Who hasn’t heard of the Indo-Soviet Treaty of Peace, Friendship & Cooperation of 1971, signed at a time when India was heading into a war with Pakistan over the genocide in what was then East Pakistan (later Bangladesh).
But how many know that Moscow saw the treaty differently, as a way to get India on its side against China. And when India said no, the Soviets retaliated by refusing to sell any military hardware to this country.
Or the irony in India negotiating the Civil Nuclear Agreement with the US in 2008, which had sanctioned this country for 30 years for its nuclear programme and for refusing to sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
Avtar Singh Bhasin, former director of the Historical Division of the Ministry of External Affairs, whose seminal work Negotiating India’s Landmark Agreements contains all these details and more, believes the nuclear deal was India’s coming of age moment.
“We knew from the beginning what we were losing, what we have and what we didn’t have,” Bhasin told StratNewsGlobal on The Gist programme. “We had been prevented access to nuclear and dual use technologies. There was also an economic field that we could not access.”
Indian negotiators worked with the US to swing a deal that has transformed the bilateral relationship. Bhasin credits former US secretary of state Condoleeza Rice for persuading then President George Bush, that an outreach to India was needed.
“It is not a great power yet but it has the potential to be a great power and the policies of the past were not paying any dividends,” Bhasin said and that advice paid off.
Bush was impressed by the fact that India had pulled itself up largely through its own efforts. It was also the time when the Indian diaspora was beginning to make a contribution to the US.
He describes the India-Sri Lanka Accord of 1987 as India’s “worst foreign policy disaster. It was a domestic problem in Sri Lanka between the Tamils, about 12% of the population, and the majority Sinhalese 74% of the population.”
In his view, the Tamils saw themselves as equal to the Sinhalese and wanted merger of the northern and eastern provinces. It didn’t help that India began training and arming the Tamils around the same time as Delhi was accusing Pakistan of encouraging militancy in Punjab.
The book also covers the India China agreement on Tibet signed in 1954, and the Shimla Agreement of 1972 with Pakistan. Bhasin says neither agreement protected or advanced India’s interests, more so with the latter where there is no relationship worth the name.
Tune in for more in this conversation with Avtar Singh Bhasin, former director of the Historical Division of the External Affairs Ministry.
