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Before you listen to this episode of The Scene and the Unseen, I have a recommendation for
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Do check out Pulliya Baazi, hosted by Saurabh Chandra and Pranay Koteswane, two really good
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Kick-ass podcast in Hindi.
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America is far away from India, and yet it's also very close to us.
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Indian culture today, particularly among the English speaking elites, is practically American
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culture, and our geopolitics has had the shadow of America hanging over it for all 71 years
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Whether we are fighting with Pakistan or maneuvering with China, America is watching closely.
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What does everything that is happening here, our geopolitics, our culture, look like from
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How do they view this mad, messy region called South Asia, and what do they want from it?
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Welcome to The Scene and the Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics, and behavioral
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Please welcome your host, Amit Bhanwa.
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Welcome to The Scene and the Unseen.
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My topic for today is America in South Asia, and it specifically focuses on the insights
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of an outstanding new book by the historian Srinath Raghavan, titled The Most Dangerous
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Place, A History of the United States in South Asia.
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In the book, Srinath traces American involvement in India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan for the
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last 250 years, from well before India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan even existed as independent
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How did they look at us?
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Where did their interests coincide with ours?
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Where did they collide?
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Srinath joins me today to talk about all this and more, but before we begin our conversation,
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here's a quick commercial break.
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Srinath, welcome to the Seen in the Unseen.
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Srinath, you're the first historian on the Seen in the Unseen, and your history is quite
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interesting itself because you had mentioned that you were into theoretical physics and
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were thinking of getting a PhD in theoretical physics, but then you joined the Rajputana
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Rifles, and then you spent a few years there, and then you got into becoming a historian.
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So how did that happen?
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Well, as an undergraduate, I was studying physics and hoping to do doctoral work there.
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But with things like theoretical physics or pure mathematics, either you're really good
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There's no such thing as a middling sort of physicist in some ways.
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And I kind of understood pretty quickly that I was on the no good side of things.
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So decided to drop the sciences, but had very little idea of what else to do.
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And I had a couple of friends from college who had signed up for the short service commission.
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And that seemed to me to be an interesting way to spend a few years, you know, get to
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see places I hadn't, and then hopefully make up my mind about what I wanted to do.
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So I joined the Indian Army and got commissioned with the Rajputana Rifles.
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Tell me something about how you got drawn to history, per se, like, were you always
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a keen reader of sort of books of history and then decided that, hey, I want to do this
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Or was there something which kind of triggered that?
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Well, I mean, I was always very interested in politics from the time I was a student
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In some ways, you couldn't help it, early 90s was a highly political time in this country.
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And I was very interested in sort of politics.
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I was fortunate that when I was a teenager, I was surrounded by people who gave me a lot
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of exposure to learning, thinking about politics.
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And of course, history was always a way into that.
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But I must confess that I didn't get around to doing any serious sort of study of history
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till such time, actually, I was halfway through my tenure in the army, when it became interesting
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to me that, you know, some of the things that I was sort of actually doing had, you know,
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military history and the history of war, per se, particular caught my fancy.
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And that is how I started getting interested in it.
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You know, when I look back, I think the one history book which possibly had the most impact
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on me was something that I never read as a piece of history in that sense is this book
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called The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1989,
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And an uncle of mine was to go to the United States quite often back in those days, actually
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And I must have read it several times.
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I still have it on my shelves.
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And I still think it's a great book.
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Well, so that's that's a book the listeners can get from Amazon right away.
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And being a historian, what does it involve like we live in an age, of course, where you
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don't only have facts, you also have alternative facts, and you have all kinds of narratives
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So at one level, there is, of course, the sense that the layman might have that, oh,
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we know what happened in history.
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Why do we need to, you know, kind of go back and look for, you know, what are we really
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And at the other level, there's almost a sense that now, though, it doesn't matter.
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Anybody can say anything, anything goes.
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So what does it really involve like when you choose a particular project, do you start
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with a fascination over say a particular historical character?
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Or do you feel that there is a shortcoming with some specific narrative?
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Or do you feel that there are gaps in this narrative and I need to fill them?
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Yeah, I think it's more the latter rather than the former, at least in my case.
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And the way that typically historians and people who are sort of studying history professionally
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tend to sort of approach is to say that, listen, you want to take a look at some particular
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question and then try and get a grip on it by looking at historical materials, right?
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So in a sense, what we tend to think of as being taken for granted are things which are
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constantly up for revision.
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So in that sense, you know, there's a great Dutch historian called Peter Gael, who said
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that history is an argument without end.
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And I think that's a very good way of thinking about the subject, which is to say that you're
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constantly approaching the past with new perspectives, because the questions that you're interested
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about the past are always determined by your present.
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So it's your current politics, it's your current sort of social interests that in some ways
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trigger your interest in the past.
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That is how the study of history continuously evolves over a period of time.
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And when you're looking at new themes, you're also looking at new evidence.
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So you're looking at new archives, you're looking at new texts.
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So in that sense, you know, it is rarely the case that in history, people tend to disagree
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about brute facts, right?
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I mean, of course, you always have some debates about how valuable this or that piece of evidence
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But what you're looking for is a fit between argument and evidence.
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And in that sense, it's, you know, history, like the other social sciences, is continually
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determined by your sort of current location and your interests, social location, political
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location matters a lot.
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And I guess it's necessarily true that every simple narrative is fundamentally wrong because
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And there are layers and layers and you essentially kind of...
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So you know, before we get to the subject at hand for this episode, what does your work
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Like when you when you begin a project, you already sort of have a broad narrative in
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mind and you're looking for evidence that confirms it or are you just saying that, hey,
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this is interesting, let me go a little deeper and find out.
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And then like, how does it work?
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What kind of like, when you talk about, you know, going into the archives, what are these
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How do you find this material?
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How do you approach it?
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So let me give you a sort of explain this using a concrete example.
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So my one of the books I wrote, actually, my second book was a history of the creation
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of Bangladesh in 1971, right?
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So for a project like that, basically, I was actually working on another earlier project
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that led me to find a bunch of papers which completely astonished me for the depth of
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material that they had on the Bangladesh crisis.
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And these were the papers of P. N. Huxer, the principal secretary to Mrs. Indira Gandhi,
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who was a very key figure during the 1971 crisis.
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So what I got really was a bunch of materials which suggested to me that, hey, there's so
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much in here that is not known, that could be used to tell a much more better informed
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But of course, you can't do it with just one set of materials, right?
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So then for several years, I started researching it.
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And the more I went into the subject, it seemed to me that just a lot of stuff had been written
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primarily from either the Indian or the Bangladeshi or the Pakistani perspective.
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But what was very interesting to me was the global dimension of the crisis, how so many
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other players who were in some ways geographically remote were nevertheless politically very
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involved, and how all of that came through.
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As I dug deeper into the subject, it became apparent to me that we are not only talking
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about states who are involved, but also other kinds of people.
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The cultural influences, the concept of Bangladesh in 1971, someone like Allen Ginsberg writing
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the famous poem in the New York Times and so on, right?
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So what it then led me to was to basically take a very different approach to thinking
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about the creation of Bangladesh, which in turn then led me to start questioning some
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fundamental assumptions, right, that in some ways the creation of Bangladesh was inevitable
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because these two geographical parts were separate.
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Actually not true at all.
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In fact, it was much more contingent.
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And that was one of the main arguments of the book, that if things had not taken the
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turn that they did in the late 1960s, and for reasons which are not specific to Bangladesh,
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but for a global conjuncture, you may never have had this crisis coming out, right, which
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is a bit of an unsettling proposition to make particularly for Bangladeshis.
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But that's the way I think history moves, is that you start with some piece of evidence,
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you see how it fits with what the received narratives are, then you come up with a different
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way of explaining this stuff, and then you sort of present an alternative sort of narrative.
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And you know, one day we should do an episode in 1971.
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And in fact, the whole Bangladesh thing sort of forms part of the narrative of this book.
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Your latest book is called The Most Dangerous Place, Colonial History of the United States
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And what the book looks at is essentially evolving American attitudes towards this region,
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which we call South Asia over the last more than 200 years.
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And you know, how did you arrive at this kind of specific project?
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And I'm also intrigued by the title, The Most Dangerous Place in the World.
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Yeah, so the project in some ways is, you know, for various other projects that I've
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been doing, especially for the three previous books that I wrote, including this book on
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the creation of Bangladesh, I had been visiting various American archives, the National Archives
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of the United States, various presidential libraries to do research over the last 15
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So at some point, you know, about three or four years ago, it struck me that I just have
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so much materials that I could still use to sort of tell a story of American involvement
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And again, it struck me that much of the narrative and much of the good scholarship and the good
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books that we have are primarily focusing either on very specific periods like the Cold War.
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They tend to focus on the high politics, which is to say, you know, US-India-US-Pakistan
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relationships, or they tend to focus on one sets of relationship, right?
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I mean, it's about how the United States dealt with India, and so on and so forth.
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And it seemed to me that what we needed was a book which was at once broader and longer
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in historical chronological scope.
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And you know, I had already written a book on India during the Second World War in which
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the United States did play an important role in my research and writing.
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And it just struck me that, you know, that I actually needed to go back right to the
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moment of the founding of the American Republic and think about US involvement with this part
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of the world in a longer term story.
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Because I think one of the great stories of the 20th century from a historical standpoint
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is the rise of the United States as its global power without peer and without historical
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sort of, you know, comparison being there.
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So in a sense, to me, the really interesting thing about this book was an attempt to say
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how does South Asia fit into the story of American ascendancy?
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You know, where does this region come in, which in some ways seems so peripheral, that's
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what everyone assumes, but which has from time to time, you know, imposed itself on
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I mean, to give you just one example, and we can pick up on other things as we go.
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You know, think of the most dangerous moment in the second half of the 20th century, the
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Cuban Missile Crisis, right?
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But the Cuban Missile Crisis is a time when the United States is so focused on its main
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rivalry with the Soviet Union, right?
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There's nuclear weapons, all of that stuff, right?
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It's everything that you would assume with the main concerns of the Cold War.
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But at the same time, the Americans are confronted with the problem that the Chinese have attacked
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So the Sino-Indian crisis is something that the Kennedy administration has to attend to
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even while the Cuban Missile Crisis is playing out, right?
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So in a sense, the periphery has a way of imposing itself on the core, which I think
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is the reason why history constantly surprises statesmen, right?
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Which is why somebody said, you know, a week is a long time in politics.
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I think that's the reason, because you never know what's coming up next.
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And your book is organized along broadly chronological lines.
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But at the same time, there are these three strands running through it of, you know, American
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interest in South Asia, these three sort of different areas of concern for them.
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So can you talk a little bit about how you made that the organizing principle in a sense?
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So the three strands that I sort of talk about really are power, ideology, and culture.
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And I say that if you want to understand the sort of take and have an interpretive grasp
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of how the United States has interacted with this part of the world, and how that interaction
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has changed, has become important, less important, you know, immediate problems come in there
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But from a sort of a 230 year perspective, there are these three strands which really
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stand out in American involvement with this part of the world.
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The first is power, by which I mean the pursuit of interest in the first instance of economic
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interest, because that's what Americans came to the subcontinent for trade.
