Mumbai: A week before Jimmy Carter’s inauguration in January 1977, Indira Gandhi had ended the Emergency and scheduled elections for March 1977. In February, Indian President Fakrudin Ali Ahmed died, and Jimmy Carter, in a gesture of symbolism of considerable warmth, designated his mother, “Miss Lillian” who had served two years as a Peace Corps volunteer near Bombay during the late sixties, to represent the United States at the funeral.
After the elections, which saw the defeat of Mrs Gandhi, the veteran Janata Party leader Morarji Desai, 81, virtually moved from jail to being the Prime Minister. The peanut farmer from Georgia and the austere Gujarati, both owed their elections to major political trauma — Carter to Watergate, and Desai to Emergency.
According to Dennis Kux, the author of a seminal work on Indo-US relations (1941-1991), Estranged Democracies, both men shared a “genuine concern on the principles of human rights democracy, disarmament.” The US repealed a law that required it to vote against all World Bank loans to India following the 1974 Pokhran nuclear test.
X
Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brezeinski, placed India in a higher strategic position than the presidencies of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. It classified India as a “regional influential”, along with Saudi Arabia, Iran, Indonesia, Nigeria, Brazil and Venezuela.
Morarji named Atal Behari Vajpayee as his foreign minister. Carter named a former Princeton University President Robert Goheen, who had been born in India of missionary parents, and who retained strong links with India, as ambassador. Before he left for Delhi Carter instructed Goheen to tell Morarji Desai: “If India would restrain from developing nuclear weapons and agree to discuss non proliferation, he would clear the pending Tarapur shipment.” When Goheen conveyed this to the Indian Prime Minister he promised Goheen, “I will never develop a nuclear bomb, and yes, we will engage in discussions.” Consequently, Kux records, on June 28, the American Nuclear Regulatory Commission, under pressure from the Carter administration, “approved the long-pending export license for nine tonnes of enriched uranium fuel.
X
Carter initiated a friendly and extended correspondence with Morarji Desai. When Deputy Secretary of State Warren Christopher visited, he did not couple it with the usual stopover in Islamabad, and told the press in New Delhi that US looked to “India as the leader in South Asia.” As Carter visited India, the third visit by a serving American President to India, on New Year’s Day, 1978, he kept Pakistan out of his itinerary as well.
X
The visit proved disastrous because of the unresolved Tarapur issue. Kux writes: “An open microphone caught some private remarks between Carter and Vance, revealing the two sides remained far apart on the nuclear issue. The media reported the President’s advising the Secretary of State, “I told him (Desai) I would authorize the transfer of fuel now… It did not seem to make an impression on him…When we get back, I think we should write to him it created a big controversy; another letter, just cold and very blunt.”
X
It created a big controversy. Desai downplayed the gaffe brushing aside saying Carter’s remarks were “not intended to be heard and they were not heard.”
According to Kux, the cold and blunt message was delivered through the 1978 Nuclear Non Proliferation Act (NNPA) which became the cornerstone of the administration’s nuclear policy. US pressed for full-scope safeguards on nuclear reactors built by India’s AEC but New Delhi refused, calling it an infringement on sovereignty. By early 1979, Carter responded to Pakistan’s growing clandestine nuclear programme with the Symington Amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act that barred the US from helping countries it felt were moving towards nuclear weapons capability.
X
The American business companies found George Fernandes, Morarji Desai’s Industries Minister, a tough nut to crack when it came to easing business prospects. By July 1979, Morarji Desai’s wobbly coalition, which had come together on an anti-Mrs Gandhi agenda, collapsed and Morajri was replaced by Charan Singh who served as caretaker for six months, on life support from Indira Gandhi.
On December 27, 1979, Soviet Union militarily intervened in Afghanistan and installed a pliable regime headed by Babrak Kamal, forcing Jimmy Carter to take many U-turns that were to deeply affect India in terms of strategic consequences. The day after the invasion, Carter called General Zia ul-Haq to offer support and to revive security arrangements between the two countries. Pakistan was no longer a nuclear rogue and was instead elevated overnight to a frontline state against Soviet expansionism. Carter unfroze arms sales to Pakistan arguing that Soviet threat overrode non proliferation concerns.
Three years after her defeat Mrs Gandhi was back in the saddle, winning 350 of the 542 seats. One of the first things she did was to have a statement delivered in the United Nations supporting the invasion. It was delivered by none other than Brajesh Mishra, then posted as Permanent Representative.
On the afternoon Mishra spoke in the UN General Assembly, Ambassador Goheen met Carter who told him of the development. According to Kux, “Carter was livid. Goheen calmed him down saying, “We don’t really know the circumstances. Let me go back to New Delhi and report before we do anything about this.” At the State Department, according to India Country Director Howard Schaffer, “The statement hit people like a tonne of bricks.” When we first heard of the wholesale acceptance of the Soviet line we just could not believe it.” It had been the same in the case of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968.
That January the Carter Doctrine was outlined in the state of the union address: The US would read any move by the Soviet Union towards the oil rich Persian Gulf as a threat to US vital interests and would counter it by any means necessary, including the use of force.
Meanwhile, the shrewd President General Zia, who knew he had the Americans over a barrel, played hard to get, rejecting the proffered US $400 million as, what else, “peanuts.”
