HOWEVER cautiously one assesses it, Prime Minister Inder Gujral's meeting with US President Bill Clinton in New York marks a significant change in the quality of Indo-US ties. Just as the scepticism which greeted Clinton's invitation for talks in New York was unjustified, any attempt to conclude that the meeting has heralded a new era of cooperation would be equally unjustified. One does not need to know the details of what was said during the meeting to realise that no basic Indian or US position has been changed.What the meeting has done is to open a channel of communication and discussion at the top level.
The US and India are both served by able diplomats, who discuss the issues that both unite and divide the perspectives of the two countries constantly. But what reaches the two heads of government is a digest of the results that has passed through several filters. The kind of knowledge this gives to the head of government is clinical at best and biased at worst. In the case of the US president, for whom relations with India come far down his list of priorities, even these digests stop far short of his desk. What the meeting in New York did was to allow Clinton to get a direct, personal impression of India's world view, with no intermediate filters. Even if it did no more than that, the New York meeting would have to be deemed useful.
But it has done a good deal more. Ever since the US drew Pakistan into the Baghdad pact (to contain the Soviet Union) in 1954 and China into the privileged club of nuclear nations in 1970, India's relations with Washington had been caught in a gridlock that made any meaningful improvement next to impossible. The essence of this gridlock was that in its global strategic reckoning the US equated India with Pakistan, on the one hand, and treated India as being of infinitely less consequence than China, on the other. The first led to the supply of $1.2 billion worth of weapons to Pakistan in the '50s and '60s and over $3 billion worth in the '80s. It also led to a pronounced pro-Pakistan tilt in its stance on the key issue of Kashmir throughout the '50s till the early '90s, with consistent support to the view that the accession of Kashmir to India would not be final till it was ratified by the people.
On the glib assumption that those who are not with us must be deemed, at least potentially, to be against us, the US also turned a blind eye to the fact that although the Soviet Union was north of Pakistan across hostile mountain territory, the vast bulk of the arms that Pakistan was buying was suitable only for a battle in the plains of northern India. Without this infusion of arms, Pakistan would never have had the courage to launch Operation Gibraltar in Kashmir in 1965. And without the inflow of arms in the '80s, it would not have had the guts to plan and start a proxy war against India again, both in Punjab and in Kashmir, in 1987-89.
The refusal to, in a sense, equate India with China has been even more galling, for no bilateral visit at any level between the two countries is complete without a reference to the fact that India is a democracy while China is an authoritarian dictatorship; that India and the US have a great deal in common while China has always been a potential adversary. Moreover, India has a population only one-fifth smaller than China's, a GDP only slightly more than a quarter smaller, and arguably long-term growth prospects that at least equal if not exceed those of China. Yet as a consequence of the discrimination built into the NPT, which has now been extended to missile technology, while India was not even able to get a second Cray supercomputer from the US, American firms have blithely sold no less than 45 supercomputers to Chinese firms and continue to do so despite intelligence reports that some of these have been transferred to its nuclear weapons miniaturisation and missile programmes. By the same token there is a race developing among US firms to sell nuclear power plants to China while, as the director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Hans Blix, said, the chances of India being sold any nuclear power plants till it signs the NPT are almost non-existent.
In the last three years, this gridlock has shown signs of crumbling. As the imprint of the Cold War has faded, both Washington and the powerful east coast intelligentsia, from which US presidents draw most officials, have begun to grapple with the longer term issues of building and managing the world order of the next century. This has compelled them to reassess both the US' capacity to manage this world on its own, and if the rule of the global policeman is not a viable one, to examine what alternative arrangements are feasible. India has come under close scrutiny because, given its size, strategic location in a part of the world where neither the US nor the European powers have much leverage, stability and demonstrated sense of responsibility, make it a promising partner in global arrangements to maintain peace. On the other hand, by not signing the NPT and the CTBT and by going ahead with its missile development programme, India has shown an independence and, what could be even more disturbing, a capacity for developing high technology. This makes it imperative for the architects of the new order to, as Americans would say, "get a handle on India".
What has brought this to the forefront is the Gujral doctrine. With its modest origins in an agreement to give non-reciprocal trade concessions to Nepal, this doctrine has not only shown India's capacity to take a long-term view of its relations with its neighbours that fully takes into account the asymmetry in size, but a capacity to break the shackles of the past on its thinking, and work towards precisely the regional balance and stability based on mutual trust that the rest of the world is looking for.
The meetings Clinton had with Nawaz Sharif and Gujral, and the speeches the two leaders gave in the UN General Assembly, where Sharif devoted one-third to Kashmir and Gujral did not even mention it, have reinforced this impression and heightened the distance between India and Pakistan. One half of the gridlock is therefore melting away. It is now time to tackle the second half—parity with China—and here the initiative must come from the US.