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But then subsequently, of course, you had geopolitical and security and military interests,
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particularly in the second half of the 20th century, which becomes a very important theme.
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The second is the role of ideology.
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And there again, you know, there is a peculiar sort of American ideological constellation,
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which has been very important in the way that the United States has sort of dealt with the
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And this is something which is reasonably well established by historians of the United
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States, is a combination of what you might call as Protestant and Republican ideas, right?
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So the United States has this sense of itself at the moment of its creation in 1776, as
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this divinely sort of elect country, which has a mission.
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And that mission is the spread of liberty to the rest of the world, right?
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So it's a very powerful fusion of these two themes of Protestantism and Republicanism,
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which is a very peculiar feature of American sort of ideology, which again has been a running
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theme from the sort of moment of creation and their engagement with the subcontinent
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through almost to the present.
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I mean, you only need to think about someone like Barack Obama saying that, you know, United
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States is the indispensable nation, right?
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I mean, so there is a sense, not just of exceptionalism in the ordinary sort of sense of it, but there
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is a peculiar quality to that exceptionalism.
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And I wanted to emphasize how those ideas have been very important in the way that the
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United States has dealt with this part of the world.
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And the third is really about culture, by which I actually mean two slightly different,
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but nevertheless related things.
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The first and in some ways, the easiest way is about transmission of cultural ideas, right?
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So you want to talk about things like how popular American culture, Hollywood, or in
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my case, jazz, more interestingly, has always been an important part of the way that American
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mores and values were tried to be transmitted to this part of the world.
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And of course, how people appropriate those and make very different things of them, right?
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So what does it mean to listen to Duke Ellington in Afghanistan in the early 1960s is an interesting
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But I have a sort of a broader emphasis on culture, which is of saying that how do you
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understand people, societies, which are very different from you?
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How do you cope with this idea of difference?
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And there I say that American ideas of race, religion, in particular, among other things,
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have been very important in the way that the United States has understood this, right?
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So I use sort of accounts of missionaries, of travelers, of merchants, of people who
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are sort of engaging with this part of the world, politically, journalists, and so on.
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And what do you find is that while the sort of the tenor of the engagement changes, there
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is some underlying consistency to it, which I try to capture by the idea of hierarchy,
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which is to say the Americans have always thought of the subcontinent as being hierarchically
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somewhat lower placed than them, right?
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So the Anglo-Saxons are pretty much at the top and so on.
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And these ideas tend to evolve over a period of time.
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Maybe it was about race, then it was about some sort of biological construct, then it's
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about survival of the strongest and so on.
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But right down to the 20th century, there was the sense that these are very different
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And to give you an example, I mean, even things that we wouldn't consider as sort of inflected
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with these things, like ideas about economic development in the 20th century, American
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modernization theories, which was so influential in the way that the United States assisted
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various countries with their economic development, were very much premised on this idea that
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there are some countries which are underdeveloped at the bottom of the civilization scale and
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And the challenge is to get those at the bottom to emulate those at the top.
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So in that sense, I say that this notion of hierarchy has been remarkably sort of durable
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and is a very important part of understanding how the Americans understood.
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Because in some ways, when we think about things like interests or power, we almost
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think of them as tangible things, right?
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I mean, that's why everyone says, you've got to be realistic because you think that
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politics is about power and so on.
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But power is something that is ultimately about how you perceive it, right?
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So how your interests get constituted in the first place, I think is a very important part
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of understanding any political process.
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And there, this cultural dimension of it seems to me to be very, very important.
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I mean, the way that the Americans from very early on made a distinction between Islam
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and Hinduism in this appointment, you know, those had sort of implications for the way
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they saw India and Pakistan after 1947.
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And you sort of start off the book talking about the late 18th century traders who first
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came here and immediately you see a confluence of both the economic interests because they've
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obviously come to make money and also this cultural aspect that you speak of where that
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sense of racial and cultural superiority is immediately evident.
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And it almost seems to arise to begin with from a visceral reaction to sort of what they
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Like there's one writer you've quoted in your book who talks about being so disgusted
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by a quote unquote loathsome beggar that he can't even get himself to hit him because
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he can't even, you know, and, and that sense of, you know, so they have this condescending
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and very superior attitude towards the Indians aligned with this, you know, or rather sort
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of contrasted with their economic interest in, you know, embedding themselves and kind
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Because, you know, the one thing we have to realize is that in the early decades after
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American independence in 1776, see the United States was in pretty much in doldrums economically,
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And there was a huge outward drive towards finding new markets, new avenues for trade
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And there was a very influential group of, you know, merchant, seafaring merchants based
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primarily in the Boston area, New England, who became the vanguard of much of this trade.
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China was always a very important destination.
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But in the course of that, India also becomes quite important.
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And tracing those links is one of the sort of major challenges of seeing how the early
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But as you're saying, even economic sort of interactions are influence inflected through
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this cultural prism through which the Americans are trying to perceive.
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And I don't want to give a sense that, you know, this is some kind of simple monolithic
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idea of sort of superiority out there.
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I think the fundamental issue is not so much about superiority, inferiority as about some
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sense of hierarchy, which is to say that even if people are at the bottom, you feel that,
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you know, they need to be helped, right?
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I mean, so even a benevolent impulse can come from a sense of hierarchy.
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And at bottom, this is about how you deal with difference.
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How do you deal with people who are so different from you are, right?
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How do you deal with a religion like Hinduism, or whatever, a group of people who call themselves
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the Hindus, who have this unique institution called the caste system, you know, which you've
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never sort of come across?
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I mean, you have race in America, which is very understandable to you.
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But then you use the prism of the race to understand how this sort of caste arrangement
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And then you come up with certain kinds of...
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So those ideas, the sort of often contradictory impulses and constellation of things, crystallize
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And what I then try and show is how they remain durable and important well into the 20th century.
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And what you really have in the first half of the 19th century, as you describe it, is
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that American interaction with South Asia, with India, and so on, is basically takes
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I mean, one is trade, one is missionaries.
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So the missionaries, of course, embodying what you call the benevolent impulse, that
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these are low people, and we must lift them up, and trade, of course, being what it is.
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And gradually, during this time, you talk about how India for them evolves from being
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a quote unquote land of fortune to a realm of fantasy.
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And you know, where they get more interested in sort of the spiritual aspect of India,
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you know, the transcendentalists sort of also get pretty influenced by that.
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But in the middle of the 19th century, you point to two things, two events, which change
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that interaction between America and South Asia completely.
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So, you know, the two events that you're referring to are the sort of Indian sort of rebellion
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of 1857-58, and the American Civil War, which starts just a few years afterwards.
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And both of these are sort of important historical ruptures in these societies in their own right.
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But what it means is that the early period of interaction, when you have this very dense
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commercial exchanges, all of that comes to a close, right?
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Now, in some ways, India does benefit from the American Civil War.
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For instance, Indian cotton exports had a huge boom, because American sort of cotton
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was sort of locked up, right, because of the Civil War, and so on.
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So you did have some, or even things like, you know, the export of sort of Kashmina from
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Kashmir actually experienced a major boom during the American Civil War.
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So you did have some benefits, but the reality was that the, you know, the sort of the long
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distance trade, which was a mainstay in some ways, comes to an end because of this period.
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And after that, when there is a reconfiguration, it happens in more or less autonomous ways,
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So after the Indian sort of rebellion is quelled, and India is integrated in the British Empire,
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you have the integration of India with the global economy under the aegis of the British
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So that's a very different form of engagement with the rest of the world.
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And the United States, of course, becomes this continent sized economy at home, which
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Americans realize that, you know, if only we know how to exploit this market, then we
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are set because, you know, and for the rest of the 19th century and well into the 20th
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century, the rest of the world actually matters very little in terms of trade for the United
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I mean, even today, actually, if you just look at trade as a percentage of American
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GDP, you will find that it's much lesser than that of any other advanced economy, because
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the United States has this humongous advantage of a continent sized economy, which the Americans
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were learning to sort of integrate, exploit, build companies on scale, etc, etc.
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All of that happens in the 19th century.
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So that the two sort of revolutions are, in some ways, a major point of rupture.
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But nevertheless, there are some continuities across this period, particularly in the realm
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of some of those things you mentioned, like the activities of missionaries, right?
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And again, I think the whole question of missionaries and religion shows the kind of contradictory
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strands that you had to this interaction.
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Once again, it's not monolithic at all.
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So on the one hand, you had these missionaries who first came to the subcontinent 1812.
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Now before that period, the British East India Company would not allow any missionary activity
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to happen in India, including British missionaries were not allowed.
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So when it opens up, that's the time when the Americans are also constituting the missionary
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So it's a good nice confluence of things.
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So American missionaries start coming to this part of the world, you know, as early as 1813,
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they are in Burma in places of what you'd call like Nagaland today already.
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But then they spread out to other parts of the world.
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And you know, initially, they have very little success in their actual mission, which is
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that of harvesting souls and converting people to Christianity.
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But there are other kinds of social sort of consequences which follow from missionary
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activity are, I think, very important, and are running through the 19th century into
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the early 20th century.
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You know, the missionaries are the first ones who introduce print culture in various parts
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of India, including Western India, you know, we're doing this in Bombay.
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And you know, this part of the world benefited a lot from various kinds of printing presses
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established by the missionaries.
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The missionaries were the first ones actually to have, you know, dictionaries for Indian
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languages in English, because they had to sort of translate the Bible, because you know,
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Protestantism expects that you will engage with the text yourself, right?
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They were the first ones who emphasized primary education, even for women and girls.
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Jyoti Bapule and his wife were both, you know, educated in missionary schools.
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You know, the missionaries in southern India, like my home state of Tamil Nadu, were very
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active in what were then known as the pariah colonies, or where Dalits lived, and you know,
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very influential in giving them education, allowing them, sensitizing them to land rights
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You know, later in the 19th century, missionaries were active in famine relief in Victorian
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They were also, you know, they were active in a range of sort of quasi developmental medical
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You know, you think of something like Christian Missionary College in Wellor, which is the
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first big medical college in this country, set up by American missionaries.
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You know, the eradication of hookworm was actually undertaken by American missionaries
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supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, already by 1910-15.
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So you have this extraordinary seam of activity which is continuing despite this rupture.
#
And would you say this is something that is part of or runs parallel to America's otherwise
#
sense of manifest destiny?
#
You know, which, you know, you've defined as, you know, the spread of liberty and republicanism
#
But it seems that at another level there is, and this perhaps arises to begin with out
#
of the benevolent instinct, but is also, you know, a sort of a reform process at the same
#
time where they see all these things that are wrong with the local culture in their
#
eyes, of course, not necessarily otherwise, and then they try to reform it and a lot of
#
good comes out of that.
#
No, I think it's very much part of this process, right?
#
So the idea of manifest destiny is first, you know, adumbrated in the American context
#
And the idea is to say that, you know, basically the United States is destined to conquer all
#
of North America, right?
#
Because there were all these territories which were occupied by indigenous communities, the
#
Indians in North America, and manifest destiny was basically an ideological sort of justification
#
for American expansion in a continental sense, right?
