American Interest in India Under Carter and Reagan

AMERICAN INTEREST IN INDIA UNDER CARTER AND REAGAN Thomas Perry Thornton he death of Indira Gandhi resulted from India's internal problems and its implications will be felt most heavily inside India. The foreign policy orientation ofthe new leadership in Delhi is at best ill-defined, and certainly Rajiv Gandhi's main preoccupation over the next months will be his country's domestic problems. But major events such as leadership changes are matters of great concern elsewhere, for India has a significant role to play on the international scene. For nearly two decades Indira Gandhi was the architect and engineer of her country's foreign policy. Following her death, speculation about Rajiv Gandhi's foreign policy views has been widespread but necessarily ill-informed since his views are unknown, and perhaps even unformed; we also do not know where he will look for advice. There may be sharp changes ahead, but it is useful to look first to the past as a guide to the coming period of uncertainty. In the past eight years there have been two leadership changes in both India and the United States, and each of these promised much sharper policy changes than seem probable in the transition from Indira Gandhi to her son. There could hardly be two more different settings for the relationship between the United States and India than were presented in 1977 Mr. Thornton is adjunct professor of Asian studies at SAIS. He has dealt with South Asia in the U.S. Department of State and was a senior staff member of the National Security Council during the Carter administration. The views expressed in this article are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of any element of the United States government. 179 180 SAIS REVIEW and 1981. In the former case, Jimmy Carter was the newly elected president of the United States, committed to a more forthcoming policy toward the Third World and an approach that downplayed the importance of the Soviet Union. Carter and his National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski would also elaborate a policy of cultivating regionally influential countries as a means of devolving some of the United States' excessive responsibilities that had been assumed during the postwar decades. India, for its part, was soon to hold a general election that would punish Indira Gandhi for the sins of the Emergency and bring Morarji Desai to power, a man known to be well-disposed toward the United States and committed to a greater balance in Indian foreign policy. Certainly, the new leaders were seen as an immense change for the better over their immediate predecessors in terms of the Indo-U.S. relationship. To cap it all, Carter was the first president who had any sort of personal tie to India; his mother had served in the Peace Corps in suburban Bombay a decade earlier. In 1981 the situation was dramatically reversed. The Indian government had passed once again into the hands of Indira Gandhi, who was deeply suspicious of the United States. The new American president showed little interest in the Third World generally and India specifically. His foreign policy posture was focused on the U.S.-Soviet relationship and on the need to build up American positions of strength from which to counter Soviet aggression. Reagan's interest in international economic issues, especially as they would affect developing countries, was not very great. The administration was believed to have strong pro-Pakistani sentiments, in contrast to the Carter administration, where feeling had been distinctly cool toward Pakistan on grounds of human rights and nuclear nonproliferation. Even more important than the personal and national political equations was the state of global politics. The Carter and Desai teams came to power in the glowing Indian summer of détente. Angola was barely a cloud on the South Asian horizon, and in other respects the bipolar relationship seemed conducive to cooperation between the United States and India and unlikely to put demands on either side that would tend to strain the relationship. In early 1981, however, the global situation was notably unfavorable. "Détente" had long since passed from the vocabulary of world leaders, and the Soviet Union was...