South Asia, at this particular juncture of history, is strategically important to the United States and its Allies not so much because military control of the area would increase the power of the West as because denying it to the Soviet Union diminishes Soviet potential power; by denying South Asia to the Soviet Union, we block not only South Asia but a much vaster area to the penetration of Soviet influence. The Soviet Union, having reached the Indian Ocean, would be capable of intercepting the communications between Europe and the Middle East on the one hand and the Pacific region on the other hand and of depriving the Western powers of important, though not indispensable, sources of cheap raw materials.
South Asia is, in the main, composed of two peninsular subcontinents, the Indian subcontinent and Further India, the latter composed of Burma, Siam, French Indo- China, the Strait Settlements, and Malaya.
First the Portuguese and then the British were able to control Further India by virtue of their control of India proper and Ceylon. Conversely, Burma and Malaya, in the hands of a hostile power, constitute a serious menace to India and would cut the link of the defense of South East Asia. The Commentaries of Alfonso de Albuquerque, the architect of the Portuguese empire in Asia, makes it clear that he conceived of that empire as being erected upon the structure of a naval base in India, with a forward post in Malacca. This fundamental strategic concept remains valid today.
Strategically, this area possesses two common geographical denominators: accessibility by sea and relative inaccessibility from the rest of the Asian continent.
The great mountain barrier formed by the Hindu Kush and the Pamirs, the Himalaya Mountains and their spurs reaching into Burma, Siam and China, represents one of the few remaining natural, effective, strategical boundaries on earth. In historical times, India was successfully invaded by land only twice, namely by Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan. Alexander the Great’s exact route is uncertain. We know that Genghis Khan’s horsemen rode across the Shibar Pass of the Hindu Kush and down the Tochi Valley to the banks of the Indus.
To the east and west, Baluchistan and Burma are lands of passage. However, neither country presents ideal conditions for the east-west movement of armies. Baluchistan is one of the most inhospitable wastelands on earth. The topography of Northern Burma, Thailand, and Western China is characterized by the deep gorges formed by the Brahmaputra, the Salween, the Mekong and the upper reaches of the Yangtse. This configuration reduced the traffic of the Ledo Road to a minor share in supplying China in World War II, as compared with supplies transported by air. In short, the overland routes are bad.
It is true that caravans have travelled for centuries through the Karakorum Pass (joined by the Western Road, 900 miles long, to Lhasa and the Himalayan passes leading from the Brahmaputra Valley and the states of Sikkim and Bhutan) to Shigatze on the Tsangpo River in Tibet. It is likely that Buddhism spread from India by land to China. However, no large-scale military operations are recorded by history to have breached these formidable natural barriers.
The Mongols, founders of the Islamic Mogul Empire, invaded India via Afghanistan. This, the last conquest by land, was followed by conquest from the sea.
Britain conquered India by land forces brought to India by sea. Britain held India by sea power. The advance of Russian land- power, beyond the reach of seapower towards India’s northern frontier, turned Britain’s flank. The railroads and highways built by Russia in Bactria, the establishment of Russian settlements on the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya and Russian roads built towards the frontiers of China confronted Britain with a situation which her strategic arrangements were not designed to meet.
Great Britain had established her Asian empire by sea. Yet all throughout the 19th century and right up until World War II the British did not maintain in the Indian Ocean, the Arabian Sea, and the Bay of Bengal, any substantial naval forces. Rarely more than two cruisers and a few destroyers represented British seapower in the Indian Ocean. And yet Great Britain held India by sea. This seeming paradox is readily explained by the fact that throughout the 19th century all sea power and all land power, in short, all political and military power, were based upon Europe, and Britain’s naval arrangements, a fleet based upon the British Isles, were sufficient to block egress from the European continent of the naval forces and land forces of the European powers.
It was only in the late 19th century, when Russia began to push by land towards the frontiers of Central and Inner Asia, that traditional British strategy was decisively challenged. For Russia was capable of bringing forces to bear upon the northern frontiers of India far more rapidly than Britain could move land forces into India by sea. Moreover, it was impossible for British naval power to intercept a Russian army marching towards the frontiers of the Middle East and India.
This strategic revolution challenged the then prevailing state of strategic things much more decisively than did later the submarine and the plane. The first real challenge to sea power was the challenge by rail-borne armies deployed on the northern frontiers of India. It was this change in the strategic balance which set in motion the other developments which led to World War I. In the first World War the Germans attempted to reach by land the Middle East and ultimately India and based their strategy upon railroads beyond the reach of British seapower. In World War II, Japan conquered Further India and by land inconclusively besieged India.
