Friends with Benefits: The India-US Story

By Seema Sirohi

Thirty years ago, when veteran journalist Seema Sirohi first arrived in Washington DC, bilateral relations between India and the United States of America were at their worst. In the late 1980s and 1990s, the political spotlight shone favourably upon Pakistan and China. For the leader of the free world, India didn't matter. The years leading up to the twenty-first century saw the US-and the multilateral organizations of which it was a member-force India to jump through endless bureaucratic hoops. India's nuclear tests in 1998 were the final nail in its coffin, as far as the US was concerned.

Cut to the present, and the curtain has lifted on a dramatically different geopolitical stage. India is no longer the enemy for the US, nor is it sidelined strategically. In an age dominated not just by China's rise but by its undoubted political and economic muscle power, India has become the fashionable new ally in Washington.

What has taken the two countries so long to get here? What have been the events that have forced India and the US to dance, finally, in sync? Did political leaders take the initiative to push policy mandarins to change the game, or was it vice versa? What role has China played in the change in bilateral relations? And are India and the US finally ready for a relationship of equals, or will they continue to be 'friends with benefits'?

To look for answers, this book takes the reader back to the twilight years of the Cold War, and charts an engaging journey of global and bilateral diplomacy through the decades. Using first-hand reportage and drawing on conversations with key diplomats, foreign policy makers and former CIA operatives, Sirohi brings a delightfully frank and anecdotal perspective to a thrilling tale of diplomacy and high-voltage politics.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins India
• Release date: Jan 19, 2023
• ISBN: 9789356295919

Seema Sirohi

Seema Sirohi is currently based in Washington as a senior journalist specializing in foreign policy. She received her master's degree in journalism from the University of Kansas, Lawrence, and studied sociology at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. As a journalist, she has covered India–US relations for more than two decades for The Telegraph, Outlook and Anandabazar Patrika. She has reported from various nations around the globe, such as Italy, Israel and Pakistan, and published opinion pieces in The Los Angeles Times, The Christian Science Monitor and The Baltimore Sun. She was also a commentator with National Public Radio and has appeared on BBC and CNN. Her book, Sita's Curse: Stories of Dowry Victims, was published in 2003. Twitter: @seemasirohi

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Preface

When I came to Washington as a journalist more than thirty years ago, India and the United States were in a difficult relationship. They barely talked to each other, and when they did, it was mostly to score points. The conversation seemed passive-aggressive. The two democracies had no ‘love language’, only a dictionary of stern words they threw across the room when given a chance. An air of forced tolerance prevailed.

India saw US policy on major issues—nuclear proliferation, Pakistan-sponsored terrorism, China’s expansionism and the China–Pakistan nexus—as off the mark, even non-strategic. The US, on its part, saw India and Pakistan as ‘wannabe’ nuclear weapon states and equally irksome. While Pakistan was useful in furthering US policy goals in South Asia, India tended to be in opposition as a giant talking head. In short, India could do no right, and Pakistan and China no wrong.

When Indian diplomats raised the issue of Pakistan’s terror factories, their US counterparts tended to get impatient. They ignored the evidence, even though US intelligence was telling them the same story. Pakistan’s role in the ongoing Afghanistan war was too important in the US strategic calculus to raise any uncomfortable questions with Islamabad.

As for China, the story was nothing if not lurid. The US was willingly selling sophisticated technology to China and indirectly helping it increase the lethality of its military. It is a fact that China improved the range of its missiles and bombers with US technology.¹ Corporate greed, political misjudgment, corruption and an underlying certitude that a non-Western power would not be able to best the US blinded policymakers and gave China a free ride.

India, meanwhile, had to jump through hoops to buy anything useful from the US. The US even tried to prevent others, including Russia, from selling dual-use technology to India.²

Fast-forward to 2022 and the US is threatened by what policymakers politely call the ‘China challenge’. Today they are trying to push back a power they helped raise from puberty to adulthood. China’s ambition to march ahead of the US with an ever-expanding web of economic and strategic plays across the globe is no longer in doubt. US officials have watched China grab bits of territory and claim areas of the seas—enough to keep expanding but never taking a bite big enough to invite war. India is a victim of these ‘grey zone’ tactics on its border.

The US wants to slow China’s inexorable march and maintain its pole position with the help of allies and partners such as India. And India, too, needs powerful friends to deter China as New Delhi tries to reverse Chinese incursions along the border. A partnership with the US has become almost imperative for India to face its own ‘China challenge’. Washington and New Delhi are in agreement that China presents a threat to their security interests.

There are other important drivers of the India–US relationship to be sure—the four-million-strong Indian American community, India’s large market, shared democratic values, the challenge of climate change and India’s development needs, to name a few.

Being raucous democracies, India and the US have taken time to feel their way towards each other. The dance has been slow, even tortuous, but today they are increasingly in sync, having overcome certain ‘hesitations of history’ to build the partnership.

My idea is to tell the story of this evolution from divergence to convergence and from estrangement to engagement by drawing on more than three decades of reporting, observing and absorbing, without leaning too much to one side. The telling is adamantly non-academic but always professional, with some opinion, plenty of flavour of the times, a little humour, a bit of snark and a sliver of outrage.

