, Hardeep Puri denies that Kashmir was being dealt such. He explained: I do not agree with the suggestion that once proximity increased with Washington post-1991, many of the communication with Islamabad on

138  P. BHATTACHARYA Kashmir were routed through the United States. Ever since I remember, we have been against third-party mediation. There was an incident during one of the rounds of the security dialogue when I was leading the Indian delegation. Assistant Secretary Robin Raphael tried to pass on to me a paper, which has been sent to her by our Western neighbour. She passed it halfway across the table. I left it there, made no attempt to pick it up and told her that our bilateral communication channels with Pakistan were open and active.

The dissent against the Rao-line of cosying up to the US came from a more well-known circle. Dinesh Singh was the second external affairs minister after the quick exit of Madhavsinh Solanki from the Rao cabinet. Singh was an old school Indira Gandhi socialist, he was against the Rao-line of getting up close to the US, and he made it known through well-placed leaks to the media. But he was really on his own. There was a fair amount of discomfort apart from Dinesh Singh’s which permeated amongst the arguably Congress socialists of the older generation like Arjun Singh, Natwar Singh and Narayan Dutt Tiwari. Amongst the younger lot Mani Shankar Aiyar, who was an enthusiast of Rajiv Gandhi’s outreach to the Regan administration, was in Rao’s case uncomfortable to accept the large section of the bureaucracy’s love for then PM’s US line. Sonia Gandhi was not yet ready to challenge Rao, and possibly, she was in agreement with the pro-US line. In the absence of any published record of her views, one can only speculate. Clinton administration’s pressure on the Indian government on three counts: nuclear non-proliferation, trade access and human rights kept Rao busy for quite a while. Even a venerable Dixit would occasionally lose his temper in the presence of close associates because of the attitudes of Clintonites. Rao’s foreign policy with his economic policy complemented each other. If Rao wanted the support of the Fund-Bank, he needed a combination of two factors, one was Manmohan Singh and the other, the US. As we know now an imperative had grown in the light of the NPT review and CTBT for an Indian nuclear test. But Rao proved incapable of delivering for the scientists, and indeed the nation, what it wanted desperately at that point in time. He was upstaged by the Americans who told him to cease and desist in plain terms. Rao’s biographer Vinay Sitapati has noted the following:

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The man who had decided not to take a decision on nuclear weapons was being forced to make up his mind.2

The ambivalence, the PMO leaks and Rao’s inability to create a close coterie of advisors on the nuclear issue who could guide him, disallowed the then prime minister of India from handling the sensitive issue. The New York Times on 15 December 1995 ran a story that revealed Rao’s plan of covertly preparing for a series of nuclear tests. The story was a global expose of India’s nuclear plans. The only thing that remained after that was a decent burial the nuclear plan. On 19 December 1995, as Sitapati has recorded Clinton sent a message that he wanted to speak to Rao. The call finally matured on 21 December. Rao’s last word to then US president was that there is now ‘[N]o plan to explode. But yes. We are ready. We have the capability’. This was a pathetic exhibition of failed power which showed a certain degree of machismo, backed by no intent.3 Manmohan Singh was no Rao. Nor was he a Vajpayee. He was on the lookout for a deal that could at one level freeze the Indian nuclear weapons programme and at another level provide the Western nuclear power industry, business. As has been mentioned before, the economic reform programme was imposed on the people by stealth. Left to Singh, the Civil Nuclear Agreement would have seen the same modus vivendi. But UPA was a coalition government and UPA chairperson—the head honcho of the coalition—was Sonia Gandhi who was not yet ready to dump the Left parties, even though the Left was adamant about not allowing the country to get into a strategic alliance with the US. Karat the former general secretary of the CPI-M and who led the left block of 59 MP’s was set in his belief that India cannot join hands with an ‘imperialist’ power. He told the author: The nuclear deal issue became prominent after the US Congress adopted the Hyde Act in December 2006. The (CPI-M) Central Committee meeting held on August 23–24, 2007 discussed the political crisis arising out of the nuclear deal. Since the government was insisting on proceeding with the 123 Agreement, the Central Committee endorsed the Polit Bureau stand and authorized it to take whatever steps necessary to block the agreement.4

The ‘global stage’ provided a platform to the complaint that India does not and has not clearly articulated what its ‘national interest’ is.

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As a corollary, an absence of a stated national security policy is held up by powers like the US as an absence of a strategic culture. Indian interlocutors like C. Raja Mohan, a key strategic thinker of the country had stated once ‘why should India have to have a declared national security policy’. The statement framed in terms of a question was not rhetorical. But an NWS and a regional hegemon with the third largest army in the world need a document that draws the red lines of robust national interest. On 18 July 2005, India and the US had a crucial summit between President George W. Bush of the US and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India. The 2005 Joint Statement was a precursor of the Civil Nuclear Agreement which, in the opinion of many foreign policy stalwarts like Shyam Saran, former foreign secretary and Shivshankar Menon, a foreign secretary who followed him, and later, a National Security Advisor was a milestone for which they worked so hard for so long. Shyam Saran talked about the technology denial regimes which afflicted India post-PNE in 1974. He sees one of the keystones of the 18 July Joint Statement, the agreement between the US and India for technology transfer. Saran as the foreign secretary was a primary driver of the Civil Nuclear Agreement (CNA) for the US. Menon and Saran are believers. The CNA was the acme of their foreign service record. So, when Menon wrote ‘In India… the initiative quickly caught the imagination of the young aspirational generation that was emerging’. The search for ‘strategic autonomy’ or Non-alignment 2.0 was visions that could have contradicted Menon and Saran.5 But both being acutely aware the where the Indian interest lay—especially of the elite—and thus took part in the formulation of Non-alignment 2.0, albeit post-reorientation of Indian foreign policy vis-à-vis American relations. ‘Strategic autonomy’ is not a choice, the luxury of enjoying that status depends on the Comprehensive National Power (CNP) a nation can bring to bear on international politics. Nor can there be a hand-medown big powerdom that much of the Indian elite including the economic policy hierarchy had made seem a natural phenomenon. It is rather ironic that a hard-boiled bureaucrat-politician Manmohan Singh and his followers always raised the red rag each time the various prime ministers, beginning with Indira Gandhi when she wanted to go for nuclear tests in the early 1980s, again.

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For the CNA to take shape, a series of measures were needed to be taken by both the Indian government and the US administration. The delegation that had gone for negotiations to Washington included Raja Ramanna along with a retinue of officials from various relevant ministries. The discussions were detailed and sometimes ‘nerve-racking’. Menon writes ‘Once it was clear that India’s nuclear weapons were off the table, India afflicted by an energy crisis, tired of ‘outlaw’ status and publicly recognising its interest as an NWS in the existing order and in preventing the emergence of more NWS was ready to work with the United States’.6 India went through the gamut of statutes required to satisfy US laws and rules of International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). India was to segregate its nuclear installations which included those that were to contribute to the nuclear weapons programme and the others that were for nuclear power generation for civilian purposes. The IAEA safeguards required surprise checks on the civilian sides. There were fears that even the American inspectors could intrusively inspect nuclear facilities of the country, not, however, the unsafeguarded nuclear sites. India also thought that it could trade its unspoken agreement for signing CTBT and the articulated position of signing FMCT. Thankfully, the ‘non-proliferation’ Ayatollahs belonging to and associated with the Barack Obama administration could not carry the US Congress for ratifying CTBT. Thus, a famous Jaswant Singh statement that India wishes to enter the nuclear clubs and close the door behind them didn’t quite take place. So, for a long time China, an N-5 member state, almost held out a threat, could strike a similar civil nuclear deal with Pakistan. They had to drop that idea ultimately because of the pressure of the Western countries led by the US. But now when India wishes to join the NSG, the Chinese are showing their power by keeping the door closed with the condition that the door could be made ajar if Pakistan is also made a member. Could this be considered a policy failure on the Indian part, some would ask. On the other hand, India till sometime ago was not willing to sign what the Americans had been calling the ‘foundational agreements’ for defence collaboration. These agreements were the Logistics Supply Agreement (LSA), the Communication Interoperability and Security Memorandum (CISMOA) and the Basic Exchange and Cooperation Agreement (BECA).

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Narendra Modi-led NDA II finally broke ranks and signed the logistics agreement with the Pentagon called Logistics Exchange Memorandum of Agreement (LEMOA). This entails a nodding acquaintance at the minimum with basing rights for US forces. This means that the US forces on an expeditionary journey could enjoy their R&R (rest and recreation) besides resupplies and any other requirement the visitors can demand within the statutes of LEMOA. By the same token, the American logic about terrorists who are harboured by sympathisers to the LEMOA positions then India could be a party to a battle or a war that the US expeditionary forced could indulge in after basing in the country. Interestingly, Manmohan Singh could not emerge as a Narasimha Rao—the wily politician who almost sought to erase the signature of the Nehru-Gandhi clan from the Congress Party—despite the full backing of the American regimes of Bush or Obama. Was it a structural malady of his style of operation? Policy opacity is Singh’s signature tune. Now making a document classified as ‘top secret’ cuts both ways. At one level, it hides the faults of its authors. On another level, an opaque policy decision fails to garner popular support. This is a political reality that the Indian bureaucracy seems unable to learn. In a fast-changing world—post-2008 financial meltdown—the demand of the time is for transparency and positions that are called populist by a media which thinks like the politico-bureaucrats and consider that they are the custodians of unpublished information that comes to use for limited sectarian gratification. But what is populism? If in a democracy of popular politics and people’s votes count why shouldn’t a decision-maker be a populist. Thus, when Modi talks about Direct Benefit Transfer, he reflects the failure of a governance system that failed to deliver public services and goods, while building a new one. What is this failure of a system that seeks to gain strength from nuclear options and yet cannot depend on its public servants to deliver on public needs. A China could raise by the bootstraps about 300 million above the poverty level in one generation. Current statistics show that only 2.4% of the Chinese population earns less than $2 a day, while India has at least a 30 per cent-and-above of the population, earning less than $2 a day. Why is this relevant in the context of two advanced developing countries like China and India? Reason: India fashionably is called a multiparty democracy while China is a one-party state.

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But how is it so different from Japan that till sometime ago was also a one-party state or an America that is a two-party state and UK, the same. Why is it most of Europe is in a huge ferment despite its civilisational binding between nations? Its people within the European Union have had enough of the Friedmanian neoliberalism which socialises the cost of mistakes of the government and their sponsors, the capitalist class, while indulging in primitive accumulation of wealth for a few. Thus, there is the rise of populist political leaders who cater to the interests of the people writ large. Some China watchers in the West make that PRC is ruled by a totalitarian regime. They say that the party state controls virtually every facet of the people lives. It is like a covenant that rules human lives from the cradle to the grave. This author’s tour of China is completely contrary to these images. In 2007 just before the Beijing Olympics, China was getting ready to exhibit its best side under the microscopes of 1500-odd foreign journalists, who were to visit the nation. And one can confidently state that no government has the wherewithal to monitor the movements of this gaggle. Journalists are well known for chafing at the edges when any nation state seeks to control them. In 2007 December, there were 250 plus publications that were available at various publication kiosks in any major city like Chongqing, Wuhan or Kunming, besides Beijing. When one checked with a veteran foreign journalist then based in Beijing, originally from France, how free are these publications from party and State control, he had stated clearly that while many of these publications are promoted and published by even provincial CPC units it’s a nightmare to be so censorious, simply because the trained manpower required is humungous. On a journey in one of the migration boats over the Yangtze river passing through the Three Gorges dam, one found that the people upper deck of the board were as voluble as South Asians can be. In Chongqing, the former national capital from where the so-called nationalist Guomindang used to rule the country, the scenes one saw were a raucous society that loved its self-expressions, be it in the form best restaurants or roadside shacks, the human spirit was evidently unshackled. A local friend who also is a travel guide had told some interesting stories. One of them was how the great fear of social disharmony—Western analysts make this a leitmotif of Chinese governance—over the possibilities and probabilities of such a situation hardly militates ever enough, either the party and/or the State which supposedly they fear. He had

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said, seemingly apocryphal that anyone could stand at the village centre and shout that this or that Chinese leader is a ‘thief’. No one would even give him a second look, including the authorities. But, if he gathers a hundred people around himself, that’s when the authorities will be hot and bothered. While this story might seem apocryphal, the principle it connotes seems, well, Chinese in a very Confucian way. Quintessentially, this did not fit the criterion of either a Nazi Germany or a Stalinist Russia or even India and its cow vigilantes. Still China is authoritarian in the classical sense because a little more than 50% of the GDP is produced under the direction of the party state. The state-owned enterprises are behemoths that would buy out failed private enterprises. The fact remains as the Chongqing friends told the author, in a fast urbanising China, people still have more trust in public housing programmes, than private builders. This sounds quite like India because India truly as much as China was a mixed economy before the 90s. Some would call it a ‘mixed-up economy’ but the fact remains those who called it by that epithet would invariably have been reared on incomes generated from the State sector. Now, what capitalism has done to both these countries was to take away first security of tenure in a job and second, collective bargaining. The CPC does not allow as we have seen in this book earlier, any other trade union activity that is independent of them. Western organisations that belong to what is called the international community actually account for the number of social and economic unrests taking place in PRC. Invariably, those numbers would be in few thousands annually. When the proportionality argument is applied to these numbers and China’s 1.3 billion people and at least half a billion working class are brought into play in comparison, these numbers seem puny. In India, the same principle is followed through a subtle way of co-option by the powers-in-being who also belong to six major trade union organisations of the country. A Honda factory agitation or a Maruti Suzuki agitation is exceptions to the rule and shining examples of trade unionism, however being dependent on individual integrity of leaderships. In those situations, invariably the owner’s thugs or the State’s police forces are always ready to break such upsurges. On the CNA, the parties of the Left supporting the UPA government, especially those who were on the same page with Prakash Karat, then general secretary of the CPI (M), understood the driving need of

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the Indian power elite to tie up with Americans. They believed that this was essentially inviting ‘an imperialist power’. He says: The failure on our part was to underestimate the determination of the Prime Minister (Manmohan Singh) and the Congress leadership to somehow go ahead and fulfill its strategic commitment to the United States.7

What the official Left was oblivious of was the entrenched idea amongst the Indian upper and middle classes of ‘the American dream’. When did this transformation of the Indian elitist mindset take place considering that both Nehru and Gandhi had demarcated the Soviet-backed projects—power, steel, etc., as the commanding heights of Indian economy. When did this unquestioned admiration of US emerge? This is not a rhetorical question. Unless we understand this fundamental transformation of the Indian society into a consumerist American model, we won’t be able to understand what is the philosophical background behind the civil nuclear agreement people like Shyam Saran or a Shivshankar Menon were touting so strongly. They cannot be questioned based on their nationalism, because they have unwaveringly proven their loyalty to the country. Yes, J. N. Dixit’s parents were freedom fighters. The Sarans and the Menons were after Dixit’s time. But when they convincingly pursued policy, they believed in their path. Menon writes: ‘In India one of the first questions put to foreign secretary Shyam Saran when he returned from Washington in April and May 2005 with ideas on how to move the initiative forward was, why should India trust the United States, a country that had reneged on its commitment to supply fuel to the US-built Tarapur power reactors for the lifetime?’ This is uniquely the dilemma the Indian elite has always faced visa-vis the US. It is a love-hate relationship where the bureaucracy could be tempted by various fellowships like the Hubert Humphrey or the Masons that took them to the institutions of their dreams like the Harvard University, Stanford University or the Princeton and sometimes even, the University of Chicago, but to write them off as ‘compradors’. A CIA note that appeared in public in the 1990s and disappeared soon leaving no paper trail had stated this was a quick way of influencing the thoughts and practices of identified officials who could be on an escalator in terms of their careers after being run through the US university campuses including the most conservative economics departments of

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the University of Chicago. You may recall Milton Friedman—the guru of neo-classicism or neoliberalism—to be a presiding deity in that department. This education usually comes packaged with many other US dollar denominated international job assignments, condition these national decision-makers to tie the country with the American ‘manifest destiny’ of being a global hegemon. Primacy in the comity of nations for India’s efforts in search of its own exceptionalism is centred on Chanakyan political theory. In the view of this author and the context of an article written by him in the Strategic Analysis journal, published by India’s premier think-tank Institute of Defence Studies and Analyses, is based on a limited value strategic approach of Chanakya that bestows on the nation state a default position on ‘enmity with thyneighbor’. In the context of South Asia, this attitude is reflected even after Pakistan’s ‘two nation theory’ was disproved by the birth of Bangladesh. And, the strategic matrix is laid out as India remaining a pre-eminent power in this region, while it progresses towards being an emerging major power. The adherents of Chanakyan philosophy gain traction as their idea of exceptionalism is based on India’s unique geopolitical position and the possibility of humungous expansion of its geostrategic reach. Menon writes ‘As India grew its economy and accumulated power it gained agency in the international system, its options increased and the scope and significance of the choices it made steadily expanded. We may have been uniquely blessed’. The uniqueness of Indian civilisational experience militates a view that is more peaceable and contrived, unlike China which believes in its Zhong Guo (Middle Kingdom) syndrome as a natural state of being; or the US which believes in ‘falling dominos’ in their favour. In other words, both China and the US are driven by their physical power while India chooses the strength of its philosophical context of nationhood that overcomes all barriers. The ancient philosophies coupled with its enormous absorptive capability of extra-territorial social and cultural influences—while Indianising them—is also a reservoir of soft power. While South Asia is supposedly India’s zone of influence, it is getting challenged from the proxy power of Pakistan that works through a process of military engagement at a sub-conventional level. The declaration of the status of NWS in 1998 by the NDA I government did not create a security umbrella. Pakistan’s own nuclear explosions in the same month and the same year on the other hand appeared to successfully remove the

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conventional deterrence of a larger country. We witnessed the conventional deterrence failure as a symptomatic expression in Kargil in 1999. India took more than a month to dislodge the cross-LoC intruders. This was despite India having a larger army, better equipped and well trained. At the strategic weapons level, the nuclear arsenal came to little use. But it did show the world who the aggressors were and how are visionist state, Pakistan could be. The problem has now been confounded by China’s involvement where the Chinese have created a paradigm shift from the old US Cold War methodological instrumentation. Chinese, on the other hand, are investing 48 billion US dollars that could buy-off Pakistan’s elite without Beijing following Washington’s often mindless enunciation of deepening ‘faultlines’ in its nation state. The power shift that the world is witnessing now in the post-2008 phase is not complete but is in the making. India could have taken part in that process from South Asia, had its own backyard been stable. This is precisely a ‘coopetition’ (cooperation and competition)—a condition that Sino-Indian relation is supposed to embrace. What is happening for now is a process of testing respective leadership’s ability to shape the regional and global environment. Defeat of the ideology of neoliberalism riding on liberal democracy’s systemic vanguards—like Constitutionalism and supposed Rule of Law—was internalised and expressed by more perceptive political scientists, economists and sociologists of the West. Thus, much before Davos 2016 and the formulation of the concept of the Fourth Industrial Revolution by the likes of Klaus Schwabe (a WEF chief) and Christine Lagarde (an IMF chief), the smart American NGOs had begun the drumbeats of an alternative to Washington Consensus of the 1990s, called the Beijing Consensus. As mentioned above, neoliberal economic policies riding upon liberal democratic principles created serious doubts about the latter’s longevity. The idea that governments could recede to the background with the regulatory authorities emasculated, and market becoming king, thus arbiter of global fortunes, became a theme song ever since Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher emerged on the horizon. Beijing Consensus was supposedly based on an authoritarian regime regulating from the top of the market forces their worst instincts, but allowing them to play in a limited way. India under Narendra Modi and his economic advisors, who told him that the Planning Commission needed to be shut down and replaced by something called NITI Aayog

