ASIA AFTER BANGLADESH

...Geography has spared the Middle East and Vietnam this awesome burden...

...If she forced Pakistan to take the refugees back or else to face a war and dismemberment, then not only would India's economy and her political and social system be spared the risk of collapse under the burden of the refugees, but Pakistan would be eliminated as a countervailing factor, India's role in southern Asia would grow at China's expense, and she would be taken more seriously by China...

...Her answer to China was what followed the Treaty...

...But their actions will have much larger consequences...

...If she allowed Pakistan to get away with what it had done, the whole of Asia would know that India had been made powerless by the fear of Pakistan's ally, China...

...As the U.S...

...By her intentions, at least, the answer is No...

...Rather than become the ally of one side in a world that is reverting to bipolarity, she would like to be in a concert of middle powers which are independent vis -a-vis this new bipolarity...

...by promoting Russia to enemy number one, it has also transformed Russo-American rivalry to its own advantage...

...Not only has China converted bipolar diplomacy into a triangular diplomacy...

...India's emergence as a southern Asian power can be more or less taken as certain now, because in combination with Russia she is stronger in this region than any availableopposing combination...

...It remains to be seen whether China will succeed more than Russia did in getting Hanoi to concede a Vietnam settlement acceptable to Nixon...

...They might have taken place anyway, but not so fast...

...China had only a limited involvement in the NEW DELHI Middle East, just as it had in the cold war between the two halves of Europe...

...China's complementary antagonisms toward the Soviet Union and India could lead to only one objective: to play off Pakistan to the maximum advantage against India, to squash any dream India may have of carving out a regional place for herself under Russian auspices, and thus to make the whole of South and Southeast Asia a Chinese preserve while eliminating the foothold Russia was acquiring through its influence in India...

...Gandhi turned to the Pakistan crisis...

...Gandhi and her willingness to take the risk of giving history a push...

...is willing to take a hand in that, an Indo-Pakistani war can be for it, too, as well as for Russia and China, the beginning of a global earthquake...

...The gainer on the subcontinent would be an old friend, Pakistan...

...If in the process China also became a noose for the Indians, that would not worry him too much...

...This war was the product of several factors transcending the hostility between India and Pakistan...

...The balance of power in southern Asia is at stake, not only the future of Pakistan—and more than the balance of southern Asia...

...If China seeks to undo recent events, directly or through the backing of Pakistan, Russia will face the same quandary as China faces today: it must live up to its treaty commitments to India or else be shown up as a paper tiger...

...BUT THIS understanding was wholly eroded by the Sino-Soviet hostility and by Nixon's urge to manipulate it to the advantage of America...

...It came in the midst of what could have been India's most desperate crisis since the partition 25 years ago...

...But whether events will support her intentions depends on the United States...

...But India's interests demanded a commitment that would be firm enough to deter China, and she succeeded in writing it into the Treaty...

...The fluid relations between the world's three biggest powers could be more violently upset by what happens between India and Pakistan than by the war in the Middle East or that in Vietnam...

...Vietnam has contiguity with China, but while it draws China and Russia into mutual competition it does not expose them to a mutual armed conflict...

...These two passions of his younger days would have invaded his world view in later life as well, but perhaps not so suddenly or deeply if China had not offered them the opening it did...

...Despite its brevity, the 14-day war between India and Pakistan marks a major diplomatic watershed, and despite the localization of the combat it will strongly influence the future of southern Asia and relations between the United States, the Soviet Union, and China...

...When the fighting broke out, as it was bound to, India set the strategy completely in her own unaided judgment...

...China and the U.S...

...If China redeems its pledges to Pakistan and Russia its pledges to India, can the United States stay out of the conflict...

...has not only been a prime factor in Indo-Pakistani conflicts in the past• but as long as Sino-Soviet hostility persists and the U.S...

...Through most of the 1960s there was a tacit understanding between the U.S...

...only Nixon probably wrote off India with more satisfaction than regret...

...in the interests of this stability they could permit India to be a major power in the region 316 though not the predominant one, and Pakistan could be encouraged as a countervailing power against India...

...But Nixon was counting without Mrs...

...Her bialignment with the United States and the Soviet Union came when China took a hefty bash at India in order to knock the world into a triangular shape...

...and China...

