NEW DELHI: India’s initial trust in America stemmed from President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his envoy to India, Louis Johnson, who did much to push Winston Churchill and Great Britain to relinquish their Indian empire.
This was reinforced by Jawaharlal Nehru’s “Discovery of America”, a three-week tour of the US in October 1949, years before his tumultuous reception in the Soviet Union (1955) and warm welcome in China (1954). And nothing perhaps cemented the relationship more than John F. Kennedy’s instant offer of military assistance to combat the Chinese invasion of 1962.
Then came PL 480 that bailed us out of certain famine in the mid-1960s. (PL 480 was a US programme to provide food aid to developing countries, particularly those with food shortages.)
Yet, perhaps the most important American initiative was their ignoring our nuclear explosion in 1998, despite some tough rhetoric at the time, and then making the offer-that-could-not-be-refused to Manmohan Singh (who did not even ask for it) to insulate our nuclear military programme from the civil use of nuclear energy to facilitate the further generous US offer to assist us with civil nuclear energy. There has been little progress on the ground because we, after our experience with Union Carbide in the Bhopal disaster of December 3, 1984, insisted that the foreign partner share the huge financial burden of the enormous damage that would result from any accident at a nuclear energy facility—which no US company is prepared to accept.
More recently, the growth of the Hindu diaspora in America and its eye-popping support to PM Narendra Modi in India and Donald Trump in the US have fed the bromance. That, I think, fairly sums up why we trust the US so much and are so keen on downplaying the many insults and unwarranted economic aggression we have been subjected to ever since the Pahalgam terrorist attack and Operation Sindoor.
As for Pakistan, our distrust is rooted in Mohammad Ali Jinnah’s victory over Mahatma Gandhi, Nehru, and the Congress in securing from the British the Partition of India as the price for granting independence to our country. In eight decades, we have still not forgiven them for their triumph. And, for their part, over the same eight decades, they have kept harping on the “Two-nation” Theory despite the secession of Muslim-majority Bangladesh from Pakistan and tense relations with their even more Islamic neighbours—the Taliban Afghanistan and the Ayatollahs’ Iran. This should have, but has not, taught them that in so diverse a region as South Asia, religion alone cannot be the basis of nationhood. Nevertheless, they have made a national grievance of Kashmir, starting from Jinnah riding roughshod over Sheikh Abdullah and invading Kashmir even as the Sheikh’s deputy, Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad, was in Pakistan awaiting an audience with Jinnah to discuss the question of accession.
They keep bringing up the UN resolution of 1948 while conveniently forgetting that they never implemented the first precondition set out in the resolution before a plebiscite could be undertaken: the withdrawal of all Pakistani armed forces, formal or informal, from the territory. They also forget Nehru’s offer to the Pakistani prime minister in August 1953 that a plebiscite could be held provided it was under the aegis of a neutral Nordic plebiscite administrator, not US Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz.
Leave aside issues on which we disagreed, Pakistan has also showed that it could not be trusted even when we agreed—as when Zulfikar Ali Bhutto agreed with Indira Gandhi at Simla in July 1972 to work towards converting the Line of Control in Kashmir into an international boundary between the two countries and then betrayed his pledge.
No wonder then, that there have been at least six wars between the two neighbours: 1947, 1948, 1965, 1971, 1999, and 2025, not to mention a deliberate Pakistan policy since at least 1990 of inflicting “a thousand cuts” on India through cross-border terrorism backed by shrill hate speech from high authorities. This, despite repeated attempts by Indian Prime Ministers to arrive at a modus vivendi with them. In sum, the Pakistanis have given us plenty of reason to distrust them.
But so have the Americans: first, by betraying us over Kashmir by switching sides at the UK’s behest after their first statement in the UN Security Council backing our claim of Pakistan being the aggressor in Kashmir. US plebiscite administrators displayed biased behaviour until Indira Gandhi, in 1971, effectively shut down UN operations in Kashmir; John Foster Dulles abused India’s non-alignment as “immoral”; and the US armed Pakistan as a military ally in the guise of confronting the Soviet Union despite our warning that the weapons would be used only against us, as they were. The US also threatened us, as Lyndon Johnson did with his Battle Act that sanctioned states that entertained normal diplomatic relations with countries like Cuba and Vietnam, of whom the US disapproved.
Other reasons to be wary of the US include Richard Nixon’s boorishness in calling Indira Gandhi foul names; sending the nuclear-powered US naval aircraft carrier, the Enterprise, to frighten us into not completing the job of helping the Mukti Bahini liberate Bangladesh; and, more generally, India opposing a Pax Americana soaked in blood, circling the globe from Chile and Paraguay through Venezuela and Cuba to the Congo and apartheid South Africa, and from Israel through Syria, Iraq, and Iran to Afghanistan, and on to Vietnam and Korea.
But are there any reasons to trust Pakistan, at least enough to re-engage with them after a whole decade’s stand-off? Yes, there are. First, it profits us little to scratch at the scabs that have been forming over old wounds. It gets us nowhere and stops us from exploring alternative avenues of peace and good neighbourliness. Second, not talking has not stopped cross-border terrorism. Third, a lack of engagement negates the abundant goodwill for us that exists at all echelons of Pakistan society, while ceding ample space to hostile Pakistani elements to spread their poison without let or hindrance. Fourth, it impresses no one that we cling to our grievances to justify behaving like a bully.
Fifth, our meretricious boast of being better than a Pakistan that is eight times smaller than us in population, and 10 times less in GDP, does not help. Being politically and militarily weaker only enables them to leverage their purported victimhood at India’s hands into fruitful military alliances with such disparate allies as the US and China, aided by geography and geopolitics, which have placed them strategically at the right location, and their ready willingness to be used by others in return for strengthening them vis-à-vis India.
Many Indians argue that we cannot engage with Pakistan so long as it is directly or indirectly ruled by the military. The fact is: Pakistan under military rule—whether it was Ayub Khan and the Indus Waters Treaty, or Zia-ul-Haq and his near agreement on Siachen with Rajiv Gandhi, or Pervez Musharraf and his “four-point” plan of resolving the Kashmir imbroglio—has been a far more reliable interlocutor with India than the civilian politicians who can never agree among themselves and are constantly looking over their shoulder at the armed forces who can, and do, usurp the throne.
Just keeping off Pakistan, while stoking anger against them for domestic political reasons, does us no good. And it costs us a great deal in national harmony and international support. Why persist with ancient grievances and present hostility instead of opening the gates for re-engagement? The only valid way forward is “uninterrupted and uninterruptible dialogue”.
(Mani Shankar Aiyar served 26 years in the Indian Foreign Service, is a four-time MP with over two decades in parliament, and was a Cabinet Minister from 2004 to 2009)