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or a policy shop. This organisation was peopled by experts who were former neoliberalists, but now are in friendlier garb of being conscious about the lack of social-security structure in the country. The work was begun under the UPA I which had an organisation called National Advisory Council (NAC). That too was a nation-building institution with a prominent social consciousness of India’s backwardness. But considering Manmohan Singh remained unreconstructed—possibly for the first time in his life—the market cronies of the political elite hijacked many of the NAC pronouncements. One doesn’t know about Singh enough to say that his nationalism was unfettered by any ideological predilections. Those of the Chinese princelings (those who were born to early leaders) who were allowed to go abroad to study by Deng after his reform process began, came back and contributed with a strong nationalist streak to the PRC growth. The confusion about Manmohan Singh arises from one of his speeches at Oxford University. One may recall at this stage, Singh was a student of Cambridge University till his M-Phil in economics, and who won the Adam Smith prize of the Oxford University for his D-Phil, a rare of the rarest collaborations between these two pristine universities. The speech that Singh delivered during a commemoration of that occasion was a paean to the British colonialists/imperialists: What impelled the Mahatma (Gandhi) to take such a positive view of Britain and the British people even as he challenged the Empire and colonial rule? It was, undoubtedly, his recognition of the elements of fair play that characterised so much of the ways of the British in India. Consider the fact that an important slogan of India’s struggle for freedom was that “Self Government is more precious than Good Government.” That, of course, is the essence of democracy. But the slogan suggests that even at the height of our campaign for freedom from colonial rule, we did not entirely reject the British claim to good governance. We merely asserted our natural right to self-governance.8

In one stroke, he removed chapters from the resplendent history of the Indian Freedom struggle that included Khudiram Bose, a 20-year-old youth who died for his country; the Chapekar brothers of Maharashtra; and Bhagat Singh of Punjab. Though Gandhi was against this part of the freedom movement, one should remember that he willy-nilly launched the Quit India Movement in 1942 which took the life of a woman of much advanced years like Matangini Hazra in Bengal. The

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nature of Manmohan Singh’s ideological belief is harshly defined by the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), and the official communists of India who swing between calling the likes of him as national bourgeoisie or just bourgeoisie. Chinese leadership under Mao on the other hand gave communism a cultist nature that led to a sort of ‘takfirism’ (apostasy) especially when such movements were launched like ‘Let Hundred Flowers Boom’ or the ‘Cultural Revolution’. The concept of Mao thought to be added as a third leg of the two-legged parentage of communism—Marxism and Leninism—is a product of classical sycophancy of Liu Shao Chi and of course, Lin Biao, once an anointed successor of Mao. Each of these movements was Mao’s attempt at suborning the intellectual class of China at one level and establishing his unchallengeable supremacy on the CPC structures like its Central Committee and Polit Bureau for his lifetime and beyond. But returning to our original narrative, while Clinton eventually delivered in favour of India during the Kargil conflict by putting Nawaz Sharif and General Parvez Musharraf, then the Chief of Army Staff, on notice, but he did not fail to push the nuclear non-proliferation agenda that was being by touted by those called the Friends of Bill (FoB), who were termed by an evocative expression of the father of Indian strategic thought, Dr. K. Subramanyam as the non-proliferation ‘Ayatollahs’. The redefined Indo-US relationship spanned three American regimes and four Indian governments. This created a sense of a ‘false consciousness’ about an abiding consensus growing in the country around the relationship which was not tested till the CNA debate began. While the Left of course was constantly contesting the newly fired up US affinity of the Indian ruling class, the large swathe of anti-US but otherwise liberal intellectuals who also belonged to the ruling class also failed to quite rise-up to the occasion, till the debate began. The opposition to CNA was on one level based on anti-imperialism as defined by Karat. On the other, there were technical issues, which really were serious pushbacks from a large section of the Indian scientific community. They were extremely conscious about how they had to indigenously develop capacities in a technology denial regime triggered and led by the US. There was even news that then Atomic Energy Commission Chairman Anil Kakodkar being held back from a meeting that was taking place in terms of the segregation of civilian and military installations on nuclear power. That was a tactical play to go back to the negotiations with a

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negative list for those assets and say that the scientists did not agree to the inclusion of this or that asset thus to be exempted from intrusive inspections. Even then, there were sections of scientists being sidelined on an issue like the CNA where the highly sensitive elements were known only to a small group of scientists and technologists. They believed the Foreign Service officers and other bureaucrats did not have a full knowledge of the nuclear power establishment. But it was also true that a large section of the scientific community again was tired of reinventing the wheel. They wanted access to the advanced technologies that the US and its allies could provide to India. This was indeed an inherent contradiction of the backstory of the CNA negotiations and the related strategic partnership with the US. But as was seen in China in the 1970s the nay-sayers group that opposed Mao certified Zhou-Deng initiative of opening a window to the US were eventually cut-out from decision-making totally. Initial euphoria with the strategic partnership of the US began to die down towards the second term of the Barack Obama administration. There were three issues that continued to niggle the new relationship. The first was the let-down that the American nuclear power generating companies had on the commercial opportunities that arose out of CNA. This was a result of the deep domestic contestation over who ‘liabilities were vested upon in case of nuclear accidents’, thus slowing down the overtures of the American MNCs. Second point of disturbance was the constant badgering of Islamabad to get the same or similar CNA. And, the third was the issue of the strategic limitations India had in terms of American forays in this continent particularly in the North East and South East Asia. The sense of priority for India that was witnessed during the George W. Bush presidency was overwhelmed by the immediate priorities born out of Islamist insurgencies and terrorism. While India was certainly a bulwark in the coalition against Islamist upsurge, but it was also restrained considering the country also belonged to 250-odd million Muslims that made it the second largest Muslim nation in the world. The first being Indonesia which too had a wide tapestry of religious, ethnic and linguistic communities constituting the country. Pakistan constantly competes even with this status of India as being the second largest Muslim population of the world, often claiming that they were the second.

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One of the most contentious issues in the post-CNA phase was the liability that nuclear power generators and distributors should incur in case of a nuclear accident like Three Miles Island in the US, Chernobyl in the former Soviet Union and Fukushima in Japan. As Menon writes, ‘Two aspects of the Indian Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage Act of 2010 subsequently became controversial in India and between India and the United States. One point of contention was the provision in Section 17 that the (power generation) operator had right of recourse against suppliers if the supplies caused an accident. But such an openended risk worried both Indian and foreign suppliers. This problem has largely been addressed by limiting the right of recourse by amount, time and the value of the part involved and by contractual provisions in addition suppliers can now ensure themselves against such claims’.9 The other irritant post-CNA was the entry of India to the NSG and the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR). The Americans hardsell NSG waiver to India for the procurement of nuclear technology. Indian ruling class believes that till the time India is a member, its claim as an NWS is going to remain limited. It is a matter of great resentment amongst those Indians who wanted to close the club door after their entry that it is PRC which has blocked the entry. China says that rules in the NSG about entry for various States should be uniform. This suspiciously sounds like what Indian position used to be in the pre-CNA days. India believed that it was not in its interest to sign the NPT because the rules were discriminatory. That was India’s position on CTBT also. Lastly, the biggest takeaway for the Indian Left was the mistake of the CPI (M) leadership committed to allow Indian government negotiators to go to Vienna after the signature on the 123 Agreement or as it is called the Henry Hyde Act. Had they stopped the IAEA deliberations with Indian government representatives on issues like segregation of nuclear installations and safeguards over and above the additional protocol, could have gutted the strategic embrace of the US with India, which the Left so disliked. ‘[A] meeting was held in early November, 2007, in which the Congress leadership (Mrs. Sonia Gandhi and Pranab Mukherjee) including the Prime Minister finally agreed that they would go for talks to the IAEA on the draft agreement but will not sign it. They will not sign it unless the Left gives assent It was on this basis that the government negotiated the draft of the safeguards agreement’.10 Clearly, it was a political failure of Karat and Co in recognising the intent of the UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi. Right from the beginning

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of 2005 visit by Manmohan Singh that ended with the now famous Joint Declaration of Strategic Partnership, she at every stage had supported Manmohan Singh’s US line. While of note is also the fact that the only time during his a troubled decade-long tenure Singh held out the threat of resignation was when Gandhi wanted to stall the negotiations. On none of the occasions when corruption charges were made against his Cabinet members did the prime minister make such a threat. There are two points of doubt about India declaring itself an NWS with a hydrogen bomb, an ultimate deterrent. The controversy about the 45 kilotonne yield of the H-bomb tested in Pokhran II was in the air till a few years ago. Begun by the chief scientist of DRDO Dr. K. Santhanam who wrote and spoke vociferously about how India needed to test another fusion bomb because the Pokhran II bomb had a lower yield than what was claimed was countered by equally weighty members of the scientific community. He found ready supporters for his theory amongst both informed and uninformed people, but the establishment line continued to hold that the experiment was of a fusion bomb, and not a fission device. The other problem is the one faced by the strategists who wanted to create a doctrine out of the atomic arsenal. One is not sure whether India’s nuclear weapons were genuinely a deterrent for the fact Pakistan tested the threshold for Indian pain soon after the tests in Kargil. Threat of war under a nuclear shadow requires a response proportional to the grade at which the pain threshold exists. The former Chief of Army Staff, General J. J. Singh began talking about the ‘Cold Start’ strategy for some time the Pakistan army establishment didn’t have a conventional riposte. But now the Pakistan armed forces leadership in conjunction with civilian authorities have become a votary of nuclearisation of the conventional battle space. In other words, they are talking about using tactical sub-kilotonne weapons early on to stop any Indian army advance. The Indian leadership is swinging between two extremes. Avinash Chander, the former scientific advisor to the defence minister and former DG of DRDO, told this writer in a formal interview that India would retaliate massively to even a sub-kt usage in warfighting by Pakistan. With the event of BJP led NDA II government, talk has begun whether India too should also go with a strategy of tactical nuclear weapons to be used in an exercise of the second-use option. The issue is not resolved yet though India has the capability of sub-kilotonne miniaturised warheads for shells that could be used with conventional artillery.

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Notes

1. Talbott, Strobe, Engaging India: Diplomacy, Democracy and the Bomb (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2004). 2. Sitapati, Vijay, Half—Lion: How P.V. Narasimha Rao Transformed India (India: Penguin Random House, 2016). 3. Ibid. 4.  Conversation with Prakash Karat, the former general secretary of the CPI-M, that supported the UPA I to attain majority in Parliament for a minority government. 5. Menon, Shivshankar, Choice: Inside the Making of India’s Foreign Policy (India: Penguin Random House, 2016). 6. Ibid. 7. Op. cit., n. 3. 8. Singh, Manmohan, “Of Oxford, Economics, Empire, and Freedom,” The Hindu, 10 July, 2005. 9. Op. cit., n. 4. 10. Op. cit., n. 3.

CHAPTER 8

China, India Should March to Their Own Drummers

This was a three-minute long handshake. The diminutive statesman wouldn’t just leave the hands of the young, handsome, bright leader from India. This was Deng Xiaoping four years before he died when Rajiv Gandhi went visiting wintry Beijing in December of 1988. By then Sumdurong Chu had already taken place and India’s gung-ho Chief of Army Staff General Krishnaswamy Sundarji had launched Operation Chequerboard. This was the first major pushback of the PLA when they showed signs of advance across the Line of Actual Control. This was a different India which earlier was often diffident in launching operations against Chinese forces. India’s institutional memory till then had remained overwhelmed by the takeaways of the 1962 border war. That happened when Rajiv’s grandfather, the larger than life first prime minister of the country and an intellectually sharp globalist, Jawaharlal Nehru had listened to and taken too seriously the suggestions of an intelligence chief. The mistake that he committed along with his Defence Minister V. K. Krishna Menon was to play army generals from South Block in New Delhi, instead of leaving border management policies of the country to those who guarded them. In this case, the Indian Army was the force in being, led by Chief of Army Staff, General P. N. Thapar who was favoured by both Nehru and Menon. After all he was of the same bloodline of Romesh Thapar the bon vivant socialist out of Bombay, who later settled down in New Delhi. Lt Gen B. M. Kaul who was hastily made the commander the 4 Corps that was assembled for him to take on the increasingly belligerent China © The Author(s) 2019 P. Bhattacharya, Sino-US and Indo-US Relations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-7276-6_8

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also North Eastern Frontier Agency (NEFA) and was the first to be engaged in battle by the PLA as the Indian retreat began. Such was the generalship of Kaul that when goings got tough he flew back to Delhi, ostensibly on the orders of the Army Headquarters. Disaster was imminent. While the PLA almost knocked on the door of Assam: Nehru virtually wrote off this province. In a radio address, he went on to say that his heart bleeds for the people of Assam to be abandoned to the advancing Chinese Army. Gopinath Bordoloi who was the chief minister of Assam volunteered to take up arms and lead a guerrilla force against the PLA if it took Assam. But the Chinese leadership did a unique exercise; they retreated from almost the gates of Assam, to the position where they were before the border war began. Mao had reportedly said that ‘India needed to be imparted a lesson and that has been done’. This is the backdrop of the Sino-Indian relationship that prevailed till Sumdurong Chu operation took place. This was a borderline part of erstwhile NEFA, now Arunachal Pradesh. The 1988 visit of Gandhi was thus continued to be burdened by this history of internecine conflict. Indians considered 1962 aggression a betrayal: with India’s efforts to have Mao’s regime recognised by the UN as the legitimate government of China. By then Gandhi, 1988, was already besieged by the Bofors scandal where a significant part of his political campaign had been spent. He put a wager on the remaining political capital on creating a new history for the Sino-Indian relationship. Next milestone event in the bilateral relationship was the visit by Narasimha Rao to Beijing in 1993 that produced a ‘peace and tranquility agreement’ which was important enough for Shivshankar Menon, a Sinologist himself, to choose as the first chapter of his recently published work called ‘Choices’. There are three documents which are the guiding documents of the relationship between the two countries. With the disputed borders in the northeast of India and the northern tundra of Ladakh-Aksai Chin, total real estate under dispute between the two countries is 45,000 sq km? While the border war in 1962 barely gets a mention in the annals of the PLA, it looms large on the minds of the Indian people, sections of Indian polity and much of the armed forces. Zhou Enlai had offered to Nehru that if India ceded Aksai Chin while retaining Arunachal Pradesh, the boundary dispute can be settled. Instead of accepting that offers

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Nehru piloted a resolution in Parliament for taking back from China the territory it had lost in 1962. Zhou’s offer was made to Rajiv Gandhi by Deng in 1988 again. New Delhi sat on the offer till a decade later when it was taken off the table by the Chinese. The new deal that Dai Bingguo recently floated in a rarely written memoir, Strategic Dialogue, by any senior Chinese official carries another formula to settle the border issue. This entails the centrality of the Tawang monastery (the seventh Dalai Lama was born there). One explanation of this demand is that Chinese nationals especially from Tibet consider the Tawang monastery to be the second most important religious site, the first being Potala Palace where the Dalai Lamas resided. Now, in exchange of a tract secured by the PLA to the Tawang monastery as demanded by Dai, also would require the portion of Jammu and Kashmir that Pakistan first intruded upon and later gifted to China. This extends into Aksai Chin and an extremely important road the Karakoram Highway runs through the territory connecting Xinjiang and Tibet. But the rest of Aksai Chin could be returned to India by the Chinese. This is a rather accelerated process of solving the border problem with India considering what Deng had told Rajiv, ‘China and India should concentrate on their respective national developments and reconstruction efforts… He (Deng) informed Rajiv Gandhi that the boundary dispute’s the main hurdle that prevented full normalization of relations was a complex problem which would take time to resolve. He suggested while this problem be tackled through new bilateral institutional arrangements China and India should give up their inhibitions about expanding bilateral relations in all other spheres’. A Joint Working Group (JWG) was decided upon out of that meeting to be working on the boundary question co-chaired by the foreign secretary of and the vice foreign minister of China. By now, 17 sittings of the JWG of the two countries have not produced much progress. Except the middle sector abutting Uttaranchal, the north and the east remain as contentious as they were when Deng was alive. Not even maps of the Line of Action Control (LAC) have been exchanged between the two countries. Result: there are often reports of ‘transgressions’ that get publicised and the ultra-nationalists of both the countries populating the social media raise a merry hell. In the process, this kind of intractability gets reflected in the bilateral exchanges between the two countries.

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China had disputed boundaries with 21 neighbouring nations; only two remains unresolved. They are with India and Bhutan. The most fascinating transgression took place just before and during President Xi Jinping’s visit in September 2014. China’s president was visiting the country—that began with a big sign of cordiality reflected in the Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s reception of Xi on the banks of the Ganges River in Varanasi. In normal circumstances, most practices of international relations and diplomatic actions take place in the quiescence that marks a summit. Probably for the first time after the 1940s a summit meeting between the two Asian majors were shrouded by a dark moment when the PLA walked across the Indian perception of the LAC at the northeast of India and setup camp. While the border issue may not have figured in a big way in the interactions between the two leaders, following the Dengist principles of bilateral exchanges in areas and agreements prepared and signed still the occupation of the PLA continued to be a bugbear. This transgression continued for more than a fortnight and signalled that it couldn’t have had taken place with a rogue commander seeking to embarrass both the leaders of the two countries, as was held by some Indian analysts. It had to be cleared at the level of the CMC of which Xi was a chairman. Was this a signal to India for accelerating the settlement process of the border dispute or was this an indication of the Chinese leaderships increasing unhappiness with India’s diplomatic orientation. In other words, the American effort to increasingly involve India in the Western Pacific or Indo-Pacific region thus letting New Delhi reach out to the littoral nation states, for example, Vietnam. On the other hand, the Chinese forays in continental South Asia especially in Pakistan, Nepal and Bangladesh have created serious heartburn in South Block headquarters of the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) and the PMO. Despite India’s reticence about challenging China in the maritime domain, the Americans, the Japanese and the Australians are keen that the seventh largest Navy and the fifth largest air force pick up the slack, with the US receding a little in the background. A few times, beginning with the UPA I, a hesitant government have tried to keep Exercise Malabar going—the largest naval exercise in the Indo-Pacific region between US Navy and the Indian Navy. First Ex Malabar had created major consternation amongst the Chinese mostly with the involvement of the Australians and the Japanese together, subsequently the last two countries were excised on the face of protests of the Left Parties supporting the UPA I.