#
But what is interesting, and to me it was very striking, was how this whole ideology
#
of manifest destiny in some ways was always justified as being completely in contrast
#
to the imperialism being practiced by other countries like Britain, particularly in cases
#
So American imperialism at home, or American expansionism at home, was always seen as a
#
better alternative to the kind of exploitation of countries like India that were being done
#
In the sense they're less coercive and so on.
#
Yeah, not just less coercive, but they believe that, you know, Americans are settlers.
#
They actually settle down in this land, whereas British are just coming, they're visiting,
#
they're going back, they're exploiting this country, they're taking away its treasures.
#
So it's very interesting how the American reading of India up to the mid-19th century
#
is really, you know, is a mirror through which they look at Britain itself, right?
#
Which is a country with which they have very serious problems at this point of time.
#
In fact, in one of your early chapters, you've also cited this defense of slavery that was
#
made by someone who said that, hey, you talk about slavery, but look at the British oppression
#
of the Indian natives, that is far, far worse.
#
And then in a sense, once Britain becomes this great advocate of abolition of slavery,
#
I know that the whole abolitionist movement is in Britain, the Americans, especially in
#
the South, who are the pro-slavery lot, are constantly calling out British hypocrisy by
#
pointing to India, right?
#
So in a sense, India is part of those domestic American debates.
#
So it's in that sense that I feel that, you know, while in a sense, many people may not
#
have actually known India, India did have an important part in this American ideology.
#
And of course, Protestantism and the role of the missions was very much part of this
#
idea that, you know, the United States has discovered this unique constellation of providential
#
sort of, you know, faith-based sort of blessings with this ability to sort of craft a Republican
#
model of politics and that this is in some ways the best thing for the rest of the world,
#
And of course, there were differences even in the United States about how to take that
#
in some ways mirrors this whole democracy promotion kind of debates of the last decade,
#
you know, which is to say that should the United States sort of, you know, stand as
#
a shining city on the hill and act as a model or should it actually be sort of doing things
#
And then there were always debates about those kinds of things.
#
But I think there was a broad consensus that yes, the United States was in some ways destined
#
and they were people who were chosen, elect, which is a Protestant sort of way of thinking.
#
And I guess if there was an ebb and flow on this, you could say the period between the
#
two world wars was sort of the ebb when it, you know, drifted more towards isolationism
#
and saying, hey, we'll have nothing to do with the world.
#
And that's also a very interesting period in world history because for the first time
#
you don't really have one dominant power anymore.
#
You know, Britain has kind of lost some of that and there's sort of a vacuum within which
#
the great depression happens and Nazi Germany happens and all those kinds of things happen.
#
But in that period, what I also found interesting in your book is that you see, you know, you've
#
pointed out the various contradictory strands of one, there is this growing cultural fascination
#
with India, especially someone like Gandhi who was described by them as the greatest
#
living person and Time magazine made him person of the year in 1930.
#
And there's something symbiotic there also because a lot of Gandhi's inspiration came
#
from Thoreau and a lot of Thoreau's inspirations came from Indian mysticism.
#
So it's kind of funny that way.
#
But that again is in contrast to this anti-immigration sentiment that is coming up and the trouble
#
that Indian immigrants in America are facing.
#
But broadly, by the time the World War Two happens, you point it to a couple of public
#
polls where there is widespread support for Indian independence in America.
#
Even though America, the state itself has taken a step back and saying, hey, you know,
#
we're not going to interfere with the rest of the world.
#
I think the period between the two world wars is kind of interesting because while the United
#
States is not directly politically engaged, there is a much growing great awareness of
#
Indian politics, of Indian society and so on.
#
And this whole fascination with Gandhi in some ways is a reaction to the First World
#
War because after the end of the war, there's a huge pacifist movement which happens in
#
most Western countries to which there is a strand even in the United States.
#
And some of the better known figures of that period actually came out of that strand of
#
And for them, you know, Gandhi was this sort of seen as embodying this new form of politics
#
which emphasizes nonviolence and civil disobedience.
#
And as you say, you know, in some ways that goes back to Thoreau whom Gandhi had read.
#
Now, you know, in an earlier question you had asked about, you know, this sort of transcendentalists
#
who are a group of, again, intellectuals mostly in and around Boston who are very fascinated
#
by India in the mid-19th century, Emerson, Thoreau and others.
#
The interesting thing is how this phenomenon is a constant recurrence, right?
#
So you have the transcendentalists in the mid-19th century.
#
You have the American pacifists in the early 20th century.
#
And if you fast-forward into the 1960s, you have the American sort of hippie trail, so
#
Now, in each of these instances, what you find is that India and its culture, particularly
#
the Indian sort of religion, especially the high philosophical sort of, you know, the
#
Upanishads and the mysticism, the sort of the metaphysics, so to speak, is seen as providing
#
an antidote to American commercialism, to American militarism, you know.
#
In a sense, India is this other to the United States, right?
#
So there's this constant fascination with India as somehow providing a refuge from everything
#
that is wrong with the United States, right?
#
So in a sense, the Gandhian moment is very much like that.
#
But what you find is that in the 1920s and 30s, there are lots of Americans who come,
#
who spend a lot of time with Gandhi.
#
In fact, some of the first expositions outside of India of Gandhian nonviolence and its principles
#
were undertaken by people.
#
Some of these people, of course, went back and influenced another generation of American
#
activists during the civil rights movement, who again looked to Gandhi, you know, Martin
#
Luther King and others, for whom this was very important.
#
And of course, you know, and then vice versa, as you're saying, the transmission belt of
#
this kind of interaction between particularly groups of African Americans and the Indian
#
nationalist movement was very strong, right?
#
So you have a figure like Kamala Devi Chattopadhyay, who goes to the United States and, you know,
#
and then sort of is really very well received in terms of the kinds of audiences that she
#
has and understands and tries to relate these two problems, right?
#
So there is a sense that just as African Americans are being oppressed within the United States
#
of America, there is a problem of imperialism, which is seen as a sort of international counterpart
#
to a domestic problem, right?
#
So there are these many ways in which India and the United States at a sort of a common
#
popular level of that of the people come together before this great sort of geopolitical watershed
#
of the Second World War happens.
#
And then with the Second World War, obviously, the US has to shed its isolationism and you
#
also have, you know, you also write about how Roosevelt is favorably inclined towards
#
He tries to intervene, for example, when there is a famine in Bengal and at various times
#
he tries to intervene with Churchill to sort of take a kinder attitude.
#
But at the same time, there is a fact that India is, you know, also part of the war and
#
Japan can invade at any time, so giving them independence now makes no sense.
#
And you know, so Roosevelt also has to kind of contend with those sort of, how did all
#
So, you know, by the time the Second World War begins, September 1939, the story in India
#
is that, you know, India has basically taken it to the war without any consultation with
#
any Indian, you know, sort of political groups.
#
It's worth recalling that at this point of time, it was Indian political parties that
#
were in power in the provinces, Congress Party, of course, but others as well, and that, you
#
know, the Congress actually decides not to support the war effort, even though they are
#
favorably sort of, they do believe that the fascists have to be sort of, Nazis have to
#
be resisted, but they believe that Britain cannot on the one hand say that it's fighting
#
for democracy while withholding rights of Indians.
#
So there is this period of impasse really between 1939 and 1942 when the Congress Party
#
is kind of trying to toy with various kinds of positions, which will allow it to reconcile
#
both these imperatives.
#
One of supporting the war effort, which at least people like Jawaharlal Nehru and most
#
of the other leadership was very favorably inclined.
#
Gandhi, of course, had a very different view because of his sort of stance on nonviolence.
#
But at the same time, you know, you also want some kind of statement from the British about
#
independence for India, which is not forthcoming at all.
#
And the United States has been sort of watching this.
#
And once the attack on Pearl Harbor, which coincides with attacks on various British
#
territories of Southeast Asia, and the advance of Japanese to Burma by March, April 1942
#
happens and the United States is fully engaged, then they decide that, you know, India has
#
to be sort of bought into the war effort wholeheartedly rather than this kind of a situation where
#
their cooperation at the popular level seems to be withheld, even though the Indian army
#
is growing pretty fast.
#
But so it's in that context of the Roosevelt administration, actually, President Roosevelt
#
himself leans on Churchill to say that, you know, you have to sort of give some attention
#
It is against that backdrop that the famous sort of mission led by Stafford Cripps comes
#
to India to discuss with Indian leaders of various kinds about what kind of a constitutional
#
settlement can come up for India and with what timetable and so on.
#
Now, the mission fails.
#
But what is interesting is how interested the Americans are in keeping that going.
#
Now, even after that failure, the Americans don't disengage immediately.
#
It's actually the turning point really comes with the Quit India movement, which was a
#
popular movement, even though we tend to associate it with Gandhi and others, you know, Karo
#
Yamaro kind of slogan and so on, you know, do or die.
#
But the reality was that a lot of people started doing things quite autonomously during the
#
Quit India movement, right?
#
So there were many groups of protesters who went, the Quit India movement was quite violent.
#
You know, at least in Eastern India and Bengal and other parts, there were military supply
#
lines which were being sort of endangered by the activities of the rebels.
#
And it is in that context that the Americans actually decide that we have to prioritize
#
the war with Japan over a domestic Indian political settlement, and we cannot jeopardize
#
this at this point of time by choosing sides between.
#
And then of course, Churchill is an important ally because they do want Britain to remain
#
So in that context, Americans sort of take a back step and then don't really try and
#
play much of a role, though it's quite interesting that, you know, even successive sort of emissaries
#
sent by Roosevelt, however, tend to take a very sympathetic line towards, you know, Indian
#
nationalism, towards the Congress Party, towards Gandhi, who was in a major fast in early 1943.
#
At one point, it looks like he might just die.
#
And the Americans are intervening saying save his life.
#
Yeah, right, absolutely.
#
So in a sense, there is a degree of this thing, but India becomes very important from the
#
perspective of the war because by 1943, India emerges as this most important allied base
#
for operations in Southeast Asia.
#
The Americans are involved in the subcontinent directly in a sense of supporting economic
#
sort of activity around the war.
#
The war effort itself, you know, it's striking, there's one part of the rail network between
#
Calcutta and Assam, which was then, you know, Assam then included everything up to the Burma
#
border, an 800 kilometer stretch of it, which was actually operated by the Americans themselves
#
So the Americans actually very heavily engaged, you know, they took over the sort of operations
#
of the Calcutta port to a considerable extent, right.
#
So they were very, very deeply involved in the subcontinent.
#
For the first time, you know, thousands of Americans actually saw the subcontinent soldiers
#
So in that sense, I think the Second World War really marks an important sort of rupture
#
And do you think that sympathetic position that the Americans took and the interventions
#
they made to Churchill had any role to play in making India's independence more probable?
#
Well, I mean, I think the fact was that the Cripps mission failed, as I said, in a sense
#
that you wouldn't have any immediate resolution.
#
But the mere fact that the British had to send out a mission and agree that India's
#
independence was on the cards meant that whenever the war came to an end, you are not going
#
to have a situation where the British could reasonably expect to dial back from that.
#
I think given the scale of India's commitment during the Second World War, given the scale
#
of sacrifices made by India during that period, I mean, just in terms of simple financial
#
transactions, you know, at the end of the Second World War, Britain owed India three
#
billion pounds, now, which in today's currency is like the equivalent of 300 billion US dollars.
