Hey Indians, beware of America

Will India act as a US proxy?

“May God defend me from my friends; I can defend myself from my enemies.” These precious ‘pearls of wisdom’ of the French philosopher Voltaire are quite relevant to India, today. India has many friends but the one with which she will have to be very watchful is the United States. Americans have no qualms about changing friends. During the Cold War, they treated India as the ‘Other’ for supporting the cause of non-alignment in international relations and for maintaining closer ties with the erstwhile Soviet Union – the underlying premise being that “my enemy’s friend is my enemy”. After humbling Soviet Russia, the Americans have created a new enemy in the form of communist China. No wonder, there is a lot of chatter in the US media, intelligentsia and political elites from Hillary Clinton to President Obama magnifying the ‘ominous’ rise of China which needs to be contained like the USSR. The planned containment hinges around the policy of ‘Asia pivot’ under which, in addition, to yoking the South-east Asian nations in the Chinese neighbourhood into pro-American alliances, the two bigger states that are expected to play a key role in conjunction with the US against China are Australia and India. This time the US premise with regard to India is “my enemy’s enemy is my friend”: it being so because not only are India and China giants in terms of size and thus obvious rivals as ‘regional hegemons’; the two have fought a war in 1962 and stake contentious claims on a very large area of their contiguous borders.

Americans are making a conscious effort to convince Indians to join hands with them to ‘contain’ China because if they would then their “Pakistan problem” would be automatically addressed. One such effort can be seen in the form of a recent book entitled, “India as the next global power: China’s nightmare, America’s dream” by William H Avery, a former US diplomat, who served at the State Department during the administrations of Presidents Bill Clinton and George W Bush. His message to the Indians is loud and clear.

Indians are reminded that the history of mankind has been a history of conflict and the twenty-first century would be no different. In the twentieth century, the US joined hands with UK to fight the ‘evil’ of Soviet communism; in the twenty-first century, “India must become America’s new Britain”. This is an “obligation” that India owes not only to its 1.2 billion citizens but to all those in the world who look towards her as a ‘beacon’ of “freedom, liberal values, pluralism and democracy”. To assume this grand role, India should formulate a geopolitical strategy of global dimension and renounce the Gandhian philosophy of non-violence because pacifism suits only those people which struggle for independence and not those nations which have attained independence. To become a top class world power, a country must have an invincible military which in turn requires a healthy economy. Never mind the enormous current poverty under which 400 million Indians live on less than $1.25 per day.

Indians are told that their recent centuries of poverty are merely an aberration in history because during most of the past two millennia, India produced about one quarter or more of the world GDP. Not long ago, the wealth of the Indian monarchs was much more than that of the English and French kings. For example, when the annual income of the Mughal Emperor Jehangir was fifty million sterling, the same for the English and Scottish crowns was merely one million sterling and that of the French King Louis XIV just five million sterling. Such enormous wealth allowed the Mughals to keep an infantry of one million and a cavalry of three hundred thousand. Thus, not only has India a history of a ‘great’ power but in view of her recent economic spurt, notwithstanding the slowdown in the last few years, it is expected to surpass United Kingdom, Japan and Germany to become the third largest economy just behind the US and China by 2030.

The point is that India has the potential to become a great military power but it cannot become one unless it overcomes two obstacles: its defence industry is weak yet it can be built by building stronger ties with the US military-industrial complex. The relationship between the two countries has gone through a transformation: from indifference in 1990s after the end of Cold War to mistrust after India conducted nuclear tests in 1998 to a common purpose after the 9/11 in US and 13/12 in India, i.e., the terror attack on the Indian parliament. In fact, Avery proposes that the new motto of US and Indian intelligence should be: “Your terrorists are our terrorists.” The emphasis on India is to increase her financial allocations in intelligence and defence establishments because while the intelligence budget of US for 2010 was $53.1 billion; India’s Research and Analysis Wing’s (RAW) budget for 2000 was a paltry $150 million.

Inspite of these handicaps, India remained the world’s ninth largest defence market in 2010 with a potential to spend about $120 billion for weapons by 2015. To convert its military potential into a power with global outreach it should acquire forward naval bases from the Horn of Africa to the Straits of Malacca. To initiate India in this direction, both the US and UK should make her a joint partner at their naval base at Diego Garcia from where India could extend her presence to the American bases in Bahrain and Singapore.

The biggest obstruction to the rise of India is China. With a thick brush, Avery paints a dark picture of China, whose economy outperforms India; its military expenditure is three times that of India’s; and as it out-innovates India through superior universities and scientific research, China has been able to extend its influence in India’s backyard, i.e., Pakistan, Bangladesh, Myanmar and Sri Lanka. For example, China is building an advanced port near Hambantota in Sri Lankan and if it gets the basing rights then the Red Army can easily ‘hop, skip and jump’ on to the Indian mainland. This should not be acceptable to India who should insist on the ‘Finlandisation’ of Sri Lanka, which, in effect, means that the latter should accommodate the former than losing independence altogether. Avery suggests that “India must use all available tools of coercion to demonstrate to Sri Lanka that its future lies in close ties with India and India alone”. Either Mr Avery is ignorant or his research is sloppy because when India did intervene militarily in Sri Lanka for the sake of “peace”, its so-called ‘Peace Keeping Force’ was ridiculed by the Sri Lankans as the Indian peace keeping dogs, and the then Indian Premier Rajiv Gandhi was physically assaulted by a Sri Lankan soldier during a visit.

In a somewhat similar fashion, the Chinese were expanding the Chittagong port with the plan to construct a deep sea harbour to link it with China through Myanmar. Avery avers that “India should treat the Bay of Bengal as its own waters: permitting the Chinese Navy to dock in a Bangladeshi port is little different than letting it sail up the Ganges.” This analysis is a part of the American scare mongering whereby Chinese building of ports is propagated as a ‘string of pearls’ strategy to choke India.

It seems the Americans are poised to pit India against China. Presently, it seems an uphill task because if China continues with what it has been spending on its defence in the first decade of this century; its defence outlay will reach $225 billion in 2020 and $425 billion in 2030 and to close this arms gap with China by 2030, India will be required to spend at least $380 billion on its defence between 2010 and 2030. Will India fall in this trap? There is at least one published report in the ‘Economic Times’ of 15 February, 2010, that does indicate that India plans to spend about $200 billion on defence equipment between 2010 and 2022.

Reading such works provides a window into the American thought processes about the likely power rivalries in Asia in which China is projected as an imperial power whose ambitions can be neutralised by propping up India as an American proxy. Whether India will bite the bait or not will depend upon the wisdom of those who will rule her in the coming years.

The writer is an academic and journalist. He can be reached at [email protected]