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But with the NDA II of Narendra Modi at the helm, Japan was included in the Malabar of 2016. The government of the day was, however, reticent about having Australia return to one of the largest maritime exercises in the region. Fact remains, however, that the Chinese, the largest power in that region with a five trillion dollar-plus economy decide to turn the screws on Canberra, Australia may realise that Australasia as a continent has Asia attached to it. With China equating its ‘100 years of humiliation’ delivered by the Japanese empire of yore, and modern-day regime chiefs visiting each time the Yasukuni Shrine, Beijing’s reactions are indicators of what Japan may see the going tougher than what is now. Though with Shinzo Abe the Japanese nationalism is rearing its head again, World War II axis power nightmares of that part of Asia could easily be stoked by PRC. In the process, India may find that its ‘Act East’ policy is being carried on by the Americans on their shoulders. What that would entail only the future can say and what it does to India’s standing in the region is also worth pondering? The idea of the Indo-Pacific was born in the minds of the American strategic thinkers and was articulated at a conference in Honolulu, US Pacific Command headquarters by then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. With former US President Barack Obama’s smart take of moving away from the Arab mess and instead pivot to what the American strategists call Asia (Southeast and East Asia), the Americans were looking for a partner who in Natwar Singh’s historic description could be ‘a regional policeman’. So obviously the idea of playing an understudy to the Americans is not just a fetish of the RSS-BJP leadership, but a thought that was being toyed with by the Rajiv Gandhi regime of the Congress Party in the mid-1980s. Clinton knew in 2010 that India will not be chary of calling the conjunction of Western Pacific and Indian Ocean as the Indo-Pacific. And at least a section of the political-bureaucratic class which the Maoists call ‘comprador bourgeoisie’ would be ready to take on naval tasks set in Washington. But yes, the Indian navy is not yet ready to follow the paths that the Americans are opening to the Indo-Pacific yet. For they don’t have the assets that could mount regular naval patrols beyond the southern mouth of the Straits of Malacca. This strategic limitation is an issue that the Americans understand. Indo-Pacific has become very acceptable to a large section of Indian strategists because it extends the potential area of influence of the

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country, closer towards China. In military terms, this is being on the edge of the South China Sea (SCS) and breathing down the neck of PLA-N. Japan and Australia function under the nuclear umbrella of the Americans. This is the reason why the Japanese especially tend to ignore nuclear weapon developments of a rogue nation like North Korea. It is only under Abe that Japan has occasionally and publicly discussed developing nuclear options. Considering US President Trump had trumpeteered during the election campaign of 2016 that any of the countries which are allies of the US and feel threatened by nuclear weapons of rivals in their region should develop their own nuclear options. That is a nightmare scenario for those who are aware of what can entail from proliferation of nuclear arsenals. Leaving that aside the clear economic and commercial value of the region is really worth one’s while to take note considering that Association of Southeast Asian Nations, ASEAN where the early ‘Asian tigers’ who grew in the 1970s and 1980s at a fast clip and raised the living standards of their population to a significantly higher level seemed to be global examples. However, the economic crisis that finally became a contagion in the region during the late-1990s took away much of the sheen they had garnered. Instead China and India picked up the fast growth trajectory, with China clearly leading. This caused an expansion of trade for the Chinese with the ASEAN but did not raise the region’s sense of security. The Americans, who generally look after the AEAN well-being, ever since World War II was followed by the long war of Vietnam, are finding it a strain to keep the same level of involvement in the security of the ASEAN region. Hence, they had been pushing the ASEAN states to take up their own security as much as they can and relieve the pressure on themselves with China becoming richer and more militarily aggressive (it has disputes with many of the ASEAN states for various small islands and coral reefs). Thus, the ASEAN has formed the ASEAN Regional Forum of which India is now a dialogue partner. India’s growing relationship with Vietnam, it appears is the strategy to create a Pakistan for China. The Vietnamese have fought a war with China and they have serious racial issues with their much larger neighbour. Vietnam also has a disputed island and finds the territoriality of the East China Sea as claimed by the PRC as controvertible. India has pushed recently for exploration of oil and gas of the Vietnamese coast

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but has been thwarted by China. While this has not been blown up yet, as a dispute between India and China, the Vietnamese have certainly shown their ire about Chinese reactions. It is an ongoing dispute yet to be resolved as much as the ASEAN insecurity is also live. So, in the maritime domain in a comparatively limited way, India has been challenging China’s claim to suzerainty the north of the Straits of Malacca. As India continues to grow its blue water navy and makes foray into the Indo-Pacific region, they are bounded to come into conflict with the Chinese. Which is why New Delhi is seeking juridical cover in terms of United Nation Convention the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). That includes open sea lines of communication and freedom of navigation. This is precisely where the Americans seem to be on a sticky wicket because the US Congress has not ratified the UNCLOS. It is still not apparent whether US president, Trump’s over-commitment in Afghanistan and West Asia will affect US strategy against the rising power of China that has to be met in the Indo-Pacific region for now. Chinese Navy till sometime ago was limited in its operations within the confines of the Taiwan Straits. They first began making foray outside the region when they undertook anti-piracy operations off the coast of Somalia. Those tasks were under an UN mandate. From there they spread into the Indian Ocean and began making port calls in countries like Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Maldives. The fact that they had a clear plan was obvious. When they began making a series of harbours as we know for their exclusive use like Gwadar and Hambantota and had plans even for Chittagong in Bangladesh, the string of these ports were even given a catchy name by the Western media, and they called it the ‘string of pearls’. As is usual with the Chinese when their activities get exposed to the world before they are ready, there is a boilerplate denial issue. In case of ‘string of pearls’ then premier, Wen Jiabao denied existence of such a plan. He also negated the supposed motivation behind the strategy of encircling India. The fact remains now that the much larger Belt-Road Initiative(BRI) has been initiated, the ‘string of pearls’ have fitted in the larger project like a glove. Moving on, US recognised China could emerge as a real challenger even during Carter administration. This was when Sino-US relationship was given the official stamp of approval with embassies being opened in both the countries. Kissinger was possibly more historically inclined than US President Carter’s National Security

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Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski. But even Brzezinski was clear in his mind that Deng was in a hurry to reform his country. He had briefed his boss Carter the same. Once the Cold War logic of the relationship was removed what got strengthened was the huge untapped economic potential of close to a billion people ready to join the economic mainstream of the world. This was also when the unipolar moment had arrived as politically the Anglo-American combine celebrated the loci of economics shifting to the East. We have already discussed the growth the Asian Tigers, the Chinese Dragon was rearing up. From the late 1990s, the Chinese began consolidating their economic power. The Americans found a real eastern hedge which they could create out of another large population centre unleashing itself and waiting for western trade access with a larger middle-class population than China. This was India. The country always had a testy economic relation with the US. The US always clamoured for more trade access and more liberal regime for investments in India. The on again off again relationship had ten perennially vexatious issues. The man who dealt with them on these issues on many occasions and then through the 1990s was Professor Anwar Ul Hoda. He says, Because of our entrenched autarchic policies, no concession could be given by India and very little progress was made in these talks. The only concession that I can recall is an increase in the import quota for almonds. Then the US tried coercive tactics by recourse to Section 301, Super 301 and Special 301, but we did not budge and there was no option for the US but to give up. The launching of the Uruguay Round resulted in some softening of the US attitude as most of the issues of interest to the USA were taken up in these talks. Nevertheless, the USA maintained the pressure bilaterally by tightening up some benefits under the GSP (Generalised System of Preferences).1

Unlike with Chinese of the early 1970s, the economic balance of power was more even with India. While this did not translate into an immediate economic advantage the doors that had been opened were obvious with the way the Clinton administration treated New Delhi, especially in the case of Kargil. But Professor Hoda believes that India’s investment unfriendly environment is a differentiator with China of the 1970s and 1980s. The issue is underlined best by he himself, ‘The US already

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provides us with better market access vis-à-vis China, but if the latter has been more successful it is because it is highly competitive in manufacturing and their level is a few notches above that of India’.2 The GATT negotiations of the Uruguay Round was the testing ground for both the US and India in terms of the qualitative changes the Narasimha Rao government was introducing. Here, Hoda testifies, ‘The real change in the US attitude was the result of the introduction of economic reforms in India in 1991–1992. Following the reforms, as the economic policies in India began changing, the US representatives at Geneva began responding warmly to Indian proposals. The two specific areas I remember in GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) negotiations in which a positive response from the US helped us to secure our objectives are export subsidies on manufactures and balance-of-payments restrictions. The US also became more constructive in working out the eventual deal on the overarching dispute settlements procedures in the WTO (World Trade Organisation)’. But these approaches to the West through the economic route hadn’t been produced through a national consensus. On the contrary, the opposition to these moves were quite vehement at the beginning. A senior officer of the MEA was one of the many who perceived this veering off the path of Nehruvian national goal of ‘self-sufficiency’. He pointed out that, ‘Economic crises in India including the depleted foreign exchange reserve made Rao – a nationalist otherwise and also a realist to the core – realised that an outreach to the US – leader of the Western block – was a necessity of the time’. What Rao had begun was continued by the succeeding regimes without much change in the content. Clinton administration made the Rao government first to run through the hoops and then delivering for it the much wanted dehyphenation from Pakistan. This was a result of the disgust they had with Pakistan’s line of seeking global attention through sub-conventional methods of attrition. By the time George W. Bush transition team congealed to populate the White House, they came up with a plan that could contain China. The primary author of this plan was another Harvard University Professor Condoleezza Rice. But before they could settle down in the White House in full regalia ready to translate ideas into action 9/11 took place. This was one of those inflection points that completely transformed the focus of the Bush II administration. By then NDA I government was well settled in India.

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They were worried that Pakistan again emerging as a frontline state in the War on Terror especially in Afghanistan. There could be a repeat of the Regan administrations war of insurgency against the Soviets, the policymakers in New Delhi thought. Jaswant Singh was the man of the moment on the Indian side. Before he was moved from the external affairs Ministry to finance India had made sure that this time the ISI and Pakistan Army would not be the nodal points for the flow of arms, ammunition, money and men into Afghanistan. One should recall that Ahmed Shah Masood the Tajik leader along with the Uzbek chieftain, Abdul Rashid Dostum who had held the Northern Alliance frontline against the Taliban ever since the group held the power in Kabul for close to a decade. On 10th September 2001, Masood was assassinated. After the wreckage of 9/11 and its shock was still descending on the people Bush too who was held off from coming into Washington by his NSA, Rice on the day of the carnage convened a meeting at Camp David. The target was already chosen. How the war was to be fought was the issue. It appeared that the Special Operations Command of the US Army will be the first to be inducted. This is where New Delhi came in because the co-fighters and the terrain guides of the US Special Operations Forces were the Northern Alliance fighters who had been reared and maintained by India and Russia besides Iran. This was the beginning of what led to a document called NSSP. As the Vajpayee government unexpectedly lost the general election in 2004, the NSSP took the form of a formal strategic partnership concluded between the succeeding government, UPA I and the Bush II administration. This beginning had Manmohan Singh almost seeming to be overwhelmed before his planners came up with an idea of encashing on the bonhomie into a concrete and comprehensive nuclear agreement. All this were being watched from neighbouring China. On the one hand, they had studied closely the decline of the Soviet form communism and on the other, they were having to watch the growing Indo-US strategic partnership. By the time the official Left had withdrawn support to the UPA I, the latter had realised the Indian middle-class dream of proximity with the US was almost like a fetish. However, there was a significant section of the Indian elite who were dallying with the idea of maintaining ‘strategic autonomy’ and reinventing ‘non-alignment’. The US’s Iraq war seemed to convince them that there was a lack of coherence in Bush II administration’s strategy in terms of fighting the Global War on Terror (GWOT).

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George W. Bush finished his term with many unfinished tasks be it in Afghanistan, Iraq or the GWOT, which the Islamic world had found to be a ‘dirty war’ in terms of the Laws of War. Hence, the connection with the Indian elite was frail by the time US President Barack Obama took office. His administration had a whole menu of how they could correct the mistakes of the Bush II administration be its treatment of prisoners of Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, the whole war in Iraq and the unmitigated action points in Afghanistan. In all this, India figured less in terms of substantiality or optics, as Obama administration continued to fulfil their agenda. Obama visited India twice, halfway through his first tenure, in 2010 when he signed on to the country’s desire for a permanent membership of the UNSC and the second time in 2015 at the beginning of Prime Minister Modi’s tenure when he attended the 66th Republic Day Ceremony as the Chief Guest. This was the first time an American president had witnessed the parade in which much of the matériel was from Russia. The US was still two years away to emerge as the largest supplier of military items in value terms. But New Delhi could not have forgotten Obama’s speech at the joint session of parliament in 2010 when he had talked about the UNSC seat along with suggesting India to do its part of heavy lifting in the region in terms of spreading democracy. He had as a target India’s actions or more, its absence in Myanmar. In his address to the Joint Session of Parliament Obama upbraided the leaders of the country when he said: It is unacceptable to hold the aspirations of an entire people hostage to the greed and paranoia of a bankrupt regime. It is unacceptable to steal an election, as the regime in Burma has done again for all the world to see. Faced with such gross violations of human rights, it is the responsibility of the international community—especially leaders like the United States and India—to condemn it.3

While he was lecturing India, on his crosshairs was China which sponsored the military junta that ruled Burma then. Professor Amartya Sen had written in his book The Argumentative Indian: If China was enriching the material world of India 2000 years ago, India was busy, it appears exporting Buddhism to China.4

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Two thousand years ago the two civilisations together controlled more than 50 per cent of the GDP but Sen points out that the cultural milieu of the time reflected the interplay of hard power and soft power. C. V. Ranganathan, a career diplomat now retired, had said in a tome on Indian Foreign Policy, edited by then director of the Foreign Policy Training Institute, Atish Sinha that for a few years in the 1950s, India offered a positive fit for the Chinese policies to be part of the rapidly post-colonising world. ‘[I]t has shown the spirit of Panchsheel which permeated international issues involving China where India played some part’. The Chinese phraseology is Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence. While India now has abandoned mentioning Panchsheel as a fundamental tenet of its foreign policy, the Chinese, when they want to impress their new treaty partners, they put Panchsheel right in the beginning of their documents. Ranganathan a former ambassador to China, besides being a permanent representative of India in the UN wrote ‘Within a few years of this millennium India has become well poised in its relations with all the major powers and groupings, US, European Union, Russia, Japan, China and ASEAN. Each of these compartments of India’s relations serves to reinforce a wide spectrum of India’s interests in insuring development peace and stability. Care must be taken to see that no single compartment of each of India’s relations with the major powers and groupings impacts adversely on the other’. That is the crux of ‘strategic autonomy’. But in practice, it seems now that China is coming out at a fast pace as a big power seeking to define a parallel new world order, India’s US compartment is getting meshed in with the China compartment. For example, it can be debated whether India should have been a member, a prominent one in the BRI and/ or the China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC). If India would have not allowed the US box to come into play in terms of the decision about the CPEC, it could have enjoyed enormous strategic advantage out of its stake. What is this strategic advantage that India could have looked forward to as a stakeholder? First, it would have been a part of a lifeline of Pakistan for which China is spending 48 billion dollars. Second, China’s stake would have meant that Pakistan could not have cut the same branch on which it was perched even to spite India as they have done in the past. Third, the CPEC alignment being parallel to the Line of Control (LoC) passing through former northern areas now Gilgit and

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Baltistan into Pakistan administered/occupied Kashmir, thus raking in an obliteration of the LoC and an access into PA/OK. But India’s strategic competition with China as a product of being a hedge for the US in this continent did not allow it to think in terms of its own stakes in the ‘near abroad’. So, India is kind of boxed in a commitment to provide a supposed alternative security partner for Southeast and East Asian nations, other than China. This is a derivative of the idea that the Rajiv Gandhi government had first thought about when Natwar Singh had touted an idea for being the ‘regional policeman’ of the US. Thus, while there is a continuity of thought in the foreign policymaking establishment across five regimes beginning with Rajiv Gandhi and continuing with Narendra Modi, it seems more like a Gordian Knot. On the other hand, China’s parallelism with the US in terms of multipolarity of power in the world is based on a coalition with Russia and in terms of Northwest and West Asia, with Iran. India had toyed with this triumvirate idea during the Rao regime in the mid-1990s. Rao as the prime minister did not have the political heft and the power to transform the Natwar Singh line of thought dominating the foreign service and the strategic community in the country, to invest in the incipient coalition. When Vajpayee wrote that letter to Clinton after Pokhran II in 1998 where he justified India’s nuclear weapons explosion because of its insecurity about China’s economic and military growth, he was clearly an inheritor of a post-Nehru philosophical process where the AngloAmerican combine pervaded. In case of China too, the US is so umbilically connected to its economic growth that it is not being able to come out entirely as an independent big power. A holding of a trillion dollar plus US securities and an over $250 billion plus trade surplus cannot still make China truly an alternative to a Western focused world order. Having said that how do we justify an argument that India and China got to march to their own drummers. The 2008 crisis of capitalism should have loosened the bonds both of India and China. Donald Trump’s ascendency to the Oval Office and his trumpeteering of the view that the economic and trade relations with China has benefitted the latter more than the US has however got sublimated once Trump got some initial advantages China provided. In all this, the optics are important. These show that both China and India are not ready for transformative politics in the global scale.

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So, what do they do in the interim? The Chinese President Xi Jingping who was now the fourth member of the Chinese pantheon of core leaders believes that US and China can avoid the legacy of history of the conflictual rise of major powers and avoid the Thucydides Trap. Thus, Beijing would try to avoid a military confrontation with the US during its rise. Keeping that in mind India should have found it easier to be less Atlanticist. But that is New Delhi’s default position which signifies the colonial baggage of the country in a post-colonial world. India should have calculated that even without the American pivot to Asia, its early efforts ‘Look East’—a term that owed its origin to J. N. Dixit and Narasimha Rao and continued to the H. D. Deve Gowda and Gujral regimes; continuing through to Modi were producing results even without a definitive American backing for the idea. In other words, in the post-1997 crisis, Asian Tigers were more aware of a local Chinese challenge even before the American strategists had come out of the hangover from their conviction of victory in the Cold War. Jawaharlal Nehru in his Discovery of India wrote, ‘The Pacific is likely to take place of the Atlantic in the future as a nerve centre of the world. Though not directly a Pacific state India will inevitably exercise an important influence there. India will also develop as a centre for economic and political activity in the Indian Ocean area in Southeast Asia right up to the Middle East. Her position gives an economic and strategic importance in a part of the world which is going to develop in the future’.5 While writing for the same Sinha edited volume on Indian Foreign Policy—almost an official account of various foreign policy initiatives tells us when India was reforming its economy during the Rao era—the so-called Asian Tigers who constituted the ASEAN had been a strong influence upon his regime. For example, the former Singapore prime minister, the legendary Lee Kuan Yew had been a constant motivator to Rao and Manmohan Singh. Singapore though was the size of Haryana, had serious natural resource-deficit in the island-nation but had emerged from the boondocks into a spectacular success story. Ambassador Ranjit Gupta wrote: ‘India’s supportive and cooperative approach in ensuring a political settlement in Cambodia leading to the success of the Paris conference of 1991 helped lay the foundation for a new political relationship between ASEAN and India’. One may recall that Vietnam and China had fought a war against and in favour of the

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murderous Khmer Rouge regime respectively. So, when Rao articulated his ‘Look East’ policy, the ASEAN countries welcomed it. Gupta writes India’s ‘Look East’ policy was welcomed because it dovetailed very well with ASEAN’s fundamental strategic requirements. When it was established at the urging of the Anglo-American alliance in the late 1960s, the ASEAN was meant to stave off Sinification of the region in the heydays of Mao. China was then looking forward to exporting communism to the region. Singapore’s Lee always believed that India underperformed as a regional power for a long time. He had been urging prime ministers of India since Indira Gandhi to raise the country’s profile in the Southeast Asian region. In other words, he wanted a hedge against the Chinese projection of power. Thus, in the strategic matrix of ASEAN, India figured for a long time till Rao-Dixit team decided that India needed to look to East. There was the domestic logic that also played a role in their decision-making. That domestic rationale emerged from India’s Northeast where the separatist insurgencies had been reduced to relative quiescence to a large extent. The Chinese actually stopped fuelling these insurgencies from 1980s as a part of Deng Xiaoping’s principle of unfettered reforms of China and thus disengagement from sponsoring insurgencies. For Rao, Northeast required an economic boost and mainstreaming. The distance between Nagaland and Thailand is lesser than the distance between the Dimapur and New Delhi. This is one element of the strategic paradigm on which Rao and his advisors worked upon. The other element was to connect with the so-called Asian Tigers in economic terms for trade and interactions on soft power terms, as Joseph Nye had described the phenomenon. Arguably, it can be said that the US took a benign approach towards this alignment if not actually encouraging the various capitals into a closer embrace. What Nehru and Rao had foreseen, the Americans woke up to the global reality during the Barack Obama administration, which wanted to create a distance from the Islamist mess of America’s own creation in West Asia, thus rebalance or pivot away from countries beyond repair like Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and to an extent, Egypt. As has been mentioned earlier, the Indo-Pacific region was a formulation of the US State Department which was articulated by then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2010. A large section of Indian strategists with their bias for the world view of the Anglo-American combine took to the idea immediately. Of course, it also meant an expansion of

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an Indian zone of influence. Now that Donald Trump is at the helm of the United States, his foreign policy seems befitting the twentieth century than the twenty-first. As he sent 5000 boots on the ground, soldiers really, to Afghanistan; by his first foreign visit to Riyadh, he has shown middle-America is not willing to abandon its appetite for oil. He has recommitted American resources, military and otherwise, to West Asia again. One can then argue that concomitantly he would reduce attention in the Indo-Pacific because the US economy in his watch till now have not performed the way by which he can take on two theatres of conflict. So clearly, India’s position in the Indo-Pacific gets strengthened while its strategic reach is still limited. Even as the indigenously built aircraft carrier INS Vikrant is in the level of final fitment, India has only one functional aircraft carrier INS Vikramaditya. For force projection in the Indo-Pacific, India would require a larger navy than what it has right now. But it cannot begin to be gainsaid that India wait for all its naval assets in a deployable level for it to be ready to take up the slack left by the Americans. Politically as China tests India’s strategic resolve, how should India act? If the Indian elite are serious about ‘strategic autonomy’ then it is in India’s interest to be a balancer between China and the Southeast Asian nations. It may have some tactical value of having a Vietnam as a thorn for China in an equivalence with a China creating a hedge out of Pakistan for India. It remains a fact that for the welfare of the region including South Asia, India’s role as a ‘balancer’ in what the Western world knows as Far East, should be primary in its geostrategic profile. One must recall at this stage Bangladesh where a mature handling by India had shown how regime change can be managed successfully. In Sri Lanka, with the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF), India made a classical mistake of not being able to define its strategic objective. India needed to build up its vision on these experiences. Sun Tzu, China’s patron saint for strategic lessons had said it should hide its capacity and bide its time. It seems with Xi Jinping China is ready to ‘come out’ on the world stage with its power projected beyond its own geographic location. This is despite China’s own calculation that US continues to be a rich country with the largest military power in the world, while the Eastern nation by itself will only reach a middle-income level per capita by 2020.

