CRamS wrote:
Anyway, my point being that all this tamasha for international (read American) optics,
how much does it actually fetch India? And that too at the cost of India's H&D at the hands of TSP, not to mention lives lost etc? Or lets say, India adopts what I suggest in
viewtopic.php?p=2003027#p2003027, how much would India lose from what it ostensibly "gains" now?
CRamSji,
This is hard to quantify on the basis of what two-bit shills like Gaffney or Uneven Cohen might like to claim. The only way it is possible to quantify what our diplomatic measures in terms of optics (and no, they aren't exclusively for American eyes) actually fetch India is to estimate using cases where they have actually been employed in conjunction with direct military means.
I would take the Bangladesh war as one example. Between December 1970 and the beginning of hostilities, Mrs. IG and her MEA (Sardar Swaran Singh) visited DOZENS of international capitals to directly convey India's point of view regarding the genocide in East Pakistan, the undermining of democracy by Islamabad, and the massive humanitarian and economic crisis India was facing as a result of the refugee efflux. The word "dossier" has become a laughable term on BRF these days, but that is what our highest MEA officials and diplomatic corps used as the stock-in-trade of our offensive... coldly detailing evidence of every one of the Pakistan army's atrocities and resulting catastrophes.
What use was it? If you go by the standards of "H&D" and such, very little was *visibly* achieved. The Indo-Soviet treaty in Moscow was the big prize. The only other country to positively offer assistance to India was Israel (with whom, ironically, we had no diplomatic relations at the time).
Other countries like Egypt (banditji's Non-Aligned ally) suddenly discovered their uber green-ness and refused to even entertain our diplomatic missions. Doors were definitely slammed in the faces of our highest officials, in various places. In the vast majority of nations visited, nothing was achieved that was ever published or written about in the newspapers. True enough, diplomacy is a very quiet and un-sexy business, especially when it is working as planned. Most promises and reassurances and deals made in this realm actually RELY on absolute concealment from public scrutiny in order to function.
But if you read "The Blood Telegram", for instance, you will see that even in a Washington DC with the most anti-Indian president of all time in charge, our diplomatic offensive was STILL serving as a constraint on what Nixon & Kissinger could or could not do in support of Pakistan. Ironically, at that time it was the State Dept. under William P Rodgers who were the relatively less pro-Pakistan (if not totally pro-India) faction of the administration. US Ambassador to India Kenneth Keating pushed our case admirably well, to the extent that Nixon suspected him of having been "turned" by the Indians. And in the Senate, then opposition leader Ted Kennedy lambasted the Nixon administration about supporting Yahya's genocidal acts time and again. All this didn't happen because Keating or Kennedy were simple, honest and well-meaning folk (like Archer Blood). It happened because, even at that lean and friendless time, our diplomatic community was working its tail off to cultivate a lobby in Washington, and giving them things to work with.
What was the sum total gain of our worldwide diplomatic offensive? 13 days. Assurances were publicly there from the Russians to India, from the US and the Chinese to Pakistan. The other assurances that were privately conveyed to either side, the public still doesn't know about. But in the event, the net effect was to ensure that whatever the US did in support of Pakistan was too little too late... the Soviet subs had time to position themselves in proximity to the Bay of Bengal by the time the Enterprise CBG arrived, and the Chinese never lifted a finger at all.
What complicated (and largely invisible) network of pressures and counter-pressures sustained India's freedom to engage in an overt military campaign between 3rd and 16th December, nobody knows. What we do know is that the heroes of that war... FM Maneckshaw, Generals Arora and Jacob (and the men under their commands) turned every second of those 13 days into pure gold, and achieved more with that very limited window of time than perhaps any other army in modern history. Still, the 13 days had to be bought somehow.
If we had not provided our lobby in the US (or the UN, or in European capitals) with the "optics" they needed, would Nixon have been able to support Pakistan much more openly? Would they have received their F108s and other weapons earlier through direct US military aid channels? Would Russia have been as willing to stake what they did on supporting us? Would China have been emboldened? Who knows. We can argue as much as we want about it in hindsight. But at the time, the GOI who would be responsible for the conduct of a war AND its consequences did not take any chances. They did not sit around worrying about H&D (even though many slights to Indian diplomats did occur as we went door-to-door). They did what was needed to buy the IA what time they could to do its job.
And another thing. People here want "visible" action. I was not alive at the time of the '71 war but I know some forum-ites certainly were. I would like to ask them for their recollections: at the time we were arming, training and deploying the Mukti Bahini, was this involvement widely trumpeted in the Indian news media? Did the GOI go around shouting from the rooftops about how it was giving Pakistan all these highly effective jhaapads, and protecting India's "H&D" by doing so,? I seriously doubt it, myself, but I would sincerely like to know.