Chapter 1

The Way We Were …

I t was the year 2000, and India and Pakistan were inching towards war. The Kashmir crisis had boiled over after a decade of border clashes, terrorist attacks and incidents at sea. Both countries had accumulated an extensive array of advanced weapons, including nuclear surface-to-surface missiles. The two navies were sent to sea, with both countries declaring maritime exclusion zones. India threatened to attack any foreign naval force that entered its 600-nautical-mile zone.

The Indian subcontinent was heating up just as the Cold War was winding down. An increasing number of countries flaunted sophisticated weapons. The Soviet threat had receded but the rise of new centres of power posed new dangers. There was no global equilibrium because ‘independent activity by Third World nations’ had become more likely. Western analysts worried about potential conflicts between ‘mortal enemies’ and ‘catastrophic failures of the human condition’ in poor countries. The India–Pakistan conflagration was but one example of dangers facing the post-Cold War world.

As the sole remaining superpower, the US had responsibilities to prevent a nuclear war in South Asia. The US national security team gathered in the Situation Room located in the basement of the White House. The air was thick with tension. Top Pentagon generals gave a PowerPoint presentation on the India–Pakistan situation. In their judgement, India was preparing a pre-emptive strike against Pakistan’s nuclear facilities—Agni and Prithvi missiles were at the ready. They wanted to deter India.

The team agreed that a ‘highly destructive’ India–Pakistan war was a danger to US national security. US vital interests were at stake. Maintaining regional order and a peaceful maritime environment were paramount, since the US economy was increasingly dependent on imports. Any disruption in oil supplies because of closure of sea lanes would be devastating.

The US government decided to send two aircraft carrier battle groups and two nuclear-powered attack submarines into the Indian Ocean as a warning. The US fleet penetrated India’s maritime exclusion zone south-west of Bombay. In return, the Indian Navy conducted ‘aggressive’ over flights and ‘mock’ submarine attacks against US aircraft carriers and threatened to mount a real attack if US forces didn’t leave.

The US, in turn, warned India of an ‘appropriate’ response if it interfered with ‘the peaceful transit’ of the American fleet. The US military base at Diego Garcia was ordered on full alert with B-52 bombers ready to fly. Targets in India were selected. The list included Agni and Prithvi missile sites, Virbahu submarine base, Venduruthy naval air station, ammunition storage facilities, hangars, a power plant and even repair shops. The idea was to destroy Indian weapons, sensors and all ground capability that might pose a problem for US carrier battle groups.

American B-52 bombers, attack submarines and naval destroyer ships rained down a total of 190 cruise missiles on Indian targets. The missiles came rapidly, crushing India’s ability to respond. India’s command and control centres were decimated. The Indian Navy was under relentless fire and its aircraft were grounded. US forces still had 117 missiles in reserve in the unlikely case of an Indian response.

India was humbled.

What’s described above was presented as a likely event in 1991 in front of an elite Washington audience. General Dynamics, one of the largest US arms manufacturers at the time, set the chilling war scenario nine years into the future, in 2000. Today it may seem fantastic, even unbelievable, but at the time, India was seen as a hostile power by large segments of the US strategic community. Defence companies knew how to plug into the hostility index to sell their wares. And General Dynamics was trying to sell its ‘next-generation cruise missiles’ to the Pentagon. At least two briefings were held in early 1991 at prestigious think tanks, including a US government-funded one with serving and retired military officers in attendance.

The incident provides a flavour of the times when a testy but improving India–US relationship, American triumphalism, arrogance and eager defence manufacturers came together in a perfect storm.

Here’s what was happening. In March 1991, General Dynamics was in the process of generating support for its new weapon among strategic analysts and military officers. Company representatives had prepared five likely scenarios in which the US military might use their new weapon with three times the range of the Tomahawk—the missile used in the just-concluded Gulf War, also built by the same company in collaboration with McDonnell Douglas Corporation.

The India–Pakistan scenario was disturbingly realistic in at least how tensions could build up over Kashmir. The company’s well-paid managers had done their homework. They knew the US establishment was worried about India’s expanding missile capabilities. Every Agni test triggered strong words from the State Department. Other Indian misdeeds listed in the briefing documents included India leasing Soviet submarines, testing medium-range ballistic missiles and expanding the Indian Navy with the ‘intent to dominate the Indian Ocean’ to contain the influence of US and other ‘outside’ powers.

Here was the catch—in the imagined scenario, the US would intervene against India, not Pakistan. The result would be devastating and would teach India a lesson. Scenario-planning is fine and dandy, but the details of this were disturbingly close to official US thinking at the time. And that is what struck me as a reporter. It was newsworthy.

In a congressional testimony on 27 September 1990, Air Force Lt Gen. G.L. Butler had identified three sources of conflict in the future:

Intractable conflicts between mortal enemies (the India–Pakistan rivalry qualified for this)

Catastrophic failure of the human condition in the Third World

Rise of new centres of power (India again qualified as an emerging regional power in Asia)

Post-Cold War life was getting tough for the Pentagon in the face of prospective budget cuts. But it was getting even tougher for arms manufacturers. They depended on the $300-billion Defence Department budget for existence. New weapons needed new wars, or at least the prospect of one to keep the factories whirring.

