The Significance of the New India-US Framework Agreement on Defence In the face of the CPM-led criticism of the "New Framework for the US-India Defence Relationship", the government sought to play down somewhat the implications of the recently signed document claiming that it is only a 'framework' that simply supersedes the 1995 "Agreement on Defence Relations" and whose content has still to be filled out. The Prime Minister on the eve of his trip to the US declared that the country would not be sold cheap (is it alright then for it to be sold for a not so cheap price?) and that the Congress party, as the historical leader of the Freedom Movement, needed no lessons from the Left about its patriotic commitment. But this dissimulation will not work. Like the Agreement it replaces, this one outlines the areas of defence and security cooperation for the next 10 years on the basic presumption that both countries are entering a newer phase in the fulfilling of the NSSP (Next Steps in the Strategic Partnership) thereby sanctioning and promoting the very principle of a 'strategic partnership'. Indeed, the Accord that was subsequently signed during Manmohan Singh's state visit to Washington in late July in which the US promised to clear the non-proliferation barriers both within the US and internationally (the Nuclear Supplier's Group regulations) so as to help India develop its civilian nuclear energy sector, was clear confirmation of the political-strategic significance that must be attached to this defence Framework Agreement and to the Accord that has followed it. The real meaning and importance of this Agreement becomes clear once one goes beyond outlining its particular features and situates it in the wider historical, political and strategic context that emerges and evolves in the post-Cold War situation - of a US out to establish an informal global imperium and most certainly looking for 'partners' to fulfill this project. The Specifics The Agreement lists the fields where the two countries can cooperate more closely. These range from issues of trade in defence equipment and transfer of 'sensitive' technologies to matters of collaboration, co-production, R & D to matters of consultation and collaboration in various security-related areas with obvious strategic ramifications. These include involvement in the US Ballistic Missile Defence (BMD) system and its associated Theatre Missile Defence (TMD) systems; 'multinational' operations, i.e., US-led military-imperial schemes whether sanctioned by the UN or not; naval military operations in the Indian Ocean and beyond; collaboration in 'countering' terrorism, i.e., joining hands with the US as it wages its selective and hypocritically defined "war on global terrorism", a 'war' that specifically exculpates its own terrorist behaviour and that of its allies and friends, and whose most important feature is the ideological cover it provides for the US pursuit of Empire. Indeed, the Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh during his trip to Washington shamefully endorsed this cover-up by publicly applauding the US role in "countering terrorism" and assuring it of Indian support. For good measure he also endorsed the US role in promoting democracy, again assuring it of Indian support. These public declarations far outweighed the very mild statement he also made about the attack on Iraq being a "mistake" He was careful not to use any stronger or more honest language about its brutality and illegality or its real intent and larger purpose. Since such defence cooperation is part of an ongoing process initiated (after the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union) by the Narasimha Rao government, there has been progressive institutionalization of this process of extended and deepened cooperation. The latest addition to the string of committees and programmes that were created from time to time - from joint steering committees for naval and air force cooperation to the International Military and Exchange and Training (IMET) Programme to the organisation of joint military exercises - is the Defence Procurement and Production Group to oversee defence trade and a Joint Working Group to carry out a mid-year review as part of the US-India-Defence Policy Group. What the actual material outcomes of the two deals with Washington for the defence ministry and the Department of Atomic Energy might be and how useful they will prove (e.g. excessive reliance on imports of nuclear energy equipment, outdated F-16s, etc.) remains uncertain. This uncertainty thus provides room for criticism from those who otherwise defend the necessity of an Indo-US alignment but worry that India may be selling itself too cheap. However, these reservations are of relatively minor consequence for they do not threaten to alter the main trajectory of India-US relations, now consecrated by the welcome given to the Washington Accord in the mainstream 'national' media. The Wider Context While September 11, 2001, and the rise of a neo-conservative cabal in the White House has affected the pace, manner and tactics of the US pursuit of an informal Global Empire, the strategic commitment to a ruthlessly aggressive pursuit of this near-century long ambition emerged as the keystone of US foreign policy behaviour only after 1991 and the collapse of its most important systemic and geo-political challenger, the former Soviet Union. On the Indian side, the same collapse was decisive in promoting both a neoliberal turn in economic policy and an abandonment of nonalignment in foreign policy behaviour. The way was cleared then for the two governments to begin a process of establishing "strategic friendship", even "strategic partnership". For most of the nineties, however, efforts in this regard did not quite match the rhetoric of both countries being "natural allies". The reason was simple. Even during the Cold War era South Asia was never as important geo-strategically for the US as the Far East (controlling Japan, confronting North Korea/USSR/China, and later aligning with China against the USSR) and West Asia (oil). Indeed, South Asia's importance was essentially derivative - as yet another third world site of extended rivalry between the US and the USSR and then between the USSR and China. Moreover, even after the end of the Cold War and the progressive transformation of the social character of the Indian state - the rising strength and weight of business groups and a 'middle class' perceiving real benefits to itself from neoliberal integration into the world economy and therefore desiring greater accommodation with the West and the US in particular - there remained an enormous asymmetry of power between India and the US. This has always meant that the actual terms of 'friendship' or 'partnership' could only be forged on terms established by, and clearly favouring, the latter. The story of Indian foreign policy since 1991 has therefore been one of how state elites, dominant classes and their middle class support base could convince themselves that such an unbalanced alliance was highly desirable and (to use that hoary and usually quite meaningless phrase) in the 'national interest'. It is a story of progressive Indian accommodation to the US, not the other way around. Through the nineties up to Pokharan II (and even afterwards) successive Indian governments sought to persuade the US government that it should move away from supporting Pakistan towards itself. After all, India was the bigger and more powerful country and its interests should be given preference as well as priority over those of the Pakistan government. The US has never seen things this way though obviously it has to recognize India as the bigger, more powerful country and its usefulness as an ally. If the 1998 nuclear tests caused a temporary hiccup to improvement of India-US relations, this was smoothed over within the reign of the Clinton administration itself. The latest US declaration has finally crowned the logic of that process of accommodation. For the US, neither Pakistan nor India is to be put in the same category as a nuclearised Iran, Iraq or North Korea, though India, especially, should confine itself to being and remaining a small nuclear power (SNP). The Strobe Talbott-Jaswant Singh talks - the most sustained series of high level foreign policy discussions between the two countries - convinced the US that the BJP government was its kind of government, one that was more than willing to bend over backwards to appease the US in return for an end to isolation on the nuclear issue and acceptance of India as a 'responsible nuclear power', i.e., a country willing to join as a rule-abiding member the very same international non-proliferation regime led by the US that it had earlier condemned as hypocritical and discriminatory in order to justify its acquisition of the bomb. Then, New Delhi had in the course of these talks signaled its willingness to join the CTBT regime that the Clinton administration was keen on. When the Bush administration, which rejected ratification of the CTBT, came to power this particular issue was dropped from the bilateral agenda. But the game has remained the same. The BJP led government, and now the Congress-led one, want de facto acceptance as a nuclear power and at least informal membership in the nuclear club and are prepared to make the concessions that the US might want in return. These range from the issue of imposing safeguards on parts of its nuclear energy sector to accepting the kind of nuclear restraints that will put some kind of an admittedly loose and fairly commodious 'cap' on the quantitative and qualitative development of its nuclear arsenal (arousing the ire of that section of the Indian bomb lobby which wants India to rapidly go well beyond SNP status) to obedience on the lead that the US may wish to take on non-proliferation matters to accepting the kind of military and strategic relationships the US wants from India. Hence, there is not just the acceptance by India of the legitimacy of the US "war on global terrorism", quiet endorsement of the BMD-TMDs issue in return for some technology crumbs through participation in the setting up of this project. That this very project is aimed at establishing US military-nuclear dominance in space as a way of ensuring its unilateral global dominance over all other countries is no longer something to be mentioned let alone criticised. Nor is it a matter of any consequence that the US's BMD project (or its research into the development of battlefield, mini- and micro-nukes) is all a form of nuclear insanity that guarantees a continuous nuclear arms race by threatening not only non-nuclear weapons states but also some existing ones . If the 1998 nuclear tests meant, in US eyes, a heightened though somewhat negative salience to South Asia (the dangers associated with a nuclear face-off between India and Pakistan) two other developments gave a more positive salience to the place of India and the region as a whole in the US's wider geo-political and strategic thinking. India, despite its poverty, but because of its sizeable 'middle class' (actually in absolute numbers a mass elite and not at all a broadly median category as is the case with the middle classes in advanced industrialized societies), is not only one of the ten most important 'emerging markets' for foreign