#
You know, that was the amount of money that Britain owed to India for the war effort of
#
So it's an extraordinary sort of mobilization of a very poor country.
#
Which India of course wanted to use to rebuild its economy and so on, and that didn't work
#
Yeah, that didn't work out.
#
So in a sense, you know, you had this extraordinary sort of, you know, transformation of the relationship
#
between Britain and India, which had happened during the course of the war.
#
So it was going to be very difficult for anyone to dial back from there.
#
But nevertheless, by the time the war comes to an end, the Americans are actually quite
#
happy to let the British sort of run the subcontinental affairs, because they are just too engaged
#
on what is happening in Europe, you know, where the sort of, you know, the post-war
#
period and, you know, the onset of the Cold War, et cetera, as well as East Asia, with
#
the occupations of Japan, Korea, you know, various kinds of things happening.
#
The Americans are actually quite happy to let the British sort of come back into free.
#
And it's not really until the Korean War of 1950-53 that the Americans then decide to
#
displace the British and take a much more direct active role in the affairs of the subcontinent.
#
I think World War II is an apt time to take a quick commercial break.
#
franchise, Zinkar and Jishnu revisit their origin stories of the Potter Wars.
#
And with that, let's continue on with your show.
#
Welcome back to The Scene in the Unseen.
#
I'm here with Srinath Raghavan and we're talking about U.S. attitudes towards South Asia.
#
Srinath, you were saying that, you know, we were talking about how the U.S. was focused
#
on, you know, became refocused on South Asia during World War II after this long period
#
of isolationism because India was both an important front in the war per se with, you
#
know, worries about Japan invading and also because things, I guess, had reached that
#
stage in the popular imagination where Gandhi was a popular figure and there was widespread
#
support for Indian independence.
#
But after the war, you know, America sort of turns its gaze away from South Asia and
#
you mentioned two reasons for this.
#
So the primary reason, of course, is the Americans are very preoccupied with much of the rest
#
There is Western Europe and Eastern Europe, whose fate has yet to be decided, the reconstruction
#
of these economies have to be undertaken.
#
There is American sort of occupation in East Asia of Japan, Korea.
#
All of these are things which take up a lot more time and attention.
#
And the Americans are reasonably happy to let the British come back.
#
The Americans support broadly the attempts by the British in 1946 to actually keep India
#
I know which, you know, in India, we tend to assume that the British always want to
#
I mean, whatever be the divided rule policy or a longer frame.
#
The fact was that in 1946, the British did want to keep India together, principally because
#
India had proved to be such a great strategic asset to the British Empire during the Second
#
So because partition of India would have meant partition of the Indian army, right?
#
So that was something the British were desperately trying to avoid.
#
And then the Americans were happy to sort of support that line.
#
And ultimately, of course, when partition kind of became inevitable, they went along
#
But again, in a sense, even subsequently Americans would regret the fact that they allowed the
#
British to in some ways lead them by their noses, especially say when the Kashmir issue
#
came before the UN Security Council in 1948.
#
The American position on that particular dispute, which was very strongly shaped by British
#
who in turn had wider concerns about Muslim populations in Palestine and what would happen
#
if they were seen as opposing Pakistan on this particular issue because Kashmir was
#
the Muslim majority state and so on, right?
#
So the British had a very...
#
And the Americans were just like, hey, you guys know Kashmir better, so we'll defer to
#
So they just allowed them to sort of do that.
#
And in some ways, subsequently, Americans would say that maybe that was not the best
#
But nevertheless, given the range of other claims on their time and attention and energy,
#
that is what the Americans ended up doing.
#
And as I said, things only start changing from the second half of 1950 when North Korea
#
And there is now a major concern that the Soviet Union might actually strike similarly
#
at other places, particularly in the Persian Gulf, which was seen as very vulnerable.
#
And in that context, Americans then start thinking seriously about building alliances
#
to contain the Soviet Union in the Middle East and in Southeast Asia.
#
And in both these contexts, funnily enough, it's Pakistan, which is seen as the more chosen
#
And again, there, you can talk about how the stereotypical images of Hindus and Muslims
#
then gets transposed onto Indians and Pakistanis.
#
Which is Muslims being virile and warriors and Hindus being shifty and shady.
#
And the effect and incapable...
#
And what is interesting to me, and again, these are the things that you learn just by
#
doing research, is how striking are those sort of tropes and themes and those codes
#
of thinking about this part of the world, which go back to this literature.
#
I mean, like Kipling, for instance, I mean, generations of Americans only knew the subcontinent
#
through Kipling, right?
#
And in that sense, the influence of those ways of thinking was very strong.
#
So in a sense, and then it is interesting that when the US-Pakistan alliance is concluded
#
in 1954, the Americans do hardly any serious assessment of what is it that Pakistan is
#
going to do for them by way of this alliance, except for assuming that Pakistan has somehow
#
a very great supply of Punjabi Muslims who can be fielded in uniforms against the Red
#
And that, you know, these are people who are sort of predisposed to fight in a way that
#
And of course, there is a political problem as well, which is that India is not aligned.
#
Dawar Lal Nehru has his own sort of views on the United States and its policies in Asia.
#
And that also adds to the sort of, you know, the sort of growing gulf between India and
#
And one of the things that struck me was that at the moment of independence, you could probably
#
say that there is a sort of a blank slate in South Asia, that Pakistan, India, they
#
can turn whichever way.
#
And at that point, Jinnah sort of takes a practical, real politic view.
#
He sees what is happening with, you know, that the US would need a counterpoint to the
#
And in fact, you quote him as telling Margaret Bokwhite, quote, America needs Pakistan more
#
than Pakistan needs America, unquote.
#
And therefore, you know, there are those overtures towards America.
#
And in contrast, Nehru basically alienates the US in three ways.
#
Number one, he has this whole philosophical approach that Asia is for Asians.
#
So getting rid of colonialism doesn't only mean getting rid of the British, it means
#
The second approach is, of course, his whole approach towards a mixed economy and import
#
substitution and so on, which doesn't at that time align with the Americans' ideology.
#
And again, here again, ideology sort of coming into it.
#
And the third is simply his personal arrogance towards Americans, because, you know, a lot
#
of these early Indian freedom fighters were also, in a sense, British liberals.
#
And he takes that kind of snobbishness and attitude to his approach to the Americans.
#
I think it's fair to say that, you know, all of the things that you mentioned were important
#
issues in the way that US-India relations unfolded in this early period.
#
Pakistan made a pitch for American assistance pretty quickly, you know, even though for
#
all of Jinnah's bravado, I mean, the fact was that Pakistanis desperately needed this
#
And at that point of time, their concern was not so much military sort of counterweight
#
against India as economic aid, because it was a new state which is being created and
#
But of course, once the Kashmir issue came to the fore, and India and Pakistan were locked
#
in this sort of antagonism and were fighting a war and so on, it became clear to the Pakistanis
#
that in order to offset India's sort of superior military and economic capabilities, they needed
#
some kind of a counterweight.
#
So you have this sort of wooing of the Americans, which happens in the context of the Korean
#
War, etc., culminating in the thing, right?
#
The second point is about economic philosophies and so on.
#
And again, what is interesting in the early period is that, yes, you know, as early as
#
1939, when the Second World War was beginning, the Americans are, at least parts of the State
#
Department are starting to think about what do we need for the post-war world, right?
#
And one of the things that is very strong in American thinking is that the post-war
#
world should not have the problems that the interwar period had.
#
And they believe that one of the major reasons why you had this kind of aggression by Japan,
#
countries like Germany, etc., was that the global economy had been broken up into various
#
kinds of autarkic blocks.
#
And one of those autarkic blocks, incidentally, during the Great Depression was that of the
#
British Commonwealth, right?
#
So which is one of the...
#
So opening up the British Commonwealth countries like India and integrating them with the global
#
markets was a very important part of the American vision for the post-war world, right?
#
So the United States wanted very much to keep India in the capitalist sort of this thing
#
and believed that India has to be an important part of that story.
#
So the Americans were willing to cut India a lot of slack.
#
I mean, I don't think the problem was as much about India adopting a planned economic growth
#
model or even a mixed economy.
#
As with many of their other allies, the Americans were willing to sort of give a lot of ground
#
to countries to decide what was working for them because their ultimate aim was to ensure
#
reconstruction, development, and integration in the capitalist rather than the socialist
#
So that was the broader consideration.
#
But I think there were issues over, say, American investments in the subcontinent, which was,
#
interestingly enough, opposed not just by the political class, but by the Indian business
#
If you think of all the people who wrote the Bombay Plan of 1944, they were the same people
#
who were constantly reminding Jawaharlal Nehru that, you know, do not liberalize your sort
#
of industrial policy, et cetera, because they thought that India has to have this space
#
for Indian capitalism to come up.
#
Well, out of self-interest because they wanted to protect their own interests.
#
And then they believed that, you know, so far the experience of having been working
#
with British capital in India in such a big way was that Indian capital is always sort
#
of, you know, never allowed to grow.
#
And they believed that this independence also meant an opportunity to create a national
#
economic space with an Indian sort of capitalist sort of led development happening, right?
#
So there was that kind of a thing.
#
But Americans also had other kinds of differences with India, right?
#
For instance, Americans throughout the first and the second five-year plan, which if you
#
say is the first decade after Indian independence, really, through the 1950s, were insisting
#
that India was focusing too much on heavy industrialization, not paying enough attention
#
And even though India did not actually go with American priorities, Americans gave enormous
#
amounts of economic aid to India.
#
I mean, if you think of something like the second five-year plan, you know, there was
#
such large financing gaps in the plan that even the planners themselves assumed that
#
this money would materialize from somewhere and that somewhere was the United States of
#
America, which was the only dollar surplus country, so to speak.
#
So in that context, Americans were willing to sort of, you know, despite these differences,
#
they would have sort of accommodated it.
#
The third point which is saying is quite interesting and important, which is about Jawaharlal Nehru's
#
attitudes towards the United States and its policies in Asia, but also towards the United
#
So on the policy front, I think it's fair to say that Nehru believed that the United
#
States, you know, in the post-war period was, in effect, creating divisions among Asian
#
countries by continuing to hold on to military bases in Japan and other places.
#
And that U.S. policy in some ways was a very sort of destabilizing element in this region.
#
And that was a major source of sort of, you know, clash of worldviews, so to speak, between
#
And of course, you know, Jawaharlal Nehru, as you rightly point out, I think it's fair
#
to say, had, you know, had a degree of contempt for the Americans as a bunch of Parvenu capitalists,
#
you know, which mirrored the attitudes of the British aristocracy more than that of
#
In fact, there is a very oft quoted line in the memoirs of Dean Acheson, who was President
#
Truman's Secretary of State.
#
And he says that, you know, when I met Jawaharlal Nehru, I was reminded of Queen Victoria's
#
statement about Prime Minister William Gladstone, and she said that he spoke to me as if he
#
was addressing a public meeting.
#
And you know, in a sense, that's the way that we felt about Jawaharlal Nehru as well.
#
So there was definitely that kind of a cultural gulf as well.