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With that as the backdrop many China-watchers believe whether its current forays and bold actions are sustainable. Take the case of the islands on the SCS. It has built small islands on the SCS and East China Sea that have extended its brown and blue water economic zones. It is putting pressure on countries like Vietnam and Philippines to give up their rights on disputed islands. The BRI project is hugely ambitious an exercise in changing the geostrategic and geopolitical contours of the world by which a parallel new world order can be created as an alternative to the current world order defined by US-led West. This is the result of a reading by the Chinese strategists about debunking the world order of the West and its loss of the unipolar moment of the world. Beijing does not have the misplaced arrogance that it can undertake the exercise alone. It has tied up with Russia that is looking at itself as a Eurasian power, which must counter NATO’s strategy at chipping away its areas of influence and reach up to its frontiers. China and Russia together have become a formidable force to create genuine multipolarity in the world. Both China and Russia consider Iran a Northwest Asian nation and an emerging power that has enormous influence over Central Asian countries besides also parts of West Asia where there are Shi’ite majority nations like Iraq. Together they can access comparable national resources of the declining West. Historian Paul Kennedy had written his seminal volume called The Rise and Fall of Great Powers way back in 1988 just before the Soviet Empire was to disintegrate. In the book, Kennedy’s contention was that the great powers fall when their economy weakens beyond a certain threshold. The 2008 financial crisis that resulted in an economic recession of the kind seen only during the Great Depression of 1929. This signified the decline of exotic financial improvisations which sought to replace real capital with the strength of financial paper embodiments called derivatives. This economic shock has shaken the foundation of the Western economies that have moved away from nuts and bolts manufacturing to services. In the services sector, the margins are low and creation of economic value is difficult. The Western capital has been shipping these jobs out to the poorer economies where wages are kept depressed, and thus, profit and surplus value are both in favour of the capitalists. This 2008 crisis have shown that really the MNCs and the TNCs do not owe allegiance to any national territory. The US President Donald

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Trump seeks to ‘bring back jobs to America’ and thus make ‘America great again’. Whether he can achieve his goal is in the realm of the future. However, the second tier powers like China and Russia find the space to assert themselves under those circumstances. This alignment of Russia, China, Iran and with India joining in was first thought about in the early 1990s by a Russian foreign minister and statesman Yevgeny Primakov. Towards the end of Rao’s term, he had toyed with the idea of whether this alignment is possible. But he did not have enough time to do the political experiment and see whether it reaches fruition. Also, for tangible support of the Fund-Bank institutions, he needed the American establishment to support him. Following that the US focused Indian elite gained the support of the consumerist middle class of the country to build in Anglo-American policy bias of the Indian government. As a result, the Russo-China combine recognised India to be belonging to the opposite camp. This is despite having a ‘special strategic relationship’ with Russia and a strategic agreement with China. Besides, after the 2008 crisis the G-7 comprising Western economies lost much of its heft in terms of fixing rules of trade and economic engagement for the rest of the world. The solution was found in creating a group called G-20 that included the Western economies and a slew of advanced developing countries’. But separately five advanced developing countries created a group of their own as we know to be BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa). They even floated a development bank parallel to the Bretton Woods institution. Called New Development Bank, it is chaired by a famous Indian banker K. V. Kamath. Similarly, China also founded an international bank, Asian Infrastructure and Investment Bank (AIIB) of which India owns an 8.52% share as one of the promoters. The idea of developing these financial institutions for developing countries primarily as a parallel thought to the waning influence of the Fund-Bank combine and its Asian clone the Asian Development Bank (ADB). As the crisis of 2008 destroyed the rationale for neoliberalism and the rise of what the Western media calls ‘populism’, it is found ironic to talk about that in a popular democracy where the political class is weighed in terms of the popular support they enjoy. It is understandable why general elections in countries as varied from Greece to the Philippines; from the US to France are throwing up leaderships who are outside of the ambit of the ruling elite. In Japan,

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for example, the dominance of the LDP that seemed to be on the wane during the nation’s economic crisis which began much before 2008, bounced back with a leader who was a populist to the core. Shinzo Abe talked about emerging out of the shadow of World War II and expansion of the Self Defence Force (SDF) of the country, justifying it in the context of China’s rise. To restart the Japanese economy, Abe followed a set of policies that included large public investment as a pump priming process. If one looks at the US now the same formula of major public investments is being talked about by the Trump administration. The reason Brexit took place is of course a rise in British nationalist sentiment that dictated the country to come out of the collective and egregious policies of the European Union and its institutions like the European Central Bank. Free trade and globalisation are clearly on a path of retreat where the negative results of neoliberalism become apparent. For countries, like India and China, thus it is becoming clear that they will have to etch their own signature in a world which is becoming more nationalistic and insular than a globalist world view that was opposed to financial globalisation. Nations share knowledge through processes of civilisational exchanges for millennia. Indians remember two Chinese explorers who opened the gates to the subcontinent. At the heart of their globalist beliefs lay examples of Chinese travellers like were Hiuen Tsang and Fa Hien, while Atish Dipankar and Padmasambhava took Buddhism to China and Tibet many millennia ago. The civilisational-nations that they are, the message they need for a modern world view has to emerge from the depth of their ancientness. Ironically, while the current thinkers of both these nations were toying with these, the articulation of the view came from Henry Kissinger, the German Jewish statesman of the US. In a dialogue under the aegis of the Atlantic magazine, Dr Kissinger pointed at what is the point of beginning of this volume. He told his interlocutor: [I]f you read the transcripts of my earliest conversations with Zhou Enlai [the Chinese premier with whom Kissinger met secretly in 1971 as part of the effort to open relations], you will notice two things. The first is that we were lucky, because we had no practical day-to-day relationship to talk about—except Taiwan, which we set aside—so, in order to build confidence, we had to talk about our philosophies of world order. And two, as a

174  P. BHATTACHARYA consequence, we sounded like two college professors discussing the nature of the world and its future.6

An empirical continuity can be drawn from Kissinger’s allusion to his own experience to Amartya Sen’s thesis that scholarly exchanges between the two countries went beyond the study of Buddhism and other Sanskrit sources. There are records of at least 200 scholars of Chinese origin who spent time in India indulging in scholastic exercises in the first millennium, while numerous Indian students were in the famously reclusive nation that was imperial China, working on mathematics and science.7 China is described as the ‘Front Office’ of the world. India is considered the ‘Back Office’. The competitive advantage of both lie in their large population base but the drive for job creation owing to demographic pressure’s tugs and pulls lead to the creation of the forces of politics. But early on, the respective education systems denied them the opportunity for invention, innovation and originality, thus denying them the edge for creating real value. So, when China wants to establish a special economic zone it gets enough non-trade unionised—legally speaking—people to seek jobs. In India’s case, collective bargaining and organised workers movements have been made inactive by non-legislative methods. As a result, they succeed in the environment of globalisation where competitive advantages, trade balances and economic value hold precedence over knowledge, innovation and skill. Hard power on the other hand cannot be considered in either of the countries in terms of being situated on the lowest rungs of algorithmic evolution reaching up to artificial intelligence. The elite of the two will have to understand that the gurus in terms of classical economics, Adam Smith and Milton Friedman are passé and Joseph Schumpeter, is the new icon. Instead of hailing these Western economies, both countries need to look for intrinsic strength for achieving their respective economic goals. While India’s GDP can be divided into three components with services constituting over 50% and industries along with agriculture dividing the other 50% in half. This underlines the fact that India is a ‘back office’ of the world. If India needs to change that paradigm and truly compete with China, industrial manufacturing and especially agriculture need to be bolstered both in terms of investments and productivity.

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Agriculture has been crying for reform in India for a long time but has been completely ignored by the Manmohan Singh strategy of reform. China on the other hand requires to domesticise demand thus deepening domestic markets in proportion to their 30-odd per cent savings rate. In other words, the Chinese population needs to spend money for themselves to maintain their own economic growth. This entails that China does a structural reversal from being a export-led economy to one that encourages domestic demand as one of the key drivers for growth. The Chinese leadership has also realised that the mind-boggling 10 per cent annual growth rate of 15 years cannot be replicated till the mixed economy continues to add girth to the SOEs. But that growth path is already over-leveraged to an extent and thus requires a fresh push towards assimilating nimble and authentic private production units. In case of India, the story is different. The country needs to increase phenomenally its public investment in building physical infrastructure which at best is still in a patched-up Band-Aid state. The money required is in the range of close to trillion dollars. The next priority should be boosting manufacturing to a level so that it can compete with the services sector as one of the main drivers of the Indian GDP. Where China has also been successful in terms of the quality of their growth—that is distribution of national wealth more evenly—India still has a long way to go in achieving that. This requires the return of a planning commission not so much as a superstructure but for micro-level exercises. The crying need for reforms in agriculture—removal of farmers’ suicide causes should be the primary element of any plan—has to come again in agricultural infrastructure. It remains a fact that India’s measly growth in agriculture has come not in production of food grains but really what is horticulture, in producing of vegetables and fruits which are more readily encashable, but also more perishable. India’s population is expected to push China to the second place within this decade. India must have enough food to feed the population besides enhancing income growth for farms. The factor of land reforms has more or less been settled with the passage of time but serious reforms are needed for the economic conditions of the real tillers of the land. The rentier system of marketisation of agricultural production needs to be rationalised—if not abolished—and reduced where possibility arises for real income growth for the tillers.

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Notes 1. Op. cit., n. 16 in Chapter 6. 2. Ibid. 3. Obama, Barack, Remarks by the President to the Joint Session of the Indian Parliament in New Delhi, India, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/ the-press-office/2010/11/08/remarks-president-joint-session-indian-parliament-new-delhi-india, accessed on September 28, 2018. 4. Sen, Prof Amartya, The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity, Penguin, p. 167. 5. Nehru, Jawaharlal, Discovery of India, Penguin, 2008. 6.  Goldberg, Jeffrey, World Chaos and World Order: Conversations With Henry Kissinger, The Atlantic, November 10, 2016, https://www.theatla ntic.com/international/archive/2016/11/kissinger-order-and-chaos/506 876/, accessed on September 30, 2016. 7. Op. cit, n. 4, p. 161.

CHAPTER 9

India’s Grand Strategy and Exceptionalism

When India got Independence on 15 August 1947, large number of offshore India-watchers had thought that the intense diversity of the country would create such centrifugal pressure that it could tear the country asunder. On top of that, was the fear of Western analysts that the country could turn towards communism. And the main communist party was strong enough, coming out of colonial rule, while large swathes of people of the country tended to be situated on the left ramparts in their politics; thus creating an incendiary revolutionary urge. A cursory glance at the recently declassified dump of CIA documents shows how the agency and the successive American governments had a fixation about the Indian communist movement. Sardar Vallabhai Patel, the first Deputy Prime Minister and central Home Minister, was on the right of Nehru. Irrespective of his political beliefs, Patel sewed together a tapestry of the princely states and absorbed them into the idea of India and its geographically integrated and political entity. On the other hand, Nehru was defining the social, economic and international relations imperatives of the country. Right from the beginning, the first prime minister of India was acutely aware of the global circumstances in the immediate aftermath of the end of World War II. He was looking for a world order that is equitable, secular and universally enfranchising. A world order as defined by Henry Kissinger, an opposite of Nehru, stated: ‘No truly global “world order” has ever existed. What passes for order in our time was devised in Western Europe nearly four © The Author(s) 2019 P. Bhattacharya, Sino-US and Indo-US Relations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-7276-6_9

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centuries ago at a peace conference in the German region of Westphalia conducted without the involvement or even the awareness of most other continents or civilisations’.1 The post-Westphalian nation states that emerged did not necessarily have a standardised regular format. A mere charter for the citizens to be agreed upon with the ruling classes—often the monarchy—was not necessarily democracy as we know it today. A classic example is the Magna Carta of 1215 between the smaller feudals of Britain, and ruler King John was a sort of an illustration of what eventually took shape after the post-1648 treaty that ended the pontifical rule of the Roman Catholic Church. Jean Jacques Rousseau, the eighteenth-century political philosopher had enunciated the ‘Social Contract’ that took the form of theory which legitimised the relationship between the ruled and the rulers. Along with ‘Social Contract’ theory, Nehru was influenced greatly by the ‘Webbs’ (Sydney and Beatrice)—their Fabian Socialism—during his education in the UK. The Indian Constitution is the fundamental document of sharing power between the people and their elected government on the one hand, and another sharing of power between the national elite and their counterparts in the regions of the country. The chairman’s seat of the Constituent Assembly significantly belonged to the Dalit community, who were the most oppressed class for centuries. Dr. Bhim Rao Ambedkar who had once fanned the flames of fissiparous tendencies by talking about ‘separate electorate’ for his community was the chair. He owed his early education to the Prince of Baroda, thus was a conservative by nature. Yet the constitution of the independent country he signed on to was a fine piece of charter that accommodated rights, duties, special interests of the backwards and forwards, and most of all, flexibility. This has led the India-watchers of the West to believe that the country is a liberal democracy. Universal adult franchise without any qualifying attributes; rule of the elected majority and the citizens’ rights and duties along with the State’s own makes it a seamless document. A familiar critique of the Indian situation from the developed and militarist West used to be that India did not articulate its national interests, national security strategy and grand strategy. In the 1990s at the end of the Cold War, this caused India some grief amongst those who were trying to promulgate a new world economic order at their believed endstate obtained by the so-called decimation of communism. ‘New Delhi may have been unsuccessful in realizing its most ambitious aims, and it

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may have settled for flawed instruments in their pursuit, but that is a far cry from claiming that India has consistently lacked a real grand strategy’.2 This is the opinion of a top-notch strategist of the US of Indian origin, Dr. Ashley J. Tellis. The current theory of national interest has been stated by two successive former foreign secretaries and public intellectuals like Shivshankar Menon and Shyam Saran. Shivshankar Menon quotes from the Preamble of the Constitution which says ‘Sovereign, Socialist, Secular, Democratic Republic’ as grand strategy of the country; and the only change that Saran makes with this formulation is in place of socialist he talks about ‘equitable’. Maintenance of sovereignty clearly is a primary goal of the nation state. One has heard several times various defence and foreign ministers of various regimes stating that ‘not an inch of the national territory can be lost to an aggressor’. If this formulation is taken into account as the fount of a grand strategy, then Tellis seems accurate in terms of his articulation. Over decades, India’s national integrity has been challenged severely in the east, west and north but invariably this has worked not as a divisive force but as a unifier. India thus has proved over times its logic of sustenance which to a great extent has been to common economic interests and a general allegiance to the nationhood. Tellis has held, ‘From the moment it gained liberty from the Raj, India pursued a grand strategy focused on preserving political unity amid its bewildering diversities and potential rifts, protecting the nation’s territory from internal and external threats, and realizing the economic development that would transform the country into a genuinely great power’.3 He was reacting to a document that emerged towards the end of the tenure of UPA II government called ‘Non-Alignment 2.0’. This grand strategic view was somewhat given a shape by a jointly written eponymous (as above) document by intellectuals of the order of Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Sunil Khilnani, Shyam Saran and a few others. This was in the form of a paper that could trigger a debate across the country over its content but it did not get enough publicity for a discourse to arise. The vision of this document is based on an understanding of the new industrial age that has dawned. This industrial age is based on gaining and triggering ‘knowledge’. The latter’s importance has increased exponentially in the new economies around the world where production systems have become more ‘intelligent’ and thus knowledge based, than being completely based on labour power as in the old economies.

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Knowledge is the next binding force of India’s normally heterogeneous politics of identity. The caste becomes the main driving force while class, especially the lower classes are coterminous with lower castes. Since the death of Nehru and Lal Bahadur Shastri, the first two prime ministers of the country, caste identities have been the most important determinant for victory in the elections. Also, access to resources has lost their significance because knowledge can be universally attained and does not have the binaries of natural resources—that entails the owners and the seekers. Non-Alignment 2.0, the document that is at the heart of this chapter, is one which talks about a strategic goal for India to attain for itself in the global comity of nations. The document suggests that indeed knowledge will be the main driver of the Indian growth story. The reasons for this are two: one, the huge amount of investment that is required to build the infrastructure for core material developments like manufacturing is beyond the capacity or the desire (in terms of monetary investments) of the State and its entrepreneurs. Thus knowledge becomes a comparatively easier option to impart and gather results, in the process, making India a major destination for the same. Secondly, knowledge is increasingly becoming independent of Capital thus reducing its importance in terms of its politico-economic and social impact. As in Non-Alignment 1.0, the two aspects that drove its relevance from the 1950s to 1980s were: one, the nations that were gaining independence from imperial powers of the West and seeking a common platform which can become stepping stones of the member nations; and two, a common call for support of Capital is stronger in its articulation when collectively made to the Bretton Woods Institutions that were supposed to feed from the noblesse oblige of the colonial powers. Hence, as you can understand that 1.0 and 2.0 are two different animals. The 2.0 begins where 1.0 has produced results, may be minimal in its ability to ‘trickle down’ to the ones who need the most. But it has succeeded in creating a relatively prosperous middle class which fuels bigger growths for capitalist, colonial West. It is this middle class which is the driving force for the knowledge generating institutions that seeks to take away ‘either me or you’ choices for the societies of these developing countries. Non-Alignment 2.0 document of Indian thinkers acknowledges that fact and seeks to create strategic space for India in the new world order which it should trigger.

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The policy options generated from 2.0 are not necessarily just for India but for those who have walked the same economic and social development trajectory like India. Nehru had consistently addressed his domestic and foreign policies to the legacy of self-doubt arising out of the millennial failure of Indian nationalism. The deluge he feared most after his death was a return to the age-old nightmare of balkanisation and internecine strife characteristic of India in the prelude to Mughal and British rule. Selig Harrison wrote these lines in an article published in Foreign Affairs journal in 1965 two years after Nehru had died. As he quotes Nehru about his legacy, the post-Nehru period appears to the reader as rather bleak. Hence a few millennia in the past of what was considered the country, appears deeply divided amongst local chieftains thus apparently seeming to be fragmented in history that is of Bharat. However, the irredentist politics of the Congress Party even during the British Raj attempted to reestablish the writ of an indigenous political movement they wanted to occupy the space that would be left by the retreat of the British when the time comes for the colonial rule to be ousted. Having said that the post-colonial Congress Party turned Western style of education as a lifestyle after the first generation of leaders departed the scene. This became crassly evident in the post-Cold War period when Indian leaders of politics, bureaucracy and other intellectuals turned westward. One can recall the lines by the former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh when delivering a speech at Oxford University. In 2005, Manmohan Singh was enjoying the support of the Left block which is more avowedly anti-imperialist, anti-colonial in its politics. But they did not make an issue out of this, even though they had notched up the highest ever number of parliamentary seats, 59 in total. Instead, they waited for another time. That came when the government undertook the negotiations and final signing of the CNA (Civil Nuclear Agreement) with the US. Even then there were dissensions within the block and the leading party of the group, the CPI (M), namely the Communist Party of India (Marxist). Interestingly, the state unit of the CPI (M) which created most of the rumpus after support was withdrawn from UPA I in the basis of antiimperialism was the West Bengal unit of the Party. Bengal as a province of British India had a long history of opposing the colonial rule both in violent and in non-violent manner. This is also recorded in history of India’s independence that those revolutionaries who went to jails suffused with nationalism returned from there as communists.

