Harold Gould is a familiar name to Indian readers. His latest books gives an engaging account of the way successive American Presidents viewed India and reacted to India down the years while telling us how his own views on and of India have been shaped since he visited the country in 1954.
From Roosevelt to Barak Obama every one of the American Presidents have contributed to broad basing the India-US relations even as they got carried away by the Pakistani phenomenon and the Washington’s geo-political and strategic considerations of the day. The author reasons thus: ‘there are broad historical patterns in which the policies and decisions of American presidents can be classified, yet their unique personalities and ideological predispositions also played a role in the political choices they made’. This is what we have come to term as the US diplomacy of hyphenation in South Asia.
Though we don’t see an end to the practice, as yet, the writer, who is a visiting professor at the Centre for South Asian Studies, University of Virginia, strongly believes that India-US relations have acquired a new depth and new vision under President Bill Clinton and his successors. We are told that the tilt towards Islamabad in the early days was primarily on account of British thinking influencing strategic egg-heads in Washington. The prospect of establishing an American air base in the Kashmir Valley appeared tantalizingly close to a reality in those days as the ‘Americans were enticed to favour a greater Pakistan that included Kashmir’. Both 9/11 and 26/11 have taken the US in a different tangent. And it has to settle for an airstrip in Balochistan for ‘Drones’ to take off on sorties to Pakistan’s very own Talibanised tribal belt. Yet, surprisingly, the US refuses to revisit its anti-terror doctrine and the Afghan war strategy, which are tied to Islamabad’s goals. There is a naivety of sorts in the US policy prescriptions vis-à-vis Pakistan that is hard to believe. Otherwise how can one explain why the US has allowed Pakistan to dictate the course of events in the Af-Pak region that have seen the emergence of an ISI mark ‘good Taliban’ and the award of ‘saviour’ tag to the Haqqani network. The US assertions on aid utilizations have turned out to be an empty rhetoric. In fact, at times US appeared happily content with the pushing of its arms cart into the two rival South Asian markets. Professor Gould has elaborated his views on the US-India relationship in a newspaper interview recently. He said and I quote: ‘The long-term consequences of delinking India and Pakistan mean that the balance of power in South Asia has shifted from its Cold War militarized US-Pakistan axis to a US-India axis which features a broad range of military, economic and nuclear coordination. The range is the thing: multiplex ties of this nature acquire an enduring quality that bodes well for the future as long as mutual relations continue to be managed as well as they thus far have been since the Clinton breakthrough. I think institutionalization of the new relationship has gone far enough by now for one to conclude that some key aspects have become virtually irreversible. But if political conditions in Pakistan ever disintegrate to such a point that the Islamic extremists who permeate the body politic pose the danger of gaining control of the government, and threaten to gain access to Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, the game could change in an instant’. Gould is convinced that the Obama administration will like to see Pakistan make steady progress in the direction of democratic governance. That should be bad news to the new Musharrafs in the making at the GHQ in Rawalpinidi. From what President Barak Obama (also his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton) have said in the past few days, he appears to accept the basic premises of the India-US strategic relationship. He also expects the US to benefit from India’s growth story when his own American economy refuses quickly move out of the meltdown stage. But a reality known to students of international affairs is that while the Democratic regimes go out of their way to eulogize the great Indian democracy, it is the Republic regimes which have shown flexibility in dealings with India with their willingness, and, in fact, readiness for the out of box thinking. Long before Bill Clinton appeared on the scene with his unadulterated admiration of India, Delhi had a great friend in John F Kennedy. He was very keen on meeting India’s first prime minister. As contemporary media reports had recorded, and the Gould narrative tells now, the Kennedy- Nehru summit was a disaster. “By the time Nehru reached Washington he was in his seventies and clearly showing his age and Kennedy found him to be ‘terribly passive’. Kennedy said that it (their meeting) was ‘like trying to grab something in your hand, only to have it turn out to be just fog’. It was, Kennedy said, ‘a disaster…. The worst head –of-state visit I have had’.”