I found out about the General Dynamics war scenario from a European expert I knew back in Delhi. He was on a fellowship in Washington, and we were meeting for lunch. While chatting about India, he happened to mention the General Dynamics briefing. He said he was surprised, even shocked, at the cold-bloodedness of the India–Pakistan scenario. I asked if he had any documents laying out the war game. He reached into his briefcase and pulled out a complete set.

He also told me that no one in the audience asked why India was chosen as the ‘enemy’, given the positive movement in relations under President George H.W. Bush. The two sides were beginning to explore a better defence relationship. The Indian government had recently allowed about fifty US military transport planes to refuel in Bombay (now Mumbai) on their way to the Persian Gulf during the first Gulf War, before political pressure forced New Delhi to stop the facility.

No consideration was given to the flip side—deterioration in US–Pakistan relations over its nuclear programme and Pakistan’s dangerous games in Afghanistan. US military aid was frozen. ‘It was almost as if they [company reps] were trying to start a blueprint for demonizing India,’ my source told me. They had imagined a nightmare scenario that could only result from terrible mistakes and poor judgement on the part of the Americans and equally bad decisions by India and Pakistan.

India–Pakistan was one of the five scenarios they painted in which the US military might wield the new cruise missiles in the future. Others included US attacks to thwart Indonesian rebels trying to close the Sunda Strait between Sumatra and Java, a reprise of the 1986 US raid on Libya, and strikes against Iran, which had closed the Persian Gulf in alliance with Iraq. These were all in the realm of the possible.

My first article on the General Dynamics briefing was published on the front page of the Telegraph on 14 March 1991 with a banner headline across seven columns: ‘Top Defence Firm Briefs Pentagon on How to Neutralize India.’ The story was placed above a report about the Lok Sabha being dissolved, which was a major domestic development. Within a day all hell broke loose, as other Washington-based Indian correspondents sought reactions and comments from General Dynamics, the State Department and the Indian Embassy. Denials and denunciations came thick and fast.

Various US spokespersons and officials called my article ‘preposterous’, ‘ridiculous’, ‘misconstrued’, ‘exaggerated’, ‘incorrect’, ‘absurd’, ‘utterly false’, ‘extremely misleading’ and ‘unfair’. I was shaken, especially because Abid Hussain, the Indian ambassador, was among them. It wasn’t easy to face the torrent of adjectives that came my way. I hit a low.

However, none of the spokespersons disputed the facts reported—that such a briefing had indeed taken place, that targets were shown clearly on India’s map and that 190 missiles were to be launched against Indian targets in the imaginary scenario. General Dynamics spokesman Alvin Spivak went on to tell bald-faced lies. He claimed that no Indian map was used (it was, not once but four times), that the company didn’t select, propose or advocate targets (it did, because specific targets were named) and that the use of missiles was not discussed in the context of India (it clearly was because 190 missiles were unleashed).

I had the documents to prove Spivak wrong. I sat tight. Reading his statements, an American aphorism kept coming to mind: ‘When you don’t have the facts, you pound the law. When you don’t have the law, you pound the facts. When you have neither, you pound the table.’ Company executives were more disturbed that the contents of their briefing had been leaked and less concerned about the offensive nature of that content.

A couple of weeks after my story, the National Journal, a serious Washington-based magazine at the time, reported on the same briefing, corroborating everything I had written. The piece noted that defence contractors ‘run a danger of detonating diplomatic landmines in their zeal to finger the next Saddam Hussein’, as shown by the contretemps in India. In fact, David Morrison, the reporter, identified the Center for Naval Analyses, or CNA, as one of the places the company had given its presentation. CNA is federally funded and sponsored by the US Navy—it’s a government outfit. The company spokesman had claimed otherwise.

Morrison also quoted a senior Indian diplomat who said, ‘This is the first time I recollect having seen something like this. It’s very shocking for a company to have done such a thing.’ In the same article, Selig Harrison, a South Asia expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, called it ‘a very damaging and significant episode in Indo-American relations’.

Shortly after Morrison’s piece, K. Subrahmanyam, doyen of India’s strategic community, wrote an article in the Sunday Observer, again validating the facts while laying a thick coat of sarcasm on General Dynamics. ‘One cannot expect those who do not read anything except the tendentious dispatches in American newspapers to be familiar with the repeated Indian declarations to never use nuclear capabilities except in retaliation,’ he wrote. Subrahmanyam noted the ‘mischief potential’ of such scenario-building based on four decades of Cold War conditioning. I was more than vindicated.

My editor Shekhar Bhatia was faxing me articles to cheer me up.

After the story broke, the Indian Embassy was in regular touch with me to find out if I knew more than what I had reported. Senior diplomats were appalled at General Dynamics and told me so privately. They took the targeting of India—even in a hypothetical scenario—very seriously. India had been clubbed with traditional ‘bad guys’ such as Iran and Libya. They wanted an explanation and an apology from the company. General Dynamics was starting a dangerous trend, they told me.