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It is worthwhile noting that when the general secretary, Sitaram Yechury of the CPI (M) went to the UK on an invitation from one of the Oxbridge institutions he talked about ‘Great Britain’ in the introduction of his speech. This signifies how much influence of the British had been ingrained even in the subconscious of a ‘communist’. His predecessor Prakash Karat studied at the University of Edinburgh. He however appears to have a more collected intellect and holds up the core principles of the Party. He was interviewed for this book and he said this about the CNA that was touted to be a transformative point in the Indo-US relations. He says that the CAN was actually concluded without complete consensus even within the Union Cabinet. As far as I can recall it was Dr. Manmohan Singh who was on a visit to Japan who made the announcement about signing the safeguards agreement with the IAEA. It appeared at that time that Pranab Mukherjee was not aware that such an announcement would be made.4

Mukherjee, Defence Minister of the time, and was negotiating with the Left group for getting their acquiescence, was clearly cut out of the loop—despite his seniority and his role as a crucial negotiator with important supporter of the minority government. Naturally, he could have felt to have been cut off at the knees, degrading his credibility as an ‘honest broker’. Returning to the subject of the West Bengal unit of the CPI (M), Karat is of course very politically ‘correct’ and expresses the party line: There was no such issue. If you read the reviews of the Lok Sabha elections (2009) and the assembly elections (2011) made by the West Bengal State Committee and the Central Committee you will find that the causes for the defeat are enumerated. They relate primarily to internal political situation in West Bengal, performance of the Left Front government etc. Both Singur (2007) and Nandigram (2008) occurred in the period when we were engaged in the struggle against pro-US policies of the UPA government.5

All this is a reflection that the Indian ruling class including the official Left have a mind that still can’t escape its colonisation by the imperialists of the West. Therefore, India reckoned the Atlantic Ocean to be more important than the Pacific. This is also why when Rao as the harbinger had sought to shift the focus of Indian foreign policymaking from the

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Atlanticist attitude to what he called ‘Look East’, his perspicacity was not fully appreciated. It is even more surprising that a Hindu obscurantist organisation—albeit in the process of aligning itself more with the modernist view of India—like the RSS or its nationalist political front the BJP is also so besotted with the Anglo-American combine. When Narendra Modi laid down the foreign policy focus after his ascent to power in 2014 though he talked about ‘Act East’ policy, he waited for the president of the US, Barack Obama to pivot from West Asia to Southeast and East Asia. Jaswant Singh, the ailing BJP senior, who was a finance minister in NDA I is a classic example of how the West may leave the occupied lands but leave a deep imprint of servitude on its former feudal potentates. Singh was member of the Atal Bihari Vajpayee Cabinet when post9/11 the US decided to attack Afghanistan to remove the Taliban. He called on the US to use Indian military facilities as the logistics hub of their armed forces. A parliamentary outrage had followed and the NDA I government had to withdraw that offer made in 2002 when the US launched its Afghan War II. In any case, Washington had been eyeing Pakistan for its geographical proximity to its neighbour Afghanistan. Singh’s Cabinet senior then deputy prime minister and looking after home ministry, Lal Krishna Advani went even further in 2003 when the George W. Bush administration launched its long-desired Iraq War II. He had in fact shown an unseemly desire to send Indian troops to join operations with the US in Iraq. It was left to then prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee to cool down his martial ministers and actually keep India from the illegitimate war in Iraq. In all this, the principles of ‘strategic autonomy’ or a NonAlignment 2.0 didn’t seem to be the guiding force of the leading edge Indian ruling elite then. One can safely argue that the economic liberalisation programme unveiled in 1991 had made the rich richer and got the advanced sections of the middle class to access offshore branded consumer products. Since most of these foreign branded materials came from the US and Europe, they were naturally keen that their own consumerism and cultural influences would drive them to the West. It is natural that the fascination for hybrid foreign goods was begetting them hybrid governments. But the same system had processes of self-correction. These were the days—the 1990s—when one would hear in the senior government circles various figures about the size of the

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Indian middle class, quite in contrast to what Professor Amartya Sen calls ‘effective demand’—demand backed by purchasing power. Thus, it is no surprise that the early entrants—major foreign brands like McDonald’s, KFC and say, international clothing brands, etc.—got the wrong end of the stick. They found the number of people who were not price sensitive about their products was very few. A lot of them had to completely rework their business plans thus taking in huge losses in the interim. That is one part of the ‘India story’ as the economic liberalisation programme was launched in 1991. The other part of the ‘Story’ is even more bleak. Reforms that Manmohan Singh introduced did not address the two most important areas of the Indian economy. Interestingly, while he took many of his ideas from the Fund-Bank prescriptions he did not consider the need for investment in building infrastructure and reforming Indian agriculture in a way it could maintain its productivity at the level of the Green Revolution. An infrastructure development committee had produced a shiny report towards the end of the 1990s and talked about big money that was required in the order of hundreds of billions of dollars— close to a trillion dollars. Agriculture on the other hand required a serious boost and realignment of government subsidies, which till then were essentially applicable for the rich farmers, industries like fertilizer and pesticides, etc. Singh’s austerity formula of reducing food and agricultural subsidies was targeted at those who resided on the margins of society. Thus began the rise of the services sector, primarily low-end jobs that paid small remunerations. Information technology sector is the main story of this period. It began with Indian firms applying solutions during the Y2K crisis. That was a low level of software development—an exercise that had volume but small profit margins. Along with that grew the IT enabled services sector (ITES). This gave rise to the call centre business, which provided the English-speaking youths of the country an opportunity to earn money. That was hyped as a major success of the reform programme. Thus the smart newsmakers called India a ‘back office’ of the world, while China being the manufacturing hub was called the ‘front office’. The factually correct descriptions of the people with these jobs, which became available during this period were termed as ‘cyber coolies’. Derogatory as it was it still reflected the backwardness of the Indian economy. When compared to China, Indian educators in the case of engineering, medicine, science and technology were not of a standard that could

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satisfy the demanding globalised developed economies of the world. The Chinese took a different route, they started with reverse engineering modern products of the developed countries and sought to learn technology that they could absorb, while they came under pressure in terms of intellectual property rights (IPR) violations. Nevertheless, China continued with a seeming insouciance of a growing drumbeat of supposed technology theft from the West. India eschewed this process but continued to suffer from trade and technology denials. Having said that, the Indian industry, which was owned by various business families, holding small chunks of equity, initially felt threatened by globalisation. So, they quickly raised their equity level in the industries they owned and managed, thus in the process bringing in some capital. India, also like China wanted foreign direct investment. However, it succeeded much less than China because of the attitude of the Indian bureaucracy. Mission mode Chinese acted in unison like a well-oiled machine. Of course, an argument can be developed that India being a multi-party democracy was fit for having policy debates in public, unlike the Chinese, thus slowing down corrective processes. Researches focused on these elements of the national systems followed by China have shown that ‘crony’ capitalism succeeds only to the extent of levelling the field only to the extent of providing the initial opportunities, but nothing beyond that. In case of India, the UPA experience showed that the domestic protection provided to the old family-owned businesses could continue in a different form by favouring the same firms with a different set of policy prescriptions—say, in terms of conditions under which joint ventures can be formed and national resources obtained.6 Institutionally, while many labour laws were not allowed to be applied in China, the absence of opposition facilitating authoritarian diktats, the Indian political and bureaucratic class whittled the laws down to absurd levels, while at the same time attacking the trade unions viciously through pliant media. In effect, if one compared China with India the democracy deficit appears almost the same. Nevertheless, the Chinese mixed economy showed more dynamism than India. The private entrepreneurs who arose during this reform process were in many cases as kleptomaniacal as they were in China as in India. But interestingly, for example, Shanghai Composite Index—the only equity index of China—never really went through the ‘boom and bust’ cycle. In other words, even if there were economic bubbles they did not significantly affect the fundamentals of the economy.

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But in India, right from the time the reforms began, the security scams became a frequent occurrence, choking off movement of capital to provide more profitable ventures. Without getting into examining the reasons for their incidence, one can safely say that the regulatory mechanisms came up comparatively late in India than in China because of failure on the part of successive central governments. Yet, the general population of both the countries had equal measure of suspicion about private entrepreneurs in various sectors. Returning to the main remit of this volume—finding commonalities and contrasts between the Chinese and the Indian experiences of aligning with the US bilaterally, and thus raising lessons which can form the takeaways for this country futuristically, one has to return to the bilateral relations between New Delhi and Beijing. Reason: territorially and in terms of economic development they shared the same space. The NDA II under Prime Minister Narendra Modi took charge in 2014. Of course, ‘the transgressions’—across LAC incursion by the border guards of the PLA are politely termed by the Indian security establishment—continued from both sides through to the end of the UPA II because of differing perceptions of the LAC. The most important incident took place, however, when President Xi Jinping was to visit India in September 2014. About a week before his visit the PLA border guards in the Chumar sector of southern Ladakh transgressed the LAC again. This time they came with provisions to pitch tent. Meanwhile, Xi arrived in Delhi, attended his engagements and went back. But the PLA marauders did not. That took intense negotiations at the official level for the guards to return to their own positions. Narendra Modi had begun his tenure with a foreign policy blitz. He invited all the government leaders of South Asian neighbours including Nawaz Sharif for his swearing-in ceremony. This was followed by Barack Obama and Xi Jinping visits. While Narendra Modi gave them a tour de force beginning with a visit to banks of the Ganges in Varanasi, his own constituency. But Xi was keeping his card close to his chest. Soon after he went back to Beijing, he declared himself one of the ‘core leaders’ thus joining in the same pantheon which included Mao and Deng. And only after that he unveiled one of the most ambitious Chinese projects, which aimed at living up to its Pinyin name, Zhong Guo (Middle Kingdom). The project was to recreate the Silk Route of the antiquity, which included roads, rail and ship travel to three continents Europe and Africa, besides other nations of Asia.

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When he unveiled the South Asian part of the project called CPEC (China-Pakistan Economic Corridor) Indian leadership felt that joining the project on an invitation from China would be sanctifying the LoC and Pakistan Administered Kashmir. Indian leadership failed to recognise that they could have actually gained by joining the project. If India was a part of the CPEC, it could have got access to Gilgit and Baltistan besides Pakistan Administered Kashmir. In that scenario besides the access to these disputed territories, the country would have gained by having the LoC virtually becoming obsolete. Still, because of various political reasons Prime Minister Modi and his cohort in the government could not take decisions which could have led to the materialisation of this natural solution to the J&K problem and its Pakistan element. It seems India is trying to walk a lonely furrow. But it must be said while the difference between the fourth largest economy of the world (in PPP terms) and number two, in all terms—soon to become number one in real terms—is quite big, this is also a policy tempering factor. On top of that, there is the requirement of raising hundreds of millions of people above the poverty level of $2 a day per person, for about 40% of the population. Weighing all this India cannot go beyond Sun Tzu’s caution ‘Hide your capacity, bide your time’ or as Chanakya had said, ‘mobility is key in warfare and deception is more important than that’. Unfortunately for India, the vagaries of the RSS affiliates political interventions, aside of the BJP, consumed time and energy in domestic politics of even a man like Modi who loves self-aggrandisement in especially areas of foreign policy, had to get engaged in firefighting within the country. These obsessions of the obscurantist, albeit transitional, parent of the BJP consumed so much attention that like Nehru trying to translate a long-held belief for land reforms and failing, Modi too appeared consumed by domestic politics from his third and the penultimate year of his debut term. The relative isolation he faced in South Asia—primus interperes of the Indian ruling class—triggered by the BRI convention of which India did not attend, cannot be ameliorated by even the US under the presidency of Donald Trump. Trump himself has become an outlier in Europe after the G-20 conference of 2017. And he has the same status in South and Southeast Asia considering China’s outreach through the BRI. In this scenario, the Indian elite has got vertically divided between those who believe that the country should have followed China’s lead in

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its attempt at creating a new world order parallel to the Pax Americana, and the others who believe that Washington still can set the global rules of engagement. There are twin debates that too are causing divisions in the ranks of the Indian elite; one, whether the principles of governance being laid out by the RSS are helping India to remain a secular, modern nation, and whether to align themselves with the post-Enlightenment West, in civilisational terms. Two, the other half believes that India needs a strong dose of Hindutva precept and what they call sanatan dharma, thus propitiating stone idols, cows and various men in saffron clothes. This last group has an oversized idea of India’s economic and political context that does not necessarily follow its national capacities. This is an internal debate that India has been having ever since the destruction of the Babri Masjid in 1992 by the RSS-BJP stormtroopers led by various leading lights of both organisations. It has become sharper now because of the pressure on the secular force leading to a constriction of the space the same enjoyed. Despite that, the debate is continuing as has been exemplified by Modi’s visit to Israel. The fact that Modi could be inveigled into visiting the memorial of the Zionist founder of Israel, Theodor Herzl on the erstwhile Palestinian land is surprising because he did not visit the Hagannah Memorials whose members had created Israel. He did not even visit the memorials of David Ben Gurion or Moshe Dayan. Both these gentlemen organised the Hagannah and fought for land in Palestine which could be for the Jewish nation. They were not Zionists, they were largely secular and what they wanted was a nation state for the Jews who have been tortured and incarcerated over thousands of years in Europe. The last straw on the back of the camel was the Nazi holocaust that was almost successful in obliterating the race. The fact that Modi visited in Israel, as a prime minister of the country, where no other Indian PM had gone and the fact that he did not visit the Palestinian lands as in West Bank and Gaza reflect the political desire of the RSS-BJP. That is to send a message to the minority Muslims of being subservient to the majority Hindus. The mistake the PM’s planners made was to consider that all Jews are Zionists as much as they would like all Hindus to be ‘Cowists’. Neither assumption is based on any empirical evidence. Ever since India became independent and established a ministry of external affairs (MEA), it has been the prime minister who had laid down

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the principles of Indian foreign policy. Beginning with Nehru, as with Modi the foreign policy direction has been fixed by them on certain universal principles like peace, mutual prosperity and inclusive polity for the comity of nations. So it is indeed difficult for any prime minister to radically change these basic tenets of foreign policy. On the other hand, Modi’s personalised style of practising foreign policy is nothing new considering a Nehru or a Indira Gandhi being front and centre on the world stage. But while Nehru was an idealist, one sees the same realism that reflected on Indira Gandhi’s style of practising foreign policy, in Modi. As much as Indira Gandhi has been a propounder of hard power occasionally mixed with soft power, Modi’s functional style departs from this mix when he bases his policies solely on hard power. This fact is important in terms of the influence over him by his close advisors within and outside the PMO. Also, the RSS has a theory held for long that India being considered a soft state is the reason why misery is heaped upon it. A Narendra Modi as a political realist has often shown his impatience with the ideological insularity of the RSS. In some cases, like in the case of Israel visit he has had to make pragmatic compromises with the organisation. In a world where Donald Trump is a president of the most powerful nation (militarily) and a Theresa May of Brexit fame is a prime minister of the UK, the world order that was created in post-World War II period by the West is on a tailspin. There is a dire need for an alternative world order to be established by some of the major powers who have emerged in the post-colonial phase of human history along with those who emerged after the Cold War. Where India fits in is a major issue on which a Narendra Modi has his task cut out. Specially since he has hinted several times that he would like to win the next general election for another five years, he would have to be prepared to do the heavy lifting for positioning India at a strategic level in the world order, old or new, by which country can only enhance its position politically and economically. Modi’s conception of leaving a legacy is such that even if he doesn’t win the elections for a second term he would have to create the basic structure within which the succeeding government can pick up the thread and move forward. Excepting for the Left which disagrees with NDA II’s pronounced pro-US bias as much as that of the Congress-led UPA, there is a consensus on the overall foreign policy on both sides of the aisle. In the process,

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he must choose his allies correctly. There is a belief now amongst the strategists of the world that in a Trump presidency the number of nations who look up to the US for politico-diplomatic directions are fast depleting. But they also consider Modi to be America’s camp follower. Considering the alternative global structure as has been mentioned earlier, China and Russia have taken the lead to begin building institutions and authorities which will hold up the global order as more and more converts join in. In that light, Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS) have already taken some small steps that are above and beyond the G-7 and the G-20. The BRICS is essentially an idea driven by China while another cross-regional formation, the IBSA, which is an India-driven interregional formation are some of these structures that New Delhi will have to interact and strengthen while making a place of primacy for India. Of course, in those circumstances he would have to shed the US-centric foreign policy which is a default position of the RSSBJP combine, and he cannot ignore entirely the BRI plan of China being backed by a Eurasia focused Russia. Till now the BRICS combination and even China alone have made preliminary moves to bypass the Fund-Bank structure through which the US, more specifically, US Treasury and the Federal Reserve (American Central Bank) tries to control global finance and economic development. Interestingly, US Treasury and Federal Reserve have had their importance severely eroded in the post-2008 phase of global economic development. Instead, China has become a virtual banker of the US because it owns a few trillion dollars of US government securities and has a positive balance of trade in its favour with the US to the extent of about half a trillion dollars. Jury is out on the efficacy of the trade war that Trump has launched against China and even the rest of world, including Europe. The Chinese do not seem to be in the mood to relent. They have struck down twice attempts by the Trump administration to negotiate their way out of the morass that Trump has pushed the global economy into. India is chary about aggravating relations with either country on this issue. The country knows the vantage it holds as the fastest growing economy of the world and the advantages it can enjoy from the reorientation of its two largest trading partners fighting amongst themselves. For India and China, a friendly relation is a geopolitical imperative. The reasons that are fairly obvious but still need restating are: (1) geographical proximity, (2) advanced developing mixed economies, (3) large

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populations but with contrasting demographics, (4) similar status in global terms, despite India starting late with its reforms than PRC and (5) comparatively similar military might. Considering these factors, even if their differences are at the geo-strategic level, especially when it comes the issue of the so-called lone superpower, there should be a common agenda drawn from the other members of BRICS. Unfortunately for India, the elite are still smarting from the 1962 defeat in a border war with China. They keep those memories alive and well in the minds of people by nurturing them on a regular basis. Yet the elite also realises the economic advantages of joining hands with China in terms of allocation of global public goods and services are compelling. Nevertheless, the competition aspect of ‘cooptetion’ overtakes the cooperation level. This is largely a misguided reading of the present and the future. China has taken thirty years to reach the level of the second largest economy in the world while India started in the 1990s and it’s still a work-in- progress. After fifteen years of a continuous cycle of economic growth at about 10%, China has significantly slowed down in the post-2008 phase. The buck seems to have now passed on to India to drive the global growth at a reasonable pace. Without questioning the quality of the growth, one can say that Indian economy can sustain over a long period 7% plus to 8% economic growth. This should catapult India to the number two position, Purchasing Power Parity-wise relegating the US to the third position, even if Washington finds new drivers of economy in the short terms. Of course, after the defeat of the neoliberals in 2008 the new mantra in the US is an idea which has been optimistically termed as the incoming ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’. The idea has a certain credibility crisis because of the nature of its propounders. Klaus Schwab the originator of Davos-based World Economic Forum and Christine Lagarde, the current managing director of the IMF, both of whom got it all wrong as bubble after bubble was created by synthetic financial instruments in various parts of the developed world by the various private financial institutions. The regulatory mechanisms of these countries were all severely weakened according to the neoliberal belief of the Schwabs, Lagardes, Greenspans, Bernankes, etc. This ‘industrial revolution’ is based on the precepts of science and technology-driven processes, which ultimately resulted in artificial intelligence (AI) that currently drives robots and even better, drones. So is this a shift from one guru of capitalism to another. Neo-liberalist Milton

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Friedman to Joseph Schumpeter who saw the advancement of western capitalism based on invention, innovation, and newer frontiers opened up by human intellect. An age-old global fear that is on the rise on whether AI will replace human jobs. It is interesting to know that the global working class had to transit from mechanisation to information technology in the latter half of the twentieth century riding out the same fears. Structural adjustments the working class had to undergo left a large section of people especially of the older generation on the wayside of the technological transformation. Human misery it caused has been well documented to guide the decision-makers during the transition from IT to AI, so they factor this in when they drive the revolution. Now this is also an effort to shift the locus of wealth generation and accumulation back to the currently beleaguered West from Asia led by China and India. While China is better poised than India to stanch an effort to do this, India too will have to raise the standards of her technological prowess a few notches to catch the wind. The real story is fear of globalisation that has struck almost all the advanced Western economies and has turned the people inward. It is time China and India need to strengthen the regional multilateral organisations like the one between Bangladesh, China, India and Myanmar (BCIM) or the Indiadriven BIMSTEC (Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation). These kinds of regional organisations are more efficient in terms of cooperative growth and knowledge sharing and technological development, besides other economic values. These regional organisations are more important considering the complete failure, perhaps rightly so, of the World Trade Organisation (WTO). China has been trying to do just that. However, both China and India must take an attitude towards the West that is clearly based on a realist approach. This essentially means the current anarchic condition of the Western countries which is increasingly ignoring multilateral institutional structures they themselves spawned for global governance that they are ignoring is going to continue for some time. So with its superpower dreams and India with its ‘strategic autonomy’ principle should take clear advantage of this confusion and seek to grow not alone but regionally. That is one way of giving shape to the ‘Asian Century’ that the current punditry has envisioned. Non-Alignment 2.0 document prepared by a group of concerned individuals whose thoughts about national interests abound in the

