There is no dearth of scholarship on US-India relations or on Sino-Indian relations. However, few, if any, scholars have sought to link India's relations with the United States with that of the People's Republic of China (PRC). Yet, during the Cold War, the fortunes of the three states were in many ways quite intertwined. Indian views of the PRC, especially in the early days of the Cold War, significantly affected the course of US-India relations. Later American policy shifts toward the PRC, particularly under the Richard Nixon administration, had profound ramifications for India.
Two recent books, Francine R. Frankel's When Nehru Looked East and Tanvi Madan's Fateful Triangle, provide important discussions of the many turning points in this triangular relationship. Frankel's book, as the title suggests, concerns itself with the period under the leadership of India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. Despite the apparent focus on the role of the PRC in US-India relations, her work actually has a wider scope. A significant part of the initial segment of the book, for example, deals with the vexed issue of the Indo-Pakistani dispute over Kashmir. Frankel's analysis of this critical epoch is bolstered by considerable archival research. However, it mostly confirms the prior findings of Chandrasekhar Dasgupta's masterful account War and Diplomacy in Kashmir, that British politicians and diplomats squarely influenced mostly naive American policy makers into adopting an overtly pro-Pakistani stance on the dispute.Footnote 1
Frankel then turns her attention to the interactions that the United States and India had during the Korean War. In this section, she elaborates upon how India sought to play the crucial role of an intermediary between the United States and the PRC during this vital crisis. She demonstrates that India's attempts to placate the PRC in the name of avoiding a wider conflict quickly and unfortunately placed it at odds with the United States. Of course, India's efforts to appease the PRC stemmed in considerable part from its concern about stabilizing the Sino-Indian border in the Himalayas. Subsequently, India's efforts to maintain a degree of influence in Beijing had a particularly unwelcome effect on American public opinion toward India.
Other sections of the book are exemplary in terms of their description and analysis of the historical record, for example, a segment dealing with the US decision to forge a military alliance with Pakistan. As is well-known, and as Frankel confirms, the US decision stemmed largely from the anticommunist zeal of the Dwight D. Eisenhower administration and that of his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles. It is worth noting, as Frankel underscores, that knowledgeable diplomats in the US State Department expressed misgivings about this pact and that Senator William Fulbright, the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, clearly expressed his reservations about the wisdom of the alliance.
Of course, the treaty dealt a significant blow to US-India relations and caused deep resentment among India's political leadership. In the same chapter, Frankel dwells at considerable length on the discussions that led to the creation of another American-led pact, the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO). The British prime minister, Sir Anthony Eden, who was obviously privy to the American plans, had invited Nehru to attend a planning meeting to discuss the prospective treaty. Nehru declined, however, invoking India's commitment to nonalignment and India's interest in seeking peace in Southeast Asia. Frankel's analyses of the political backdrop to the forging of these two pacts is quite sound. It is nevertheless far from clear that India's relations with and concerns about the PRC played a significant role in its hostility toward the first and its unwillingness to support the second.
Later in the same chapter, Frankel turns to an important discussion at the Bandung Conference that, for all practical purposes, set the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) in motion. (The first, formal meeting of the NAM would take place in Belgrade in 1961.) Even though Nehru had invited Zhou Enlai, the Chinese premier, to the meeting, it was Zhou, not Nehru, who won the most attention of the delegates. This was ironic because many of the countries who rebuffed Nehru's attempts to get them to eschew military pacts were actually quite exercised about the threat of global communism.
Other episodes, quite unrelated to the PRC, also undermined US-India relations. For example, India's stance on the Hungarian crisis of 1956 also contributed to US-India estrangement. On this occasion, Nehru's failure to forthrightly condemn the Soviet invasion of Hungary, in contrast with his vehement denunciation of British, French, and Israeli actions in the Suez Crisis earlier that same year, understandably led to charges of double standards. Despite this gulf between US and Indian views of the crisis at the highest levels of leadership, the United States would nevertheless play a critical role in the Sino-Indian border crisis and war of 1962. Oddly enough, while this chapter provides meticulous detail on the crisis itself, its discussion of the substantial American role in it is somewhat scanty.
