Fateful Triangle. Tanvi Madan
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of its strategic culture, India does not “do” alliances.
This book argues that a US-India partnership to tackle a China challenge is neither inevitable nor impossible. India has partnered and even aligned with countries against China—with the US in 1962–1963 and the Soviet Union in 1971. On the other hand, at other times, even when American and Indian policymakers have believed China to be a major threat, the countries’ alignment has not been sustainable. The two countries have come together against China, but only when certain conditions are in place (i.e., when they have agreed not just on the nature and urgency of the threat, but also on how to deal with it).
While the US-India-Pakistan triangle has received a fair amount of historical attention, the US-India-China triangle has not. To some degree this is not surprising, given that policymaking organizations have structurally separated East and South Asia. This separation had the effect of placing India in a South Asia box in terms of scholarship as well. And that lens reinforced the traditional argument that the US-India relationship was characterized by estrangement during the Cold War and engagement after it. That, in turn, has shaped the narrative in academic and policy circles that the two countries have moved from being estranged democracies historically to engaged democracies in the present era.
By broadening the lens, however, this book reinforces the argument of more recent scholarship on the US-India relationship: that the two countries did engage during the Cold War. Moreover, this engagement was not just episodic. Indeed, estrangement and engagement were constantly competing elements in the relationship. Thus, even while the two countries had major disagreements on the Korean War—often differences over China that would spill over to other areas of the relationship—they were engaging at the working level, including with the US using India as a channel to and from China. Similarly, during periods of cooperation between the two countries on China, sources of estrangement like Pakistan and the Soviet Union had not disappeared. But their shared concern about China incentivized the two countries to deemphasize or manage those differences more effectively.
Those shared concerns also helped them overcome—or even helped change—the preferences of personalities, which are sometimes given too much weight in US-India narratives. This book does not argue that individuals did not matter, but it does show that structural factors could alter or overcome individual preferences. They explain, for example, how John Foster Dulles—long portrayed as anti-India—went from criticizing and resisting India’s role in Asia to arguing on Capitol Hill that to bolster US interests in Asia it was crucial to strengthen India.
As this indicates, this book also seeks to take the US-India relationship out of the South Asia box and consider the broader Asian setting in which it played out. Today, there is much discussion of the new link between the Asian subregions, of India as a democratic anchor in the Indo-Pacific, and of Delhi’s Act East strategy. However, even in the first few decades of the Cold War, American and Indian policymakers saw the broader region as connected.
Indian officials worried about instability in broader Asia affecting India’s interests. They did not believe it would stay contained in East and Southeast Asia, and they thought it would constrain the time and space India needed for nation-building at home. Thus, seeking stability, Delhi was active on a number of Asian issues, including the Korean and Vietnam Wars. At times, it played a leading role, such as when it helped convene the Bandung Conference of Asian and African countries. At other times, it played an intermediary role—for example, during and after the Korean War—and on the International Control Commission that supervised the implementation of the Geneva Accords in Southeast Asia. At yet other times, it resisted joining groupings in the region. And throughout, its objectives in Asia shaped its approach toward China and the US.
US policymakers, in turn, thought about India in the Asian context. Their domino theory envisioned India as part of the chain of Asian dominoes that could fall to communism and shift the balance of power in the Soviet Union’s favor. It is why they worried about Indian failure. But they also saw a successful democratic India, even if it was nonaligned, as showing other Asian countries that the communist Chinese model was not the only alternative.
American and Indian policymakers did not always see regional developments in the same light. Delhi’s postcolonial and Washington’s anticommunist prisms at other times led to different interpretations and disagreements. This meant that each sometimes sought a larger role for the other in Asia—as a stabilizer, balancer, or influencer—but sometimes resisted it as being unhelpful.
This book aims not just to reinsert India into the Asian story but also to reinterpret aspects of its China policy and its foreign policy more broadly. The view of China in India was at best a dominant one, but there was never a consensus. China policy was constantly contested within the Indian government and polity. The debate is usually framed as revolving around differences on whether or not China was a challenge. But this book shows that concern about China was more widespread—even Nehru, considered to be naïve about China, believed it would pose a challenge. The key difference was the kind of challenge, and how to deal with it. For example, India’s first deputy prime minister, Vallabhbhai Patel, believed China was a geopolitical threat and needed to be confronted with the buildup and use of force, and possibly even alliances. Nehru, on the other hand, mistakenly believed that China would think like India and would seek development at home and peace in its periphery. That meant a geopolitical challenge was some ways off and that India had time. He was more concerned about the threat of ideas and subversion from China in the short term.
Like Patel, Nehru advocated the strengthening of border infrastructure and defenses. However, prioritizing autonomy over capacity building, a greater focus on the Pakistan problem, and a concern about diverting funds from development to defense meant that his government neglected or delayed making the required investments to strengthen itself vis-à-vis China—a lesson that current and future Indian foreign policymakers would do well to remember.
It is also worth remembering, as this book shows, what nonalignment was and was not. It was not merely or even primarily a result of principle, but was driven by pragmatism. It was a strategy that Indian leaders, acting from weakness and operating under political and economic constraints, used to expand their options by diversifying their portfolio of partners and thus their dependence. This was important to Indian foreign policymakers because, even as they sought security and prosperity, they also wanted strategic and decisional autonomy.
The policymakers of a recently decolonized India found themselves facing a geopolitical, economic, and ideological climate that was significantly shaped by the Cold War. Their diversification strategy helped create space in this competitive context. It was not a result of trying to “avoid entanglement,”9 but of recognition that, unlike the US in its early years, India was connected to the world and could not help but be involved in and affected by global and regional developments.
The external dynamics did bind India’s options, but they also created opportunities for Indian policymakers. They were not passive spectators and sought to shape their environment. And they used the Cold War and American fears after the “loss” of China for India’s benefit—including by eliciting military and economic aid from Washington and getting the US to serve as a frontline state when they faced a China challenge.
The Cold War in this one sense benefited India. Its importance to both Moscow and Washington derived in no small part from the superpower competition. One cannot answer the counterfactual about whether India would have been as important to them in the absence of the Cold War, but one cannot take it as a given that these countries would have seen it to be in their interest to invest heavily in India absent their competition.
That superpower rivalry, and the related geopolitical and ideological contest between China and India, indeed made India less peripheral to the US than was earlier believed. Some have asserted that “Americans seldom regarded India as special. Their prior perceptions did not place India on the same plane as China. Few appreciated the value to American interests of a strong, independent and nonaligned India.”10 It is true that India moved up and down the US priority list, but this book shows that there was a significant period of time when the US did see India as special and sought to build and support a strong India.
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