Sol Sanders Archive

India has a functioning parliamentary democracy, a federation of self-governing states – all something of a miracle in a country of some 1.2 billion, soon to surpass China to have the largest population in the world. Struggling to overcome the torpor of almost half a century of Soviet-style planning which crippled one of the most sophisticated entrepreneurial communities in the world, there is now a process of liberalizing an economy bound by a combination of colonial residue and socialist dogma.

But this is not the whole picture.

The Indian economy is at a crucial state where it needs huge transfers of foreign direct investment with its accompanying technological transfers. The floodgates were supposed to be opened with the so-called 123 Agreement signed with the U.S. in early 2007. The Bush Administration looked at the economic possibilities and the weight a more prosperous and stable India with its profession of Western-style freedoms would lend to an Asia increasingly in the shadow of China’s economic liberalization but continued political repression. It decided to let bygones be bygones, lift the sanctions against transfer of nuclear technology which India which had secretly developed weapons of mass destruction, and, more importantly, other hi tech for India’s burgeoning manufacturing. There has also been a strong bid to develop military ties with sales of armaments and collaboration in policing the vast Indian Ocean, the main path of hydrocarbons from the Middle East enroute to world markets.

Picking up a mantra from the Clinton Administration, the long festering sore of friction created by Washington’s off and on alliance with Pakistan and New Delhi’s alliance with the Soviets, the new formula was that Washington would treat each country separately.

Perhaps only those who knew nothing of the enormous ties of history — in Indian English, kith and kin — and their unresolved bitter disputes, could believe in such a formula. The whole idea got even more ridiculous when, after 9/11, President George W. Bush told President Gen. Pervez Musharraf that Pakistan with its unfortunate connections, formal and informal, with the Islamicists would either switch sides or feel the full weight of U.S. power.

The debate rages over whether Musharraf has done enough, but it is clear that Pakistani collaboration has been crucial in the whatever U.S. successes so far in the war on terror.

Predictably, New Delhi is still playing hard to get, even occasionally falling into the old throes of its love affair with Moscow. This has practical implications. The notoriously corrupt Indian arms purchase procedure has bought a multibillion dollar white elephant, a mothballed antiquated aircraft carrier from the Russians. And almost daily the cost of refitting it – it was a “gift” from Moscow – and the time lag in doing so gets longer. Yet New Delhi is negotiating on the possibility of purchasing new missile destroyers from Moscow. And despite India’s long history of miserable experiences with Russian fighter aircraft – it lost one a month of the Russian MIG fighters over an eight-year period – has not stopped it from a flirtation with Moscow for what could be the largest single order for military aircraft in history.

Not a small part of this continued befuddlement with Moscow arises out of the long infiltration of the Indian foreign ministry by bitterly anti-American professionals. But it also arises from India’s complicated domestic political scene, wherein Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s coalition of ideological misfits, relies on India’s still powerful two Communist Parties for its parliamentary majority. [It is ironic that one has long and warm ties with the Chinese Communist Party.]

The Communists have threatened to abandon the government over 123. That would force elections at a time when Singh’s own Congress Party – the creature of the Nehru family now presided over by the legendary Jawaharlal Nehru’s grandson, former Prime Minister Rajiv Gadhi’s Italian-born widow – doesn’t think elections would benefit it. Singh might have to abandon 123 and all its economic promise.

Furthermore, to woo the left generally – and the growing power of the lower echelons of the Hindu caste structure beginning to feel their electoral weight – Singh has launched a new round of do-good programs. A guaranteed income for most Indians who still live in poverty-stricken villages, is an imitation of earlier strategies which turned into corrupt, power tools that have all but fouled its electoral system. Each and ever effort to remove restrictions on trade and investment are bitterly contested, often thwarted. That may be one reason the huge Indian family fortunes acquired in former near-monopoly enterprises are going abroad in a big way for investment in Europe and America, and even China.

While vast amounts are to be expended on new weapons programs, much of the nitty-gritty of security has been neglected. Singh publicly has warned over and over that so-called Maoist armed rebellions which produce almost daily attacks on police, civil officials, and landowners, are the greatest threat to Indian national security. But a program which has intermittently given strategies for fighting these insurgencies in 10 states to local government has failed and their numbers appear to be growing.

The threat is all the more real because these so-called Naxallites — named after the area where they began their mayhem in the narrow neck of land which connects the country to its extended northeast — have strong ties to a similar movement in Nepal. There, after waging a 20-year civil war in which more than 35,000 have died, the Maoists have entered the government and persuaded the other political parties to end the once semi-religious monarchy. Although the Nepalese Maoists condemn the “revisionism” in Beijing, Nepal has under whatever regime always played China against India. New roads – and possibly a railroad – connecting the little Hmalayan country with China’s Tibet are being built.

Although New Delhi and Beijing continue to make warm, cooing noises, the fact is there are almost weekly episodes of Chinese incursions on the Himalayan border where the two countries fought a brief, but devastating for Indian prestige, war in 1962. There are half a dozen local armed movements in the India northeast, agitating for independence or further autonomy, often supplied with weapons through black markets operating from Burma, and, perhaps, China. New Delhi has not fulfilled plans to build infrastructure in the area – some of it still claimed on Chinese maps – to match the Chinese expansion of infrastructure and its military garrison in Tibet towering above the northern Indian plain.

Furthermore, India’s relations with its eastern neighbor, Bangladesh, despite its fathering the old East Pakistan’s independence in 1971, are abysmal. The virtually impossible to defend borders in the riverine area have made it a sanctuary for anti-Indian operations. A military junta which took over last year in the virtual collapse of civilian government is armed by the Chinese. Furthermore, the military have failed to root out the growing Islamicist movement there tied to the international terrorist networks.

These networks have ties to a growing terrorist movement – long facing almost a half million Indian security forces in the Himalayan region of Kashmir which New Delhi disputes with Pakistan and which has been at the center of three and a half wars since independence in 1947. Whatever the level of instigation, equipping, logistics, and training of the Kashmiri Muslim a guerrilla in Kashmir by Pakistan – and it has been considerable — the fact is that the Kashmiris would probably choose independence or affiliation with Islamabad if given a free choice. But that would establish one more unstable government in the region.

Increasing acts of urban terror by the Islamofascists in India proper have ties to the international networks. But contrary to Indian insistence that all terrorism leads to Pakistan, it is clear that their roots are growing in India’s own Muslim population, probably 15 percent of the total and larger than the population of Pakistan.

Thus, the fate of Pakistan is not only linked to the diaspora of Pakistani and Indian Moslems in the West and to the Arab radicals in the Middle East, but directly to Indian security. That is perhaps why, despite the failure of any Kashmir solution or approach to it between the two countries, relations between the Musharraf government and New Delhi are better than they have been at the official level for years. In their more serious moments, Indian leaders know that an implosion in Pakistan, or its descent into some kind of civil war among ethnic and religious groups, would be disaster for India as well. There would be no way of New Delhi cauterizing its Western borders.

That is why as the new year unfolds, the prospects for the whole of the Indo-Pakistan subcontinent are not bright. It is also why, although unspoken, New Delhi when it is not distracted by the usual trivia and narrow loyalties of party politics in representative government, watches events unfolding in Pakistan with as much concern as Washington. There can only be the hope that those among the Hindu chauvinists who dominate some of India’s largest political groups will not try to exploit the muddle in Islamabad.