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 three earlier episodes, we’ve covered the presidencies of Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford. Here, in Part 4, we look at the relatively bi-focal, ie the twin threats of a nuclearised South Asia and Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, times under Presidents Carter, Reagan, and Bush Senior.
Just before Jimmy Carter took over the US presidency in January 1977, Delhi lifted the State of Emergency, eliminating a major source of tension. But the damage was done; Indira Gandhi lost badly at the polls in March. For the first time since Independence, Congress lost control of parliament to the opposition multi-party Janata Front.
Morarji Desai, an eighty-one-year-old Gandhian who wanted India to move away from the Soviet Union and back toward true nonalignment, became Prime Minister. He got along well with Carter, who had a real affinity for the developing world. On separate trips, both the president and his Secretary of State, Warren Christopher, visited India without stopping in Pakistan, underscoring their desire to ‘de-hyphenate’ the two and make clear that the US considered India ‘the true leader in Asia’, as Christopher told the press during his visit.
Non-Proliferation: The Breaking Point
But for all the early promise, the relationship stalled. Desai’s government proved surprisingly parochial in dealing with foreign investors, limiting their ownership of Indian enterprises to 40 per cent. The rules prompted several big American companies—including Coca-Cola and IBM—to leave the country.
But the most insurmountable hurdle between them remained Desai’s blunt refusal to subscribe to nuclear non-proliferation. The issue was made more urgent by the mounting evidence that India’s arch-foe, Pakistan, was trying to develop nuclear weapons.
By early 1979, in fact, US intelligence proved so definitive on that score that Washington enacted a provision of the US Foreign Assistance Act prohibiting economic aid to any country actively seeking nuclear capability, which predictably angered Islamabad.
Soon after, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan sent Washington crawling back. With the threat of Soviet expansionism suddenly renewed, Pakistan’s nuclear misdeeds seemed far less important than building a solid defense against Communism. Carter moved quickly to get Congress to reinstate military aid to Pakistan in early 1980, but President Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, still smarting from the earlier disruption of aid, rejected the proffered $400 million as ‘peanuts’.
Delhi, meanwhile, infuriated Washington by downplaying the Soviet actions, arguing that the Afghan government had requested Moscow’s help. And it renewed complaints about American arms to Pakistan—even though Pakistan hadn’t accepted any.
Reagan Embraces Zia, Irks Delhi
When Ronald Reagan took office the following year, Zia played hardball and managed to extract an arms deal for Pakistan worth a whole lot more than peanuts. Totalling $2.5 billion, the package included forty prized F-16 fighter jets, a model the US had previously sold only to Israel, Egypt, and its NATO allies. Through Pakistan, the administration also channeled covert arms to the Afghan mujahedin in their fight against the Soviets.
Indira Gandhi, now back in office in Delhi, bitterly protested the arms sales to Pakistan—a move that baffled Washington. Secretary of State Alexander Haig insisted that arming Pakistan would lead to greater world peace and stability. "A weak Pakistan only serves the interests of the Soviet Union," he said. "A strengthened Pakistan, in close relationship with the USA, poses no threat to India, and indeed should contribute to the overall stability of the subcontinent."
Besides, the State Department pointed out, hadn’t Delhi just signed a new arms deal with Moscow? Washington couldn’t understand why the Indians were more upset about the US arming Pakistan than about the Soviets moving steadily closer to their borders.
Gandhi’s Personal Diplomacy with Reagan
Through all the bitterness and slanging, there were bright spots in the US–Indian relationship. In 1982, Reagan invited Gandhi to Washington, where she charmed everyone with her warmth and assurances that Delhi’s friendship with Moscow didn’t preclude its friendship with Washington.
They eased some of the tension over the nuclear nonproliferation stalemate and agreed to promote greater cooperation in the fields of science and technology; they declared 1985 ‘the Year of India’, promising an extensive Indian art and cultural exhibit that would tour the US.
But they remained at odds on most substantive issues; two years later, Gandhi proclaimed that she and Reagan connected ‘entirely on a personal basis’ and that in fact US policy was generally ‘opposed to ours’.
To be sure, State Department UN voting records for 1983 show that India opposed the US on all of the ten key issues; Pakistan, by contrast, voted with the US on half of those.
Bush Sr and a Reset on Pakistan
By the late 1980s, Mikhail Gorbachev had come to power in the Soviet Union, ushering in a new era of perestroika—openness—and vowing to pull out of Afghanistan. For Washington, that had the dual effect of reducing tensions with India and making Pakistan much less strategically important.
Persistent evidence of Islamabad’s ongoing efforts to develop nuclear weapons—including its refusal to stop enriching uranium—irritated the administration of George H.W. Bush to the point where it decided to cut US economic and military aid, which pleased India.
The world was changing fast; one by one, the Soviet satellite states were shedding their Communist ideology and severing ties with Moscow. Washington saw its role in South Asia—and South Asia’s place in its overall foreign policy—shifting dramatically; when tensions between India and Pakistan flared up over Kashmir in late 1989, Washington got involved in cooling tempers on both sides, fearful that any military confrontation could turn nuclear.
That India welcomed America’s presence as peacemaker showed what a different world it had become.
Postscript: In Part 5, we shall check out the climactic two terms of President Bill Clinton, a Democratic president after three terms under Republicans Ronald Reagon and George W Bush, Sr.