capital but given its neoliberal lurch one that is willing (unlike China or South Korea) to forego the kind of protection for, and encouragement of, domestic capital formation that both China and South Korea have insisted upon in the course of their own development. US economic interest in India is general while it is merely selective in the other smaller countries of South Asia including Pakistan. Geo-economically then, India is the key country in the region. But geo-politically, India and Pakistan serve non-substitutable US interests. This means Indian cannot turn the US against Pakistan in any serious way and in fact has had to accommodate itself to the US perspective which aims to utilize alliances with both countries separately and not to take permanent sides with one against the other. The importance of Pakistan to the US was spectacularly reinforced after September 11 for reasons going well beyond the ostensible one of fighting Muslim terrorist groups hostile to the US. Before September 11 the US had no geo-strategic entry into Central Asia. The assault on Afghanistan provided the key for it to make just such an entry, including within its ambit a host of other countries from Kyrgyzstan to Tajikistan to Kazakhstan to Uzbekistan and Georgia. Most of Central Asia and West Asia is Muslim populated. The US need for Muslim client regimes is therefore paramount. Pakistan's new importance as a base for US pursuit of its ambitions in Central Asia more than compensates for its declining relevance for the US (after its direct entry via the 2003 Iraq invasion) in West Asia where its relationship with Saudi Arabia helped strengthen one of the four key legs (the other three are Egypt, Turkey, Israel) of the strategic stool on which US power has rested. By contrast, India's geopolitical importance for the US lies southwards and eastwards towards the Indian Ocean and as a junior partner in strategic perspectives concerning the possible containment of China. As a Hindu majority country there is no way that India can substitute for what Muslim client regimes can provide the US in West and Central Asia. And of the 54 Muslim majority states, it is Pakistan that has the widest pool of skilled, scientific personnel and educated elites; the most professional and battle-hardened army; the one country with the bomb; and whose military dominated governments have been more or less reliable allies of the US for decades - all assets the US will not casually discount. For all the justified relief that one may feel at the defeat of the BJP-led NDA and its replacement by a Congress-led UPA government, significant change for the better has taken place only in certain areas of domestic policy such as partial repeal of draconian legislation, promises to secure and carry out a National Employment Guarantee Act, some de-saffronisation of education, and so on. As far as the basic contours of neoliberal economic policies and of foreign policy behaviour go, there is no change of direction from the past. On the contrary, on the economic front the pace of liberalization may have slowed slightly (debatable) while a few more sops have been offered to the Left. In the domain of foreign policy the ideological fervour that lay behind the BJP's desire for alignment with Israel is missing but the commitment of the Congress to strategic partnership with the US and to sustaining, even deepening, the relationship with Israel remains intact, despite Left pressure. The new Framework Agreement and Accord are proof enough of that. A Fundamental Contradiction But there remains a deep incoherence in the strategic perspectives of those who make up the overwhelming bulk of the Indian 'foreign policy establishment' and who, with whatever reservations, believe that India must move towards partnership/friendship with the US. This arises not because they don't share the justified Left hostility and opposition to the imperialist bully that is the US. It arises because there is a fundamental contradiction within what the Indian government and strategic community claim they want to achieve in the long term (and there is no reason to doubt their sincerity in regard to this claim) and their actual foreign policy behaviour. They say that they are committed to the creation of a more 'multipolar' world order yet are endorsing policies that move away from rather than towards such a goal. The language of unipolarity and multipolarity are for the most part crude simplifications that have never done much conceptual justice to the task of grasping the actual complexity of global politics. But leaving this aside and accepting their widespread and common use, it should be clear that 'unipolar' domination is what the US imperial project is all about. The US ambition is not the creation of a global equilibrium through power balancing but the establishment of its global hegemony through a worldwide system of alliances that would accept its undisputed and indisputable leadership. Behind the rhetoric of wanting to help India become 'a major power in the world' lies this crystal clear ambition. The emergence of multipolarity therefore requires a very substantial political and strategic weakening of the US. The US needs to be politically defeated in places like Iraq, in West and Central Asia, and elsewhere, e.g., in Latin America where resistance to neoliberalism is strongest and where Venezuela is proving to be a growing irritant. For it is such defeats that will tame it internationally, subdue and erode its confidence, and significantly moderate its ambitions. What then becomes the role of foreign policy statecraft by other countries vis-à-vis the US if the achievement of multipolarity is