Britain relinquished political control of India because her strategic hold was broken, or rather, because the costs of holding India would have drained British power in Europe. Developments within India, social unrest, population pressure and rising nationalism speeded Britain’s withdrawal and hastened the emancipation of India. However, the power base of British rule had been fatefully weakened much earlier by change in strategic relationship.
For Britain, India was not only a source of wealth but also the keystone of her defensive position in Asia. It was the “hinterland” of her naval bases. Of these, the two most important were Trincomalee in Ceylon, and Singapore in the Straits Settlements, for only those two ports are deep water ports. There is along the east coast of India no other port that can shelter large vessels. Madras, the Hooghly, and Rangoon can accommodate only light cruisers and destroyers.
The most precious of South Asia’s strategic potentials is manpower. True, 85 per cent of South Asia’s population are still engaged in agriculture whereas in the United States 15 per cent manage to produce the food consumed by the rest. Yet, in India, as a result of the introduction of western methods, the same transformation of quantity into quality which, several generations earlier, wrought the economic and military rise of Japan, is beginning to alter the traditional structure.
Perhaps the most important strategic asset of India, looking at the future, is her industry-in-being. India is the one area of Asia, with the exception of Japan and Manchuria, which has developed a sizeable heavy industry. It can be argued that because of the much more favorable raw material situation of India, India is bound to become the heavy industrial area of Asia par excellence. Paucity of domestic raw material supplies always hampered the industrial expansion of Japan. Japan quickly exhausted her own domestic iron ore reserves. Japan, even at the high noon of her power, was compelled to forage for scrap iron and was critically dependent on the relatively low-grade minerals of Manchuria. Although Manchuria was richly endowed with coal, her resources of iron ore and nonferrous metals were poor. By contrast, India possesses the largest proven high-grade iron ore deposits of Asia, and these deposits are located in the vicinity of plentiful deposits of coal. The reserves of high-grade ore, containing 55 to 60 per cent iron, located in Bihar and Orissa, are estimated at approximately two billion tons.
India is endowed with all kinds of non- ferrous minerals, in addition to coal and iron, including the uranium bearing monazite sands of Travancore, and abundant water power—in short, all the paraphernalia which are necessary for the creation of heavy industry, the basis of modern state power.
British investments, particularly in the form of an efficient and, by Asian standards, dense railway system, and domestic capital formation created the conditions for the development of Indian heavy industry. India possesses today a steel industry capable of producing approximately two million tons of steel annually. By American standards that is not very much, but by the standards of Asia that is considerable. The Jamshedpur Works, owned by the Tata family, is the most modern and largest steel mill in Asia and probably one of the most modern in the world.
But more important still, this nucleus of heavy industry, based upon iron ore and coal, constitutes a reservoir of skills and technological talent. The steady increase of skilled and managerial personnel greatly eased India’s transition to economic as well as political independence.
Another strategic asset of India is an intangible one, yet one with which the West must reckon in its dealings with Asia. India is the source of cultural and intellectual influence that radiates over large parts of Asia. Although the claims as to extent and importance of that influence, advanced by some Indians and not a few western well- wishers of India, cannot be easily verified, it is an indisputable fact that India’s prestige in world politics has risen spectacularly in the few years elapsed since India gained her independence.
South Asia’s most important strategic liability is overpopulation. In a sense, the colonial powers have done their job too well. Thus, for example, when the British conquered India, they found a population of less than 200 millions. When they left India in 1947 the population exceeded 420 millions, the most phenomenal job in demographical upgrading in the history of the world. The average expectancy of life under the rule of Britain increased from approximately 20 years to about 32 years.
Though South Asia’s population growth may in another fifty years slow down on the western pattern of industrialization and urbanization, the present outlook warrants serious concern. For this enormous population has to be fed. The fact is that the Indian food production falls below the requirements of the Indian population. In the 1930’s India began to import food from other parts of the world. It was because of the failure of the Burma rice crop that, in 1943, starvation ravaged Bengal. The Malthusian law has caught up with the Indian population which has outpaced the domestic means of subsistence.
Another serious strategic liability is the political divisions of South Asia. The Indian subcontinent is divided into the Union of India and Pakistan, and Further India into Burma, Siam, Indo-China and Malaya. Political strains and stresses assail the integrity of each individual country.
Perhaps not even superlative statesmanship could, in 1947, have prevented the partition of India. As it is, partition weakens India as a whole. It is easy to blame the mutual intransigence of Hindus and Moslems for the breakup of the Indian Empire. However, it is generally overlooked that “communalism,” although it was a significant feature of Indian society for a long time, was raised to the power of an irresistible force only comparatively recently. The antagonism of the religious communities, Hindu and Moslem, could not have assumed the status of a dominant political issue had it not been for the loosening of India’s social structure as a whole. Again, the West—in this particular instance, Britain—had done its job too well.