#
Nehru once very condescendingly told J.R.D.
#
Tata, do not speak to me of profit, it is a dirty word.
#
And I suppose that attitude carries through to how he looked at American capitalism.
#
But also perhaps there is some amount of animus, as you've pointed out in the book, through,
#
you know, incidents like, for example, the denial of the sterling that was owed to India,
#
which, you know, which America kind of supported that not being given to India.
#
And you know, that's one reason to hold a grudge.
#
Another reason to hold a grudge is the stand that America took on Kashmir, where they just
#
supported the British, which, you know, in retrospect, like you said, it's completely
#
But Nehru sitting at that vantage point of history probably did not view it in that way
#
and, you know, just saw them as the enemy.
#
But in general, the American decision to align with Pakistan in 1954 in some ways was a major
#
turning point in their engagement with the subcontinent, not just with India, right?
#
So of course, India-Pakistan relations over Kashmir and, you know, and then the American
#
alliance had an impact on India-U.S. relations.
#
But we also forget there was a second non-aligned country in the subcontinent, Afghanistan,
#
at that point of time, which also had very serious problems with Pakistan, primarily
#
over this, you know, disputed boundary area, which they refer to as Pashtunistan, where
#
the group, a community called Pashtuns used to live on either side of that.
#
And there was a fairly strong Pashtun nationalist sentiment on either side, including such stalwart
#
people as Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, who was known as Frontier Gandhi, who was a sort of
#
a major advocate of the sort of Pashtun unity movement.
#
And we also, you know, should recall that Afghanistan was one of the few countries which
#
opposed the entry of Pakistan into the United Nations in 1948.
#
So you know, the animosity was actually pretty strong there.
#
And you had a parallel development in Afghan-Pakistan relations, as what happened with India-Pakistan
#
relations, where American alliance with Pakistan in some ways really throws the Afghans off
#
And of course, we must remember that in that case, they were the weaker of the two parties.
#
So in a sense, you have a strange constellation of India and Afghanistan on either side of
#
Pakistan, both of which are ostensibly non-aligned countries.
#
But after the Americans sort of drive towards forging an alliance with Pakistan, end up
#
dealing ties with the Soviet Union.
#
And that, of course, coincides with the rise of Nikita Khrushchev, who's also open to dealing
#
with non-aligned countries, is not as ideologically sort of minded as Stalin was and had a more
#
pragmatic view of what the Soviet Union wanted to do.
#
And in some ways, you know, the US sort of alliance with Pakistan really draws a line
#
through the subcontinent.
#
And it makes it inevitable that India and Afghanistan then have no choice.
#
They have to sort of gravitate towards the Soviet Union eventually.
#
And as historians are generally sort of very hours to say anything was inevitable, though
#
I think, yeah, it's in a sense, the logic of it then becomes difficult to escape, especially
#
when you have a leader like Khrushchev, who is willing to sort of give you things.
#
See, with someone like Stalin, for instance, you know, India had absolutely no relationship
#
with the Soviet Union in the first, you know, five, six years after Indian independence,
#
because there was an Indian Communist Party which was opposed to Indian Azadi and stuff.
#
And this, you know, the government was cracking down on them at home, so there's no question
#
of sort of having any good relationship with Soviet Union.
#
You know, Nehru sent his own sister, Vijayalakshmi Pandit, as ambassador to Soviet Union.
#
She never even got to meet Stalin.
#
The first Indian ambassador who ever got to meet Stalin was Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan.
#
And that too Radhakrishnan was, you know, more or less sort of bulldozed his way through
#
and had a chat with Stalin and so on, right.
#
It's only after Stalin's death that there is a slow reorientation of Soviet attitudes
#
So, in a sense, you know, it is not just because of what the Americans did, but also what was
#
happening in the Soviet Union.
#
So you have this, once again, a constellation of things which brings India and Afghanistan,
#
you know, in a much more favorable relationship with the Soviet Union.
#
The Soviet Union is willing to sort of bankroll things in Afghanistan, they're willing to
#
bankroll things in India.
#
But at least as far as India is concerned, the United States, however, continue to remain
#
much more important in economic terms.
#
You know, we tend to think of the Indian economy as somehow being very influenced by the Soviet
#
And I think that's actually fundamentally wrong.
#
There are aspects also with planned economy model, which we did take in, especially ideas
#
But, you know, a lot of your economic plans were vetted by American economists who used
#
to come to India, who used to stay and spend time, act as consultants to your planning
#
So, and then the Americans, as I said, you know, were very important in bridging the
#
financial deficit, which our plans had almost from the very beginning.
#
We'll cover the economics later, but that whole decision of the US to sort of adopt
#
Pakistan in a sense also sets a permanent dissonance in place.
#
And that dissonance is in fact reflected in the title of your book itself.
#
You know, Bill Clinton had once called the Pakistan Afghanistan border the most dangerous
#
And Obama had later used the same phrase for the India Pakistan border.
#
And the American approaches to these two borders in terms of principles is completely different
#
that on the one hand, when it comes to the border with India, they'll support the whole
#
Kashmir movement, you know, which Pakistan is deeply interested in.
#
But on the other border, they won't support the Pashtunistan movement.
#
And similarly, on one border, they are very concerned about clamping down on terror entirely.
#
And on the other border for a long time, it was kind of a wink and nod kind of thing that
#
you sort of let it happen.
#
And would you say that this is something that kind of began at that period and has continued
#
since and this is a sort of a dissonance that it's hard to come to terms with?
#
But from the American point of view, you know, it's rarely the case that in international
#
politics, you're going to be able to apply the same principles in all places, right.
#
And in fact, I quote one of the Americans as telling the Afghans that listen, we were
#
the ones who invented the term self-determination, but we can also tell you that it doesn't apply
#
So, so in a sense, obviously, larger political and other kinds of interests do come to the
#
But at the same time, I think it's fair to say that at least after 1963, the Americans
#
made no serious attempt to sort of intervene in the Kashmir dispute.
#
1963 really was the last time because India in the wake of the war with China and the
#
defeat against China was looking to the United States for military supplies.
#
The United States was, Kennedy administration was giving those military supplies.
#
The Pakistanis and Ayub Khan protested and the Americans felt that maybe this is a good
#
opportunity to try and see if some kind of a solution could be done in Kashmir.
#
And that broadly speaking was the last time the Americans actually directly ever get involved
#
And their whole idea is that, listen, we need the subcontinent to be stable, which is to
#
say we don't want wars.
#
We don't want arms races out here.
#
We want these countries to develop broadly on capitalist lines and clearly stay away
#
from the Soviet camp, right.
#
So in a sense, you had some kind of minimal objectives, which if they were met, you know,
#
life would be going on.
#
But then of course, you know, a range of other considerations come into play from the 1970s.
#
And you know, Pakistan has been a failed state for so long that we don't realize that it
#
wasn't always thus and you point out that, you know, between 59 and 69 when Ayub Khan
#
was in charge, Pakistan pretty much took the economic direction, which the US wanted them
#
to take and it worked for them.
#
I mean, you know, that decade in some ways is Ayub Khan was celebrating as this decade
#
of development, of course.
#
But the reality was that the Pakistanis were much more amenable to American suggestions
#
on their models of planned economic development.
#
The Pakistan Planning Commission was also very strongly supported by a group of economists
#
based at Harvard, called the Harvard Group of Economists.
#
And in a sense, they undertook many of the things that India was not willing to take.
#
For instance, Pakistan embraced the green revolution technologies before India did,
#
right, and never quite faced the same degree of constraints.
#
They allowed for a system of sort of, you know, put in place a fiscal infrastructure
#
of tax breaks and such like things, which allowed for capital accumulation to happen
#
much stronger and this thing.
#
And Pakistan had access to certain kinds of markets.
#
So that's a decade when you see Pakistan is actually economically doing better than
#
India, at least in terms of growth rates and such like things.
#
And there is a sense that, you know, you have a regime which might be authoritarian, but
#
it's still delivering, right, which is the sort of model that American political scientists
#
like Samuel Huntington actually hail as a good way of thinking about it, which is to
#
say that democracy and such like things may not be the most important thing for the developing
#
So that's a sort of redefinition, which is given by an authoritarian figure, who is nevertheless
#
also a benevolent authoritarian figure because he can deliver.
#
So sort of a redefinition of that manifest destiny where it's not just delivering liberty,
#
that's right, yeah, delivering whatever we feel they need.
#
So in a sense, you have that kind of a thing and Pakistani thing.
#
But what is also clear is that by the end of the decade, by 1969, the sort of the lopsidedness
#
of the Pakistani growth story also comes to this thing, right, and that lopsidedness broadly
#
happens along two axes.
#
The first is that of sort of excessive concentration of wealth amongst a very small group of corporates
#
and families really, like the parts of the subcontinent, family-owned businesses is the
#
model in Pakistan as well.
#
And the Pakistan Planning Commission's head in 1968 actually discloses in an interview
#
that some 22 families in the country actually own over 95% of the wealth, right?
#
And then it's a shocking thing because you've had this.
#
The second axis along which there is this kind of lopsided growth is the West Pakistan,
#
which is Pakistan as we know it today, is getting much more of investment resources,
#
industrialization is happening there at a much stronger pace than what is happening
#
in East Pakistan, today's Bangladesh.
#
And that leads to a major gulf between the two wings of Pakistan.
#
And it's interesting that the Pakistani Planning Commission is actually staffed almost entirely
#
by Bengali economists, right?
#
So the guys who are writing the plans know very well that these things are in some way.
#
So they come up with this whole narrative of saying that this economic growth model
#
is essentially neocolonial because we are providing agricultural inputs and all the
#
investment and industrialization is happening in the West.
#
And that's supposed to be the sort of dependency model, so to speak.
#
So in a sense, the sort of American assisted economic policies do extract a toll.
#
And that in some ways leads to the collapse of the Ayub Khan regime in 1969, the set of
#
protests in both East and West Pakistan and leads to the overthrow of the military dictatorship.
#
And then of course, that also sets in train a series of events which leads to the liberation
#
And according to you, you've of course written a whole separate book on this, but even in
#
this book, you devote some time to it, that 71 is absolutely critical, not just to the
#
subcontinent itself in terms of India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, but also the way the US perceives
#
And of course, in the 70s, everything kind of changes, you know, where the Cold War becomes
#
less relevant and other factors come into play.
#
1971 is important because, you know, if you look at the period, say, in the run up to
#
the in the 1960s, right, I mean, especially the second half of the 1960s, the United States
#
is kind of disengaging from the subcontinent a little bit.
#
Under Lyndon Johnson, the United States is increasingly involved in the war in Vietnam.
#
During the 1965 war between India and Pakistan, the Americans kind of take more or less what
#
I call a plague on both your houses kind of attitude, right?
#
They impose arms embargoes on both sides, they say, we're not going to give any aid
#
And ultimately, when the post-war conference is held, it is held by the Soviet Union.
#
That's where Lal Bahadur Shastri dies, right?
#
So it's a very interesting thing that for the first time, the United States actually
#
allows the Soviet Union to take the lead in settling the geopolitical affairs of the subcontinent.
#
Because of American involvement in Vietnam.