Frankel's book, while very carefully researched, thoroughly documented, and clearly drafted, falls short on one critical dimension. Obviously, India's stance toward the PRC at various junctures during the Cold War did little to boost the cause of US-India relations. However, as her own evidence repeatedly shows, the two countries, as the international relations scholar J. Ann Tickner demonstrated in her book Self-Reliance and Power Politics, had vastly different conceptions of world order.Footnote 2 Regardless of their differences on how best to deal with the PRC, it is possible to argue that the two democracies would have emerged, to use the American diplomatic historian Andrew Rotter's evocative phrase, as “comrades at odds.”Footnote 3
Tanvi Madan's book Fateful Triangle covers substantial portions of the same ground but extends its analysis into the late 1970s. Madan's book is equally well researched but takes a more straightforward chronological approach. Madan's central argument is that American policies toward the PRC shaped its policies toward India. In turn, she claims that New Delhi's view of Beijing shaped its ties with the United States.
At the outset, Madan asserts that one of the lodestars of postindependence India's foreign policy, nonalignment, was not merely based upon ideological premises. Instead, she contends that it was a pragmatic doctrine that sought to maintain the newly independent nation's decisional autonomy. This quest for autonomy coupled with a certain naivete on Nehru's part about India's ability to shape the behavior of the PRC, placed New Delhi at odds with the United States under the Harry S. Truman administration. The United States saw the PRC as part of the communist monolith and thereby felt the necessity to keep it at bay. India, despite the prescient warnings of its able ambassador to Beijing, K. M. Pannikar, instead saw it as a mostly nationalist power. To that end, New Delhi sought to moderate the behavior of the PRC. However, Beijing obdurately blamed the United States for the tensions surrounding Taiwan. Despite these differences, the United States remained fitfully committed to India's development seeing it as a possible bulwark against Communist expansion in Asia.
It is interesting to note that despite a detailed and mostly nuanced account of US-India relations during the Eisenhower administration, Madan, unlike Frankel, devotes only a short section of chapter to the US-Pakistan pact of 1954 and its impact on India. Given the extraordinary consequences that this treaty had on Nehru's views toward the United States, her cursory discussion of the subject is somewhat baffling.
That said, her analysis of a critical period in US-India relations, from 1959 to 1962, is deeply informed, carefully nuanced, and downright fascinating. Among other matters, it shows that despite the PRC's truculence toward India from the late 1950s, even in 1961, Nehru still held the flawed belief that it would not resort to military action against India. Of course, events in October 1962 would prove him to be dramatically wrong. In the following chapter, Madan discusses a particularly delicate set of negotiations that the United States (and the United Kingdom) prompted India to pursue with Pakistan following the disastrous Sino-Indian border war. In part the John F. Kennedy administration was keen on an India-Pakistan rapprochement because it believed that such an understanding would enable the two countries to adopt a common front against the PRC. In the event, this effort failed largely because Nehru was in no position to make any concessions to Pakistan. Two factors left him hamstrung: the emergent Sino-Pakistan nexus and his own domestic political weakness in the aftermath of the 1962 war.
Madan also provides an illuminating account of the interactions of the United States, the PRC, and India during the Vietnam War especially during the Lyndon Johnson administration. During this time span, India found itself in a cleft stick: on the one hand, it was firmly opposed to the US escalation of the war in Vietnam. Simultaneously, it was acutely dependent on the United States for food assistance to stave off the possibility of famine. As India found itself at odds with the United States on the issue of Vietnam, Johnson accordingly dragged his feet on food aid. Amid these dire conditions, Indian policy makers, Madan shows, fretted that the PRC would exploit India's time of duress to sow discord within the country and exert renewed pressure on its borders.
Of course, US-India relations would significantly deteriorate under the Nixon administration as it reached out to the PRC against the backdrop of an impending crisis in Pakistan. Despite the fact that this phase of US-India relations has been covered quite extensively, Madan nevertheless manages to bring a degree of freshness to the discussion. For example, it is intriguing to learn that Indira Gandhi, in the hope of reducing tensions with the PRC, actually considered signing a treaty with Beijing. However, one of her principal advisors, P. N. Haksar, dissuaded her from pursuing this option.
Madan concludes the book with a brief discussion of how the challenge of a rising and assertive PRC has produced a degree of strategi convergence between the United States and India. Of course, what remains to be seen is if it can be placed on a more secure footing given India's ideé fixe about maintaining its strategic autonomy.
These two books together demonstrate that, despite the vast body of scholarship that exists on the US-India bilateral relationship, the inclusion of the PRC in those discussions offers new insights into its evolution. Both authors, through their extensive use of newly accessible archives, have made important and novel contributions to the existing knowledge of the subject.