their stated longer-term goal? Should this goal not determine the diplomatic strategy, and therefore the associated tactics, that should be adopted by these countries? Of course, it should but it doesn't. Therein lies the incoherence. There are four possible strategic perspectives that a state can pursue through appropriate diplomacy and statecraft when faced with an aspiring hegemon like the US. It can seek to balance against it. It can bandwagon on it. It can try to hide i.e., be neutral. It can try to transcend, i.e., insist on abiding by international laws so as to excuse itself from not aligning with the hegemon. There is also a fifth strategic posture, which a power can adopt with respect to another threatening power. This is co-binding or seeking to institutionally so lock in the potentially threatening power with one's own country that mutual constraints are imposed, thus obviating the potential threat. This is what France did with Germany after World War II. It is what China wants to do with the US but the US being much the stronger country has less compulsion to adopt such a policy towards China. It is what India could try and do with Pakistan but not what it can try and do vis-a-vis the US. Of the four other strategic perspectives, three either work against the US ambition to dominate the world order or at least do not act to help it in this respect. The fourth - bandwagonning - is what the US most wants because such a strategic posture on the part of other countries is precisely what it most needs to fulfill its ambitions. Of course, such is the complexity of the world order that contrary to the assumptions of most foreign policy or strategic 'experts' much more than the foreign policy behaviour of major states determines the shape and trajectory of world politics. For that we can be eternally grateful. But the US is perfectly correct in seeing bandwagonning by other states as the best guarantee of its efforts to become and remain the global hegemon for as long as possible. What the Indian state is currently doing is precisely bandwagonning and therefore exactly what the US wants. But India is also pretending to itself that this is in its national interest. The end result is that India merely pays lip service to the striving for multipolarity and does not at all see the contradiction in what it is doing and in what it says it ultimately wants. There is a profound disjunction at the level of diplomacy and foreign policy behaviour between the claimed strategic goal that it believes it must pursue because it would give it greatest relative autonomy and authority in the system of nation-states - promoting multipolarity - and its actual practice of statecraft as embodied in the policies and diplomatic stances it pursues and adopts. This is hardly surprising. It is not as if either Russia or China are seriously pursuing a policy of balancing against the US. For them as for India and a host of other countries the geo-political global framework in which they are content to operate is a hub-and-spokes bicycle-wheel arrangement where the US stands at the hub and the countries at the end of each spoke, all pay far more attention to strengthening their movement towards the hub (bandwagonning) than to movement along the rim (balancing). In the final analysis there is no 'natural' law, no compulsion of so-called national interest that determines which of the four strategic postures a country pursues. Even the transnationalization of elites through economic neoliberal globalization does not determine the distribution of relative gains and power between different national states. It is ultimately the social and moral character of the political leadership in each country that is decisive in determining the direction taken. Besides all this, there is the issue of China. The future evolution of US-India relations is connected to the future evolution of US-China relations, which will be essentially shaped by the stronger country, the US. Currently, amidst all the conflicting pressures that operate within the US, it has, in effect, adopted a dual posture seeing China as a potential strategic partner or friend and as a potential competitor or rival. Accordingly, it pursues policies of preparation and development towards both possible outcomes. China welcomes the first approach since this would leave it space and time to further modernize and to do so in ways that could make eventual co-binding of both countries a real possibility. On foreign policy the two dominant currents in Chinese strategic thinking are nationalist and pro-American. Regardless then, of advances made towards resolving the border issue, the parameters of the future India-China relationship will be decided by the evolution of the US-China relationship. This is the price that both these Asian countries pay for tying themselves so strongly to the desire for a strategic friendship or relationship with the US. The absence of a sufficient distance today from the US and of a coherent, consistent and subtly coordinated diplomacy in pursuit of multipolarity, makes the adoption of a genuinely independent foreign policy by India tomorrow much more difficult, risky and painful. The Left's Response The CPM's new general Secretary, Prakash Karat, is to be congratulated for putting up the kind of Left-led resistance to this Congress-led UPA government on economic and foreign policy issues that could never have been expected from his predecessor, Harkishen Singh Surjeet. But as the Accord in Washington shows, this has been far from enough. But at least the resistance has provided the main pole of political opposition to the government - much more so than the BJP/NDA out of