Abbreviations & Index toward rear of yearbook
K. SUBRAHMANYAM
hostage. The US, though a secular country, had no compunction in using religious fundamentalism and extremism as instrumentalities to fight a “Holy War” to defeat the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. That “Holy War” gave rise to the Jihadi terrorism which led to the 9/11 attack on the US. Today, US President Barack Obama pledges himself to fight a “just war’ against those holy warriors spawned by the tragic blunder of the US, straying from its basic values in the late seventies and early eighties. India’s isolationist non-alignment was the result of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s strategic calculation. India could not afford to alienate the Soviet Union with a Zdhanov’s thesis in the Cominform calling on Asian communists to carry out the uprisings. The Chinese Communist Party was even more antagonistic to the Jawaharlal Nehru government in India than the Soviet Communist Party. Nehru’s non-alignment aimed at not alienating the USSR. He succeeded in this effort and the Soviet attitude towards India became increasingly benevolent as the Soviets sensed potential hostility from China. By the late fifties, India and the Soviet Union developed a mutuality of security interest vis-a-vis China. This mutuality of security interest lasted through the Cold War. From 1971 onwards, China switched sides and became a tacit ally of the US against USSR. The end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union called for review of policies by both India and the US. The P.V. Narasimha Rao government carried out economic liberalisation, established ambassadorial relations with Israel, opened to the “east” and took steps to improve relations with the US. Washington on its part carried out a number of think-tank studies on improving relations with India. The NDA government assuming office in 1998 marked a watershed
B
oth India and the US are new to the concept of partnership. The US inherited the leadership of the western world with its entry into the Second World War and its victory in it and its subsequent efforts in rehabilitating and providing security to the Western European countries and Japan. Since the US was the liberator, rehabilitator and security provider for the western world and subsequently the engine of growth to China and East Asian and Southeast Asian countries, it was accepted as an undisputed leader of most of the market economies and democratic countries. The US exercises leadership over NATO and Anzus alliances and provides bilateral security to Japan and South Korea and tacit security to ASEAN. Therefore, it was not used to having partners but only allies who accepted its lead. India practised isolationism in the name of non-alignment. It maintained cordial relationship with the Soviet Union and a non-antagonistic relationship with the US during the Cold War. Though during the Cold War, there was a greater commonality of values between democratic and pluralistic India and democratic and pluralistic US than between India and communist USSR, the US chose to align itself with non-democratic dictatorships and distance itself from India as part of its Cold War strategy and tactics. The US made a deal with China at the time when the country was passing through the worst phase of Cultural Revolution. China is today the main challenger of the US and holds it as an economic
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11 SP's MILITARY YEARBOOK | 2009-2010 | 39th Year of Issue
WEAPONS EQUIPMENT VEHICLES CONCEPTS & PERSPECTIVES TECHNOLOGY BUSINESS
INDIAN DEFENCE
The proposed joint Indo-US clean energy and climate change initiative can do to India what the US investments and joint ventures did to China in the eighties and nineties. To deal effectively with climate change and green house gas emission, India should concentrate on getting the clean energy and climate change initiative started at the earliest. This is going to be an industrial revolution.
ASIAN WHO’S WHO
www.wikipedia.org; www.pib.nic.in
Laying Foundation for a Partnership
REGIONAL BALANCE
3 Relationship Indo-US
CONTENTS
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