#
Johnson just decides that, listen, these are incoherent.
#
They don't have the bandwidth.
#
These are incorrigible countries, you know, let the Soviets go and break their head against
#
that wall if they want to.
#
You know, he has to worry about great society at home.
#
He has to worry about Vietnam abroad, right?
#
So his priorities are pretty full and that's, you know, the civil rights bill is being sort
#
of activated at the time.
#
So lots of things happening.
#
So there's a period of kind of disengagement.
#
But then once you have the Nixon administration come in, they come in with a very different
#
set of priorities, which is to say that they want to get out of Vietnam, but get out in
#
an honorable fashion, right?
#
So an American exit has to be sort of orchestrated in such a way that it does not seem as a scoot
#
And in that context, they believe that the United States will need to sort of reach out
#
to China, which is seen as a country which will allow them to sort of, you know, influence
#
North Vietnam to the negotiating table and such like things.
#
In order to reach to China, the Americans decide to sort of go through Pakistan because
#
Pakistan and China have a good relationship going back to 1962-63 when India and China
#
So Yahya Khan, who's the new military dictator of Pakistan, actually acts as a conduit between
#
the Nixon administration and the Chinese leadership.
#
And in that context, the Pakistanis and the Yahya Khan regime acquires an importance in
#
the Nixon administration's mind, which is kind of out of proportion to anything the
#
Pakistanis were doing at that point of time, partly because Americans were doing it, the
#
Nixon administration was doing it so secretively.
#
I mean, Nixon did not even inform his own sort of senior cabinet officials about this
#
It was all done in a hush-hush way.
#
And because of this extreme drive towards secrecy and need to sort of keep especially
#
Congressional Republicans out of the frame because you're reaching out to China, the
#
They want to do it completely through a secret channel and Pakistan becomes important.
#
But this opening up to Pakistan and Kissinger visits Pakistan in summer of 1971 and after
#
that it's out in the open.
#
That coincides, of course, with the onset of the Bangladesh crisis, which has begun
#
with the crackdown of the Pakistan army on the Bengalis in March.
#
By the end of summer of 1971, you have an estimated 10 million refugees on Indian soil.
#
And it is quite clear that this is an issue which is, you know, definitely going to escalate
#
And the Americans at that point of time take a very pro-Pakistan line in a sense.
#
It is arguable about whether the United States actually needed to do that in order to pursue
#
even its own hard-nosed interests with China because what we know from Chinese sources
#
and other things is that the Chinese themselves were telling the Pakistanis to sort of back
#
away from that kind of an extreme military action against the Bengalis.
#
But the Americans wouldn't want to do it.
#
And finally, when the war happened, the United States took a very antagonistic position towards
#
They cut off all economic aid to India.
#
They cut off all military aid to India, of course, even earlier.
#
And then they sent the sort of, you know, the Seventh Fleet with aircraft carriers with
#
nuclear weapons on board to the Bay of Bengal in an attempt to intimidate the Indians.
#
And of course, the Americans claim that Nixon and Kissinger believe, you know, or whatever,
#
they used it as a pretext that the Indians were going to attack West Pakistan and not
#
Whatever be the reasons, the reality was that that episode really sort of ends up marking
#
a deep rupture in U.S.-India relations.
#
And the Indians just had moved into Dhaka before really anything much happened.
#
So in a sense, I mean, nothing happened in a real sense, but it left behind a legacy
#
which was, you know, which was very difficult to sort of pick up pieces.
#
And also for Pakistan, because the Pakistanis believe that the Americans actually did not
#
help them very much during this, right?
#
So you again have a period of disengagement with Pakistan, U.S.-Pakistan relations, U.S.-India
#
relations are very turbulent.
#
And one sort of knock-on consequence of the 1971 thing, which in some ways goes to your
#
point, which is a recalibration of American sort of priorities in the subcontinent in
#
the mid-1970s, was the Indian decision to test nuclear weapons, which was at least given
#
a certain impetus by the 1971 crisis and what happened during that time.
#
And you know, in 1974, India goes nuclear and preventing India from, you know, becoming
#
a proliferator is a very important American priority from there on.
#
So nuclear weapons as a whole and subcontinent, it's worth pointing out that the Pakistanis
#
were already thinking about starting a nuclear program by 1972, soon after their country
#
So it's not as if they started only after the Indian tests, but the Indian tests again
#
gave an impetus to the Pakistani program.
#
The second thing which happens in the 1970s, which I think again marks a complete break
#
from the old Cold War priorities, is the rise of what you might refer to as political Islam
#
or Islamism in Pakistan with the advent of Zia-ul-Haq, but even before that, with Pakistani
#
support to groups like the Jamaat-e-Islami of Afghanistan, which the Pakistanis were
#
using in order to basically keep the Afghan regime from making claims on Prussia, right?
#
And now once the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan happens in 1979, the whole dimension of using
#
the Islamist fighters, they call them freedom fighters, Mujahideen, to drive the Soviet
#
Union out becomes a major priority for the United States.
#
Both the last parts of the Carter administration and the Reagan administration, a lot of effort
#
is spent in the subcontinent on doing this.
#
But that also means that you're also turning a blind eye to Pakistani sort of efforts at
#
acquiring their own nuclear weapon, which the Americans know very well about, right?
#
And we now know from declassified American documents, which I've used in reconstructing
#
that particular part of the story, that the Americans confronted Zia-ul-Haq about his
#
nuclear programs with evidence, which obviously they had collected through technical and other
#
intelligence sources, and allowed Zia to sort of get away with the ways it lies.
#
And not just that, but gave congressional certification under the Reagan administration
#
successively saying that the Pakistanis are not pursuing a bomb, right?
#
So in a sense, the period between 1975 and 87, 88, in many ways, you encounter a set
#
of problems, which I think mark the major concerns for the Americans today.
#
If the Americans today believe that the subcontinent, or at least they've sort of said that it is
#
the most dangerous place, it is because of this confluence of nuclear weapons and these
#
jihadi forces, which ultimately are the sort of ultimate nightmare of every American administration
#
when it comes to subcontinent, that somehow one of these guys is going to get hold of
#
one of those devices or materials and so on.
#
But the problem goes back to the mid-70s, which is why I say that in some ways, from
#
the mid-70s, it's not just the old Cold War priorities of saying we need Pakistan to contain
#
the Soviet Union and so on, but a completely new set of issues which comes to the fore.
#
And so here's my question.
#
I mean, the US then takes a bunch of decisions around supporting Islamism and around backing
#
Zia, funding the ISI, backing the Mujahideen and so on and so forth, which have grave historical
#
consequences a couple of decades onwards.
#
But at that time, strategically, it must have seemed completely reasonable and the only
#
I mean, what are the counterfactuals here?
#
Could they have done anything differently?
#
Like is it fair to now point a finger and say that, hey, you know, you created Osama?
#
Or was there something at the time they could have done differently without the benefit
#
Well, I mean, so I think it's fair to say that, you know, the Americans did not create
#
Osama in any straightforward sense of the word, right?
#
But the reality is that the United States supported a group of people, you know, various
#
kinds of Islamist guerrillas, and allowed Pakistan to build a sort of an infrastructure
#
to support and utilize these groups, over which Americans had very little oversight
#
and basically got the Saudis to match their contributions, all in the name of doing this.
#
And actually, towards the far end of it, ended up giving very dangerous systems to the Mujahideen,
#
including the infamous Stinger missiles, you know, with which they were bringing down sort
#
of surface-to-air missiles, handheld surface-to-air missiles.
#
And the Americans spent the better part of the late 1980s actually trying to buy those
#
from black markets all over the world, right?
#
So those were very counterproductive things.
#
So in a sense, while, you know, their desire to sort of get the Soviets out of Afghanistan
#
might have been understandable, you know, it's not clear to me that this was necessarily
#
the best way of doing it.
#
And what is interesting is that the problems with these approaches were pointed out to
#
them at that point of time.
#
It's not that we are talking about this stuff with a post-9-11 kind of view, right?
#
I mean, if you look at the records of conversation, we now have a few of them between Rajiv Gandhi
#
and officials in the Reagan administration.
#
The Indians are constantly pointing out, you know, it's actually quite, it is almost a
#
replay of what is happening in the mid-2000s, where, you know, the Indians are constantly
#
pointing out to them saying that, listen, look at the kind of people you're supporting,
#
I mean, people like them are genuinely extremists and that if you are going to give, allow these
#
groups to sort of come to power in Afghanistan, it is going to lead to a great degree of instability
#
And we are not just saying it for ourselves, but on the whole, right?
#
I mean, in that sense, and of course, as I said, I mean, not just the sort of allowing
#
these groups to sort of take place, but allowing Pakistan to sort of develop a nuclear weapons
#
program covertly and assisting them in effect, you know, by sort of allowing them to do this
#
stuff was a deadly cocktail.
#
And again, I don't think these are only criticisms which can be made with the benefit of hindsight.
#
I think people are pointing it out at that point of time that these were dangerous policies
#
and that the acquisition of nuclear weapons by Pakistan in such a covert manner would
#
have very destabilizing consequences or support for these kinds of groups.
#
Of course, someone like Osama Bin Laden was in the play even then, but I don't think,
#
I think it's fair to say that he was not a very important player, but nevertheless, that
#
I mean, that was an unintended consequence, obviously, I mean.
#
I think, I mean, what was unforcible at that point of time was that, you know, some of
#
these people would then target America much later, but then you had to have a series of
#
intervening events, right?
#
I mean, you have to have the American sort of participation in the Gulf War, their presence
#
in Saudi Arabia, which then led Osama to sort of, you know, think of Americans as the sort
#
of most important enemy and so on.
#
It's that perfect storm of events if you may call it that.
#
Yeah, so in a sense, yeah.
#
I mean, that is subsequent history.
#
I mean, I think we should not be anachronistic by reading later events into that point of
#
But at that point of time, you know, even the characters with whom the Americans dealt,
#
many of whom, those dramatists personally, are still around.
#
I mean, you know, just earlier this year, we had Gulbuddin Hekmatyar walking back into
#
Kabul, which for people who lived through their generation was an extraordinary sort
#
of event because this man kind of was single-handedly responsible for the destruction of Kabul by
#
artillery firing, you know, in the early 90s.
#
And these are people with some very, very unsavory past.
#
So while, you know, this whole conflict is kind of blowing up and, you know, this is
#
almost like a new front or a new narrative in the old front.
#
One old story comes to an end, the Cold War ends very abruptly when the Soviet Union collapses.
#
And shortly after that, you have India's liberalization.
#
And you know, these have dual consequences.
#
One of course is that the Cold War imperatives no longer really matter.
#
And the other is that the ideological tension between the US and India now seems to be coming
#
to an end because India has opened up.
#
And the third consequence of this is that the third strand, apart from power and ideology,
#
which you speak of, is culture and American culture, which was already popular in India,
#
but now essentially enters and takes over young India.
#
Yeah, I think absolutely.
#
So I, you know, and I think you have to bring each of these various strands into the frame
#
to quite understand why US-India relations have really transformed in the post-Cold
#
I mean, why is it that two countries which were sort of divided on sort of political
#
economic grounds, had these cultural gaps, which as we've discussed now, you know, quite
#
sort of important, persistent and so on, managed to actually come together in that period?