I wrote a longer full-page article for the Sunday paper to contextualize the episode. I interviewed Selig Harrison at Carnegie. Harrison, a former journalist, had covered India in the early 1960s. He had been the Washington Post’s bureau chief and understood South Asia better than most in Washington. He said that projecting India as an enemy was ‘pernicious and irresponsible’, and weapons contractors tended to have a negative impact on relations between countries. ‘The scenario against India was a significant barometer of anxiety … [that] proliferation of missile technology can lead to ambivalent attitude towards friendly countries,’ he said. He was right. General Dynamics was exploiting prevalent fears about missile and nuclear technology in the hands of non-Western countries to sell new weapons to the Pentagon. That was the game.

Ambassador Hussain played an interesting role in the episode in how he dealt with me. An eternally personable man, he went along with the State Department and the Pentagon to make a public show of anger against my story, while using my article to make his interlocutors squirm in private. Shooting the messenger insulated the bilateral relationship in public. Neither the State Department nor the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) in New Delhi wanted the episode to become another hurdle in bilateral relations. The experience taught me not to expect support and to know my ‘place’.

The State Department’s vehement denials perhaps reflected a wider concern of American diplomats at the time. After the 1990–91 Gulf War, anti-Americanism was on the rise in several countries. Left parties in India were energized against the war. Outside the Washington bubble, the war was not seen merely as reversing the invasion of Kuwait by Saddam Hussein but also as an unabashed expression of American power, military superiority, the unipolar nature of the post-Cold War world and the hijacking of the United Nations by Western powers. The excessive military response against Iraq and the resultant criticism had put US officials somewhat on the defensive. They saw even legitimate reporting as an attempt to light fires.

Just as US officials were denouncing my story, Ambassador Hussain’s deputy in the Indian Embassy was putting pressure on senior executives of General Dynamics through the State and Defence departments. The Indian side wanted a clear explanation and a mea culpa. The apology from General Dynamics came more than a month after my article. I got hold of the letter before others and, once again, it was front-page news.

E.J. LeFevre, vice president for government relations for the company, wrote to Ambassador Hussain and promised to ‘modify the briefing to remove this [India–Pakistan] scenario from any and all future presentations’. He said the company regretted ‘any inconvenience this episode may have caused your government’. The letter was a masterful exercise in mitigation, deflection and obfuscation. In the end, the company admitted it had conducted a series of briefings ‘for academic groups and lower-level military personnel in order to make the case for current and improved stand-off weapons systems’.

Today such a war game would be unimaginable—India and the US share a stable and growing relationship built on an increasing convergence of interests. The potential is deemed endless and captured in superlatives. The India–US relationship is seen as one of the ‘defining partnerships’ of the twenty-first century. The two countries are working together in almost every domain, including strategic, space, health, technology, education, agriculture and energy. Their defence forces participate in a dizzying array of military exercises designed to increase familiarity and improve field coordination, should the need arise for joint operations.

But the General Dynamics episode was a perfect reflection of US–India relations at the time—some posturing, some progress and a lot of patience. The experience taught me a lot about life and living. I learnt some quick lessons about the games diplomats play, the lies executives tell, how ants get crushed when elephants ride and how misogyny is rampant in all professions.

The Story So Far …

The story of India and the US is one of a thousand heartbreaks and a hundred reunions. It is a story of inching closer, drifting apart, trying again, getting disappointed, developing new stakes in each other, losing interest, recharging batteries, giving it another shot, succeeding partly, celebrating with high rhetoric, hiding disappointment but strategically leaking true feelings while continuously rebranding the relationship as larger, deeper and wider, and strengthening the foundation. It’s remarkable how much the process—initially halting but increasingly steady—has achieved over the past thirty years, roughly the period that I have been privileged to report and analyse the India–US relationship.

Also remarkable is how both countries have learnt from each other, even changed their style of diplomacy a little over time to better suit the partner’s requirements. Broadly speaking, US diplomats have become kinder and gentler, and Indian diplomats less starchy and rule-bound as a result of their long institutional association. This is especially true for the past twenty years, when the relationship really got going. Indians have made the Americans more sensitive to a different worldview, in which a country can stand alone for decades and, for instance, not sign a patently unfair and unequal treaty on nuclear weapons but maintain a clean record as if it were a signatory. The Americans have helped Indians break out of a few sacred ideological straitjackets by relentlessly pounding the table and projecting their views.

The Landscape: A Broad Picture

In the late 1980s, when I began reporting for the Telegraph from Washington, India–US relations were surprisingly sparse. Not much had changed since the early 1970s. The Pentagon was a votary of Pakistan because of a long history, close relations with the Pakistan Army and the ongoing CIA-financed war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, which Islamabad was directing and helping to execute. The State Department was keeping the India relationship afloat but mostly to tell Delhi what it shouldn’t and couldn’t do. US spokespersons constantly criticized India’s missile and nuclear programmes.

But Pakistan’s clear hand in fomenting terrorism in India was a non-issue for the State Department. The Commerce Department was mainly the office of technology denial for India, raising and lowering the bar depending on India’s latest missile test, while allowing China to legally buy cutting-edge US technology. China could rob the bank in daylight and not be caught.

