A new direction for India-U.S. ties

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9 highlights

  • Nehru not only declined the U.S. offer to India to become a UNSC Permanent Member with Veto but instead campaigned for China to take up that seat.

  • The U.S. however resisted that campaign till 1972, when in a turnaround the U.S. supported Communist People’s Republic of China and entered into “strategic partnership” in the 1970s onwards with the reform-minded new leadership of Deng Xiaoping.

  • In 1991 when then Prime Minister Chandra Shekhar told me to find out if we can get a policy-conditions free loan at a concessional interest rate from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), I told him that the IMF would never agree, but since a large size of the voting power in the IMF was directly or indirectly controlled by the U.S., we should placate the U.S.

  • Thereafter, Prime Minister Chandra Shekhar spoke to the U.S. that India would agree to a pending American request with the Prime Minister’s Office for permission to refuel their air force planes flying from the Philippines to Saudi Arabia for the first Gulf War when Iraq occupied Kuwait.

  • What India needs to take today is for dealing with the Ladakh confrontation on our side of the Line of Actual Control by China. Obviously, India needs U.S. hardware military equipment. India does not need U.S. troops to fight our battles against China on our border.

  • Third, the U.S. needs India to fight her enemies in the neighbourhood such as in Afghanistan. It is my view that India should send two divisions gradually to Afghanistan and relieve U.S. troops to go home.

  • India needs the U.S. to completely develop the Andaman & Nicobar, and also the Lakshadweep Islands as a naval and air force base, which the U.S. can share along with its allies such as Indonesia and Japan.

  • Thus, India needs technologies such as thorium utilisation, desalination of sea water, and hydrogen fuel cells, but not Walmart and U.S. universities to start campuses in India, as proposed in the new National Education Policy draft.

  • Eighth, the U.S. must allow India’s exports of agricultural products including Bos indicus milk, which are of highly competitive prices in the world.

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