The very improvements brought about by western technology and western science engendered the increasing disintegration of the traditional values of Indian society. These values were in part religious, in part aesthetic. These traditional values of Indian family life and village society have been degraded by the impact of western techniques, its mass production methods and its stimulation of new wants.
There is the analogy of 19th century Europe. In Europe, too, the rise of modern science and technology and of the decline of traditional beliefs created a spiritual vacuum. And that spiritual vacuum, because man cannot live by bread alone, was filled by competing ideologies, nationalism, and Marxism. In India, it is a particular form of nationalism, communalism, which has filled the void created by the erosion of the traditional values of Indian culture.
India was, at best, a precarious creation, for whatever unity there was, was not the creation of the Indian people themselves, but of Britain. There was no India before the British came to India. The last Indian Empire wrought by Indian hands was the India of King Asoka, 2300 years ago. Thereafter India was a group of principalities, a “geographical expression,” not a state. It was English conquest that united the peninsula. The withdrawal of Britain set. loose the centrifugal forces which had always rent the Indian peninsula.
Not the least of South Asia’s strategic liabilities is weak government. The fact is that nowhere in this area are political structures stable, because nowhere are they broadly based. The Congress Party in India does not rest on the firm basis of genuine democratic consensus. India is ruled by a self-appointed one-party government just as is every nation of South Asia. The government of Pakistan is beset by serious difficulties, resulting partly from the division of the country in two parts separated from each other by the territory of the Union of India, partly by the troubles of the tribal areas, and partly by social tensions. The government of Burma has been grievously depleted by recurrent assassinations and revolutions.
Each of these governments barely manages to keep its nationalist extremists in check. Thus, for example, the Congress Party in India is buffeted by the increasing demands for an activist policy by the Hindu Mahasaba, the party of caste Hindus, calling for the annexation of Kashmir, war against Pakistan and severe repression of Moslem minorities in the Union of India. Pakistan is beset by irredentist movements. The tense relationships of Pakistan and Afghanistan are characteristic not only of the regional conflicts besetting the area, but also of its dangerous exposure to Soviet penetration.
Pakistan and the Union of India are bitterly at odds as to who shall possess Kashmir. But they are divided on many other issues, such as the allocation of military supplies Great Britain left behind, alignment of their currencies and various other problems of readjustment which arose out of partition. Afghanistan is now seeking to exploit this conflict, just as powers to the north of India have always sought to exploit her internecine quarrels.
Afghan propagandas call for the creation of “Pathanistan,” to wit, a Greater Afghanistan which would include part of the northwestern provinces of Pakistan and thus unite all “Pathans” under the rule of Afghanistan. However, the Afghans themselves, although they are pressing upon India, are exposed to pressure, for the Soviet Union sponsors a Tajik irredenta. Tajik nationalist propaganda, originating from the Tajik Socialist People’s Republic, a constituent part of the Soviet Union, calls upon all Tajiks to unite. Unfortunately for Afghanistan, the population of northern Afghanistan happens to be Tajik. The Soviets hint broadly to the Afghans that they can compensate themselves for the loss which they may suffer as the result of the Tajik secession by creating “Pathanistan” at the expense of Pakistan. The Union of India appears to have given aid and comfort to the Afghans. This maneuver unquestionably discommodes Pakistan; it imperils the security of all of India.
The Communist Party in India is probably not yet as important a factor as it is in Burma, Malaya, and Indo-China. It is, in all likelihood, a much more formidable threat than would appear from the public statements of the Union of India and Pakistani governments. It can be inferred from reports of repressive measures that both governments are fearful of communist infiltration. Their fears are grounded in India’s intellectual climate no less than the economic dilemmas facing all backward countries.
Fundamentally, most educated Asians are not deeply interested in Marxism or Jeffersonian democracy or other western ideologies. What does interest them is industrialization, i.e. the acquisition and application of western technology, its machines and skills.
Though South Asia’s intellectuals are, with the exception of a diminishing group of traditionalists, agreed on the need for industrialization, they disagree profoundly on procedure. There are some who hold that Asia must industrialize with the help of the West, the West at this particular moment being America. Others argue that Western help entails several disadvantages. First, they fear that Asia, by accepting Western loans and technical assistance may be drawn into the “imperialist” wars of the West, and, secondly, that to permit the West to share in Asian development is to invite the West again to return to Asia—by the back door, so to speak, but nonetheless in a controlling capacity. Not a few Indians reject Western participation on these grounds. China’s success in financing her own capital development, just as that of Russia 25 years ago, has greatly encouraged this faction of anti- Western Indian thought. Their argument can be summed up as follows:
“Asian peoples can industrialize by their own effort and by the same means by which the Russians industrialized. The Bolshevik leaders forced the peasant population to supply the investment capital and the labor necessary for industrialization. That meant millions of ‘kulaks’ dispossessed of their land and left to perish or be forced into the slave labor camps. South Asia has no dearth of people; its peoples are used to suffering and want. By taking the difficult road, i.e. industrialization without the aid of the West, Asia, too, can build an industrial civilization and remain master in her own house.”