...India pressed upon Russia the very persuasive argument that it was in Russia's own interests in southern Asia to show up China as merely a paper tiger...

...the U.S...

...China became a much better weapon for the containment of Russia than any John Foster Dulles could have thought of...

...Ever since she consolidated her domestic position, perceptive Indians had been confident that she would take the first chance she could to consolidate her foreign-policy position too...

...The Soviet Union, convinced though it was that its investments in Pakistan had gone to waste, was loath to give up its former game of trying to carry Pakistan along with India...

...If West Pakistan does not collapse under the weight of internal dissentions—and that cannot be ruled out—China and the United States will try to prop it up after this winter so that it may continue a harassing conflict with India and thus keep the options open for a more decisive intervention later on...

...is physically far but has very high stakes in the rivalry between the U.S.S.R...

...This simple arithmetic of power, which is as strong a motive in the behavior of nations as in that of individuals, is as good an explanation of the developing global picture as the Sino-Soviet ideological tussle or Nixon's ambition to win a few diplomatic laurels before the next presidential election...

...CORRESPONDENCE FROM ABROAD But what will follow next...

...That is why it advised India to rule out the use of force...

...In other words, West Pakistan will be cast in the holding role in which the four West Pakistani divisions in East Pakistan were cast until they collapsed in the middle of December...

...could not do very much in the present conflict because events moved too fast for the United States, and China was blocked off by snow in the Himalayan passes...

...That done, Mrs...

...At the time of Nixon's ascent to the White House, India appeared to be in such a mess altogether that it encouraged no one to invest any strategic hopes in her...

...The Soviet Union and the United States are deeply involved, but lacking the necessary mass and physical contiguity with either of them, neither the Arabs nor Israel can tilt the balance between the two superpowers...

...It is here that Russian, American, and Chinese diplomacies most overlap and mutual trade-offs can take place...

...NOW LOOK at India and Pakistan...

...Therefore: • the U.S...

...The terms and timing of the cease-fire in the west were also decided by India herself, whatever President Nixon may say to please West Pakistan...

...She hastened recognition of Bangladesh to present the U.N...

...Russia had been urging such a treaty for two years at least, but India consented only when Nixon's diplomacy made this precaution against Chinese ambitions essential...

...This was the geopolitics of the Tashkent conference, which America watched from a distance with sympathy...

...For reasons explained in the opening paragraphs, the implications of the changes in the global picture were bound to be seen more in the Indian subcontinent than anywhere else...

...on four points about the Indo-Pakistani subcontinent: • the two powers shared interests here that were more complementary than competitive...

...To this, Nixon could have had no objection...

...Since then India has been reacting to the growing hostility between Russia and China, the growing detente between America and China, and the continued hostility of China, of which the Sino-Pakistani axis is only one aspect...

...Vice-President in the mid-1950s, Nixon had grown up in world politics when the cold war was at its height...

...With or without this further test, India will have to face one further problem to succeed finally in throwing back the Chinese ambition of unquestioned supremacy in southern Asia: will India be content to remain a junior partner in a treaty alliance with the Soviet Union...

...China, by its implacable hostility to Russia, has speeded up a number of geopolitical changes in the world...

...and the U.S.S.R...

...Just as Pakistan will not harass India again unless China prompts it to do so, China will do the prompting only if the U.S...

...There is an enormous population as well as close physical contiguity with Russia and China...

...In this situation, with the United States anxious to preserve its leading position and China more than willing to impede Russia in the hope of improving its own position, it was natural that the United States and China should discover an affinity...

...This gave India cause for serious concern, and less because of what China and America might do between them to Russia than because of the chance China would get to reorder southern Asia according to its desire...

...It inaugurated Russia's policy of putting India and Pakistan in the harness of a regional tandem, in which the United States also saw some chance of stability...

...The 14-day war with Pakistan marks the advent of the difference...

...Despite the arrival of the American fleet in the Indian Ocean, India insisted on and obtained the unconditional surrender of the large army of West Pakistan in East Bengal...

...If China in its own interests encouraged Pakistan to risk a war, as the Pakistani air strike on December 3 suggests (or if, as Pakistan suspects, Russia in its own interests encouraged India to risk a war), then will China let Russia and India get away with the dismemberment of Pakistan...

...President than with anyone else...

...Pakistan may have forced the war upon India, with the preemptive air strike on December 3, for the limited purpose of preventing an Indian attack on East Pakistan...

...it will bring in its train much larger events than the emergence of a new nation of 75 million people or the repatriation of 10 million refugees...

...This makes the borders between India and Pakistan one of the great new epicenters of the world...

...the guiding hand for ensuring these arrangements could be more that of the Soviet Union than of the United States, the region being more important to Moscow because of its problems with Peking...

...with a fait accompli...

...till the 11th hour It remained committed to the unity of Pakistan...

...It is possible that with the Indo-Pakistani tension mounting every day as the refugees poured in from Bangladesh, Russia would have preferred a looser commitment...

...But India decided to give events a new direction, because she knew that her stakes were immense...

...Using to good advantage the division between hawks and doves that exists in Moscow as in all capitals—Kosygin seems a dove in this respect, Brezhnev a hawk —India committed Russia, in the joint statement issued at the end of Mrs, Gandhi's Moscow visit after the Treaty, to a clear recognition of India's right to take any steps that may be needed for getting the refugees back into East Bengal...

...It is the nature of the role she will be able to play which continues to be open to speculation, and the answer lies more with the U.S...

...The U.S...

...India may have launched the war, on December 4, for creating conditions in which the refugees would go back to their homes in East Bengal...

...Although Pakistan's defeat has been accepted by China, this does not mean that it has been accepted for all time...

...Thanks to Nixon and the uprising in East Bengal the chance came sooner than expected...

...This places the option in the hands of Nixon to decide whether India will be a power in southern Asia under Russian auspices and as a Russian front—or as an independent link in a chain of similarly independent middle powers around the globe...

...is not only liable to be sucked into an Indo-Pakistani conflict, and was so psychologically in December via the Seventh Fleet...

...It was at India's insistence that the Treaty was so worded as to commit the Soviety Union to giving immediate and effective assistance if, for any reason whatsoever, China or Pakistan would threaten India...

...gives assured backing against a Russian response...

...But there is a difference now: India is also trying to influence world events instead of only reacting to them...

...China emerged as a challenge to Russia just when the Soviet Union was closing in upon the U.S...

...This subterranean linkage has yet to be explored between Indo-Pakistani tensions and the peace of the world...

...Her answer to Nixon was the Indo-Soviet treaty, signed within four weeks of Kissinger's visit to Peking and announced with the same dramatic suddenness...

...As American interests would recede in southern Asia, the space would be filled by Chinese interests, not by the less preferable ones of India or Russia...

...Therefore it is important for the world to note the subtle change that has taken place in India as a factor in the world's diplomacy...

...Nixon hugged this opportunity wholeheartedly, with Kissinger giving sophistication to Nixon's gut reactions, and China's relations with Pakistan giving added satisfaction...

...If India becomes an independent power in southern Asia, she will revive on a higher plane the role of nonalignment she played during the 1950s 318 on a lower plane...

...She can be checkmated in this by China alone, and even by China only if the U.S...

...he had also been very prominent in getting Pakistan into Seato and Cento...

...its consequences will enlarge the change...

...India's traditional nonalignment was a reaction to the cold war in the old bipolar world...

...encourages it...

...But if West Pakistan can work up a chance for them, they will try to nip in the bud the position India will otherwise acquire in southern Asia...

...Besides deeply involving the United States, the web of mutual obligations surrounding India and Pakistan—which are very real whether or not embodied in formal treaties such as the Indo-Soviet and the U.S.-Pakistani treaties—have built a continuous politicomilitary frontier, the world's longest, out of the borders between Russia and China, China and India, and India and Pakistan...

...Thus Nixon will come closer than he can in any other way to the two main objectives of his Asian and world policy: to find a way out of Vietnam and to help China become as tight a noose for the CORRESPONDENCE FROM ABROAD Russians as it possibly can be...

...these interests could be better served, for both powers, by promoting stability in the region than through conflict...

...But China will certainly demand a high price for making the effort, and so great is Nixon's investment in his new China policy that he will probably concede to China a much higher say in the affairs of southern Asia than Johnson conceded to Russia...

...But the finesse and cool courage of her leadership converted the crisis into India's most startling achievement since independence was won...