jaibi
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By:Basharat Hussain Qizilbash
Will India act as a US proxy?
“May God defend me from my friends; I can defend myself from my enemies.” These precious ‘pearls of wisdom’ of the French philosopher Voltaire are quite relevant to India, today.
India has many friends but the one with which she will have to be very watchful is the United States.
Americans have no qualms about changing friends. During the Cold War, they treated India as the ‘Other’ for supporting the cause of non-alignment in international relations and for maintaining closer ties with the erstwhile Soviet Union – the underlying premise being that “my enemy’s friend is my enemy”. After humbling Soviet Russia, the Americans have created a new enemy in the form of communist China. No wonder, there is a lot of chatter in the US media, intelligentsia and political elites from Hillary Clinton to President Obama magnifying the ‘ominous’ rise of China which needs to be contained like the USSR. The planned containment hinges around the policy of ‘Asia pivot’ under which, in addition, to yoking the South-east Asian nations in the Chinese neighbourhood into pro-American alliances, the two bigger states that are expected to play a key role in conjunction with the US against China are Australia and India. This time the US premise with regard to India is “my enemy’s enemy is my friend”: it being so because not only are India and China giants in terms of size and thus obvious rivals as ‘regional hegemons’; the two have fought a war in 1962 and stake contentious claims on a very large area of their contiguous borders.
Americans are making a conscious effort to convince Indians to join hands with them to ‘contain’ China because if they would then their “Pakistan problem” would be automatically addressed.
In the twentieth century, the US joined hands with UK to fight the ‘evil’ of Soviet communism; in the twenty-first century, “India must become America’s new Britain”. This is an “obligation” that India owes not only to its 1.2 billion citizens but to all those in the world who look towards her as a ‘beacon’ of “freedom, liberal values, pluralism and democracy”. To assume this grand role, India should formulate a geopolitical strategy of global dimension and renounce the Gandhian philosophy of non-violence because pacifism suits only those people which struggle for independence and not those nations which have attained independence. To become a top class world power, a country must have an invincible military which in turn requires a healthy economy. Never mind the enormous current poverty under which 400 million Indians live on less than $1.25 per day.
The point is that India has the potential to become a great military power but it cannot become one unless it overcomes two obstacles: its defence industry is weak yet it can be built by building stronger ties with the US military-industrial complex. The relationship between the two countries has gone through a transformation: from indifference in 1990s after the end of Cold War to mistrust after India conducted nuclear tests in 1998 to a common purpose after the 9/11 in US and 13/12 in India, i.e., the terror attack on the Indian parliament. In fact, Avery proposes that the new motto of US and Indian intelligence should be: “Your terrorists are our terrorists.” The emphasis on India is to increase her financial allocations in intelligence and defence establishments because while the intelligence budget of US for 2010 was $53.1 billion; India’s Research and Analysis Wing’s (RAW) budget for 2000 was a paltry $150 million.
It seems the Americans are poised to pit India against China.
Presently, it seems an uphill task because if China continues with what it has been spending on its defence in the first decade of this century; its defence outlay will reach $225 billion in 2020 and $425 billion in 2030 and to close this arms gap with China by 2030, India will be required to spend at least $380 billion on its defence between 2010 and 2030. Will India fall in this trap? There is at least one published report in the ‘Economic Times’ of 15 February, 2010, that does indicate that India plans to spend about $200 billion on defence equipment between 2010 and 2022.
Reading such works provides a window into the American thought processes about the likely power rivalries in Asia in which China is projected as an imperial power whose ambitions can be neutralised by propping up India as an American proxy. Whether India will bite the bait or not will depend upon the wisdom of those who will rule her in the coming years.
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I am sure the author's concern comes from the goodness of his heart.
@Bang Galore, @Srinivas, @Jade, @karan.1970, @jayron, @NotSoSuperstitious, @hinduguy, @kaykay and others.
This guy was my teacher of Pakistan Studies and he researches well. I can tell you that he is one for Indo-Pak cooperation so his article is well intended.
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