It is among adherents of this school of thought in India and in the rest of South Asia that can be found the actual and the potential partisans of the Soviet Union. It is they who constitute the nucleus of an effective communist movement in South Asia. It would be surprising if Soviet agents were not to exploit the situation. But their work is eased by the preference of some of the most intelligent Asians for the Soviet model of industrialization.
Soviet communism is tailored not to the conditions of the West, but to the conditions of Asia. It was Stalin himself who, in a conversation with Sir Stafford Cripps, admitted that communism might not be such an attractive program for Europeans but that it appealed powerfully to the masses of Asia. Not the least persuasive argument of Stalinism is its simple, though ruthless, formula for the industrialization of backward countries.
The United States is heading for rough weather in South Asia. Resentments that only a few years ago converged on Britain now focus on America. The Pakistanis, being Moslem, favor Britain because of the latter’s more conciliatory attitude in the case of Palestine. In Burma, sentiment has swung toward Britain. The Indian middle classes no longer view emancipation as an unmixed blessing and are by no means anxious to sever India’s ties with the Commonwealth. By the same token, the position of America has deteriorated considerably. It is now Americans who are considered practically everywhere as the standard bearer of Western imperialism. The plight of America has its comic aspects: not a few Americans relished the game of twisting the lion’s tail; not a few Americans took pride in taking Britain severely to task for her allegedly reactionary administration of her colonies and protectorates. That criticism, while it may have been warranted a generation ago, was far from justified in view of more recent developments and embarrassed Britain at the very task of readjusting her relation to the Asian peoples of the Commonwealth.
Some of this indiscriminate anticolonialism has boomeranged against us. The peoples of India, of Pakistan, of Burma, do not regard us with sentiments much different from those which they formerly reserved for Britain. It is now the United States that represents the epitome of Western power, and Asia has no reason to regard affectionately the political, economic and military superiority of the white race. If we are to develop a policy toward South Asia, it must be based upon premises other than the gratitude and love the South Asian peoples presumably bear us, because we formerly advocated—against embattled Britain—the emancipation of the colonial peoples from Western rule.
What are the alternatives and capabilities of U. S. policy as regards South Asia?
First, we can do much by supplying South Asia with economic, financial, and technological aid. Food subsidies to India, for example, should be granted generously. But there are limits to the effectiveness of charitable undertakings, first, because South Asia’s population is so vast and, secondly, because the South Asians themselves are determined, come what may, to help themselves.
Perhaps the most promising approach is still the one by way of private enterprise. There are in this country a great number of bankers, merchants, and industrialists with a long experience in South Asian trade. The precondition of expanding this trade, not only in terms of profits for the entrepreneurs engaged in it, but in terms of increased living standards of the masses of South Asia, is political and military security. It is up to governments of South Asia to create conditions of internal security and business confidence under which business will be prepared to take risks at reasonable rates and to plow back profits in the form of long-term investments. Venture capital will not venture forth in the face of threats of confiscation. The United States now faces Asian problems with which Britain had to live for two centuries. The United States can do worse than to take a second, more comprehending look at policies and practices which not only earned for the British considerable profits but which have also brought enormous benefits to the Asian masses.
South Asia is the area of Asia’s demographical revolution. South Asia’s population doubled within the last one hundred years. This created not only grave economic problems but also social problems of a revolutionary nature. The breakdown of the traditional cultural structure and the withdrawal of Britain have created a vacuum. South Asia is passing through an era of difficult internal readjustments while being exposed dangerously to threats of Soviet aggression. Basically, the situation is fraught with revolutionary implications far more consequential than is the situation of China. In Soviet planning, the Chinese revolution has set the stage for the next act: the greater Indian-South Asian revolution.
For the United States, the situation in South Asia spells out a few simple but urgent lessons: we must seek to understand the nature of the revolutionary forces at work. There are some problems we can help South Asia to solve. The most important ones the South Asians will have to solve themselves. But there is one problem that South Asia cannot solve at all, and that is the problem of external security. That problem now devolves on us, just as it formerly devolved on Britain. Whether we are indeed Britain’s heirs is an open question; the great mass of the Asian peoples do regard us as the new colossus of Western imperialism. We may wish to decline that part, the imperialist part of Britain’s heritage. There is one part we cannot decline: Britain protected the external security of South Asia. This mission is now assigned to us. We must accept it for the sake of the South Asian peoples and—of our own security. There is no acceptable alternative at this time.