India Loses Its Place in Soviet Policy

For the Indians, the Soviet Union has been a steadfast friend, ready to help in an hour of need.

President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s visit to India last month was more a celebration than a diplomatic engagement: holiday for schoolchildren, round-the-clock television coverage, concerts, ceremonies--all this made for spectacle.

Gorbachev is adored by Indian intellectuals. With his breathtaking pronouncements on how to cure Stalinism and give the system a human face, Gorbachev has stolen the heart of the Indian intelligentsia in a way no foreign leader has since John F. Kennedy. But Indians also admire him by comparison: Their hopes that Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi would usher in his own forms of glasnost and perestroika have been dashed; so they celebrate Gorbachev’s example.

Despite affirmations of friendship made by both sides during the visit there are important policy differences between India and the Soviet Union.

India has no certain place in the new Soviet global scheme, so boldly sketched at home and abroad. Basically Gorbachev wants to haul the Soviet economy out of its Stalinist rut; he can do so only by developing close economic interdependence with the market economies of the West. How so profoundly a capitalist concept as economic interdependence is to be incorporated into the Marxist-Leninist lexicon is still a question, but Western advocates of interdependence--the Trilateral Commission and the Brandt Commission--would be happy to have a Bolshevik convert in the fold.

Attenuation of tensions with the two main rivals of the Soviet Union, the United States and China, has become a necessity because the Kremlin cannot economically sustain those rivalries. Now, in the context of improved Soviet-American and Soviet-Chinese relations, the geopolitical importance of India declines. In Delhi, Gorbachev essentially implied that India is important--but not as important as it once was. In accepting the Indira Gandhi Peace Prize, the Soviet president said that he would increase Soviet ties to China and suggested, rather assertively, that India ought to do the same.

As in all relations between self-seeking states, India and the Soviet Union joined hands strategically in the mid-1960s because of common distrust of China. The two allies might now drift somewhat apart as the stronger among the two, the Soviet Union, moves nearer China. The beginning of a new cooperative relationship between both communist giants puts pressure on India to evolve a new policy toward its Asian neighbor. Gandhi is to visit China this month--the first such visit by an Indian head of state in nearly 30 years. He will negotiate with Beijing minus the certainty of his Moscow connections.

India can no longer presume Soviet support in relations with Pakistan and the United States. Gorbachev is scaling down the costly imperial commitments Leonid I. Brezhnev made in the 1970s--Cambodia, Afghanistan, Angola. The Afghan issue concerns vital regional interests; India had stood by the Soviet Union, hoping that Delhi would have a decisive say in the way the Kremlin settled the conflict. Gorbachev, however, decided to withdraw troops from Afghanistan and conclude the Geneva peace accord last April without consulting his Indian ally.

Nothing Gorbachev said in Delhi suggests that he wants to give India an important say in the Afghan settlement. He sees the problem to be resolved between the Soviet Union, Pakistan and the United States. True, Gorbachev chided Pakistan for not observing the Geneva agreements and suggested an international conference on Afghanistan, but he is not likely to risk renewed hostility with Pakistan or stop the troop withdrawal and thereby invite U.S. fury.

Ultimately, the Soviet Union and Pakistan have common interest in a relatively stable Afghanistan between them. With a new democratically elected government in Pakistan, the chances of an Afghan settlement are now greater than before.

What linked India and the Soviets since they signed a security treaty in 1971 was first a shared fear of China and then, later, of the China-U.S. rapprochement. The relationship was built on the old adage of “my enemy’s enemy is my friend.”

Gorbachev’s new foreign policy will surely give India a less pivotal position in the eyes of the Kremlin. The Soviet leader articulated his world view as long ago as 1986, in a discussion with an American academic soon after the failure of the Reykjavik summit. Gorbachev compared the United States and the Soviet Union to two dinosaurs encircling each other in the sand, later lamenting that both dinosaurs have fallen economically behind. Gorbachev wants interdependence, not a contest between dinosaurs where costs are heavy and gains marginal. In the game of interdependence, Delhi is a weak player because India is itself a small dinosaur, maintaining the fourth largest military presence in the world on a gross national product slightly larger than Spain’s. Meanwhile, India is of little economic importance to Moscow.

The Asia-Pacific region today ranks as a high priority area in Soviet thinking. Gorbachev wants economic entry in the region that now accounts for the largest production of manufactured goods, has the highest level of technology in the developing world and enjoys vast trade potential.

Security of the Asia-Pacific region will be underwritten by the United States, the Soviet Union and China, Gorbachev said last September. Nothing upsets Indian leaders more than talk of China as a guardian of the region. Gorbachev did try to assuage India, saying Delhi would also have a role.

The crucial question is whether Moscow continues to endorse India’s regional primacy. With Soviet support, India broke Pakistan in two in 1971 and established primacy. Military involvements in Sri Lanka and the Maldives are exercises to confirm that primacy.

Moscow has not disputed those moves but some Soviet observers now ask whether India can afford dominance. India could learn from the Soviets and the Americans the high cost of honoring a Brezhnev Doctrine or a Monroe Doctrine to maintain regional hegemony.