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document have been criticised by Ashley Tellis who wrote a similar sized monograph. Tellis naturally is a US-centric policy practitioner and analyst in the US, so he states, ‘But in light of its own reading of India’s strategic circumstances, the report’s key recommendation—that India should remain “nonaligned” well into the future and refrain from cementing strong strategic “alliances” with other actors—is deeply misguided and potentially even dangerous. If New Delhi followed the report’s core advice, India would be left perilously vulnerable’.7 Non-Alignment 2.0 does not make a suggestion of that nature as Tellis with due regard has disagreed. Non-Alignment is a grouping of nations whose conditions are similar in nature, whose society and economy is still developing and taking shape and finally their strategic doctrines are mutually similar and non-aggressive, vis-a-vis other member nations. That was the crux of 1.0 and continues to be 50 years hence, still pervasive. China and India are developing countries with mixed economies. The success of both in economic and in social transformation has had and can have a major impact on many of the member nations of 2.0. Geopolitically, Iraq War II and Afghanistan War II could not have been the high watermark of what was then called rather vengefully the ‘War on Terror’. Any discerning follower of global events can say that the decline of the West began at the moment when then President of the US George W. Bush stood on the deck of USS Abraham Lincoln and declared ‘Mission Accomplished’. He had possibly thought that his ‘crusade against the jihad’ had come to an end. The Iraq War II that began in 2003 continues. The Afghan War II that began in 2002 continues still. The Judeo-Christian and Islamist forces thrust and parry, as innocent human lives are lost. This ‘clash of civilisations’ with due respect to Samuel Huntington continues not because of just differences in civilisational values. They continue as a war between the oppressed and the oppressors. For example, when current US President Donald Trump visited Saudi Arabia in June 2017, not only did he make various assurances for continuance of thoroughly corrupt and morally decrepit regimes of West Asia, he also received in the bargain $300 billion worth of contracts for war matériel. So crassly transactional relation this is that it exemplifies all that is wrong with the West, which had European Enlightenment influencing them for the last four centuries. This scenario is pervasive enough for India having to rethink its grand strategy. While India’s grand strategy

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of seeking secularism, socialism, democracy and republicanism hold good its strategic posture in geo-strategic and geopolitical terms is now fast changing. Ever since India established a strategic relationship with the US it has gone on to creating certain imperatives that the country must encounter. It already is smarting from the blowback of the ‘just war’ of 1971 in the form of an irredentist Pakistan launching asymmetric warfare for the last 40 years. While this has brought out the resilience of the country’s population, it has tested India’s territorial integrity. The human losses have taken a toll on the national psyche; the result of which we see in the rise of hyper-nationalism and super-patriotism along with the rise to the power of NDA II. Large sections of people of the country consider a majoritarian rule to be their theme song. In other words, it seeks the marginalisation of the minority to the extent that it can survive only with servility towards the icons that the majority holds to be good. Along with Pakistan’s revisionism, the RSS’s rise also is equally a danger. Now that China has emerged as another centre in continental South Asia engaging Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka on top of its strategic pile is still Pakistan. Considering China’s material wealth is five times that of India’s $2.087 trillion economy and with 2% of Chinese remaining under the poverty line (estimates of the World Bank, 2015), Beijing is better poised to share some of that largesse to these South Asian nations. Every time a ‘strong man’ emerges from the portals of the CPC, China gets into its Zhong Guo complex. Xi Jinping the current president of PRC is one such leader ever since Deng died in 1992. While Deng’s 24-character strategy had stated, ‘Observe calmly; secure our position; cope with affairs calmly; hide our capacities and bide our time; be good at maintaining a low profile; and never claim leadership’. But Xi’s policies seem to be on steroids as the conception of BRI exemplifies, so if a Sri Lanka or a Bangladesh does not understand that what they are getting from Beijing is noblesse oblige, it is to their own detriment. In any case, conflict at this time between India and China is not quite propitious for either—each claim to be encircled by the other—because both India and China have tasks that are cut out in the domestic sector as PRC seeks to become a middle-income country by 2021 and India by 2050. Internationally, the emergent BRI is an opportunity for cooperation between India and China. Add to that the concoction, a Eurasia focused Russia seems like a ‘concert of Asia’ that can stave off any challenge to their joint authority in the continent.

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It is an incorrect reading that the BRI is solely a Chinese project and the nations through which the belt and road will pass through demand their passivity. China intelligently has sought the full participation of the countries through which this transcontinental project will pass. The PRC wants these countries to contribute financially and with manpower. In other words, China seems willing to share ownership of the Belt-Road which passes through each of these countries. So then if one argues that the BRI is just bitumen and concrete they will be quite misinformed. The BRI signals two emerging geopolitical facts of life; one, the Westled world order is fast becoming obsolete; two, the Chinese approach reflects a true new world order that has in conjunction with the main power, Russia and India which should join in showing a strategic understanding and political prudence. In effect, the challenge for New Delhi and its rather small diplomatic corps is born out of the fast-changing quicksands of international politics. This is the time when India should grab the opportunity to extend its material gains and shared areas of influence. A single-front war or two and a half war, as a chief of army staff stated in recent times, is a major distraction. One should remember Sun Tzu’s saying, ‘Supreme excellence consists of breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting’. This requires the art of understanding the enemy’s strengths and weaknesses and grab opportunities while guarding for threats. India should rather relinquish the Chanakyan saying in paraphrased terms that ‘the neighbor is your enemy’. Xi Jinping, for example, has been advocating that there is no Thucydides Trap, i.e. there is no reason why an emerging global power has to fight battles with a superpower for its own rise. It holds true for Sino-US competition and even in the subcontinental region, Sino-Indian ‘cooptetion’, where China’s search for hegemony naturally should conflict with India. But that conflict needs to be avoided by both countries, for the following reasons: (1) With BRI and its projection of an alternative new world order the PRC needs to have a benign home front and peaceful ‘near abroad’ including Northeast, Southeast and South Asia. (2) India needs time to adjust to the new realities of the globe to do a China—actually, qualitatively better economic growth in terms of distributive justice at the average rate of 8% for more than a decade. Indian elite need to actuate its long-held desire to espouse their own national exceptionalism with its clearly articulated ‘grand strategy’.

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This exceptionalist vision is based on tolerance, peace, co-­prosperity and VasudaivaKutumbakam which roughly translates into a global engagement with all, irrespective of colour, creed or religion. But often these principles are violated by rabid Hindutva ideological excesses. On another plane, the 250 million odd Muslims of the country—who make India the third largest Muslim nation in the world after Indonesia and Pakistan—do not appear on the maps for the likes of al-Qaeda or ISIS or even Lashkar-e-Tayyaba, Jaish-e-Muhammad, etc. There is a limited exfiltration of Kashmiri youth into Pakistan administered Kashmir. If one follows the logic of LoC to be the de facto international boundary, the phenomenon of Azamgarh which was touted till sometime ago as one of the most fertile lands of Islamist radicalisation on the country seems unnatural. One has to accept that the Indian ethos which underlines its exceptionalism is the coexistence of various communities, and then the Muslims too need to understand what Islam talks about and especially the perspective of time and space that gave rise to the religion in the sandy deserts of Arabia. There is a word in Arabic, Ijtihad, which coaxes Muslims to study the Quran with a higher understanding and dedication that the religion demands. Since Islam expects most aspects of life of its followers to be governed by ground-rules, the Muslims need higher perspicacity to absorb what their ijtihad tells them. There are a large number of Muslim leaders of both pre- and postindependence India. However electoral politics with its vagaries of the connection between money and votes, politicians with generally short sights and thus the episodic tryst with political power demand quick results from the money ‘invested’. So the Abdullah Bukharis and Ahmed Bukharis who began to be cultivated as vote contractors by the Indira Gandhi, as politicians of short order tend to skew both religion and politics. In effect, it’s a reduction of the religion which does not allow mediators between man and God end up being made into sheep that follow a trail. The unmediated religious studies do not have space for fatwas to be issued in the name of God by fellow humans. Those fatwas, even if issued, need not be followed by anybody. The socio-economic fallout of pampering these vote contractors is evident in such studies like that of Rajendra Sachar Committee that establishes the miserable conditions of the average Muslim in India. Even as the governments both at the centre and the states allocate enough resources for the community as special cases, the cream from those

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allocations are skimmed off by these vote contractors. Thus, a success of an Indian grand strategy and exceptionalism would demand courage from its political leaders to remove the layer of religious rent-seekers and instead reach the lowest rungs of the population in a direct manner.

Notes 1. Kissinger, Henry, World Order, (UK: Penguin Random House, 2014). 2. Tellis, Ashley J., Non-Alignment Redux: The Perils of Old Wine in New Skins, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2012, p. 4. 3. Ibid. 4. Op. cit., n. 3 in Chapter 7. 5. Ibid. 6. Li, Haiyang, and Atuahene-Gima, Kwaku, “Product Innovation Strategy and the Performance of New Technology Ventures In China,” Academy of Management Journal, Vol. 44, No. 6 (2001), pp. 1123–1134. 7. Op.cit., n. 3 in Chapter 8.

CHAPTER 10

Is ChiNdia Possible?

The proposition of China and India joining hands with other major powers like a re-emergent Russia—as the main successor state of Soviet Union, a former superpower—and an Iran staking claim on its Persian past and moderated Islam is certainly enticing to some. But the fact remains that a rising China, an economic superpower, has begun flexing its military muscle as a challenge to India, being potential South Asian hegemon. Thus, a challenge on that score can consume the structural and functional necessity of an alternative world order to be erected by the line-up, where we can truly talk about achieving inclusivity, as opposed to monopolistic exclusivity of the Western kind. The hypothesis that this volume seeks to prove is whether the relations of the two successor nation states of the frayed Anglo-American Western alliance can throw up possibilities of ordering that natural anarchic instincts of ever-increasing numbers of national, popular governments in pursuit of their so-called national interest. In that light, is the concept of national sovereignty sacrosanct or is it assailable for the sake of a global order? What can be the pay-off in a probable process of mutual exchange where the erosion of sovereignty is directly proportional to processes of qualitative growth—social, political and economic? Our search has begun from the immense possibilities of bilateral relations of the two pre-eminent emergent powers—China and India—with the primary mover of post-World War II global order, the US. Any tectonic shift in politics of global nature can no longer be suffused in blood and sufferings of other kinds. What have we learnt from © The Author(s) 2019 P. Bhattacharya, Sino-US and Indo-US Relations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-7276-6_10

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the previous chapters of the Sino-US and Indo-US relations that can be transferrable to the task of a global powershift? Paul Kennedy wrote in his seminal ‘Rise and Fall of Great Powers’ while describing the main thesis of the book, ‘[I]t concentrates upon is the interaction between economics and strategy, as each of the leading states in the international system strove to enhance its wealth and power, to become (or to remain) both rich and strong’.1 Is that all that we need to know about the enhancement of human development processes even when we think in terms of a new rules-based new international order (RBNIO) for the new millennium? An influential thinker like Kissinger says that the ruling theme of his dialogue with Zhou Enlai in 1972 was not Taiwan, Vietnam, the USSR but a philosophical exchange. He sees China in the following way: [F]or me, relations with China have been a process of education and experience. And a fundamental conviction I developed, over the decades, is that our two countries have a unique historic opportunity.2

The contrasts and commonalities of the two bilateral relations under examination need a granular attention that separates each strand from the other. But before that, what are the comparative political positions with respect to each other. Before the eighteenth century Industrial Revolution in Britain and the island-nation becoming the major naval power, China and India together produced more than 50 per cent of the global GDP. The impoverishment of both the countries came with colonialism. Chinese still remembers it as a ‘Century of Humiliation’. Indian leadership has a divided opinion about how to deal with its history of being under the British yoke. So is it possible to draw lessons for India from the Sino-US ­relationship that can be termed so transformative as being a new renaissance for China. In terms of comparative politics, China and India are opposites, as we know. If we consider the base-superstructure paradigm, when we are talking about the politics of the elite of the countries, in case of China the National People’s Congress (NPC) gets superceded by the Central Committee of the CPC that acts as the base in the process of ‘democratic centralism’. With democratic centralism upholding the power structure from bottom to the top, the central committee elects the PB members and the PB nominates the Standing Committee of seven members. The chosen two

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amongst the seven members of the PBSC become the general secretary of the CPC and the other, the first deputy to the top man. The general secretary of the Party also becomes the president of PRC. The second person of the duo becomes the premier, and chairman of the State Council, the national cabinet of ministers. For India, in a federalist structure with a strong Centre requires Parliament to be the legislating authority; the government is the executive; and from the lower courts to the Supreme Court the structure of the independent judiciary. In the same base-superstructure model, Parliament can be considered the base with the electorate directly electing their representatives as Members of Parliament. First past the post system provides for the party/s who have the numerical majority to form the executive with the elected Prime Minister as the chief executive. A largely ceremonial President is the Constitutional head of state. Considering China is a revolutionary state, its politics has often been dominated by ‘strongmen’. Mao Zhedong was the first such leader of the Chinese revolution along with Zhou Enlai. The two headed both the party and the state, but Zhou was certainly the lesser equal. Those days the party chief of the CPC used to be called the chairman and all power used to be vested in the person of Mao. That kind of absolute power even a directly elected prime minister or president could never enjoy. The checks and balances of the Chinese system are not vested in its nominal legislature like the NPC. So, in terms of decision-making especially in foreign and security policy, the chairman of the party was identified as the final decision-maker. Powers of checks and balances are largely the terrain of unacknowledged factions of the party that keep the fetters on each other. But the kind of power that Mao had, he could decide alone with or without Zhou Enlai who was the Premier of the country, and the front man of the party state. However, in deciding about normalising the relationship with ‘imperialist evil’, the US, even Mao could not take a decision on his own. As in a meritocratic Confucian system, he deferred to the committee of generals who came up with options that he could adopt. However, it had fit into the Chinese Grand Strategy. For, this was an ideological shift of gigantic proportions—yet eminently desirable in terms of Chinese national interest. The Chinese have axioms that define their grand strategy; a clearly spelt out national security strategy and it has doctrines of war they keep updating. They do not expect to engage

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US in a global war unlike the days of two super powers. They studied with a great amount of attention to the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) that US exhibited in the First Gulf War. Cautious Chinese leadership project that not before 2030 can the nation really pitch for globe-girdling influence of the kind of the US. But on the global stage, many Indian China-watchers consider that the two could tango on the basis of ‘cooptetion’—a word coined to mean ‘cooperation and competition’. But an absence of mutual trust appears to dictate their geopolitics to be more of competition than cooperation. However, in the opinion of this author, the way these two emerging powers engaged the US can bring them together in terms of ‘commonalities’ than contrasts. The Chinese have axioms that define their grand strategy; a clearly spelt out national security strategy and it has doctrines of war they keep updating. The PLA modernisation came in late but is still ongoing. The PLA is a behemoth with the largest manpower in the world. When the current doctrine of China having not to fight a major war but a short regional highly informationised war, it doesn’t require so much of manpower but needs technological upgrades that would replace many of the men. The three regional wars that China has fought till now, i.e. for North Korea, against India and against Vietnam were all based on the canons of war enunciated by Mao. That meant waves and waves of infantry with poor equipment seeking to overwhelm the enemy just by numbers in what Mao dubbed ‘People’s War’. In the Korean War, they fought the American and South Korean Army to a standstill on the southern edge of the Yalu River. In 1962, against India the border war they fought they succeeded largely because of the poor generalship exhibited by the senior Indian army officials, along with the vicissitudes of the civilian political leadership. In Vietnam, they got a bloody nose. Now there is speculation that China will reduce the PLA, which had its navy and air force along with the army being described by their generic name till some time ago are about to lose 300,000 men. The modernisation of equipment is ongoing; emblematic of this is the recent unveiling of the stealth fighter aircraft JF-21 and the refurbished Ukraine-built aircraft carrier, Liaoning. India doesn’t have a national security strategy yet. There are apparently two drafts ready. Both are drafted by two former foreign secretaries, Shyam Saran; another by Shiv Shankar Menon. But none of them have been accepted by the successive governments of the Congress-led UPA and BJP-led NDA. Since it doesn’t have that crucial document,

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the armed forces must go in blind without much idea about what strategic end-state desirable for the country’s interests. Their equipment and manpower requirements are detailed in their five yearly Perspective Plans guiding their doctrines, not the other way around. They, of course, also have the 20-year Long Term Integrated Perspective Plans (LTIPP), prepared by what is called the Integrated Defence Service (IDS) Headquarters. It is more of an aspirational command, for it is to be the Combined Defence Services (CDS) HQ, some day when the three services could join up to foster jointness of forces. The governments since the economic reforms began in the 1990s have two mantras in case of defence funding: One, it holds the defence spending line at 1.5–2 per cent of the GDP; and two, all finance ministers routinely promise there will not be any shortage of funds, if emergency arises. The emergency never seems to strike. On the other hand, the defence ministry babus come hell or high water, return unspent, even the funds that are allocated. Meanwhile as the comptroller general of audit and accounts keeps noting that India’s War Wastage Reserve, WWR which covers the basic requirements and redundancies that are required for a normal armed forces of Indian size be pegged at three months redundancy, is down to six to ten days. That shows the efficiency of the babus and their bosses, the mantris (ministers). One does not intend to revisit such literature of Western strategists like George Tanham or Steven P. Cohen. But even without that when the brass talk about two front wars or two and half wars to be fought simultaneously, one can safely wonder whether one would do that with the same armed force. A former general, Vijay Kumar Singh headed a committee on ‘Transformation’ of the army even before he became the chief. Then an army commander, one thought that once he became the COAS he would follow the tenets of his own report and begin the process of transformation of the Indian Army in right earnest. Instead, he was embroiled in an age row that did not require much elucidation here. And the other is his famous letter to the prime minister of the day, a famously anti-selfsufficiency bureaucratic-politico, Manmohan Singh. That letter was one of anguish and talked about the hollowness of the Indian Army and how there were crucial shortages in terms of warfighting matériel. Interestingly, that letter was leaked to the media from the PMO—to what end one doesn’t know yet. What this comparison of modernisation processes the forces exhibit that while under an authoritarian rule of Communist Party of China;

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the society is supposed to be well-ordered, and the processes of modernisation should be smoother. But it doesn’t seem so. On the other hand, the Indian process under a chaotic democracy is even more fraught with uncertainties. Having said that, it has to be acknowledged that even the LAC between India and China, and border transgressions that take place do not necessarily lead to war. Diplomacy that facilitates dialogue more often is the procedure by which crisis in the nature of militarised conflicts is defused. A theory propounded by the neoliberals and neocons in George W. Bush’s administration that sought to export liberal democracy on the back of neoliberal economic reforms, theorised rather simplistically that democratic nations do not fight wars. Contrary to that we have seen fighting erupt, both as civil wars and interstate warfare in some parts of the world. But war in light of the experiences of the first decade of twenty-first century has deterred interstate wars to a great extent. Instead, what one comes across are coercive diplomacy and asymmetric military operations by use of irregular forces creating deniability for States. In this vision, the biggest war-making around the world has been undertaken by the Anglo-American combine and their allies across the globe. China’s recent initiative called the Belt Road Forum has exemplified an alternative world order to the one now sponsored by the Western nations. As we have noticed in the earlier paragraphs, this world order has led to more conflicts than conflict resolution. The Border Road Initiative by China is Confucian in its origin. It requires time, excites imagination, requires formal or informal alliances and strengthens economic bonds. In fact, in the post-2008 financial crisis and following Main Street recession, the multi-billion-dollar BRI project is geared towards generating employment, increasing economic productivity and promoting inter-state cooperation. This initiative however did not find acceptability with India for right geopolitical reasons. While it is not necessary to detail the reasons for which India did not join the BRI, it remains a fact that a part of the BRI, the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor, CPEC seems to establish and provide legitimacy to the Pakistan administered Kashmir and to the territories of Kashmir that Pakistan ceded to China in the 1970s. But there is a contrary view, and that view is had India become part of the BRI the Chinese could have led a defanging Pakistan operation and made the LoC a dejure boundary—a long time desire of India to neutralise the Kashmir dispute.