On Capitol Hill, home of the US government’s legislative branch, the story was more alarming. It seemed India only had critics in the US Congress—members of the House of Representatives and the Senate were quick on the draw, slow to listen and ready to punish. India had just one real ‘friend’, and he was Congressman Stephen J. Solarz of New York, a Democrat. Fortunately, Solarz was a leading voice on foreign policy at the time and took a real interest in Asian countries. He wasn’t easily snowed by State Department officials. Solarz made an effort to understand India’s point of view and travelled often to New Delhi. The Indian establishment appreciated his willingness to be a lone ranger on India-related issues.

Indian Americans rewarded his efforts with campaign contributions and community functions. Incidentally, Solarz was the first Congressman to realize the political and economic potential of tapping into various Asian American communities—Vietnamese, Filipino, Indian—and voicing their concerns on Capitol Hill to his benefit. Other lawmakers copied his template and courted smaller but richer ethnic minorities beyond the European communities. Solarz, who died in 2010 of cancer, was one of the few American politicians to get a standing ovation in the Indian Parliament.

As chairman of the Asia and Pacific Affairs Subcommittee, Solarz deflected the constant volley of criticism against India, including its human rights record from Pakistan-friendly Republicans. Pakistani diplomats and lobbyists regularly supplied members of Congress with exaggerated figures and inflated accounts of the Indian Army’s conduct in containing the insurgency in Kashmir. The Punjab militancy was also in focus, as were police ‘encounters’. Congressmen asked leading questions about India during congressional hearings and demanded policy changes. They were partly grandstanding, partly appeasing Pakistani demands and partly establishing their credentials as foreign policy heavyweights.

Republicans and Democrats rarely questioned Pakistan’s record, mainly because of US dependence on Islamabad/Rawalpindi for the most overt covert war against the Soviets in Afghanistan. The CIA pipeline of weapons and money for the mujahideen went through Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or ISI. India’s security interests, fears and worries were of secondary importance, if at all. The Soviets had completed their withdrawal by February 1989, having installed Mohammad Najibullah as the President a year earlier. His job was to oversee a reconciliation process and bring the various mujahideen factions on board.

Najibullah, a former intelligence chief and general secretary of the Marxist People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan, was slowly consolidating, distancing himself from communism and promoting Afghan nationalism, but he wasn’t acceptable to either the US or Pakistan. But their preferred agents—the mujahideen—were fighting a deadly factional war. Reports from the ground triggered criticism about the CIA–ISI handling of the war, because Najibullah’s government didn’t fall quickly as predicted and the mujahideen didn’t rise as a united force.

Such was the ideological fervour around the ‘holy warriors’—as US leaders called the mujahideen—that even Solarz, with all his intellectual acumen, defended the ISI. I asked him during an interview if Pakistan’s ISI was directing the CIA’s covert aid to fundamentalist groups and tilting the balance, which could be detrimental to Afghanistan in the long run. He called it a ‘classic example of scapegoating’.

No US politician was willing to criticize the biggest national undertaking of the time—a war that was slowly forcing the collapse of the Soviet Union. The fact that India had not condemned the 1979 Soviet intervention in Afghanistan and walked a fine line was a sore point with the Americans. They had no time for Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s dilemma and her fine lines. While she didn’t condemn the Soviet invasion in public, she did so in private.

I.K. Gujral, who was India’s ambassador in Moscow in 1979, recalled a meeting between the Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko and Mrs Gandhi in 1980, when the Soviets came to Delhi looking for Indian support. Gujral said in an interview with the Indian Foreign Affairs Journal, published in the January–March 2006 issue, that after an hour-long presentation, Gromyko asked Mrs Gandhi if she appreciated the Soviet position. Her terse answer was, ‘I’m sorry I can’t appreciate it.’ A major reason for Mrs Gandhi being upset with Moscow was that the Soviet intervention had given the US an excuse to resume arms supplies to Pakistan.

But India couldn’t risk its friendship with the Soviets and end up alone in the middle of a galloping regional crisis. Washington saw South Asia mainly in terms of its rivalry with the Soviets and gratitude to Pakistan, first in creating an opening to a communist giant (China) and then helping to defeat another. India’s stand complicated the picture for the US. American tendency was to define issues and South Asia’s tangled history in simple binaries—it suited whatever policy the US administration was pushing as the ‘right’ one.

India was ‘non-aligned’ and not a camp follower like Pakistan—it was friends with the Soviets, which put India on the wrong side of the Americans. It also dared to argue in the United Nations against pretty much all US endeavours. In the Indian mind, the US in the late 1980s was still the country that had threatened India in 1971 by sending the 7th Fleet to the Bay of Bengal at the height of the India–Pakistan war that led to the birth of Bangladesh. To add insult to injury, President Richard Nixon wanted China to ‘scare those goddamn Indians to death’, as he told Henry Kissinger, his national security adviser, according to documents declassified later. But China didn’t respond, while the Soviets dispatched naval units to the Indian Ocean in line with the Indo-Soviet friendship treaty, and Kissinger’s machinations ultimately came to naught.

