Opinion The essential triangle

As its economic and political standing improves,India now has an opportunity,for the first time since Independence,to influence relations between the current great powers — the United States and China — as well as their traditional approaches to the subcontinent,especially Pakistan.

During the Cold War,the US-Russian and Sino-Russian rivalries undermined India’s capacity to maintain the strategic unity of the subcontinent,resolve the problems left over by the great Partition and play a larger role in the world.

The Sino-US alliance at the turn of the 1970s and the separate alliances that Washington and Beijing built with Pakistan compelled Delhi to construct a countervailing partnership with Moscow.

Matters came to a head by the end of the 1970s,when both the US and China sought to limit India’s role in the subcontinent by boosting Pakistan’s military capabilities — conventional and nuclear.

The end of the Cold War opened space for India to improve its ties to both America and China. Yet,their enduring strategic embrace of Pakistan continued to threaten India’s interests. Deepening economic interdependence and political cooperation between Washington and Beijing after the Cold War tended to relegate India to the margins.

After the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington DC,the US declared Pakistan a “major non-Nato ally” as part of its war against terror.

China has continued to describe its relationship with Pakistan as “deeper than the Arabian Sea and higher than the Himalayas” and insisted on maintaining Pakistan’s strategic parity with India.

Given the Pakistan army’s deep bonds with both Washington and Beijing,Delhi has found it hard to alter the strategic calculus of Rawalpindi’s India policy,especially its support to anti-India terror groups.

Over the last six decades,Delhi has had no real influence on the three most important bilateral relationships — Sino-US,Sino-Pakistan and US-Pakistan — of strategic import for India. Delhi’s bilateral engagements with Washington,Beijing and Islamabad were thinner than the ties between these three capitals.

A historic rupture in this structure of international relations,which boxed India into a corner for so many decades,may now be at hand. Consider the following.

As China has raced to become the world’s second largest economy and the dominant power of Asia,new financial and geopolitical tensions have begun to emerge between Washington and Beijing.

After reaching out to Beijing with plans for a co-management of the global economy and the Asian political order in 2009,the Obama administration is now determined to strengthen its traditional Asian alliances and build new strategic partnerships,including with India.

The US military raid on Osama bin Laden’s hideout deep inside Pakistan and right under the nose of its army has shaken the bilateral relationship to the core. After a decade of acquiescing in the Pakistan army’s double-dealing on terror,the US is now engaged in a relentless bombardment with drones of Pakistan’s terror havens.

The Obama administration has moved away from the initial linkage it made between Afghanistan and Jammu and Kashmir. It now welcomes a larger Indian role in Afghanistan,is silent on Kashmir and ready to expand counter-terror cooperation with India.

Resenting the Indo-US partnership and the American threats to cut off military aid,the Pakistan army has sought to play the China card. But Beijing quickly made it clear that it is not ready to replace Washington as the principal external benefactor of Rawalpindi.

In the wake of the bin Laden raid and the international scrutiny of the Pakistan army’s support to terror networks,China was the only country to defend Rawalpindi. Barely three months later,Chinese officials have pointed a rare public finger at the terror camps in Pakistan as the source of recent terror attacks in China’s restive Xinjiang province. As the Pakistan army loses its ability to address the concerns of Washington and Beijing,its value to two of its best friends can only begin to fall.

Whether these trends mature or not,they do suggest that the rigid security relationships that defined India’s security environment for so long are loosening. They present India with two broad strategic imperatives.

First,India should intensify its own bilateral engagement with all the three nations. The more advances India makes on one front,the greater will be its room for manoeuvre on the other two. If India’s political leadership pulls back from one relationship,either for ideological reasons or a presumed need for domestic posturing,its leverage with the other two will inevitably diminish.

The expanding engagement with India over the last decade has already resulted in how Washington views the India-Pakistan dynamic. It is a matter of time before China too will find it necessary to recalibrate its South Asia policy.

Second,as the US and Chinese relations with Pakistan enter a complex phase,there is no reason for India to wish that Washington and Beijing abandon their cooperative relationships with Islamabad.

In fact,India would want America and China to exercise their influence in changing the Pakistan army’s calculus in supporting international terror networks.

Meanwhile,increasing alienation from major powers might encourage Pakistan’s leaders to see the values of even a minimally cooperative relationship with India.

If the UPA government makes bold to inject itself into the triangular dynamic between the US,China and Pakistan,Mathai and his mandarins in South Block will find it easier to construct a peaceful and prosperous periphery for India.

The writer is a senior fellow at the Centre for Policy Research,Delhi,express@expressindia.com