#
And I think the answer to that is not just the end of the Cold War, because in some ways,
#
US-India relations were already improving even before the Cold War ended, right?
#
I mean, and you know, the declassified documents that we now have access to, I think suggest
#
that Rajiv Gandhi in some ways was the most pro-American prime minister that you had in
#
independent India up to that point of time.
#
He understood that, you know, for whatever vague visions that he had for India as a sort
#
of 21st century country, which needed to get into computers and all of that stuff, some
#
sort of story of modernization, the United States was going to be very important.
#
And Rajiv Gandhi was, you know, tried very hard to develop good relations with the Reagan
#
administration, you know, to get all of this high technology transfer.
#
Of course, there were issues still over a range of things.
#
But you know, you again understood that once the Soviet Union was going through whatever,
#
like last night, Perestroika, etc., under Gorbachev, that the old Cold War dimensions
#
were no longer going to play.
#
So in a sense, tilt towards the United States starts happening even before the Soviet Union
#
Of course, it's accelerated completely by the collapse of the Soviet Union, because
#
that takes away a complete anchor of global politics, right?
#
I mean, so it's a dramatic change not to minimize its impact.
#
But some of the shift was already happening, right?
#
The second, of course, was, as you're saying, you know, something which is actually a bit
#
of a coincidence, which is the sort of the, whatever, you know, the sort of balance of
#
payment crisis, which again, you know, it could have happened any time during Rajiv
#
Gandhi's period, because in some ways, it is actually, you know, again, that's where
#
the law of unintended consequences, right?
#
One of the reasons, one of the sort of advantages of going closer to the United States during
#
this period for the Indians also was that you wanted access to capital markets for external
#
And the Americans are happy to sort of, because they don't want to sort of do economic aid
#
They see India as a much bigger economy.
#
They don't want economic aid, but you can borrow in the markets and stuff.
#
And once Indian borrowing on American sort of Wall Street and other places starts picking
#
up, that is when, you know, the problems for your later period are being stored up, right?
#
I mean, and that's where the crisis comes actually.
#
So in a sense, but it's an independent development.
#
And then your back is up against the wall, you have to sort of reform.
#
And for the first time, at least since the 1930s, India accepts that, you know, embrace
#
of globalization is a good thing for us.
#
And that I think is an important, not just from an ideological point of view, but from
#
practical American perspective, right?
#
Because what you had was, you know, this kind of closed economy or with limited access to
#
the external world, where aid is the main driver of relationship, et cetera, inhibited
#
certain forms of things that Americans wanted, right?
#
So in that sense, the, but the opening up of the Indian economy also had other kinds
#
of cultural consequences because the Americans were now able to bring to the subcontinent
#
what other historians of Europe have called, you know, the commercial Imperium, so to speak,
#
The Emporium as the Imperium, as one of them puts it, right?
#
Which is to say that, you know, in a sense, that is a very important part of America's
#
allure and its leadership in the 20th century is the extraordinary sort of cultural impact
#
that American, you know, sort of commercial practices and models have persisted.
#
And you of course would remember when MTV came to India, right?
#
And for people of our generation, I suppose we've lived through some of these changes.
#
So and they were very striking changes.
#
And I think what our current generation, younger generation of Indians takes for granted was
#
a transformation that, you know, people like us live through.
#
And I think we often take like American cultural power for granted.
#
Like I watched a talk of yours on YouTube, which you gave at Goa.
#
And one of your fellow panelists, Professor Varun Sani made a very interesting point that
#
if you just look at how culture permeates across the world and the differences between
#
American culture and other cultures, is that anybody can wear a sari, but a sari would
#
look like fancy dress on a foreigner.
#
But anybody can wear blue jeans and completely it just seems natural.
#
And we are all in a sense, even old fogies like us who are in our 40s, but even we are
#
like far more American culturally than we realize otherwise.
#
So I think that the important shift which happens in the 90s, right?
#
Is that, you know, see, because the India in which people of our age sort of grew up,
#
I mean, the way I think about it, you know, there was a culture of conspicuous non-consumption,
#
You know, the Indian elites almost would go out of their way to say that, listen, we are
#
wearing khadi and that, you know, you don't want to sort of this thing, there's no alcohol
#
permitted in official functions, etc., etc., right?
#
I mean, the whole gamut of, you know, there is a very self-conscious sense that you want
#
to sort of have this non-consumption attitude, right?
#
Which changes, which changes quite dramatically.
#
And that allows then for a range of things.
#
And I think, you know, what Varun Sani was saying there and which I would put it in slightly
#
different ways, but I think the point remains the same, which is that, you know, people
#
tend to sort of criticize, especially Europeans, especially Europeans of early 20th century
#
when American commercial culture first landed up in Europe after the First World War.
#
The European old elite used to sort of snigger at American culture and say, how can you call
#
this stuff culture, right?
#
I mean, Kultoor is what we had, Bildung is what Germans had, you know, we had this whole
#
sort of heritage of high culture of the West.
#
But the reality is that American popular culture is attractive precisely because it's shallow.
#
It is its very shallowness that allows it to sort of inhabit various domains, right?
#
So one of the things I talk about in this book, which again is kind of, you know, people
#
like as a witness to our lives, is the establishment of McDonald's chains in this country, right?
#
How a brand like McDonald's has adapted itself to the Indian market, right?
#
I mean, I've just come from a week in Japan.
#
You can't get the stuff that you get in McDonald's here in any McDonald's in Japan, right?
#
And then the stuff that they give in McDonald's in Japan, I've not even eaten McDonald's
#
in the United States, right?
#
So the ability to sort of nestle into various cultural contexts is there primarily because
#
of this quality that we tend to dismiss as shallow or as, you know, easy to adapt.
#
But adaptability is what counts, right?
#
I mean, how many people are going to take the pains to watch Chinese opera?
#
And what do you think are the odds that China will be able to sort of exercise the same
#
degree of cultural influence?
#
And of course, the language is much harder to learn and so on, right?
#
So you know, Francis Fukuyama once prematurely spoke of the end of history.
#
And in a sense, it would seem that in the 90s, you also have an end to the conflict
#
between the US and India because on all three fronts, you know, the power front, the Cold
#
India is no longer a Soviet ally.
#
In the ideological front, India is becoming a capitalist economy.
#
On the cultural front, America is basically taking over.
#
And you think that everything's going to be hunky dory from now.
#
But of course, you know, Fukuyama was premature and even in the context of India-US relations,
#
everything changes with 9-11.
#
Yes, things do change with 9-11.
#
But again, I think from a longer historical perspective, you know, the change doesn't
#
seem as marked as it seemed to us at that point of time.
#
Let me say this both with respect to India-Pakistan relations, but also Pakistan-Afghanistan,
#
So on the Pakistan-Afghanistan thing, what is interesting is 9-11 once again reaffirms
#
a sort of a pattern of cyclical engagement-disengagement between Pakistan and China, right?
#
In the mid-1950s, Pakistan and China come together, Pakistan and America come together.
#
In the 1960s, it's a bit of a turn back.
#
In the early 70s, again, they're sort of together.
#
Late 70s and early 80s, they're together again in Afghanistan.
#
So you have that sort of cyclical disengagement, reengagement happening.
#
And that is primarily because of Pakistan's geopolitical location more than anything else.
#
So in a sense, if Pakistan has an advantage, it's actually geography.
#
And it's strides areas which are quite difficult for anybody else to access and has a certain
#
vantage point because of its peculiar geography, which gives us certain kinds of advantages.
#
And that's what colleagues like Nitin Pai say that it's geopolitical rent, right?
#
In some ways, that's exactly what it is.
#
It's a geographic rent, actually.
#
I mean, geopolitics comes fundamentally from your geography, right?
#
So that is a huge advantage.
#
In the context of US-India relations, of course, it's a very different kind of reaction, right?
#
Because what happens post 9-11 is that certain forms of activity that the Americans might
#
have sort of put up with through the 90s in the name of sort of freedom fighters in Kashmir,
#
etc., then comes to be characterized as terrorism and sort of broadly not acceptable sort of
#
And of course, you also have two other things which happened in that period, right?
#
Which is that you have an American president, George W. Bush, who is, again, a very, you
#
know, someone I feel had the American sort of ideology that we spoke about very, very
#
I mean, that's the way he used to think about the world, right?
#
So for him, the world was about republics and democracies on the one side and others
#
So in a sense, that aspect of it allowed him to think of India as this very important kind
#
The second thing which happens in the, you know, in the years around this sort of fixation
#
with terrorism and other kinds of security threats is a wider sort of, you know, demographic
#
change which is happening, which is the exponential growth of the Indian-American community in
#
the United States of America, right?
#
And their extraordinary success in the United States, right?
#
I mean, there's a new book edited by Devesh Kapoor and other colleagues called The Other
#
One Person, which is to say that, you know, the Indian-Americans are actually the top
#
one person of all immigrant communities.
#
So Indians are living the American dream there.
#
I mean, and, you know, they are referred to as a model minority.
#
Of course, you know, those kind of blanket terms always mask various kinds of differences
#
But the reality is that, you know, the cultural impressions that Americans had of India,
#
you know, which we've now spoken about at length, in some ways are dramatically changed
#
So I think, you know, while the activities of 9-11 were happening, there is also this
#
background churn of migration, democracy, cultural change, which to me seems at least
#
as important as the sort of surface events of terrorism.
#
So, I mean, the closeness of India and US, I mean, you can't turn the clock back.
#
It's there and it's just going to go deeper.
#
And I think, I mean, it can only turn back if American society itself changes, right?
#
And in a sense, if we find, you know, sort of backlash against immigrants and such like
#
things coming back, then we might be able to sort of say that, you know, yes, we're
#
going to have a slightly more difficult period.
#
But at this point of time, I'd say that, you know, some of those sort of longer term issues
#
which were so persistent have undergone significant changes.
#
And it's not clear to me that, you know, the clock is going to be turned back.
#
And what's also interesting is that while in the 80s in the phase where they were supporting
#
Zia, I suppose they were tolerant of a lot that Pakistan did, especially with regard
#
But now they've called bullshit on Pakistan in various ways.
#
So, you know, that dynamic is no longer there.
#
But I would be sort of a little cautious about how we call that particular situation.
#
Because the one thing which, again, slightly longer term perspective suggests is that the
#
United States and Pakistan have had pretty bad times as well as good times, right?
#
I mean, they've been close, but they've also been sort of, they've been both best
#
of friends and best of enemies.
#
So, you know, in that sense, they've always had a...
#
It's like an abusive marriage.
#
It's like, I need you, but you keep lying to me.
#
Well, that is the Pakistani view, right?
#
The Pakistanis believe that the Americans just use them and, you know, throw away, you
#
know, as somebody said colorfully once that, you know.
#
In that sense, that's a Pakistani certainly view.
#
In fact, I traveled through Pakistan in 2006 and I was chatting with economists there.
#
And one of them said that all of them refer to Al-Qaeda as Al-Faida, because the Pakistani
#
state was basically failing in 2001 when, you know, all that happened and suddenly American
#
aid flooded back in and the economy revived.