The Pakistan Army surrendered, and India faced off a formidable US–Pakistan–China front, successfully managing the geopolitics of the times. Memories lingered in the diplomatic psyche. Nixon and Kissinger had written the darkest chapter of US policy in South Asia in modern times. They wilfully ignored the genocide of Bengali Muslims and Hindus, defended Pakistani generals who ordered the genocide, and actively plotted against India, a country that intervened to stop the genocide.³ This twisted policy was partly a result of Kissinger’s biggest brainwave—the 1972 US opening to China after years of diplomatic isolation and Pakistan’s help in arranging it. Fast-forward to the brutal irony of present times and watch that brainwave, augmented by successive US administrations, threaten American superiority in every imaginable realm and Washington pair up with New Delhi and other capitals to manage China’s rise.

The events of 1971 and their aftermath strengthened negative feelings and stereotypes Washington and New Delhi already had about each other. Geoffrey Kemp, a Reagan administration official and a South Asia expert, told me early in my stint as a journalist that many Indians still saw all Americans as John Foster Dulles in disguise while Americans thought all Indians were Krishna Menon under cover. Back in the 1950s, Dulles, as secretary of state, and Menon, as India’s representative to the United Nations, epitomized the clash of national personalities like none other, even if they were mirror images in some ways.

My generation continued the ideological battle over endless cups of chai in Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in Delhi—our very own castle of fairness and freedom. I remember how skittish we were as young journalists if we met an American diplomat at a reception and had to make conversation. We were so generous, we labelled every American diplomat a ‘CIA agent’ for his or her country’s role in all the coups engineered and assassinations attempted. We ‘knew’ because we had read Inside the Company: CIA Diary, the Philip Agee book about being an undercover agent. Any argument to the contrary was ‘wrong’ in our view.

An equal and negative stereotype about Indians existed on the American side—Indians couldn’t be trusted because they never agreed and never followed (our) rules, argued endlessly and sucked the momentum out of everything with their crappy Third World arguments. ‘Keep the Indians out if you want to get things done’ was the overall attitude. ‘Don’t leave me alone in a room with an Indian diplomat—he will chew my brain, not the food on his dinner plate.’

Can’t We Just Get Along?

Given this mindset, getting India’s point of view across on Capitol Hill was extremely tough. No one had time for India’s complex reality, its dangerous neighbourhood or its determination to get ‘respect’ from Club West. India’s foreign ministry didn’t believe in hiring a professional lobbyist in Washington, which could have made the task somewhat easier. A friend of the Gandhi family, Janki Ganju, did the job for many years after leaving his post as the press counsellor in the Indian Embassy in 1964, but by the time the 1980s came around, India’s problems on Capitol Hill had outgrown the one-man outfit. Ganju, an affable man, simply could not deliver the goods with his legendary home-cooked meals for the few movers and shakers of Washington he knew.

Indian diplomats considered it beneath their dignity to depend on an American ‘mercenary’ to argue India’s case. After all, how could a paid lobbyist with no background in Indian history or geography be trusted above an Indian diplomat dedicated to the cause of his country? Even Solarz, a nine-term Congressman, felt a lobbyist would help, and indicated as much during an interview to me. He himself would be hired for the job ten years later, in the aftermath of India’s 1998 nuclear tests and after he had lost his House seat.

It was easy to see how other countries used this Washington tradition to effect changes in US policy, or at least get a fair hearing from policymakers. I remember writing a few pieces to argue, ‘When in Rome, do as the Romans do’, but there was very little traction for the idea in New Delhi those days. The term ‘lobbyist’ remained a dirty word for a few more years as troubles multiplied on Capitol Hill, with the Khalistani and Pakistan-supported Kashmiri groups working in tandem.

India’s ambassador at the time, Pratap Kishan Kaul, told me in an interview before his departure in August 1989 that various bilateral problems were ‘better described as hiccoughs’, not a ‘downswing’ as I had characterized them in my question. The ‘hiccoughs’ included intense questioning of India on Capitol Hill, a close vote in the House to cut development aid to India, sharp criticism of India’s first test of the Agni intermediate-range ballistic missile, the denial of a missile-testing device and the naming of India on the US Trade Representative’s dreaded ‘Super 301’ list for imposing restrictions on foreign investments.

Kaul did agree that it was ‘a matter of concern’ that 204 Congressmen, many of them Republican, had voted to slash development aid to India, while 212 were in favour of maintaining the relatively small amount of $23 million. The vote rattled the Indian foreign ministry. Even though the cut itself wouldn’t matter in financial terms, the reasons for the cut would. The symbolism of the US slashing development aid to a democratic India on human rights grounds would be huge. Indian diplomats worked hard to prevent the cut in aid.

‘Our efforts to make our position known will have to continue. Apprehensions will be confirmed if this happens again. But if it doesn’t, it can be regarded as an isolated case,’ Kaul said. I could almost touch Kaul’s ivory tower. Unfortunately, it wasn’t an isolated case but became a recurring one for some time to come. Kaul did increase the embassy staff tasked with reaching out to Capitol Hill.

