Containing China

New Delhi certainly looks like the capital of a great power. The stately neo-classical buildings of Sir Herbert Baker and Sir Edwin Lutyens, built in the early twentieth century to impress Indians with the irresistible power of the British Empire, still exude confidence. But beyond the monuments and villas of post-imperial New Delhi roars the greater city, thronged by twelve million people, choked with traffic, and clearly part of the Third World. Things have been looking up economically in recent years—even Delhi’s foul buses have been replaced with less-polluting models—and it is becoming possible for optimistic Indian nationalists to dream that their country will soon take its place at the high table of international politics. Washington’s strategists were well aware of those ambitions.

Less than two weeks after Bush’s speech, US Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage visited the Indian capital to pursue the question of defence co-operation with India—or more precisely, to flatter and to tempt. By July, General Henry Shelton, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, had arrived in New Delhi to resurrect the longmoribund Defence Policy Group (dpg), which co-ordinates military relations between the two countries. There was still the legal problem of US sanctions against India, but the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks magically eliminated congressional reluctance to reward India for developing nuclear weapons, just as it removed so many other obstacles to the neo-conservatives’ strategic ambitions. Bush issued a Presidential Determination waiving sanctions against India (and Pakistan) in the name of waging a war against “terrorism,” and Congress caved in.

After 9/11, Washington stopped talking about India’s nuclear weapons as a problem. New Delhi reciprocated, uttering not a word of protest when the Bush administration tore up the Anti- Ballistic Missile Treaty. By early December, the revived dpg had agreed to an “expeditious review” of Indian requests to buy high-tech military equipment such as radars and maritime reconnaissance aircraft.

US Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, number three in Rumsfeld’s Pentagon, travelled to New Delhi in May 2002 for the next meeting of the dpg. Agreements were struck on joint US-Indian naval patrols of the Strait of Malacca between Malaysia and Indonesia, workshops on ballistic missile defence, and co-operation in defence technology. The declared goal of the meeting was to build “stability and security in Asia and beyond,” but, as P.R. Chari of the New Delhi-based Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies acidly remarked, “What they really mean is how to deal with China.” In October, the White House formally moved India into the same category as close allies like Japan and South Korea, thus removing the need for congressional authorization for sales of military equipment not exceeding $14 million (US). Months later, joint exercises involving Indian and US special forces began near Agra, in the Ganges Valley. This was followed by New Delhi and Washington signing the “Next Step in Strategic Partnership” agreement, smoothing the road for further arms sales and joint exercises.

“India principally wants the US to partner it in shaping the strategic space in the region, which could otherwise be usurped by other regional players,” explained Brigadier Arun Sahgal (Retired), Director of Net Assessment in India’s Integrated Defence Staff, adding, “Eventually Indo-US defence relations have to overcome bureaucratic resistance from the State Department and their Indian counterparts.” But while former secretary of state Colin Powell doubtless waged a low-profile rearguard action from the State Department, resistance elsewhere in Washington was negligible. Both the Pentagon and the think tanks that live in a symbiotic relationship with it were hot to trot.

“China represents the most significant threat to both countries’ security in the future as an economic and military competitor,” argued a classified US defence department document revealed by Jane’s Foreign Report in 2003, concluding that “India should emerge as a vital component of US strategy.” Lloyd Richardson of the Washington-based Hudson Institute told the Financial Times that India had “the economic and military strength to counter the adverse effects of China’s rise as a regional and world power. India is the most overlooked of our potential allies in a strategy to contain China.” A US alliance seemed equally desirable to the truculent nationalists and Hindu supremacists of the bjp, who had exploded five nuclear weapons in 1998, mainly to demonstrate India’s great-power status to the world. Most of the bjp leaders reflexively disliked and mistrusted China (which had thrashed India in a brief border war in 1962), and they were up for any anti-Chinese alliance the US cared to propose. They were up for being America’s deputy sheriff in South and Southeast Asia, too, if that was what Washington had in mind.

So the courtship continued. In September 2003, US and Indian special forces conducted a high-altitude joint exercise in Ladakh, close to the ultra-sensitive and disputed borders of China and Pakistan, and an area where India had never before allowed foreign troops. The same year also saw the first joint aerial exercises, with US f-15s operating out of Gwalior, in central India, and Indian Air Force fighter pilots flying to Alaska to compete with (and beat) the US Air Force on its own ground. In early 2004, General Nirmal C. Vij became the first Indian army chief to visit US Central Command (centcom) headquarters in Tampa, Florida, which controls operations in what Americans call the Middle East and Indians call Southwest Asia.

But then, in May 2004, the bjp government in New Delhi lost the election to the resurgent Congress Party, led by Sonia Gandhi. Many observers assumed that the whole stealthy process of sliding India into the new US alliance system would come to a sudden halt. After all, the Congress Party was the author and guardian of India’s hallowed policy of non-alignment—and besides, its majority in the Lok Sabha depended on the votes of the Communist Party, which favoured close relations with China and profoundly opposed an alliance with the US. Yet the mating dance continued uninterrupted.

In June 2004, soon after Prime Minister Manmohan Singh took office, Douglas Feith went to New Delhi again, to co-chair the sixth meeting of the dpg. The two countries’ commitment to close military and strategic ties was reaffirmed, and India was invited to attend various US-sponsored missile defence conferences and exercises. Singh met President Bush during the United Nations General Assembly meeting in New York in September, and subsequent events strongly suggest that around that time they agreed to forge a de facto military alliance.

What can have motivated Singh and his colleagues to enter into such an alliance with the US when India’s relations with China, while not particularly warm, were as good as they had been at any time in the past half century? One motive was Indian concern about the long-standing American alliance with India’s local rival, Pakistan. That alliance had been revived and strengthened after 9/11, as Pakistani bases for operations in Afghanistan, Pakistani intelligence information, and President Pervez Musharraf’s help in suppressing Islamist militants in Pakistan all became important for America’s “war on terror.” For India, closer ties with Washington were a way to undermine that US-Pakistan link. Moreover, although Pakistan and India have not fought a war for thirty-four years, the nuclear “balance of terror” that emerged between the two after the 1998 nuclear tests made access to US missile defence technology especially attractive to the Indian military.