THE United States’ increasing strategic competition with China in the Asia-Pacific region and Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s recent visit to Moscow has created a favourable Congressional leaning towards India. American policymakers are striving to sustain and further the Indo-US threshold alliance despite New Delhi’s distancing from NATO-plus, the US Ukraine policy, and continuing purchasing military hardware and oil from Russia.
The US intention to modernize Indian armed forces with the transfer of sophisticated military hardware and cooperation in the domain of new emerging technologies could destabilize the strategic stability in South Asia. Whether India will be able to check China’s increasing influence in the Asia-Pacific region is debatable. However, it will increase Pakistan’s security dilemma and obstruct Islamabad’s efforts to improve its bilateral relations with Washington.
The Biden Administration and American Congressmen are deliberately ignoring the Indian armed forces’ brutality in the Indian Illegally Occupied Kashmir (IIOK) and Prime Minister Modi’s jingoism against Pakistan. Prime Minister Modi persistently alleges Pakistan to burnish his nationalistic credentials and to restore his declining popularity in the Indian polity. He seemed very frustrated due to the resurgence in Kashmiri fighters’ successful attacks on Indian soldiers and the complete failure of his brutal state-terrorism policy in the IIOK, which he unleashed on August 5, 2019.
Instead of resolving the Kashmir problem judiciously, Prime Minister Modi is repeating his old mantra that Pakistan is sponsoring “terrorism” and a “proxy war” against India. On July 26, 2024, while addressing the Indian soldiers and top army brass in Ladakh, he said,“ I want to tell these patrons of terrorism that their unholy plans will never be successful … Our brave [forces] will squash terrorism, the enemy will be given a befitting reply.” Prime Minister Modi’s befitting response statement alarms about the probability of a replica of India’s February 26, 2019, surgical strike. Modi’s military adventure will entail Pakistan’s quid pro quo-plus response. Notably, such an action-reaction has an inbuilt dynamic to spiral limited war into nuclear exchanges between nuclear-armed India and Pakistan.
Ironically, instead of tutoring and encouraging Indian leadership to act rationally and avoid bravado and jingoism in the nuclearized region, the Americans are implicitly endorsing Modi’s warlike approach towards Pakistan. On July 26, 2024, US Senator Marco Rubio introduced a bill in Congress to improve defence cooperation between the United States and India’. The primary aim of the ‘‘United States-India Defence Cooperation Act of 2024’’ (Act 2024) is to equip India with advanced military technology. The bill pleads that India will be treated like the US closed allies such as Japan, Israel, South Korea, and NATO members.
The Americans are determined to consider India a closed ally despite New Delhi’s refusal to join the NATO-plus in June 2023. The NATO-plus is a security bloc of NATO and five countries—Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Israel, and South Korea. The United States Congressional Committee on the Chinese Communist Party recommended including India in NATO-plus in May 2023. The Committee stated, “Including India in NATO Plus security arrangements would build upon the US and India’s close partnership to strengthen global security and deter the aggression of China across the Indo-Pacific region. The NATO-plus status to India facilitates the alliance reach to China’s border in the Himalayas. A similar intention, once again, resurfaced in the recently proposed Act 2024 in the US Congress.
The proposed Act 2024 will authorize the Secretary of State to ‘increase military cooperation, including joint military exercises, personnel exchanges, support for international peacekeeping missions, and enhanced strategic dialogue. The US provides India with $2,000,000 for international military education and training for the fiscal years 2025 through 2027.Another alarming article of the bill is that the US administration to submit a report to Congress on Pakistan’s use of offensive force, including the use of proxies against India; a list of all instances in which Pakistan has provided safe haven to terrorist groups; and a determination and description of any assistance Islamabad has offered to militants in the union territory of Jammu and Kashmir. Ironically, the Act 2024 simply ignores the reality that India has launched a campaign of orchestrating targeted assassinations, subversion, and terrorism in foreign territories, including Pakistan.
The concluding section of the proposed Act 2024 seems to attempt to levy sanctions on Pakistan on the pretext that it is sponsoring terrorism in India. It states that if Pakistan uses offensive force against India, the former will not receive any security assistance under this Act or under any other Act. It states, “bar Pakistan from receiving security assistance if it is found to have sponsored terrorism against India.” Hence, the passage of the Act 2024 would further deteriorate Pakistan’s relations with the United States.
The increasing military power of India through the generous US military hardware and technology transfers and India’s exemption from the US Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA) sanctions, which are a set of US sanctions aimed at countering Russian military trade intensifies Pakistan’s security dilemma. India had already received a few squadrons of the S-400 Triumf surface-to-air missile defence system from Russia, which it deployed on its western border.
To conclude, the proposed Act 2024 negates reality or admits and endorses India’s concocted reports that in Indian Illegally Occupied Kashmir, the Kashmiri freedom movement is not Indigenous, and it also undermines their right of self-determination enshrined in the United Nations Security Council resolutions. Moreover, it encourages Prime Minister Modi’s xenophobia towards Pakistan. Indeed, these developments are detrimental to South Asian strategic stability and economic prosperity.
—The writer is Prof at the School of Politics and International Relations, Quaid-i-Azam University.