Money for Pakistan, Jets for Free

Another issue of great concern to India in 1989 was the proposed sale of sixty F-16 fighter jets to Pakistan. The process was moving through the Congress, since congressional approval is required for all defence sales. Questions about Pakistan’s nuclear programme lurked in the background. To receive US military aid, Pakistan required an annual certificate of good behaviour. The US President had to certify that Pakistan was not making a nuclear bomb. Would President George H.W. Bush be able to give a clean chit despite mounting evidence, including from his own CIA, to the contrary?

The certification was required under the 1985 Pressler Amendment. The amendment was originally a carve-out to allow the two parties to wink and nod, and keep American aid to Pakistan and the mujahideen flowing. Solarz and another liberal Democrat from New York, Congressman Ted Weiss, tried to put conditions on the F-16 sale. But officials of the State and Defence departments pushed back. In fact, Teresita Schaffer, former deputy assistant secretary of state for Near East and South Asia, argued at a congressional hearing that ‘a more confident Pakistan will be better able to negotiate the kind of fair and lasting agreements with India, which will reduce the chances of war between them’.When Solarz asked if the delivery of F-16s would stop in case Pakistan failed to get the annual certification, Schaffer didn’t give a clear answer. Instead, she argued that Pakistan was surrounded by countries with large militaries—Iran, China, India and the Soviet Union—and needed US support.

Schaffer also resisted Solarz’s suggestion that the sale be linked to Pakistan remaining a democracy. She said such linkage would send a bad signal and amount to a ‘vote of no-confidence’ against Islamabad. ‘We have considered India’s views very carefully,’ Schaffer intoned. The hearing gave a flavour of the US administration’s attitude at the time. Many hearings before and after were of a similar nature.

Schaffer’s arguments gave the essence of Washington’s South Asia policy—military parity must be maintained between India and Pakistan. If India got ahead because of indigenous capabilities or Soviet weapon sales, Pakistan must be compensated. In this case, the sixty F-16s would do nicely. Democracy, or lack thereof, was not a defining metric for hardcore decisions. Sometimes I wondered if democracy was a qualification at all.

This was a very different time in India–US relations compared to the 1950s, when Americans actively wanted Indian democracy to survive and prove to newly independent countries that communism and the Chinese/Soviet models were not the answer. It was a time when a US President—Dwight Eisenhower—would regularly consult young India’s first Prime Minister—Jawaharlal Nehru—on international issues. The two had differing views on China and whether and how it must be integrated into the world community. But there was no doubt that survival of India’s democracy was an important goal for the Americans.

Even when repeatedly frustrated by Nehru’s point of view, Eisenhower and his deputies would come back to the original argument—the survival of Indian democracy as a goal in itself.

Over time, Eisenhower understood—even appreciated—the concept of non-alignment and India’s need for creating a bouquet of different friends. It made sense to him that Nehru wanted to avoid alliances. He saw non-alignment as a strategy, not so much an ideology, and a pragmatic necessity, not a choice between good and evil. Eisenhower called it ‘neutralism’, and the idea didn’t seem to rattle him as much as it did many others. He didn’t want to lose India—the biggest argument against communism.

Nixon, a stringent critic of non-alignment, found Eisenhower’s attitude unacceptable. In the battle against communism, those who didn’t take sides were automatically suspect. But more importantly, Nixon held India responsible for the 1971 India–Pakistan war and for complicating his opening to China. The frustration fuelled his imagination. When Pakistan’s defeat seemed inevitable in the east, he and Kissinger claimed to allies that Mrs Gandhi was on her way to attack West Pakistan. Kissinger encouraged China to get militarily involved and hinted broadly that the US would protect Beijing from any criticism. He told China’s UN representative that a Pakistan–China–US axis was needed to scare India back to the pavilion. Official Indian records show there was no plan to invade West Pakistan. Kissinger was clearly exercising the diplomatic prerogative to exaggerate.

Nixon’s personal animus towards Indians in general and Mrs Gandhi in particular has been revealed in lurid detail through declassified documents over the past few years. Kissinger was no less hostile, even though at times he was a sycophant trying to please his boss. If Nixon called Mrs Gandhi a ‘bitch’, Kissinger countered, ‘The Indians are bastards anyway’ for contemplating a war.⁴ The transcripts can make one’s hair stand on end. The language of the two men is downright racist and misogynistic. In today’s ‘woke’ culture, they would be instantly ‘cancelled’.

Nixon and Kissinger sacrificed a reasonably well-working relationship with India for a shiny new objective called China, plunging it to its lowest point since 1947. They punished India economically by cancelling World Bank loans and militarily by blocking spare parts. They even delayed food aid. Cold warriors before them had always managed to maintain good relations with India despite differences.

The long Nixon–Kissinger shadow still darkened doors in the late 1980s as I struggled to explain to readers why the two democracies had difficulty getting along. If there was a positive move here, there was an equal and opposite negative there. The pendulum would swing between an ‘up’ year and a ‘down’ year. In interactions with State Department officials, I heard stories of petty-mindedness—about cutting the number of telephone lines to the Indian Embassy because of an abrupt reduction in connections to the US Embassy in Delhi. The State Department’s India desk officers spent time thinking of innovative ways to prick just as the Indian foreign ministry found new ways to prod.