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One may recall at this stage the conversation in Shimla 1972 between Indira Gandhi and Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto as they took a stroll on the lawns of Raj Niwas. This conversation was basically a plea by Bhutto to Gandhi a late prime minister of India who vivisected Pakistan the previous year. During that talk, Bhutto wanted the 93,000 soldiers of the Pakistan Army who had surrendered and were in the custody of the Indian army. He as a quid pro quo told Gandhi that he was willing to make the LoC an international boundary. Of course, this was verbal but the truce agreement that was signed and named as Shimla Accord had the provision of return of the soldiers but Bhutto wanted to retain the promise about the LoC unwritten. So returning to the issue of India not joining the CPEC has a certain atavistic logic, which is Indian elite’s habit of looking a winning horse in the mouth. As an afterthought, Indian babudom came up with the formulation—after it realised the country’s isolation—that India could join the BRI in certain sections, but this has never found traction beyond the fact that Beijing acknowledged India’s concerns for its sovereign rights. This would be a good point in this narrative for some bean counting; what are the key take-aways from the Sino-US relations till 1971–1978 and Indo-US relations 1991–2000 (see Table 10.1). At the end of the period 1971–1978 after Deng fully arrived on the scene, China wanted another important element of its relations with the US to gain primacy: economy. For Beijing, economic development meant foreign investment in manufacturing and trade access. From 1983, after two years into Deng’s reform and opening-up began in right earnest, the first two special economic zones (SEZ) were opened in Guangdong and Fu Jian was ready to accept foreign direct investment (FDI). Americans were of the first to invest: it began as a trickle at less than USD 100 million till about 1989—the year of Tiananmen Square crisis or as the Chinese demurely call it now the 4 June incident. From 1992, the first major bump came after Deng reassured the investing crowd that all was well (by his famous southern tour)—despite the slight listing of the ship due to the turbulence of 1989—and that year the needle of FDI inflow moved towards USD 200–300 million. By the year Xi Jinping became the anointed president of PRC in 2012, the annual FDI flow was close to USD 120 billion—of which about 2.1% was from North America. Then real increase from Western sources began after China became the member of the WTO in 2001,

As a result of reaching out to the US, China withdrew from exporting revolution to S-E Asia

China helped the US exit Vietnam

Intensive engagement for mutual needs US helped Pakistan to withdraw from the Kargil conflict as India declared victory The alignment with the US made India cooling off on NAM

Narasimha Rao’s (PVNR) search for fall-guys if required on account of US-wooing overtures

Mao’s search for insulation from negative fall-outs on account of US-wooing exercise

No backing down on Taiwan status

Chinese assertion needed to be challenged and thus required to be ‘contained’

Alliance born on the anvil The committee of four PLA of Soviet expansion and that Marshals recommend Chinese needed to be ‘contained’ outreach

Commonalities

Commonalities

Contrasts

India 1991–2001

China 1971–1978

Relations with US

At the end of the Cold War, India’s woes mounted while the US declared its victory

Indian outreach was a wider design of the middle-class represented by the post-independence generation of senior politicians/officials Sporadic attempts at running the country’s Pakistan policies through the US-portfolio

Contrasts

Table 10.1  Key Take-aways from the Sino-US relations (1971–1978) and Indo-US relations (1991–2000)

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Post-Cold War the western nations sought to monopolise international trade they kept out China from the newly formed WTO as a stick That did not stop China from becoming the fastest growing economy of the world, along with becoming the largest trading partner of most countries, besides the US

Post-Mao China reoriented its economic policies to take advantage of its association with the largest economy Even though the FDI influx into China was that of NRCs, the US-based MNCs moved their manufacturing into the nation

Commonalities

Commonalities

Contrasts

India 1991–2001

China 1971–1978

Relations with US

(continued)

India’s economic reform was less orderly thus less transformative possibly because it’s a multiparty democracy and the country did not have the export-led growth model like that of China

India was pressured in the first flush by the US for market access to reach the larger-than-China’s middle class consumer market NRIs did not show the same degree of enthusiasm in investment into China and the US-based MNCs did not hv the same confidence to shift to India their manufacturing India was a part of the Uruguay Round and thus the WTO as an exemplar to the developing world

Contrasts

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Post-9/11 when China joined the world in supporting the US, it did not take part in the military operations in its backyard in Afghanistan Deepening of Sino-US relations was an aspect of bipartisan support of the US ruling elite

While the US followed the logic of capital and commerce with China, once the USSR went into terminal decline, the political and strategic element of the Sino-US alignment took a backseat

China’s foray into South Asia was a self-driven strategy based on its CNP

India too followed a similar political-strategic model excepting an influential section of the Atal Behari Vajpayee regime wanted a more pro-active path Indo-US relations also had bipartisan support especially when the relations dove into the depths of permanent bureaucracy of the US

Commonalities

Commonalities

Contrasts

India 1991–2001

China 1971–1978

Relations with US

Table 10.1  (continued)

India’s foray into East and S-E Asia really took off at the behest of the US in terms of its hedging against resurgent China With the rise of George W Bush Administration, the open-ended engagement with India was capped by the signing of the CAN whose goal was largely strategic

Contrasts

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China’s naval forces began foraying into the Indian Ocean through the process of anti-Piracy operations in the Gulf of Aden but only under an UN resolution

Bush II Administration’s focus on China as an adversary diminished in importance during the Obama Administration

But soon he pivoted out of the Islamic West Asia and switched attention to the Western and Southern Pacific, thus China containment India played a primary role in the same operations and also not as a part of the western armada but the UN resolution

Commonalities

Commonalities

Contrasts

India 1991–2001

China 1971–1978

Relations with US

(continued)

Despite Obama broke a negative tradition of the US presidents visiting india willy-nilly towards the end of their tenure - he visited first in 2010 and in 2016 - his main point of focus was Islamic nations and propitiating them India emerged as the lynchpin of the Pacific pivot with US State Department and the Pentagon coming up with a new description of southern Pacific as Indo-Pacific

Contrasts

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However Indian Navy looked askance at China’s PLA-N sailing into its eponymous ocean seeming to also challenge the US Navy that had robust presence in those waters Prospect of Sino-US conflict in a shooting war is negated by most area watchers instead engaging in ‘cooptetion’ India in the same vein do not posit an existential threat to the US but would soon have to engage China in the same ‘cooptetion’ mode

India watched the receding power of the US and realised that it had to pick up the slack and make its own presence felt

Commonalities

Commonalities

Contrasts

India 1991–2001

China 1971–1978

Relations with US

Table 10.1  (continued)

Contrasts

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from 2004 to 2005 really till 2012. But there is a subplot in the story. Right through 1983 to 2012, most of the investment into PRC had been routed through Hong Kong—a lot of that could have been from the West-based multinational corporations (MNCs). Trade access to Western nations, on the other hand, was quite preponderant right from the beginning of ‘reform and opening-up’. Thus from 1990 to 2012, the Chinese ‘quietly crossed the river by feeling the stones’, a period when their economy grew on an average of 10% annually. In other words, they continued to accrue comprehensive national power (CNP). India began the journey of willy-nilly emulating the Chinese path with its own indigenous features from 1991. As the country did not have a China-like chip to play with—as in countering a US adversary—it sought to gain the mind-space of American commerce by playing the middle-­ class card, as has been mentioned earlier. This author recalls a statement by the now deceased, a spunky Arundhati Ghosh, then an additional secretary for economic relations in MEA—the first after India’s own economic reform was launched. She had said, ‘You know what a senior World Bank official had recently told me. He told me that what can we advise India. Our key officials are mostly Indians’. To wit! Story that was being acted upon in India in 1990s was being scripted since the 1960s. In his seminal book then on Asia, Gunnar Myrdal recounted a story of Thor, the Biblical character. Thor the God of War in the Old Testament went to visit the Giants in Utgard. ‘While they were eating and drinking, the Giants teased Thor about his physical prowess and challenged him to lift a cat that lay purring in a corner of the hall of feasting. Irritated, Thor rose to toss the cat out of the window, but however much he exerted himself, he could only get the cat to stand on its legs. Finally, by using all his strength he succeeded in lifting it so that one of its feet was for a moment a hairsbreadth off the floor. When the exhausted Thor returned to the table, he found, however, the Giants upset and showing signs of fear. The saga explains that the Giants had distorted Thor’s vision. What he had been challenged to lift was not any normal animal but the mythical Great World Serpent swaddling the earth seven times, its tail firmly gripped in its jaws’. Myrdal felt like Thor in writing his book on the continent.3 The reason for this accounting and that of Selig Harrison’s apocalyptic visions were just to give a hint how complicated the journey is for

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the conjoined twins of the subcontinent. India found its path despite the confounding confusion and almost anarchic condition that existed in the subcontinent. Pakistan lost its way playing the US proxy in the South Asian version of the Cold War. India’s non-alignment with a distinct Soviet tilt still gave it leverage to address the world on the level. Returning to the main hypothesis that tries to examine whether there is a similar pattern of commonalities and contrasts in the Sino-US and Indo-US relations. Table 10.1 shows in the period of the time-line a pattern developing between the two subjects. Two important dates in the first decade of the new millennium have clearly shown the limits of the sole superpower moment in human history. The first such date was 9/11. In its wake, almost the whole world—including those nations with mostly Muslim populations—stood united behind the US. But the neo-conservative advisers of then US president, George Walker Bush, decided to seize the initiative and try and reorder West Asia. There was apparent logic in their desire. For 11 of the 19 men involved in planning and execution of 9/11 were from Saudi Arabia. But instead of aligning the forces against the retrograde kingdom, the Americans attacked Iraq. Though that was only after the US Special Forces took about three days to oust the Taliban from Afghanistan. Despite the overwhelming force deployed in the valleys and mountains of the country, the US could not lay their hands on Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri. Iraq was almost an identical story. Iraq’s army, including the famed Republican Guards, were made horsdecombat within a few days of the US invasion. Then came the appointed hour for the neocons to show their dexterity in ‘regime change’ and nation-building. Spectacular failures marked the narrative defined by those two goals. Knowing the reality as it exists, Kissinger took a long view of the world. By the end of 2016, he said the following: Islamic terrorism is consequential for the prospects of international order in the short term. Our relations with China will shape international order in the long term. The United States and China will be the world’s most consequential countries. Economically, this is already the case.4

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The academic-turned-statesman had either spoken too soon. Or his vision was coloured by his ‘patriotism’. For, he ignored two crucial developments: one took place exactly eight years ago, in 2008 and the other, about eight months ago when the US witnessed a real estate tycoon take over the presidency of the country. We do not need to recall the series of events that shook the foundations of the global financial architecture. It also marked the beginning of the end of the pervasive Western dominance of the global economy. When US President Donald Trump returned to power, he signalled that he would not play by the post-World War II structure of rules and norms set in his neck of the woods. He knew if he had to change the existing status quo, he would have to loosen the grip over the levers of power by the ruling elite who have been early beneficiaries. The first result of 2008 meltdown has been the marginalisation of the group of seven (G-7) nations who monopolised the economic landscape of the world. Group of 20 nations became the new talisman for the world economy. The leading lights of the G-20 were China, India, Indonesia and the like. So, when the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, talks about ‘Asia for Asians’—Kissinger had pointed that out without being greatly bothered by that rhetoric in that same conversation referred above—what he was meaning was actually that locus of human development has moved to the East. By the time the Chinese went for their 17th CPC Congress and chose Xi Jinping-Li Keqiang team, they were seeking to harmonise the social fault-lines, born mostly out of large iniquities that were growing in terms of individual wealth. Xi came to power with an agenda. He knew no talk of achieving social harmony would be successful, if the abiding malady of corruption is not uprooted. Xi had the full support of the PLA; a constituency he had nurtured for long, ever since he was in his 30s and was a mishu (personal assistant) to then defence minister in the late-1980s. Since he began the process with the PBSC and person of a high lineage, Bo Xilai, being a son of a member from inside the rarefied quarters of Zhongnanhai—the compound which holds the Party nomenklatura— ever since Mao, Zhou, Deng et al inhabited it, the rest of the powerful groups of the CPC fell in line. At last count about a million senior party members and government officials, PLA officers like even lieutenant generals and major generals and a few industry captains have been put away. Simultaneously, he launched the highly ambitious One Belt One Road (OBOR) project that was to be the main connectivity project of tying

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Asia with Europe and Africa. Much has been written about the project including in this volume. But this being the final chapter, one issue that has not been elucidated upon enough, needs attention now. While naturally the deep pockets of the Chinese could help its ideational adversaries to dub the project a process of neo-colonialism, but for many national governments along the way suffering crisis of public funds, the Chinese money could be their only second chance to resource public infrastructure, thus generating employment. On the Indian side, there is a certain ambivalence about the project, some of which has been discussed earlier. However, there is still a scope for India to look at the subject later in 2019. In the spirit of Wuhan summit between the Chinese and Indian leadership—something that can be speculated to be an exchange bordering on how the two countries view the future of globe. In consonance with that is the growing understanding in both the Capitals—New Delhi and Beijing—the world needs to be ordered afresh, so that it can emerge out of the current disorder. If one can believe Henry Kissinger as the right person who reads the often inscrutable Chinese with reasonable accuracy—he made close to a hundred visits to the country since his first in 1971 albeit with a weak stomach!—then Xi’s stated goal is to ‘turn adversaries into partners’.5 For this possibility to see the light of day, we have to dial back to a 1992 enunciation of the management of India’s national interest Dixit. His third goal mentioned in his now famous 11-point charter to himself for reorienting the country’s foreign policy, the third point emerged by the mid-2000s on the strategic landscape as the biggest impediment to India’s rise. To refresh memories, the third point was: ‘To cope with threats to India’s territorial integrity and stability generated by political developments and policies of India’s immediate neighbours’.6 If Pakistan has stymied the pace at which India could grow, by the time of the first decade of this millennium the strategic threat-board was showing a bigger blip. China began making inroads into what New Delhi considered its backyard. Sri Lanka turning to Beijing more fully than what it did from the late-1980s and 1990s was the real shocker for many in the subcontinent. This was not sourcing for an odd weapon system that India just would not provide the island-nation against its war with the LTTE. This was about the PLA-N coming all the way around the Bay of Bengal to the south-east of Sri Lanka, causing India’s own southern reaches that were thought to be one of the most secure.

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Then there were the smaller worries: the outlying nations of the Indian Ocean that were ports of call for the Indian Navy, running interference in their arc of influence. Countries like Maldives, Seychelles and Mauritius provided Indian Navy bases for its forays deeper into the ocean, laying increasing claim. Earlier in this book, expansion of India’s global role has been discussed in the context of anti-piracy operations in the Somali waters. Ironically, the Chinese PLA-N had cut its blue water teeth on the same mission, under the same UN mandate as India. Now, just as the talk had veered to choke points like the Malacca Straits the Indian Navy could close off, to create severe trouble for the Chinese—their largely mythical ‘string of pearls’ bases were thought of to be the casus belli—PLA-N began showing its own long sea legs even as the IN began sailing into the ocean, from its own ‘brown waters’. When this began to crease the brows in South Block and the worry lines were getting reflected in the internal papers, the world in its continental nature itself began throwing up new opportunities for raising the country’s profile. All this called for a strategic review. But as is the case with the country, there never is one concentrated, centralised space— much unlike China or even the US—the review was piecemeal. Main drivers of this change were witnessed during the formal assumption of office by the Narendra Modi government. The key to trigger the change was his invitations to heads of the other six South Asian nations. All attended the ceremonial induction. India has ‘strategic’ relations with more 40-odd countries of the world. Modi clearly had in mind a plan to touch base with especially the majors. By the third Republic Day celebration—the annual jamboree when the Indian nation state exhibits its regalia—he had as his guest the US president, Obama and even possibly more importantly, all the ASEAN leaders together. Chinese now needed to think their India portfolio. He had by then met Xi who had come visiting in the middle of a Chinese PLA ‘transgression’ across the LAC, though he was feted on the banks of the Ganges in historic Benares. In turn, Modi had been to China at a much less dramatic moment beginning his journey in Xian, amidst the terracotta army. A civilisational connect was being made. Clearly, the results of the review processes were being played out—even in the interim. The two had several meetings since. If China and India must move forward, they can no longer keep the boundary fixation issue on the

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back-burner. Deng might have wished to keep it postponed for future generations; this generation may have to measure to grab the nettle and solve one of the most intractable problems between two major powers. This may also help India to emerge out of the cul-de-sac that South Asia has become. If the 2018 September meeting of the SAARC foreign ministers is any indication, even Bangladesh and Nepal want to break free from a regional millstone around their neck. That aspiration can only be fulfilled if India expands the horizon. On another plane, the untenability of the current international order is becoming as the US under president Trump becomes inward looking. Understandably, the US mid-west that was the crucible of progressive politics of FDR’s New Dealers has turned against the beltway elite, who have appropriated most of the benefits of the ‘American Dream’. They advocated trade globalisation, allowed it to be hijacked by Wall Street and in favour of some paper wealth they created—derivatives they called them— and sold it to those who had genuine investible surplus. Thus, those people who bought the papers were lost it all as the supposed intrinsic value of those papers—housing mortgages that supposedly had ironclad security; corporate loans that undergirded value of the papers—eroded. Why did this massive loss take place? Because the American elite allowed American big capital to migrate offshore with good manufacturing jobs so that big capital could earn ‘super-profits’, on the high margins of low labour factor cost in poor countries. Trump, a faux billionaire (he himself have sought the security umbrella of the rich in the US bankruptcy laws 11 times) in the company of other such forces of reaction of the Republican Party instead decided to tap into the low-end of the genuine, yet uninformed fury of many in ‘middle America’, and have begun exploiting it to strike at the roots of many progressive legislations of the US in areas like environment, ethical science, technological development, etc. Considering this is not a treatise on the complex, multi-layered, ­multi-tiered American angst and its root problems, we shall be migrating soon to what of Trump’s domestic agenda is impinging over the US leadership on the global stage. The US has withdrawn from the Paris accord; he wants fossil fuels to be used in his backyard in greater ubiquity. He wants women’s rights on decisions about their own well-being to be legislated out of the American and global agenda. He wants now that the US has appropriated much of the world’s savings to return to the shores of the US,

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where he can build a fortress—so to say—and allow the American billionaires to enrich themselves further. He has thus already threatened to withdraw from the WTO; embroiled China, Europe and much of the rest of the world in a trade war that has begun hurting even his ‘middle America’ and high-value shale oil exports. All this has created a sense of crisis across the world and a political vacuum in its leadership to create some order. All this while China, India and even the often politically confused Southeast Asian nations had been basing their own projections on the basis of what another American guru, Joseph Nye, calls ‘soft power’. But with OBOR, China has made it known that it wants to set the global agenda. India has let it be known at the Singapore conference of the Shangri La dialogue of the British thinktank International Institute of Strategic Studies that it is willing to take part in an RBNIO. The global political arena is registering major shifts. But an abiding fact in the comparative power index of the world is the sheer weight of the American dominance. Their gross domestic product is close to 20-trillion USD in constant measure, while the second-best China is only one-fourth and India’s one-eighteenth. Military expenditure of the US is the highest in the world, higher than the aggregated total of the next 10 nation states of the world. So, when the oracular Kissinger says, ‘I do not agree that a national security policy must be equated with a “contain China” policy. It is important for us to be present in Asia in political, economic and social ways. We cannot talk about equilibrium in Asia unless we establish some of the preconditions for it, like TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership). But it should also be open to China. And it should be understood that China can be part of it so that whatever economic contest we have with China will be within a framework of a cooperative option. A military containment policy should be a last resort’.7 Xi has talked about the Sino-US economic relations as ‘ballast and propeller’8 of the bilateral relations of the country. India again realistically cannot yet take on the US hegemony, in any direct nor does its ruling class have the appetite for that. But both China and India are making known their intent. For now, it remains up to an emancipated US leadership—based on the resilience of its own national institutions—to coopt international practices, based on cooperation and competition. For the future, ChiNdia as an idea has several ‘real’ complementarities. This volume has sought to reflect on that.

