In an extraordinary address at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Randall G. Schriver, US Assistant Secretary of State in the Trump Administration had a hard message for India: dilute the relationship with Russia or face the likely consequences of economic sanctions. There was no beating about the bush, no diplomatic obfuscation. Become a banana republic like many of the Central American states, or else opt for voluntary neutering on the Japanese model. Japan has yet to sign a formal peace treaty with Russia decades after the World II ended.
National sovereignty apparently is now an outmoded concept unfit for purpose in America’s historic Manifest Destiny. The choice before India is stark before the 2+2 dialogue between the Ministers of External Affairs and Defence, Sushma Swaraj and Nirmala Sitharaman meet will with their respective US counterparts, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Secretary of Defence, General James Mattis in New Delhi.
Mr Schriver said the US appreciated India’s past relations with Russia – that was done and dusted – there was no future in such ties, he affirmed. The projected New World Order, as defined by the United States, is, and would be, characterized by arbitrary tariffs and sanctions and ultimatums. The hallowed traditions of internal diplomacy as proclaimed by the Peace of Westphalia (1648), the Congress of Vienna (1815) and the Versailles Treaty ((1918) were clearly null and void. One should add that the Vienna and Versailles documents were seriously flawed; nevertheless they uphold the conventions of civilized dialogue and compromise, when and where possible.
In spirit, at least, the projected Trump order has a disturbing affinity with the principles and practices of Hitler’s Third Reich. The Modi government has much serious thinking ahead. Whither India?.Is she to be a US poodle or a sovereign state underwritten by strategic autonomy in its diplomatic and military choices?
Perhaps a brief perusal of Henry Kissinger may help. A former US National Security Advisor and Secretary of State in the Nixon and Ford administrations, when Indo-US relations reached plumbed the depths. In the peace and quiet of retirement, meditating on the storm-tossed past with India, he penned Global Order: Reflections on the Character of Nations and the Course of History, where, apropos of India, he wrote: ‘As Prime Minister of a newly independent state, Jawaharlal Nehru argued that the basis of India’s foreign policy would be India’s national interest, not international amity per se or the cultivation compatible domestic systems.’
Dr Kissinger quotes Nehru as saying shortly after Independence: ‘Whatever policy you may lay down, the art of conducting the foreign affairs of a country lies in finding out what is most advantageous to the country. We may talk about international goodwill and mean what we say. But in the ultimate analysis, a government functions for the good of the country it governs and no government dare do anything which in the short or long run is manifestly to the disadvantage to the country.’
Henry Kissinger comments: ‘Kautilya (and Machiavelli) could not have said it better….The essence of this strategy was that it allowed India to draw up support from both sides in the Cold War camps – securing the military aid and diplomatic cooperation of the Soviet bloc, even while courting American development assistance and the moral support of the US intellectual establishment. However irritating to Cold War America, it was a wise course for an emerging nation. With a then nascent military establishment and underdeveloped economy, India would have been a a respected but secondary ally. As a free agent, it could exercise a much wider reaching influence.’
Dr Kissinger anticipated no U-turn in Indian foreign policy from that of the Nehru legacy. He concludes: ‘India will be the fulcrum of twenty-first century order: an indispensable element, based on its geography, resources, and tradition of sophisticated leadership, in the strategic and ideological evolution of the region and the concepts of order at whose intersection it stands.’
It is fitting to end this piece with India’s Russian relationship and the massive Russian Military exercise – the largest since the end of the Cold War. In the first case, India participated in an extensive security exercise on Russian soil with host Russia, China, Kazakhstan and Pakistan, the first time India and Pakistan have joined in such an endeavour. The Indian Army contingent was led by Lt General Satheesh Dua. Its spokesman was warm in his appreciation of the event and of the combat capabilities on display of the game’s senior participants.
In mid-September, Russia will hold a military exercise Vostok 2018, extending from the Ural Mountains in central Russia to Russia’s Pacific coast in the farthest East, with China and Mongolia as partners. The Russian force will include 300,000 troops, 36,000 tanks and armoires personnel carriers, 1000 aircraft plus its Northern and Pacific fleets. China is to contribute 3,200 troops and 30 war planes. The Mongolian presence will be smaller.
US Defence Secretary General James Mattis explained that his country’s priority was to bring Russia and China to heel; international terrorism having been put on the backburner. Confrontation, with all its potential perils, is the name of the game.
India-BIMSTEC target international terrorism
India is to give the regional grouping comprising Bangladesh, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Bhutan and Nepal (BIMSTEC) its utmost attention, as a security priority in combating international terrorism.
With the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) moribund, thanks to Pakistan’s obstructive policies concerning India, this larger grouping has rules of engagement based on the converging national interests of all its partners.
Pakistan’s India-baiting UN representative at the United Nations, Maleeha Lodhi sang from the old, discredited India-baiting hymn-sheet. The more things change, the more they remain the same.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi made a strong pitch, for active cooperation on international terrorism and drug trafficking at the BIMSTEC Summit in Kathmandu. He said: ‘I believe that there is a big opportunity for connectivity – trade connectivity, digital connectivity, economic connectivity, and people-to-people connectivity,’ Continuing the theme, he explained that, ‘the Bay of Bengal holds special significance for the security and development of all of us. There is no country in the region which has not suffered from terrorism and transnational crimes, such as drug trafficking linked to a network of terrorism.’
The Nepali Prime Minister Khadga Prasad Sharma Oli, as host spoke of the need to deepen regional economic integration and collaboration. On the sidelines of the Summit, Prime Ministers Modi and Sharma Oli signed a MoU on the building of a railway from Rexaul in India to the Nepalese capital Kathmandu.
Life of mercy and compassion
Oxford educated and member of the Royal College of Surgeons (Ireland), Jack Preger, a Briton now 88, came to Calcutta (as it was then known) way back in 1979 and set up a clinic in 1980 in Sovabazar, in the north of the teeming metropolis, to treat the poor of the nearby slums, and make available medicines they could ill afford. Mr Preger had spent time as a young man studying the fraught situation in the Third World and what he, as an individual could do to help fight poverty and social distress. Those were especially harrowing times, when Calcutta hovered on the brink of an urban apocalypse.
The city’s revival over the past couple of decades - now proceeding apace – may have consigned the experience to the buried past. The truly great and good who stretched out a helping hand will not be, nor should they be, forgotten. The local Telegraph newspaper has instituted a School Awards for Excellence. Children from Calcutta Rescue, the school set up by Jack Preger, visited their benefactor in his one-room apartment on his birthday. The school won a Telegraph Excellence Award.
Mr Preger said: ‘It is a matter of great pride to be inducted into The Telegraph Education Foundation Hall of Fame 2018 but it’s not for me alone, but the people who have worked together.’ He is the salt of the earth.
