Coming as it does amid apparently thawing border tensions between India and China, the US decision to ‘sell’ $450-million worth of spares for the ageing F-16 fleet of Pakistan Air Force (PAF) has the potential to disturb current attempts at regional peace in the region. It does not mean to impact the quick disengagement of Indian and Chinese forces from two more border points in the aftermath of the 2020 Galwan episode. But it does indicate the eerie similarity between the American and Chinese attitudes towards India where matters of exercising their influence in the sub-continent are concerned.
The US decision reminds India of the difference between the nation’s Cold War-era strategic relations with the erstwhile Soviet Union and the present one with China. The Soviet Union acknowledged South Asia and the abutting IOR as India’s ‘traditional sphere of influence’ and acted accordingly.
Habituated to Cold War practices vis-à-vis India, the US, like China, does not consider the region as ‘India’s traditional sphere of influence’. Hence, it is unable and unwilling to act as the Soviets did.
Between the two, China, before making plain its ambitions for the region in a big way, had its media mouthpieces propagate its stand that the ‘Indian Ocean is not India’s ocean’, even while claiming that the South and East China Seas were China’s own. The US has been more sophisticated. Washington lets its actions speak for themselves. This has been so even after India and the US signed the first-ever defence cooperation pact in 2005 and followed it up with many more upgraded ones.
Washington says it expected India to understand its position on F-16 spares for Pakistan. New Delhi has no such expectation or understanding. India also feels cheated because the US, as always, had not taken it into confidence beforehand. In the past, the Soviet Union failed to keep India abreast of its ill-fated occupation of Afghanistan—and the nation itself collapsed in the process.
India understands the region better than outsiders, even in matters of the West’s ‘democratic considerations’ in tagging nations as ‘evil forces’, more pronounced than in the past. New Delhi’s understanding of the matter goes beyond India’s strategic and security concerns.
The US failure in Afghanistan is a case in point. Suppose people in Washington are in the habit of contemplating. In that case, they will get their current answers from the past: Why did successive governments in New Delhi not yield to American pressures to put ‘Indian boots’ on the ground in Afghanistan?
Despite all the educational opportunities and jobs in the US, the Indian street opinion too can change. It will pressure New Delhi, independent of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his proven domestic popularity and his pull also among the NRI community in that country. There are inherent limitations to ‘managing’ governments in other nations, making a habit of its success in the short-term and losing out completely in the end.
Even without it all, the India-China-Pakistan triangle, as a geo-strategic region, has been heating up over the post-Cold War decades without anyone acknowledging it. The increasing assertiveness of Iran, and the inability of an America-backed Iraq to measure up, matter. The western world feels comfortable not wanting to think or rethink the Syrian conundrum. For them, the Ukraine War provides an unintelligently intellectual escape route for their conscience.
Imagine a situation where there is peace between India and Pakistan/China that is both measurable and sustainable; the whole geopolitics of the region changes overnight. It is easier said than done, but in the current context, no one should be surprised if, for instance, someone in the Kremlin is stealthily overworking his grey cells to try and help it happen. India does not tolerate the idea of trilateral consultations on bilateral issues.
In what should be seen as an ambitious plan to revive the Soviet superpower legacy, that too in the midst of the Ukraine War, where fortunes have been swinging, Russian President Vladimir Putin unveiled a new foreign policy for a ‘Russian World’. The 31-page document says that Moscow should increase cooperation with China, India and the Slavic nations, apart from further strengthening ties with West Asia, Latin America and Africa.
In New Delhi recently, Russian Ambassador Denis Alipov declared that a Russia-India-China (RIC) trilateral had ‘incredible potential for cooperation’. He did not elaborate but did not stop there, either. Alipov said that the RIC approach was very different from the policy of some powers, which ‘purposefully misuse’ disagreements between India and China. No marks for guessing which powers the Russian envoy had in mind.
Coming as it did in the context of Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbhaz Sharif’s declaration that the Kashmir issue with India had to be resolved through non-military means, the US announcement on F-16 spares could be a spoiler of sorts. It may even be argued that Pakistan needed to negotiate peace with India from a position of relative military strength—equity if not equality. It does not wash. Instead, such a course could tip Rawalpindi’s military establishment one up on Islamabad’s political leadership if the latter had any intention for peace. Whenever Pakistan had acquired American military assistance, it had deployed them as much against India as against the intended target, if any. Of this, there was only one through the Cold War years: the ‘occupying’ Soviet forces in Afghanistan. On all other occasions, the US funding and arming of Pakistan were aimed only at India, and so was the end-use of those weapons. The ‘Bangladesh War’ (1971) is a memorable example.
Even without the American refit for Pakistan’s F-16, there is enough cause for tension in the region, with the latter’s ‘all-weather friend’ China pushing up the mercury all around India. It was evidenced in the ‘Galwan episode’ on India’s northern land border and the more recent controversy involving Chinese research/spy vessel Yuan Wang 5’s port call at Hambantota, Sri Lanka, in the South.It thus seems to be a return to the old days and ways for the US—even while proclaiming India as a friend and ally, and Pakistan as a terror-hotspot.
N Sathiya Moorthy
Policy analyst and commentator