#
So, so long as Americans are engaged in Afghanistan.
#
And when I say engaged, I don't just mean military presence, but I find it difficult
#
to understand how the United States is going to entirely pull out of a place like Afghanistan.
#
You know, that area overlooks the backyard of China and Russia.
#
In a sense, given their already existing military infrastructure presence, they might thin down,
#
but I don't see them as giving up, turning their backs on Afghanistan.
#
You know, there's going to be no Vietnam-like moment for Afghanistan, as far as I can see.
#
So in that context, you know, having some degree of stability in Afghanistan will be
#
And I think one of the challenges that the Trump administration is going to face very
#
soon is how are you going to have stability in Afghanistan when you have antagonized both
#
Pakistan and Iran simultaneously, right?
#
That seems to me to be a perfect recipe for having, asking for trouble in Afghanistan.
#
So you may well see a degree of modulation of policy towards Pakistan, which again, I
#
would not be surprised.
#
You know, that has happened so often now that it is difficult to see.
#
And again, I mean, you know, you would have imagined that if you wanted a sensible policy,
#
you would say that, listen, the bigger threat is Pakistan sort of support for terrorism,
#
especially in conjunction with nuclear weapons, you know, that the whole constellation of
#
things which is so explosive out there, which if not controlled, can get out of hand.
#
You know, so it's better that we sort of, you know, keep Iran on the good side and try
#
and put pressure on Pakistan, but then the Trump administration has chosen to tear up
#
the one agreement they had with Iran.
#
And we also now have a new elephant in the room, like how does the rise of China impact
#
the way the Cold War is over, the Soviets are not a factor, but how does the rise of
#
China impact the way America looks at this region?
#
Well, I think it's going to be increasingly a very important part, right?
#
So US-China relations, you know, are now, I think we are now at a point where the Americans
#
have more or less, you know, irrespective of the Trump administration, I think, you know,
#
there's a broader understanding today in the United States that China is going to be the
#
main competitor for us, right, which I don't think was accepted quite as openly until now.
#
But now even constituencies like businesses, which were always supportive of, you know,
#
closer relations with China, understand and accept that, you know, Chinese practices are
#
sort of the thing and so on.
#
So I think, you know, you're now entering into an era where China will be seen as a
#
peer competitor, or at least a potential peer competitor.
#
So you know, there is going to be a lot of circling of icons against Chinese now.
#
But at the same time, the China-Pakistan relationship has been extremely strong over the past decade.
#
You know, you've seen Chinese and Pakistanis coming together in very, very significant
#
And I think that trend is only going to get accelerated.
#
But again, I would give credit for the Pakistanis, right.
#
I mean, throughout the Cold War, they managed to keep the United States and China and even
#
the Soviet Union on reasonably favorable terms, right.
#
So for a country, you know, which, you know, has had other kinds of problems of various
#
kinds, you know, they've managed to keep a reasonably creditable diplomatic act together.
#
So I'd imagine that, you know, they'd be able to sort of work both sides of this.
#
But I think as far as US-India relations are concerned, definitely the rise of China and
#
this kind of thing will make for greater, you know, commonality of interest between
#
the two sides in terms of managing that particular rise, in terms of ensuring that that rise
#
is not destabilizing to the rest of the world, and so on.
#
The larger question, however, I think, which is there before all of us is, to what extent
#
does the sort of attitude taken by the Trump administration mark a historical sort of rupture
#
from America's engagement with the subcontinent, at least since the onset of the Second World
#
As we've discussed, I mean, the United States has had problems with countries like India,
#
you know, on various kinds of dimensions, whether it's in foreign policy, economic issues,
#
But broadly speaking, the United States has believed that, you know, supporting countries
#
like India is a larger geopolitical interest, right, whether it was supporting India's
#
five-year plans or, you know, its liberalization, whatever, even though they were unhappy with
#
the pace of various kinds of things right up to date, right.
#
I mean, in a sense, there has been analysts like Ashley Telles, say, a degree of strategic
#
altruism as far as the United States is concerned.
#
There has been an assumption, at least under the Bush and Obama administrations, that the
#
rise of India, in some ways, is automatically an American good, whether Indians actually
#
do anything for America or not.
#
Now Donald Trump clearly takes a very different view.
#
He wants people to do things for America because he believes they owe the United States.
#
He has a zero-sum view of the world and everything is transactional.
#
So in a sense, and in that sense, I think if the Trump phenomenon proves to be durable,
#
which is to say that, you know, it is more than just the passing whimsy of one particular
#
politician who has managed to capture power by whatever reasons, that could then mark
#
a very different set of things, right, because that then marks a certain kind of disengagement
#
or a reorientation of America's position in the world, which is very different from everything
#
that the United States did in the post-Second World War period, right.
#
And it's in that sense that, you know, I think when Americans say that, you know, is the
#
liberal international order coming to an end and so on, there's a lot of debate currently
#
People, you know, tend to argue about whether, oh, was it a liberal order, et cetera.
#
But I think the bottom line point is this, which is that when the United States came
#
into the Second World War, it took a certain view of its position in the world, which was
#
to say that if we want to be the global sort of leader in Hegemon, then we need to be able
#
to take asymmetric costs for that kind of leadership position, both economically, in
#
security terms, political terms, and so on.
#
Now with the Trump administration, those assumptions are under question, because here it believes
#
that everyone is ripping off America.
#
Is he the first president who's actually thrust aside that sense of manifest destiny?
#
You know, there have been previous American presidents who have confronted very similar
#
And I think the person who confronted it in the starkest terms in some ways was Richard
#
Because you think about it, right, when Richard Nixon becomes president in 1969, the United
#
States is in this long war in Vietnam, which is going nowhere.
#
The American sort of economy is under terrible strain, partly because of its military expenditure
#
in Vietnam, but also this whole sort of pegging the dollar to the gold, which was the old
#
Bretton Woods order, is kind of coming up, right?
#
And what is the Nixon administration's response?
#
Nixon administration's response is one, to unilaterally get out of the Bretton Woods
#
order in 1971, right, with zero notice to anyone.
#
Just one fine day say, sorry, convertibility of dollar and gold no longer exists.
#
We are now in a world of free-floating exchange rates, which is as big a shock as you can
#
give to the global economy as anything could be.
#
The second thing he says is the so-called Nixon doctrine, where he says that American
#
allies will now have to start taking sort of contributing more towards their own security.
#
You cannot expect the United States to do, right?
#
So it's not very different from what Donald Trump is saying.
#
But the reality was that people like Nixon, Kissinger, Howard never believed that the
#
United States had to basically do transactional deals with everyone around, right, or to expect
#
reciprocity from everyone, right?
#
See, for a country like India, I think the problem is this, that when you see the United
#
States dealing in this fashion with allies like Canada, or Germany, or Japan, then as
#
a country which is still very decidedly non-allied to the United States, what do you expect to
#
And I think the prognosis in some ways is going to be a bit mixed, right?
#
You can never be too sure that you won't get caught in the crosshairs or some kind of a
#
And for instance, this whole obsession with every trade relationship has to be balanced.
#
That's the most extraordinary way of thinking about any-
#
Yeah, but it's there, right?
#
I mean, he's doing it with everyone.
#
I mean, again, just now they've given notice to Japan and he said in a press conference
#
that India has agreed that they're going to begin talks and so on.
#
I don't know what has been agreed, but those things are coming.
#
So it will make for a pretty interesting and challenging period for us to navigate.
#
To say the least, so in this episode, I've taken up more than 90 minutes of your time
#
and we've already sort of reached the present day, which is the end of history.
#
So I'm going to ask you to end by sort of asking you a question with two parts, which
#
is instead of looking back, look forward and tell me that from a vantage point of 2028,
#
what is the best case scenario and the worst case scenario of American involvement in South
#
Well, what is the best case scenario is that you have a situation in Afghanistan, which
#
is not much worse than what you have right now.
#
In a sense, winning the war against the Taliban with the kind of commitment that they want
#
But you see it as an ongoing thing, not won the war, winning the war.
#
So in a sense, it will be an ongoing issue of management of the problem, right?
#
See, my own sense is Donald Trump is definitely not the first president to deal with these
#
He's not going to be the last president, right?
#
Many of these issues are issues that stem from the region's own problems.
#
There is only so much that any American administration can do.
#
So they can either work with the grain or against the grain.
#
The best hope is that you can manage the problems rather than solve them, right?
#
So in that sense, if you're able to keep some degree of stability in Afghanistan going,
#
if you can prevent Pakistan from, say, going further down the route of terrorism support
#
for that kind of infrastructure, ensure that political leadership in Pakistan slowly gets
#
some degree of strength within their system and so on.
#
And you have a relationship with India, which kind of continues to improve.
#
And I think improvement is not just in security terms, but I think also in economic terms.
#
I think that that's going to be...
#
Your best case is incredibly boring.
#
What is the worst case?
#
The worst case is that you could end up with a series of sort of conflicts between Afghanistan,
#
Pakistan, or Pakistan and India, none of which have to be sort of traditional wars
#
of the kinds that happened in the past, though nobody can rule out those kinds of things.
#
But various kinds of challenges for which the United States doesn't have really the
#
capacity to intervene in the way that it was able to do in the past, right?
#
I mean, to me, the most important challenge, I mean, forget 2028, but even today would
#
be that, does the Trump administration really have the understanding, attention span and
#
interest to be able to engage with the subcontinent if you have, say, a crisis like what happened
#
in 2001 and 2002, like when there was a serious attack on India, right, I mean, of that scale
#
or something around the scale of 2008?
#
I mean, what do we expect Americans to sort of really be able to do in that context, given
#
how depleted diplomatic resources are in this administration and so on, right?
#
So in that sense, I think a lot depends on whether the current trends continue up to
#
2028 or not in the United States, right?
#
If things take a turn for the better, then you're always going to be the same.
#
But at this point of time, I think, as you said, the best case scenario is that you sort
#
of more or less continue to chug along the same lines, which is more of the same.
#
And the worst case scenario is that you have crises that the United States is not able
#
to manage in any meaningful way, looked upon in a historical baseline, right?
#
I mean, looked upon, say, from the baseline of 1962 when you had the Cuban Missile Crisis
#
going on, but still, you were able to do some things when you had a problem in the subcontinent.
#
So the best case scenario is more of the same and we are all still here in 2028.
#
Sreena, thanks so much for this conversation.
#
I've learned a lot from you today and hope to chat with you again sometime.
#
If you enjoyed listening to this episode, head on over to Amazon and buy a copy of Srinath
#
Raghavan's excellent book, The Most Dangerous Place, A History of the United States in South
#
You can follow him on Twitter at SrinathRaghavathree at S-R-I-N-A-T-H-R-A-G-H-A-V-A-3.
#
You can follow me at Amit Varma, A-M-I-T-V-A-R-M-A, and you can browse past episodes of The Scene
#
in the Unseen on sceneunseen.in or thinkpragati.com.
#
Thank you for listening.
#
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#
Do you look up to laws?
#
When you're caught up in situations, do you know what your rights are when you're stuck
#
Well, here's a show that can help you move an inch closer to being aware of what your
#
Tune into Know Your Kanun with me, Amar Ranath.
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