power. This is something to be grateful for and something to build upon. But the main bastions of this Left (i.e. CPM and CPI) have certain weaknesses that have been further revealed in their response to the Washington Accord. It has to develop an alternative geopolitical and 'national' foreign policy perspective to counterpose to those of the Congress and BJP and then seek to mobilize public opinion around it. But it is hampered by weaknesses of understanding and perspective in three areas. First of all, it continues to defend the nuclear energy civilian sector when there should be a straightforward demand for closing it down completely. It has been a disaster on all counts - efficiency-wise, safety-wise for both humans and the environment, lack of transparency and accountability, costliness and wastefulness. This is not the place to take up the issue of why we should get rid completely of this sector and shift resources massively into the research and development of renewable energy sources. Suffice it to say that since the Left does not take such a categorical stand, it is reduced to partially echoing the criticisms of sections of the right, the Centre and of sections within the DAE establishment. Hence, the litany of complaints that the Accord signed in Washington is secretively arrived at, has only limited benefits, is hedged in by too many hampering restrictions for the independent development of India's nuclear energy sector, was achieved at too high a price, and so on. The Left cannot adopt the clearest and most accurate position - that there are no benefits whatsoever in this deal because the whole nuclear civilian power sector should simply be abandoned and closed down as quickly as possible. Second, the Left has not enunciated any clear or accurate perspective on China. Contrary to the statements that have emanated from H.S. Surjeet and A.B. Bardhan (usually after a visit to Beijing - P. Karat's observations are now keenly awaited), today's China is not a non-capitalist or socialist country with which the Left in India can seek a 'natural' alliance. Both the Chinese and Russian governments pursue a foreign policy strategy and practice vis-à-vis the US that is shamefully supine, and they consistently punch below their actual diplomatic, political and strategic weight in world affairs, as does India. If this Left is going to develop a more coherent strategy of how best to fight (at home and through activity abroad) the US efforts to establish an informal global empire then it must have a much clearer idea at the level of states and non-state actors of who are its actual and potential anti-imperialist allies, who are the opponents, and who are the standers-by in this struggle to shift the global relationship of forces shifts against the US. Besides, the Left will itself have to stand firm and unequivocal in its opposition to both US imperialism and to global and regional nuclearisation, including India's. It is time that the very notion of even strategic friendship or the language of pursuing 'friendly relations' with the US is rejected and directly attacked. You cannot hope to build opposition to US imperialism in India and abroad without calling the beast by its name and without highlighting its ugly character. The kind of relationship that the Indian government should be seeking with the US is not strategic nor friendly but formal, routine, and functional. As a democracy, formal courtesies of language at the diplomatic state-to-state level can accompany complete freedom of criticism outside it. Finally, what is the vision that this Left has for its kind of India? In particular, if this Left opposes as it does and must do, this kind of defence Framework Agreement, then what perspective does the Left have for the nature of India's military power? Does the Left want to chase the chimera of India becoming a "major world power"? What is this supposed to mean if it is not just the usual code phrase of Realist inspiration for trying to make oneself a regional or global bully and to play what Realism considers the eternal game of states dominating or being subordinated by others? There are two directions that military preparations of a state, big, medium-sized or small, can take. One is to insist that the level of military preparations must be sufficient to protect one's territorial boundaries. The other is to tie the notion of military-national security to the notion of power projection well beyond one's territorial boundaries. In the latter case there is no end to the supposed needs of power projection. It is this perspective that dominates the thinking of countries like the US, Russia, China and India but not Brazil or South Africa. It dominates the thinking of countries like Britain and Israel but not Vietnam and Sweden. There is thus an inescapable normative dimension to strategic political thinking and ambitions. The vision of the world that progressives want is tied to their vision of the potential for good that humans have. It is not the least a coincidence that subscribers to economic neoliberalism are usually subscribers to conventional realist thinking in the field of international relations. In both cases there lies a deeply inadequate understanding of the character, motivations and potentials of human beings. For the first credo, humans are marked above all by the will to consume. In the second credo, humans are marked above all by the will to power. This may well be an accurate characterization of nature of neoliberals and realists. But how fortunate we are that there remain so many humans who are neither so morally debased nor so intellectually impoverished. Coyright 2005 Economic and Political Weekly |