218  P. BHATTACHARYA

Notes 1. Kennedy, Paul, Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, (USA: Random House, 1988), p. XV. 2. ‘The Key Problem of Our Time’: A Conversation with Henry Kissinger on Sino-U.S. Relations | Wilson Center,’ Stapleton Roy with Henry Kissinger, Woodrow Wilson Centre, https://www.wilsoncenter.org/article/the-keyproblem-our-time-conversation-henry-kissinger-sino-us-relations, accessed on October 3, 2018. 3. Myrdal, Gunnar, Asian Drama, Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 1968 by the Twentieth Century Fund, Inc, p. XIV. 4. Op. cit., n. 2 in Chapter 9. 5. Ibid. 6. Op. cit., n. 15 in Chapter 6. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid.

Index

A Act East policy, 159, 183 Advani, L.K., 133, 183 Afghan war, 123, 183, 193 Aiyar, Mani Shankar, 138 al Qaeda, 123, 127, 135, 196 al-Zawahiri, Ayman, 123, 135, 212 Ambedkar, Dr Bhim Rao, 178 Anglo-American Western alliance, 199 anti-bourgeois campaign, 100 anti-Confucius campaign, 74, 75, 85 Artificial Intelligence (AI), 191, 192 Asian communism, 2, 16 Asian Infrastructure and Investment Bank (AIIB), 102, 172 Asian Tigers, 160, 162, 168, 169 Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), 9, 160, 161, 166, 168, 169, 215 Atoms for Peace programme, 114, 131 B Babri Masjid destruction, 188

Bandung Conference of 1955, 14, 19 Bangladesh, China, India and Myanmar (BCIM), 192 Basic Exchange and Cooperation Agreement (BECA), 128, 141 Bay of Bengal Initiative for MultiSectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation (BIMSTEC), 192 Bay of Pigs fiasco, 62 Beijing Consensus, 147 Beijing Olympics, 2007, 143 Belt Road Forum, 204 Belt-Road Inititiative (BRI), 125, 126, 161, 166, 171, 187, 190, 194, 195, 204, 205 Bhabha, Homi J., 131 Bhadrakumar, M.K., 137 Bhutto, Benazir, 122 Bofors scandal, 156 Bordoloi, Gopinath, 156 Bose, Khudiram, 148 Bottom, Foggy, 71, 109, 111 Bretton Woods Institutions, 180 Brexit, 173, 189

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019 P. Bhattacharya, Sino-US and Indo-US Relations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-7276-6

219

220  Index Brezhnev, Leonid, 81, 108 BRICS nations, 102 BRI project, 171, 195, 204 Brzezinski, Zbigniew, 65, 162 Buchanan, Patrick, 77 Buddhism, 165, 173, 174 Bundy, McGeorge, 54 Bundy, William, 57 Bush, George H.W., 53, 93, 110, 120 Bush, George W., 8, 9, 124, 135, 140, 150, 163, 165, 183, 193, 204, 212 C Cabinet Committee of Political Affairs (CCPA), 133 Carter, Jimmy, 80, 87, 88, 90, 91, 114 Casey, William (Bill), 90 Ceausescu, Nicolae, 67 Central Discipline Inspection Commission (CDIC), 100 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 6, 16, 28, 36, 46, 49, 54, 68, 69, 72, 75, 89, 90, 94, 98, 100, 110–113, 145, 177 Chanakyan philosophy, 146 Chander, Avinash, 152 Chapekar brothers, 148 Chen Boda, 68 Chen Yi, 4, 35, 66, 68, 71 Chen Yun, 86 Chernobyl accident, 151 Chiang Kai Shek, 2, 26 Chidambaram, Palaniappan, 134 Chidambaram, R., 133 China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), 126, 166, 187, 204, 205 Chinese Grand Strategy, 201 Chinese growing population and military power, 56

Civil Nuclear Agreement (CNA), 9, 139–141, 144, 149–151, 181, 182 classical realism, 62, 101, 105 Clinton, Bill, 9, 95, 103, 115, 123, 128, 134 Cohen, Stephen P., 7 Cold Start strategy, 152 Cold War, 2, 3, 8–11, 23, 26, 28–34, 42–44, 48, 49, 54, 61, 65, 66, 71, 79, 80, 86, 87, 104, 105, 109, 112, 116–118, 120, 147, 162, 168, 178, 181, 189, 212 Combat Development and Testing Center (CDTC), 55 Common Minimum Program (CMP), 136 Communication Interoperability and Security Memorandum (CISMOA), 141 Communications Compatibility and Security Agreement (COMCASA), 128 Communist Party of China (CPC), 3, 7, 15, 21–23, 25, 28, 30, 37–39, 68, 73–75, 79, 80, 82, 85, 88–93, 95, 99, 127, 143, 144, 149, 194, 200, 201, 203, 213 Communist Party of India (Marxist), 181 Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), 4, 38, 42, 59 Comprehensive National Power (CNP), 140, 211 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), 120, 121, 133, 134, 138, 141 Comprehensive Weapons of Mass Destruction (Prohibition Act), 136 Compulsory Plagiarism, 13, 77 Conference on Disarmament (CD), 1996, 133

Index

Cultural Revolution, 4, 9, 21, 43, 56, 68, 69, 72, 74, 75, 80, 85, 88, 89, 149 Czech revolt, 1968, 6 D Dai Bingguo, 157 Dalai Lama, 126, 127, 157 Dalit community, 178 Dasgupta, Chandrashekhar, 115 Defence Framework Agreement, 137 Deng Xiaoping economic reform plan, 89 Four Modernisations, 86, 94 PLA modernisation process, 202 post-Mao strategy, 86 public spending plan, 89 Desai, Morarji, 113, 132 Dhar, P.N., 113 Dien Bien Phu, 2, 33, 53, 77 Dipankar, Atish, 173 Dixit, J.N., 115, 117, 138, 145, 168 Dobrynin, Anatoly, 6 Dong Jiaomin Hutong, 85 Dostum, Abdul Rasheed, 164 Dulles, Allen, 54 Dulles, John Foster, 2, 11, 16, 18, 30, 111 Dunkel, Arthur, 117 Dunkel Draft Text (DDT), 118 E East China Sea, 102, 160, 171 Eisenhower, Dwight, 2, 16, 28, 54, 77, 111 elite politics in Beijing, 66 Elliott, Mai, 55, 57, 64, 83 Estranged Democracies, 109

  221

F Fabian Socialism, 178 Fa Hien, 173 Fang Lizhi, 97, 99 Fernandes, George, 120, 133 financial crisis of 2008, 171, 204 Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty (FMCT), 136, 141 Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence, 166 Ford, Gerald R., 71, 78 Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, 87 Formosa (Taiwan), 2 free trade, 173 Friedman, Milton, 146, 174, 191 G Gandhi, Indira, 108, 110, 131, 132, 138, 140, 169, 189, 196, 205 Gandhi, Rajiv, 110, 132, 138, 155, 157, 159, 167 Gandhi, Sonia, 136, 138, 139, 151 Gang of Four, 65, 69, 70, 73, 75, 76, 80, 85, 88, 89 Gates, Robert, 122 GATT negotiations of the Uruguay round, 118, 163 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), 117, 118, 163 Generalised System of Preferences (GSP), 116, 162 Ghali, General Boutros Boutros, 125 Ghosh, Arundhati, 211 globalisation, 117, 173, 174, 185, 192, 216 Global War on Terror (GWOT), 164, 165 Gong Li, 48, 61, 83 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 96 Gowda, H.D. Deve, 133, 168

222  Index Great Leap Forward, 3, 39, 41, 42, 52, 59 Gromov, General Boris, 107 Gromyko, Andrei, 6, 24, 81 Group of 20 nations, 213 group of seven (G-7) nations, 213 Guangzhou, 99, 100 Gujral, Inder Kumar, 134 Gulf of Tonkin incident, 54, 64, 83 Guomindang (KMT), 15, 143 Gupta, Ranjit, 168 H Haig, General Alexander, 93 Haksar, P.N., 113 Han Hua, 7 Haq, General Zia Ul, 114 Harrison, Selig, 112, 129, 181, 211 Hekmatyar, Gulbuddin, 107 Henry Hyde Act, 151 Hersh, Seymour, 113 Hilaly, Agha, 14 Hiuen Tsang, 173 Hobbs, Thomas, 105 Ho Chi Minh, 6, 32, 43, 55, 58 Hoda, Dr Anwar Ul, 116, 129 Holdridge, John, 1, 45 Honda factory agitation, 144 Hua Guofeng, 65, 74, 75, 79, 80, 86, 88, 92 Huang Hua, 1, 45, 93 Hussain, Saddam, 53 Hu Yaobang, 80, 86, 89, 92, 94–97, 106 Hyde Act, 2006, 139 I Immerman, Richard H., 2 India anti-piracy operations, 215

business families, 185 Constitution, 178 global role, 215 Information Technology sector, 184 Modi era, 9 Muslims in, 188, 196 national integrity, 179 Northeast separatist insurgencies, 169 political relationship between ASEAN and, 168 position in the Indo-Pacific, 170 post-independence, 196 Purchasing Power Parity, 99 role as a ‘balancer’, 170 strategic competition with China, 167 Indian nuclear programme, 132, 134 Indian Ocean Tsunami Human Assistance and Disaster Relief (HADR), 109, 128 Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF), Sri Lanka, 170 Indo-Pacific Command of the USA, 128 Indo-Pak relations, 113 Indo-US relations civil nuclear cooperation, 136 conflict and, 14 during tsunami relief operations, 110 Indian nuclear programme and, 139 issue of non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, 120 Kargil war, 162 Kashmir issue, 114 in military terms, 128 regime for investments, 162 setbacks, 112 Talbott–Jaswant Singh negotiations, 122 International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), 141, 151, 182

Index

Iran-Contra scandal of Ronald Reagan Administration, 53 Iraq War, 1990, 110 ISIS, 127, 196 Islamist terrorism, 150 IT Enabled Services sector (ITES), 184 Iyyengar, P.K., 133 J Jiang Qing, 3, 9, 21, 65, 68–70, 73–75 Jiang Zemin, 92 Johnson, Lyndon B., 3 Joint Declaration of Strategic Partnership, 152 Joint Working Group (JWG), 157 K Kakodkar, Anil, 149 Kalam, A.P.J. Abdul, 133 Kang Sheng, 68 Karat, Prakash, 136, 144, 153, 182 Kargil war, 162 Kashmir, 114, 116, 117, 119, 124–126, 137, 138, 157, 167, 187, 196, 204 Kaul, Lt Gen B.M., 155, 156 Kennedy, John F., 3, 21, 33, 34, 77 Kennedy, Paul, 107, 200 Kennedy, Robert, 54 Khan, Gen Yahya, 67, 70 Khilnani, Sunil, 179 Kickleighter, General Claude M., 109, 110 Kirby, William C., 61, 83 Kissinger, Henry, 1, 4, 9, 13, 21, 45, 55, 56, 62, 65, 78, 91, 95, 113, 173, 176, 177, 214, 218 Knowledge, 52, 63, 86, 128, 150, 173, 174, 179, 180, 192

  223

Kosygin, Alexei, 6 Krushchev, Nikita, 4, 35, 38 Kuomintang (KMT), 2, 15, 19, 20, 25, 26, 28, 30, 37, 38 Kux, Dennis, 109 L Laden, Osama Bin, 123, 135, 212 Lagarde, Christine, 147, 191 Lee Kuan Yew, 168 Left deviationism, 88 LeMay, Curtis, 57 Lin Biao, 3, 9, 21, 59, 60, 67, 68, 70, 72, 73, 75, 149 Line of Action Control (LAC), 157, 158, 186, 204, 215 Liu Shaoqi, 25, 72 Logistics Exchange Memorandum of Agreement (LEMOA), 142 Logistics Supply Agreement (LSA), 141 Long March, 15 Long Term Integrated Perspective Plans (LTIPP), 203 Look East policy, 169 M Magna Carta of 1215, 178 Mao Zhe Dong concepts of fighting a ‘people’s war, 60 maritime exercises of Indo-Pacific region, 159 Marshall, George C., 15 Marshall Plan, 104 Maruti Suzuki agitation, 144 Masood, Ahmed Shah, 164 Mearsheimer, John, 100, 106 Mehta, Pratap Bhanu, 179 Menon, Shivshankar, 140, 156, 179 Menon, V.K. Krishna, 111, 155

224  Index Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR), 136, 151 Modi, Narendra, 9, 142, 147, 158, 159, 167, 183, 186, 189, 215 Mohan, Dr C. Raja, 124 Mondale, Vice President, 87 Morganthau, Hans, 5, 101 Most Favoured Nation (MFN) status, 87 Mozingo, David, 60 Mukherjee, Pranab, 137, 151, 182 Musharraf, General Parvez, 122, 134, 149 Myrdal, Gunnar, 211 N National Advisory Council (NAC), 148 National Liberation Front of South Vietnam, 55 National People’s Congress (NPC), 58, 83, 200, 201 National Security Adviser (NSA), 1, 6, 16, 54, 65, 78, 80, 98, 164 National Security Council (NSC), 1, 31, 45, 50, 78, 90, 94 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 109, 155, 168 neo-realism, 101–103 new world economic order, 178 Next Step in Strategic Partnership (NSSP), 135, 137, 164 Ngo Dinh Diem, 54 Nie Rongzhen, 66 9/11 attack, 123, 163, 164, 183, 212 Nixon, Richard non-‘communist’ neighbours of China, 76 “The ‘people’, 76 Nixon-Brezhnev summit, 70 Nixon-Kissinger’s policies towards the Asia-Pacific region, 76

Non-aligned Movement (NAM) Non-Alignment 1.0, 180 Non-Alignment 2.0, 180, 193 Non-nuclear Weapon States (NNWS), 133 North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), 54, 99, 104, 123, 171 North Eastern Frontier Agency (NEFA), 156 No truly global ‘world order, 177 No War, No Peace period, 65 Nuclear Damage Act of 2010, 151 nuclear deweaponisation, 132 Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG), 114, 136, 141, 151 Nye, Joseph, 169, 217 O Obama, Barack, 9, 124, 125, 141, 150, 159, 165, 169, 183, 186 Occupy Tiananmen Square movement, 92, 96 offensive realism, 100 OgyenTrinleyDorjee, 127 One Belt One Road (OBOR) project, 213, 217 Operation Chequerboard, 155 Oppenheimer, Dr J Robert, 131 Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), 87 P Panama Canal status, 91 Paris accord, 216 Parmar, Captain Sarabjeet Singh, 109 Parry, Robert, 53 Partial Test Ban Treaty, 121 Patel, Sardar Vallabhai, 177 Peaceful Nuclear Explosion (PNE), 111, 113, 114, 131, 132, 140

Index

Pelosi, Nancy, 98 People’s Liberation Army (PLA) modernisation, 94, 102, 202 PLA-N based strategy, 102 Ping Pong diplomacy, 69 Pokhran nuclear tests, 131 post-Westphalian nation-states, 178 Puri, Hardeep S., 115 R Ramanna, Dr Raja, 131 RAND Corporation, 55, 57, 60, 64, 83 Ranganathan, C.V., 166 Rao, P.V. Narasimha, 114 Raphael, Robin, 117, 119, 138 Rasgotra, Maharaj Krishna, 108 Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), 121, 133, 159, 183, 187–190, 194 Reagan, Ronald, 90, 93, 107, 147 realism, 100–102, 106, 189 Red Brigades, 4 Rice, Condoleezza, 135, 136 Robinson, Thomas, 61 Rogers, William, 67, 71 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 132 Ross, Robert S., 61 rules-based new international order (RBNIO), 200, 217 Rumsfeld, Donald, 135 S San Francisco Peace Treaty, 16 Sarabhai, Vikram, 132 Saran, Shyam, 140, 145, 179, 202 Schumpeter, Joseph, 174, 192 Schwab, Klaus, 147, 191 Scowcroft, General Brent, 78, 98 Sen, Amartya, 165, 174, 184 Sethna, H.N., 131

  225

Shanghai Communique, 65, 70, 78, 94 Shanghai Composite Index, 185 Shangri La dialogue, 217 Sharif, Nawaz, 122, 123, 134, 149, 186 Shastri, Lal Bahadur, 132, 180 Shimla Accord of 1972, 205 Shinzo Abe, 159, 173 Silk Route, 125, 186 Singapore, 50, 168, 169, 217 Singh, Arjun, 138 Singh, Bhagat, 148 Singh, General J.J., 152 Singh, Jaswant, 120, 122, 134, 141, 164, 183 Singh, Manmohan economic liberalisation program, 183 strategy of reform, 175 Singh, Natwar, 138, 159, 167 Singh, Vijay Kumar, 203 Sinha, Atish, 166 Sino-Indian ‘cooptetion’, 195 Sino-Indian relationship, 9, 126, 156 centrality of Tawang monastery, 157 Dalai Lama issue, 126 Dengist principles of bilateral exchanges, 158 Pakistan aspect, 150 Sumdurong Chu operation, 155, 156 Sino-Soviet split, 9, 42, 51, 52, 58, 61, 63, 111 Sino-US relations bilateral trade agreement with China, 87 Clinton era, 95 economic relations, 10 elite politics on, 68 FDI flow, 205 full diplomatic relations, 65 Gang of Four’s and, 65, 69, 70, 73, 76

226  Index Geostrategy, 102 Jimmy Carter era, 65, 82, 93 Johnson era, 3, 4 Kennedy era, 3, 77 Reagan era, 93, 95 Taiwan issue, 14, 82, 91, 161, 200 trade access, 162, 205 Smith, Adam, 148, 174 Snow, Edgar, 56, 69 Social Contract theory, 178 Solanki, Madhavsinh, 138 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, 81 South China Sea (SCS) islands, 56, 64, 102, 123, 160, 171 South East Asian Treaty Organisation, 54 State Owned Enterprises (SOEs), 103, 175 Stoessel, Walter, 67 Strategic Arms Limitations Talks (SALT I) Treaty, 70, 73, 91 strategic autonomy, 113, 121, 123, 126, 128, 140, 164, 166, 170, 183, 192 string of pearls case, 161, 215 Subramanyam, Dr K., 149 Sumdurong Chu, 155, 156 Sundarji, General Krishnaswamy, 155 Sun Tzu, 59, 66, 170, 187, 195 T Taiwan KMT’ government’s martial law, 16 Zhou-Kissinger talks, 13, 23 Taiwan Relations Act, 45–47, 89 Talbott, Strobe, 63, 120, 134 Tang Wenshang, 71 Tanham, George, 64, 82, 203 Tellis, Dr Ashley J., 179 Thapar, General P.N., 155 Thatcher, 98, 147 Tiananmen Square crisis, 205

Tiwari, Narayan Dutt, 138 Tonkin resolution, 35, 54, 56, 64, 75, 82 Trade Act of 1974, 87 trade unionism, 144 Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), 217 Treaty of Peace and Friendship, 113 Treaty on Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), 113, 120, 121, 133, 138, 151 Trump, Donald, 125, 167, 170, 171, 187, 189, 193, 213 two nation theory, 146 U United Nation Convention the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), 161 United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), 3, 74, 79, 132 United Nations Security Council (UNSC), 2, 10, 99, 104, 165 US-China confrontation, 7 US-led trade embargo on China, 2 Ussuri River incident, 66 Uyghurs, 127 V Vajpayee, Atal Behari, 128, 132, 183 Vance, Cyrus, 81, 88, 90, 91 Versailles Treaty, 104 Vietnam syndrome, 53, 82 Vietnam War, 3–6, 9, 20, 23, 31, 33, 35, 49, 53, 54, 56, 57, 59, 61, 64, 65, 71, 82, 109 Vogel, Ezra, 85, 97 W Waltz, Kenneth, 101, 103 Wang Hairong, 71 Warsaw Pact, 104

Index

Washington Consensus, 147 Willy Brandt option, 79 Woods, Rose Mary, 77 Wuhan summit, 214 X Xi Jinping, 127, 158, 170, 186, 194, 195, 205, 213 Xu Xiangqian, 66 Y Yafeng Xia, 48, 67 Yeh Chun, 68

  227

Ye Jianying, 66 Yi Jianying, 1 Young Mistresses Club, 71 Z Zakkaria, Fareed, 100 Zasloff, Joseph Jeremiah, 56 Zhao Ziyang, 86, 89, 92, 95 Zhou Enlai, 1, 6, 13, 14, 18, 21, 26, 39, 43, 48, 63, 67, 69, 71, 72, 101, 156, 173, 200, 201