US and Indian Policies in Direct Conflict, Part II

India asserted its influence at the Geneva Conference through the informal participation of Krishna Menon in behind-the-scenes discussions. The Geneva settlement reduced fears among smaller powers that China would intervene in Indo-China and weakened their incentives to join a US-sponsored mutual security alliance. It also deprived China of a rationale for its own expansion to meet a US threat. The “area of peace” thereby served India’s aspiration to protect its role in Indo-China. But this was immediately countered by the US plan to establish SEATO. Indian policymakers treated the United States as its enemy and competitor in Southeast Asia.

Kashmir

India’s suspicion of US motives set in during the first India-Pakistan war over Kashmir in 1950, after the Hindu maharaja of Muslim majority Kashmir acceded to India. Great Britain, considering that Kashmir should join Muslim-majority Pakistan and that India-Pakistan cooperation was essential to Commonwealth defense, feared India could exercise its legal right to self-defense after tribesmen aided by Pakistan invaded across the northern border. Foreign Office records reveal how the British acted behind the scenes in the UN Security Council to block a discussion of India’s request to remove the tribesmen from Azad Kashmir as the condition for holding a plebiscite. The United States, influenced by the British, appeared to Nehru as the power behind the hostility toward India, while seeking a Cold War bastion in Kashmir.

Epilogue

Strategic realignments in Asia after the 1962 India-China war are still playing out. China’s attempt to bottle up India in the subcontinent resulted in an “all-weather” China-Pakistan friendship, including transfer of blueprints for a nuclear bomb. The 1973 India-Pakistan war and the creation of Bangladesh changed the political map of the subcontinent. China’s rapid economic growth and military modernization now challenges US primacy in Asia, its long-sought goal since the Korean War. An Indian-US strategic partnership remains under discussion.

India-China War, 1962

Opposing perspectives among key policymakers account for India’s failure to prepare for the possibility of an attack by China to enforce its claim lines on the northern border. Prime Minister Nehru, influenced by Zhou Enlai’s assurances that China would never cross the McMahon Line, was reinforced by Defense Minister Krishna Menon’s belief that China, as a communist state, would never invade. They turned aside recommendations from the COAS, K. S. Thimayya, that India had to build up its forces to meet a potential Chinese attack. The war exposed Asianism as an illusion and nonalignment as unrealistic for a weak military power.

US and Indian Policies in Direct Conflict, Part I

The US policy of collective security against the Soviet Union led to the pursuit of the Middle East Defense Organization, which was undermined by Nehru’s success in persuading Egypt to follow his example of remaining nonaligned. Nehru failed, however, to prevent the 1954 Mutual Defense Assistance Agreement between the United States and Pakistan, which tilted the balance of power in the subcontinent away from India—although Mountbatten weighed in to provide advanced British aircraft and averted an incipient deal between New Delhi and Moscow. Subsequently, Nehru was confirmed in his belief that the United States was determined to build up Pakistan and build- down India.

Korea

North Korea’s attack against South Korea evoked an immediate military response from the United States, under a UN command, to draw the line against communist expansion in Asia. Once the Chinese entered the war on the side of North Korea, India could not sustain its policy of nonalignment on the merits but began to practice nonalignment as an informal version of neutrality justified as its commitment to seek peace in the nuclear age. When Mao prolonged the war in an effort to win total victory and force the United States out of Asia, India’s bias toward China in the United Nations met with the US decision to exclude India from the Geneva Conference on Korea and Indo-China, paving the way for China to assert its position as a great power.

Partition

The partition of India into the two independent states of India and Pakistan created strategic anomalies. India lost the advantage of its own geographic position, which had placed it across the Arabian Sea close to the sea lanes leading to the Persian Gulf in the west and astride the Bay of Bengal adjacent to Southeast Asia on the east. Pakistan, divided by one thousand miles of Indian territory, was considered virtually indefensible without a powerful ally—most obviously, the United States. As the Cold War took hold, India’s potential as a great power counted for less than Pakistan’s strategic location close to the oil fields of the Middle East. Nehru believed India’s decision to join the British Commonwealth protected India from sloping too much toward the United States.

First Encounters

Nehru’s forceful arguments that Asia would emerge from the retreat of British colonialism with new strength and vitality to become subjects of foreign policy found no place in Washington’s bipolar view of the world at the onset of the Cold War. Kennan’s famous formulation of containment viewed the newly independent states as backward and dependent peoples open to Soviet support and enabling Moscow to put their own puppet regimes in power. In contrast, Nehru assumed that India was destined to become a great power and the pivot around which security problems of Asia and the Indian Ocean would have to be considered. He looked toward China, still engaged in a civil war with the communists, as sharing a common outlook.

Different Worlds

Nehru considered the establishment of Mao’s People’s Republic of China an event of historical importance, transcending the Cold War and signaling the resurgence of free Asia. But China had never accepted the northern boundary with India, known as the McMahon Line, asserting it had been drawn by British imperialists intent on diminishing its control over Tibet. India, militarily much weaker than China, adopted a policy of unwavering friendship toward China as the best approach to securing a diplomatic solution to the border dispute. Once China entered an alliance with the Soviet Union, the United States perceived an expanded communist threat. Nehru, reiterating India’s nonalignment, advanced the notion of Asianism to consolidate Indian-China solidarity.