Foreword: With President Donald Trump’s unpredictable U-turns, is America swinging back towards Pakistan? Or simply nettling India? In this mini-series, we do a fascinating replay of history since the 1940s – how the personalities of successive American presidents have had an outsized impact on the quicksilver, vacillating, even fraught, America-India-Pakistan equation.
In Part 1, we deciphered the early years after Independence, under Presidents Truman and Eisenhower. In Part 2, we looked at the uneven terrain under Presidents Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. Here, in Part 3, we uncover the open hostility under President Richard Nixon, and his mid-term successor, Gerald Ford.
Indira Gandhi’s liaison with President Johnson was a virtual love fest compared to the Arctic chill that hung over her relationship with his successor, Richard Nixon. She’d had ‘excellent relations’ with every US President ‘except Mr Nixon,’ she once remarked. ‘And he made up his mind beforehand.’
Nixon's Daliiance with Pakistan & China
Since his days as Eisenhower’s vice president, Nixon had made no secret of his admiration for Pakistan or his disdain for India and its nonalignment policy. Six months into his term, the president paid a lackluster, fruitless visit to Delhi, followed by a warmer, more productive stop in Islamabad. There he revealed to new Pakistani president Yahya Khan the secret goal that would define his foreign policy: to establish ties with China.
He believed that China’s vast size and potential earned it a place in the family of nations, and that engaging with Beijing would benefit the US and the world—not least because it could provide an important regional counterweight to the Soviet Union.
Nixon asked the Pakistani president to let China’s leaders know that he considered Sino–US rapprochement ‘essential’. Islamabad willingly played the middleman in arranging the high-level meetings between the US and China, earning Nixon’s eternal gratitude. ‘Nobody has occupied the White House who is friendlier to Pakistan than me,’ he reportedly told Khan at a 1970 meeting in Washington. Eager to show his appreciation, Nixon shrewdly approved a ‘one-time exception’ to the 1967 replacement-parts-only military aid policy, agreeing to sell Pakistan 300 armored personnel carriers and $50 million worth of aircraft.
But the relationship really came to a head over what was then known as East Pakistan.
Nestled into the northeast corner of India, the Muslim-majority state had been carved out of Bengal at partition, and was home to a powerful pro-independence lobby, which gained traction after Pakistani national elections in 1970 when East Pakistan’s Mujib-ur-Rehman was denied his political victory. As raucous pro-independence demonstrations erupted, Islamabad sent troops to suppress them, unleashing a flood of refugees across the border into India.
Delhi, which strongly supported autonomy for East Pakistan, offered covert help and tried to rally international support. The response disappointed India. Worse, The New York Times reported that several shiploads of US weapons were headed for Pakistan—in possible violation of Washington’s own new arms embargo—earning Nixon the wrath of Congressional Democrats as well as New Delhi. Indian foreign minister Swaran Singh said the action could be construed not just as American tolerance of Pakistan’s atrocities but ‘as an encouragement to their continuation’.
Nixon’s historic trip to China nearly finished off the US relationship with India.
Like most of the world, Delhi was shocked by the president’s after-the-fact announcement in July 1971 that Henry Kissinger, then his Assistant for National Security Affairs, had stopped in China during a recent world trip and held talks with Chinese premier Chou En-lai. Furthermore, Nixon’s statement read, the president himself planned to travel to China sometime before May 1972.
Kissinger had visited New Delhi just before the stop in Beijing, ostensibly to discuss the East Pakistan crisis, but now, the Indians realized, ‘we were just stepping stones on the way to China,’ as one top official put it. The point was driven home when Nixon warned the Indian ambassador, ‘We would be unable to help you against China,’ in the event of a war.
India Isolated and the Emergency Years
Stung and isolated, India struck back, signing a declaration of friendship with the Soviet Union—a move Kissinger called a ‘bombshell’.
When Indira Gandhi toured Western capitals that fall, looking for support in ending the East Pakistan standoff, she and Nixon could barely stand to be in the same room; Kissinger described their meetings as the worst of his career.
By the time Islamabad declared war on Delhi over East Pakistan, the US and India were mired in a cycle of suspicion and paranoia. After India handily won the fight to free East Pakistan and establish the independent nation of Bangladesh, Washington—despite various assurances to the contrary—became convinced India was going to widen the war and attack Western Pakistan. In response, it sent the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise to the Bay of Bengal as a warning. That served only to insult India—a wound that was inflamed a few weeks later when an American journalist, predating WikiLeaks by nearly forty years, published the minutes of secret White House meetings in which Nixon called repeatedly for a ‘tilt’ toward Pakistan.
Washington’s deployment of the Enterprise in particular became a looming symbol of American arrogance and hostility toward India, and produced lasting repercussions. Gandhi went ahead and raised India’s Hanoi mission to the level of embassy, slashed the number of American Peace Corps volunteers allowed in the country, and imposed limits on US scholars studying India. Most dramatically, she turned India into the world’s sixth nuclear power by allowing the detonation of its first nuclear device in 1974.
The Indians were glad to see Nixon resign in 1974, and seemed encouraged by President Gerald Ford’s initial overtures. But then his administration acceded to the requests of Pakistani Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and agreed to end the nearly ten-year-old arms embargo. Ford was impressed by how quickly and stoically Pakistan had bounced back from its ignominious defeat over Bangladesh, and in any case, India was so much mightier that he didn’t consider it a big deal to sell a few light arms to Islamabad.
As usual, the Americans underestimated Delhi’s reaction. Gandhi called it a ‘reopening of old wounds’. It didn’t help that Delhi had also been making veiled accusations about covert CIA activity in the country—charges that Washington found deeply puzzling. Beyond helping the Congress Party, ‘We had been up to very little,’ Ambassador Daniel P Moynihan wrote in his memoir, A Dangerous Place.
But nothing shook America’s perception of India more than the state of Emergency Gandhi imposed on 24 June 1975.
After a high court found her guilty of ‘electoral misconduct’ and imposed a six-year suspension from politics, the prime minister declared martial law, arresting opposition leaders and censoring the press. In an instant, the essential characteristics that united the two democracies even when they were at odds—civil liberties, freedom of speech, rule of law—vanished. The Soviets, meanwhile, were delighted by
Gandhi’s crackdown, and offered to step up their support. Though the prime minister welcomed the arms aid, she was reluctant to become overly dependent on Moscow—perhaps owing to the influence of her son, Sanjay, an increasingly vocal political presence who, like much of his generation, strongly favored American-style market capitalism to Marxism. Sanjay died in a plane crash in 1980; had he lived and followed his mother into politics, the American–Indian alliance might well have solidified long ago.
Postscript: In Part 4, we will cover the relatively glacial years under Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagon.