The world was worried about a Chinese nuclear bomb in the early 1960s, a threat that worried India more after the 1962 border clash. Delhi and Washington started cooperating on China, and it was to India that the US turned when it came to sending spy planes over China. Nehru gave permission to use Indian airspace for U-2 flights on November 11, 1962, and U-2s flown from Thailand carried out missions over China over the next two months. The CIA used photographs from them to brief Nehru in early 1963, even as Beijing protested to India about the overflights.
The CIA sought the use of Charbatia airfield in Odisha as a U-2 staging facility and an agreement was signed in June 1963. Three days before Nehru’s death on May 27, 1964, a CIA team flew an unmarked spy plane for a mission over Xinjiang. As it touched down at Charbatia, its brakes failed, and the U-2 rolled off the runway. The CIA repaired it and discreetly flew it back a few days later. In December 1964, when Sino-Indian border tensions were again high, the U-2 returned to Charbatia and flew three missions to the border areas. Charbatia was closed as a U-2 base in July 1967.
US-India cooperation continued even after the ties between the two countries had reportedly cooled down after the 1965 Indo-Pak war. In October 1965, the CIA and the IB sent mountaineers to install a nuclear-powered spying unit on the Nanda Devi in the Garhwal Himalayas, but the mission failed due to a snowstorm – the plutonium-powered thermoelectric generator was lost. In 1967, they managed to install a nuclear-powered signal device on Nanda Kot, but it worked for only a few months. A slightly different device was placed at a peak in Ladakh in March 1969, but it became obsolete soon after as modern satellites could do the job much better.
This bit of history is important to recollect as, like then, India today faces a growing threat from China, when PM Narendra Modi finds his establishment unable to reverse Chinese territorial ingresses in Ladakh. China’s construction of extensive military infrastructure on the border, and additional deployments and induction of new military technologies, mean that even if the current crisis is somehow declared as resolved, the Chinese military threat will persist. India’s record trade dependency on China further constrains Delhi’s options. Nearly a quarter of the loans given by the Beijing-based AIIB have been to India. Despite border tensions, Delhi has not shown the courage to criticise Beijing for its repressive policies in Xinjiang or its anti-democratic actions in Hong Kong.
All this while Modi has personally either denied Chinese military ingress into Indian territory or maintained total silence on the issue. If the current Chinese leadership only respects a show of strength, Modi’s actions are unlikely to earn any in the Communist Party headquarters in Beijing. Despite the boorish bluster of his foreign minister, Modi’s response is an implicit acknowledgement of the relative difference in power between India and China, which has widened under his watch. China’s GDP is now six times India’s, while its military spending is almost four times India’s. Beijing increasingly pitches itself in the same league as America, with India either seen through that prism or as an irritating South Asian power to be put in its place.
In such a scenario, how is India going to tackle the Chinese challenge? If India is unable to generate the domestic strength to take on China in the next 10-15 years, should it not align closely with the US? These questions had been bubbling under the surface but have come to the top after the Ukraine crisis. While the world’s attention was supposed to be focused on Russia’s actions in Europe, it is Delhi’s China strategy that has come under the spotlight. The West understands India’s ties with Moscow, but Modi’s reluctance to confront Beijing is confounding western capitals.
President Joe Biden’s framing of Putin’s war on Ukraine – democracy versus authoritarianism – firmly places Delhi on the side of the West. But Delhi has argued against being forced to pick sides and has, rather unconvincingly, tried to delink the Russian action from any principles that would logically help India’s case against China. Some analysts blame it on the Modi government’s discomfort at being reminded by the western countries of India’s democratic degradation and targeting of religious minorities under his watch.
Those favourably disposed to Modi say that by not making these choices, he is ensuring India’s strategic sovereignty. However, not making a choice is also a choice. Strategic sovereignty is not merely the ability to act autonomously; it means relying on one’s own resources in key strategic areas and cooperating with partners where needed. The effectiveness of strategic sovereignty is derived not from the media byte snubbing a bigger power but from the ability to achieve the desired outcome – in this case, the ability to counter China.
Even as he will attend the Quad summit in Tokyo next month, Modi has also agreed to participate in a virtual BRICS summit in June where he will share the screen with Presidents Putin and Xi. But for signalling value, BRICS is a toothless grouping and unlikely to bother the West much. But India riding on two boats going in opposite directions in turbulent waters, however, raises serious questions about the wisdom of Delhi’s long-term strategy and choices. Foreign Minister S Jaishankar said in 2019 that “the pursuit of apparently contradictory approaches and objectives” should be seen “not just as arithmetic but as calculus”. In Latin, calculus means ‘small pebble’ – and that’s not the future role anyone would envisage for a big country like India.