After a few months of reporting, I wrote my first analytical piece asking rather earnestly why it should be so. ‘Why can’t the two countries be better friends or at least more stable friends without the frequent mood swings?’ Even back in 1989, many analysts on both sides were convinced that there was more convergence than divergence in terms of long-term interests. But there was little appreciation of India, its history, its diverse people and its democratic institutions. American officials complained about the moralistic tone—when Indians talk, they pontificate. ‘India and the US never fail to pat themselves on the back for being democracies, but somehow they do not pat each other on the back enough,’ was my naïve conclusion.

Pakistan’s Bomb: Wink and Nod

A few weeks later, in 1989, came the ‘October surprise’. Despite evidence to the contrary, Bush gave a clean chit to Pakistan’s nuclear programme and certified that the country was not making a weapon. He is said to have ‘agonized’ over the decision, according to a State Department official I spoke to. Bush’s predecessor, Ronald Reagan, had said the year before that a future certification was unlikely since Pakistan was very close to the final act. Yet, Bush went ahead and did the ‘needful’.

Bush’s certification allowed the ongoing six-year $3.2-billion military and economic aid package to Pakistan to continue. Reagan and Bush had given Pakistan a pass for three years in contravention of existing US laws. The anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan trumped non-proliferation concerns.

Only in 1990 would Bush inform the US Congress he could no longer give a certification, thus ending all military and most economic aid to Pakistan. The reason: Soviet troops had departed from Afghanistan, drastically reducing Pakistan’s importance in US calculations. It was time to obey the law on nuclear non-proliferation. But contortions in US policy to accommodate Pakistan when needed and ignore China’s role in abetting Islamabad’s ambitions would continue. It would remain a huge source of distrust between India and the US.

So emboldened was Pakistan’s ISI, having played ‘god’ in Afghanistan with American money and weapons, it tried to punish the State Department for cutting off aid by withholding information about the ground situation. Frustrated by ISI’s moves, a State Department official told me at the time, ‘We should understand that our interests are not the same as Pakistan’s and we should stop covering for them.’ But senior US diplomats in the region, such as Robert Oakley, the US ambassador to Pakistan at the time, wanted to keep a foot in.

Barnett Rubin, an expert on Afghanistan, told the US Congress that US policy was becoming hostage to Pakistan and Saudi interests. ‘The long-standing alliance between the CIA and the Pakistani and Saudi intelligence agencies ought to be broken. Both these agencies are pursuing independent sectarian goals in Afghanistan,’ he told the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, a body of the US Congress. The ISI was doing the military planning for the mujahideen and exploiting rivalries among various factions using bribes and guns.

State Department officials were trying to craft a political solution between the mujahideen factions and Najibullah with the help of the Soviets so that arms supplies to the region could stop and the two superpowers could go home. The military stalemate on the ground had forced the State Department to consider a political solution more seriously. A three-step process was being discussed—an Afghan interim government would hold a traditional assembly, or ‘shura’, to create broad-based support; the shura would talk to ‘non-criminal’ elements of Najibullah’s government and create a more popular government; and Najibullah would depart at the end, not be humiliated. The arrangement would allow the Soviets to save face. Secretary of State James Baker and Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze were both keen to find a way out. But Pakistan was against a US–Soviet settlement and told the Afghan fundamentalists it was a ploy to sell them out.

The ISI coached the mujahideen to demand a one-step process—a straight transfer of power to the interim government, something the Soviets would not accept. The ISI wanted to instal Gulbuddin Hekmatyar in Kabul to ensure pliability and control. But the ISI was unable to direct its chaotic coalition of radical Islamic warriors. Najibullah resigned in 1992, bereft of friends and Soviet aid, because by then the Soviet Union itself had dissolved. He stayed in Afghanistan until 1996, trying to find safe passage out. His family was given refuge in India, but Najibullah ended up living in the UN compound in Kabul. He was tortured and killed in 1996 by the Taliban and his body brutalized in public. The Taliban had emerged as a group by 1994 amid the continuing chaos.

It’s uncanny how similar the situation was twenty-five years later in Afghanistan. The two main actors—the Americans and the Russians—were still around, but their roles were reversed. The ISI still controlled the process through Taliban proxies, while ordinary Afghans continued to suffer.

Chapter 2

Post–Cold War South Asia

On Christmas in 1991, the Soviet flag flew over the Kremlin for the last time. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics broke into fifteen independent countries, and Mikhail Gorbachev resigned as President. Boris Yeltsin became the new President of Russia. The dissolution of the Soviet Union had been in the making for some time. Gorbachev’s attempt to reform the country with glasnost (openness) and perestroika (economic reforms) had become a runaway train to freedom.

The world watched in amazement. First, the Soviet bloc in Eastern Europe unravelled, starting with Poland in June 1989; by November, East and West Germany were tearing down the Berlin Wall. Governments in Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Romania fell one by one, and demands for independence were soon at the door of the Soviet Union. It had taken a little more than a year for the world to change completely. Diplomats all around were perplexed, unable to make sense of it all, leave alone plot their next strategy.

But there was widespread relief that the Cold War was over. The great power rivalry