Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India has cancelled his visit to Malaysia to participate in the summit of the Association of South East Asian Nations to be held from 26–28 October in Kuala Lumpur. The opposition leader, Rahul Gandhi, has alleged that Narendra Modi backtracked from his visit to avoid meeting President Donald Trump. The bilateral relations between the two countries are at their lowest ebb. It appears the distrust between Narendra Modi and the US leader, Donald Trump, has reached a point of no return. Both have big egos, and their vanity as leaders of powerful states knows no bounds.
The case of the four-decade-long deepening bilateral relations and the sudden rupture of friendship between India and the USA demonstrates how far the conduct of inter-state relations is vulnerable to sudden changes in the geopolitical and geo-strategic landscape, and the temperamental swings or ideological preferences of leaders. The clash of geo-economic and geo-strategic interests between countries impacts the entire gamut of bilateral relations. President Donald Trump, in his first tenure, was initially very fond of Narendra Modi and dealt with him as the loyal guardian of the geo-strategic interests of the US in South Asia by countervailing the Chinese leadership.
The American leaders have always treated India and Pakistan equally. The American leadership made a conscious decision to prefer Pakistan over India as an ally in this region against the expansion of communism. This was perhaps done because of the leftist leanings of the Indian leaders, Jawaharlal Nehru and his close aides in the Congress Government. General Ayub Khan, as Air Marshal Asghar Khan claims, captured power at the instigation of the US leaders, if not at their behest, and offered an unstinted alliance against the Communists.
India, though firmly in the Soviet camp, pretended to follow a Non-Aligned foreign policy. Nehru, given his political weight as a statesman, succeeded in mollifying both superpowers. This was observed in 1962 when the US came to the rescue of India after the eruption of military clashes between it and China. President John F. Kennedy extended political, diplomatic, economic and material aid to India to withstand the onslaught of China.
He also made sure that Pakistan would not open a second battlefront for India in occupied Jammu and Kashmir. After the war, President Kennedy asked the Indian leaders to resolve the Kashmir dispute. Under his pressure, Foreign Minister Sardar Swaran Singh held a few inconclusive rounds of talks with Z.A. Bhutto. The US again rescued India by imposing financial and military sanctions on Pakistan during the 1965 war.
India has adopted a policy of wait and watch, without any eagerness to pacify President Trump at the cost of its sovereign autonomy and national interests
The geopolitical and geo-strategic importance of India has always been high in the foreign and security policy calculations of the USA, even before the famous Pivot to Asia policy of President Barack Obama, which actually aimed at the containment of China. This strategic convergence and the common democratic values shared by the two countries sustained the US–India strategic partnership. It was not in the wildest imagination of anyone that such a strategic partnership would fall apart like a sandcastle. Since he assumed office, President Donald Trump has constantly criticised India, or rather Narendra Modi, on trade, tariffs, and Russian crude oil. The brief air war on 7–10 May this year between Pakistan and India influenced the American leaders’ perception of the geo-strategic situation in South Asia and the surrounding regions.
Narendra Modi irked President Donald Trump by refusing to acknowledge the latter’s role in the ceasefire between the two nuclear neighbours, and by declining to have a stopover in Washington, DC, in June while returning from Canada.These rebuffs to the American leader widened the rupture in bilateral relations. Have the older democracy (the US) and the largest democracy (India) chosen separate paths in the global geopolitical and geo-strategic trajectory, irrespective of the ascending power of their common adversary, China? Was India feeling shackled in manoeuvring freely amidst the emerging multilateral power centres and new alliances at the regional and global levels, given its partnership with the USA in the QUAD and in the China-containment policy? Was India unwilling to partially surrender its sovereign autonomy? These are a few questions which beg answers.
The USA has never ignored India like this. When Pakistan was a non-NATO ally of the USA in the tense years of the Cold War, Washington, DC used to tread a cautious path to avoid antagonising India by extending economic and military aid to Pakistan.
The US always maintained a balance between its assistance to Pakistan and pragmatic contacts with India. Jawaharlal Nehru had successfully persuaded the US leadership on a few occasions to strike a balance in their bilateral relations with both countries. Even the US leaders had to write personal letters to pacify Jawaharlal Nehru. Clearly, the political, economic and strategic significance of India could not be ignored in any future geopolitical and geo-strategic calculus.
The ascending position of China poses a real threat to the USA in overtaking it as the future economic superpower, and overshadowing India as the major power in wider Asia. India is confident about certain geo-economic and geo-strategic realities: 1) China would not start any war with India because of border disputes; 2) China would concentrate on economic development rather than involving itself in regional conflicts, and could not ignore the vast market of India for its exports; 3) the USA could not afford to exclude India from its geopolitical and geo-strategic calculus indefinitely; 4) the current glitch in the bilateral relations between India and the USA is transactional and will be repaired after a change in leadership; and 5) the US tilt towards Pakistan is also transactional and poses no long-term threat to India.
With all this in view, India has adopted a policy of wait and watch, without any eagerness to pacify President Trump at the cost of its sovereign autonomy and national interests; to attempt to revive its bonhomie with China; and to isolate the Pakistan regionally by reviving trilateral cooperation with Afghanistan and Iran.