How designs of China, Pakistan failed
Here is a speculative hypothesis that India, China and Pakistan have been locked up in a silent war, the latter two allied against India for the last 50 years. That war is coming to an end with India emerging victorious. At stake in the war was the very concept of India as a multi-religious, multi-cultural and multi-ethnic democratic polity — the vision associated with Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and other leaders of the nationalistic struggle.
Pakistan’s visceral animosity to a secular, democratic India has been known since Independence, and the Pakistanis believed that the Indian unity would not last long and the country would break up. There were doubts about Nehru’s capacity to lead. That was the time when Selig Harrison wrote about “India’s dangerous decade.” By 1965 the US war- game planners concluded that the Indian Army would not be able to stand up to the Pakistan Army. Pakistan and China started helping the insurgents in the North-East in the mid-fifties.
The Chinese communists had contempt for Nehru and exhorted the Indian communists to wage a war against the “running dog of imperialism”. The communists, drawing inspiration from the Zhadanov thesis of 1946 and the proceedings of the Calcutta Asian Youth Conference, launched an insurgency in Telangana and elsewhere. For them the unity of India was less important at that stage than establishing communist enclaves.
In the mid-fifties the Chinese started treating India as an adversary and began establishing relations with Pakistan for joint pressures on India. The 1965 war with Pakistan had full Chinese support. Though that war did not go in favour of the Pakistanis, as the Chinese and Americans expected it, China intensified its campaign against India with its articles “Spring Thunder over India” and “Prairie fire sweeping India”, a source of inspiration for the Naxalites. China also became Pakistan’s primary military supplier.
India had not always been a passive party. In the 1950s, knowing the Chinese hostility, India offered limited resources and facilities for the US efforts to keep the Tibetan insurgency alive. In the sixties India actively helped Sheikh Mujibur Rehman’s Awami League which finally led to the emergence of Bangladesh.
In 1971 Pakistan, China and the US did not anticipate the will power India demonstrated by involving the then USSR in a countervailing deterrent framework and successfully completing the Bangladesh campaign with a little bit of luck. The “Kissinger Papers”, conversation of Kissinger with the Chinese leadership, brings out the utter contempt in which Mao and his colleagues held India in the 1970s.
The Bangladesh war and the 1974 Pokhran nuclear test projected an image of India with a will to emerge as a regional power. As the Kashmir issue was solved with Sheikh Abdullah, Laldenga gave up insurgency and became the Chief Minister of Mizoram and a peace accord was signed in the North-East. But the imposition of the Emergency exposed India’s vulnerability. China and Pakistan signed a treaty when Bhutto visited Beijing in June 1976. Thereafter the Chinese appeared to have decided to use Pakistan to countervail India by making Pakistan a nuclear weapon power. In 1980 both China and Pakistan became allies of the US in the war in Afghanistan. The Americans decided to look the other way when the Chinese began to help Pakistan to acquire nuclear arms as the price to obtain Pakistan’s support for the Mujahideen campaign in Afghanistan.
Deng Xiao-Ping was more sophisticated than his predecessors. He did not want to play any direct anti-India role and, therefore, in accordance with his policies vis-a-vis the other South- East Asian countries, stopped all Chinese support to anti-India insurgents. General Zia-ul-Haq, emboldened by his nuclear capability acquired from China, started a pro-Khalistan campaign in the mid-eighties. The came the proxy war (terrorism in Jammu and Kashmir) in 1989. The Chinese also decided to arm the Pakistanis with a whole range of missiles. There are rumours that the Chinese assisted Pakistan during the May 1998 tests. The China-Pakistan nuclear relationship was so strong that the Chinese reneged on their pledges to the US about stopping supplies to Islamabad in the 1990s.
By giving Pakistan the nuclear shield the Chinese enabled it to act with impunity vis-a-vis India in terrorist campaigns, but this also gave confidence to successive Pakistani administrations to extend support to the Taliban and Al-Qaida in defiance of the US. Once again the Shakti tests of India asserted that New Delhi was determined to display its will to become a major power. By that time India had successfully withstood Pakistan’s campaign in Kashmir for nine years. Pakistan tried its last card — the Kargil intrusion — and it became totally counter-productive. Then came 9/11 and Pakistan did a U-turn, abandoned the Taliban and Al-Qaida and became a partner in the war against terrorism. Yet Islamabad expected to save its capability to carry on terrorism vis-a-vis India using jihadi organisations. It also hoped that it would still be able to indulge in nuclear sabre-rattling.
Two more developments have exposed China’s Pakistan game. One, the disclosure about the A.Q. Khan proliferation network involving China and the usual denial of China that its help to Pakistan was only for civilian purposes. What China says on the issue is no longer credible. Two, the 9/11 commission found that successive Pakistani governments helped the Taliban and Al-Qaida partly because these jihadis were available for operations in Kashmir. This has been confirmed by President Clinton in his book.
Now China is reconciled to dealing with a multi-religious, multi-lingual, multi-ethnic and democratic India without any hope of its breaking up. The arrogance of Maoist communism and the contempt for Nehruvian liberalism have given place to the understanding among the new generation that they have to change their fossiled ideologies.
The Pakistanis are isolated. Today
circumstances are ripe for long-term durable peace both with China and
Pakistan after 56 years of a silent war. India did not reach this stage
through the Panchsheel and Simla Agreements but through Shakti and Agni
tests and the sacrifices of thousands of security men in counter-insurgency
and counter-terrorist operations, besides the casualties suffered in the
five wars this country has fought.