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By P.K.Balachandran
Colombo, December 14: The Indo-US relationship which was sailing smoothly and even saw an upswing when Donald Trump was US President, now appears to have hit turbulent waters. A deep distrust marks the relationship following the US charge that Indian agents have plans to carry out killings of wanted Sikh separatists of Indian origin on US and Canadian soil.
India has totally rejected Canada’s charge in the case of the killing of Sikh separatist Hardeep Singh Nijjar. But it has appointed a high-level committee to probe the US allegation of an official Indian involvement in a plan to kill another Sikh separatist, Gurparwant Singh Pannu, this time on US soil.
While Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau used the floor of parliament to accuse India of killing Nijjar, the US has indicted an Indian national, Nikhil Gupta, on a charge of arranging a hitman to try and kill Punnu on behalf of the Indian intelligence agency.
India completely rejected the Canadian charge saying that the murder could well have been carried out by criminal cum separatist gangs within Canada. In the case of the US charge, New Delhi has set up a high-level committee to study the issue, since the US side has come up with some evidence.
While Canada has now quietened down, the US has sent top officials to New Delhi to get to the bottom of plans to kill Pannu and others. The US Deputy National Security Adviser (NSA) Jonathan Finer discussed the investigation into the plot in Delhi with the Indian NSA Ajit Doval and External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar. Christopher Wray, the Director of the Federal Bureau of Intelligence (FBI) – the agency responsible for the undercover investigation – was also in Delhi.
On top of it all, US President Joe Biden has not accepted India’s invitation to be the Chief Guest at the Republic Day celebrations on January 26, 2024. The QUAD summit that was to be held on January 27 was postponed to 2024. Though plausible reasons have been cited for Biden’s not coming and the postponement of the QUAD summit, the unease in US-India relations has undeniably been a factor.
For some time now, American scholars have been writing about the deep fissures in Indo-US relations. This trend in thinking was kicked off by Ashely Tellis of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and was subsequently carried forward by Daniel Markey, Senior Adviser in the South Asia Program at the United States Institute of Peace.
Tellis argued that India tended to go along its own trajectory in international relations and that it would not be wise for the US look at India as a firm ally on par with the UK, Canada and Australia. Markey has argued that events have shown that India and the US are not “natural allies both being wedded to democracy”. In his view, India is showing a democratic deficit under Narendra Modi’s watch and that it will not be wise to pitch US-India relations on the ideological factor. It will be more practical and sensible to pitch the relationship on a transactional plane he says.
The US needs India to resist China in the Indo-Pacific and India needs the US to help it resist the Chinese on the northern border and the Indian Ocean. According to Markey, Indo-US relations will be on a firmer footing and a predictable trajectory if they are purely transactional. In his view, India-US relations cannot be put on the same plane as the relations with Canada, Australia and the UK. These are democratic in the Western sense, and are, in addition, culturally similar – all three being Anglo-Saxon.
India is neither in the NATO European alliance nor is it part of the more intimate Anglo-Saxon AUKUS. India does not seem to be eager to go to war against China as the AUKUS partners are, preferring to settle issues with China diplomatically. India does not share US, NATO, AUKUS’ hostility to Russia preferring to trade with it despite US sanctions.
All these make India a dubious partner in the Indo-Pacific alliance which is directed against China in the guise of fighting for a “free and open Indo-Pacific.”
However, a transactional relationship can be built between the US and India, Markey says. India is desperately in need of upgrading its defence technology to meet a Chinese threat on the border. There is a threat also from Beijing’s ally, Pakistan. There is no country other than the US to which India can turn in this area of expertise. India also needs to stall China’s moves to challenge it in the Indian Ocean.
The US, on its part, needs India to stem the Chinese advance in the Indo-Pacific. Therefore there are credible grounds to build a purely transactional relationship, Markey argues.
The US may well be trying to build a transactional relationship, according to former RAW chief A.S.Dulat. He told www.thewire.in that the US had brought the Sikh separatists issue into the open and made an extraordinary fuss about it only to wrest some geo-strategic concessions from India.
India may be asked to give up on the Sikh separatists’ issue and other issues of American interest in return for arms, military technology, and intelligence cooperation.
But will India take the bait? Will India abandon its commitment to “strategic autonomy” that has been its policy since independence? Backtracking on such set policies will be extremely difficult for the establishment in New Delhi. The political leadership will suffer a loss of credibility in the run up to parliamentary elections in May 2024. The BJP government has given Indians the impression that India is a world power, a leader of the Global South, and a World Teacher (Vishwa Guru). An India of this class cannot be seen to be bowing to US interests under pressure.
But the US also has a pressing need to road-roll India and make it comply with its global interests. It has to try hard as India has been a hard nut to crack for the past 80 years from the time of Mahatma Gandhi.
In an article in Foreign Affairs on June 16, 2023 entitled: “Washington and New Delhi Share Interests, Not Values,” Daniel Markey ridiculed the paeans sung by American leaders in favour of “the world’s largest democracy” and debunked the notion that the world’s two biggest democracies have similar worldviews and interests.
This notion of commonality of ideals has consistently failed to hold water, Markey points out. “During the Cold War, successive presidential administrations tried to get New Delhi to stand against Moscow by arguing that, as a democracy, India was a natural enemy of the Soviet Union. When President George W. Bush struck a breakthrough civilian nuclear deal with India in 2005, he declared that India’s democratic system meant that the two states were “natural partners” united “by deeply held values.”
“Yet, again and again, India has disappointed American hopes. Gandhi, for example, frustrated Roosevelt by prioritizing India’s struggle for freedom against the British Empire over the war against imperial Japan and Nazi Germany. New Delhi not only refused to align with Washington during the Cold War; it forged warm ties with Moscow instead. Even after the Cold War ended and India began strengthening its relations with the United States, New Delhi maintained strong connections to the Kremlin. It has refused to work with the United States on Iran, and it has made nice with Myanmar’s military regime. Most recently, it has refused to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine,” Markey points out.
Going further he says: “If making democratic values the cornerstone of the U.S.-Indian relationship has always been a dubious strategy, today it is clearly doomed—because the very notion of common values has itself come to look fanciful. Ever since Narendra Modi became the Indian prime minister nine years ago, India’s status as a democracy has become increasingly suspect. The world’s largest democracy has seen an upsurge in violence directed at its Muslim minority, often whipped up by prominent politicians. It is trying to strip citizenship from millions of Muslim residents. It is muzzling the press and silencing opposition figures. The Biden administration, having cast itself as a vocal champion of democratic ideals, therefore finds itself on shaky ground whenever it characterizes the United States’ partnership with India as one of shared values.”
Suggestion to US
Markey suggests that considering America’s need for India to be a bulwark against China in the Asian region, and to exploit its considerable human resources, Washington must “dispense with the idea that shared values can provide the bedrock of a strong relationship,” and take into consideration only the “shared interests”.
Markey urges tolerance of New Delhi’s behaviour on the basis of a bet on long-term convergence. In other words, “rather than considering India an ally in the fight for global democracy, it (the US) must see that India is an ally of convenience.”
Seen in the present context, it implies that the US must wink at the Nijjar and Pannun affairs and seek close ties with India, virtually on the latter’s terms.
But Markey acknowledges that a shift in US policy “will not be easy, given that Washington has spent decades looking at New Delhi through rose-coloured glasses. But the (new) pivot will encourage both sides to understand that their relationship is ultimately transactional—and allow them to get down to business.”
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