Arms and the Indian sub-continent

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33778, 26 February 1975, Page 16

Arms and the Indian sub-continent

The danger in lifting the arms embargo by the United States against Pakistan is that a new arms race may start in the Indian sub-continent To some extent it probably started on the very day the embargo was lifted: the Indians no doubt used the announcement of the ending as a lever in their talks with the visiting Soviet Defence Minister (Marshal Andrei Grechko) to persuade him to deliver more or better arms. The embargo was imposed on both India and Pakistan after war broke out between the two in 1965; it has been lifted on both, but India now receives its most sophisticated arms from the Soviet Union, and manufactures others itself. Whatever the wisdom of ending the embargo, it should ensure that the United States does not lose a second customer.

The United States decided to end the embargo because Pakistan was defeated in the Bangladesh war, because India had exploded an atomic device, and because Pakistan — although a member of the Central Treaty Organisation in which it is associated with the United States — was denied a supply of American arms while India received Soviet arms. The United States says that it neither intends to make India and Pakistan militarily equal nor to assume its pre-1965 role of becoming the major arms supplier to the region. Such assurances of restraint have not mollified India and the Indian Ambassador to the United States (Mr Triloki Nath Kaul) interpreted the American move as being based on a “ concept of power, balance of power, and of creating an influence through supply of arms ...” He failed to say in what way India’s acceptance of Soviet arms differed from Pakistan’s acceptance of American arms.

The relations between India and Pakistan will be made worse by the return of a now compliant Sheikh Mohammed Abdullah to lead Kashmir. Sheikh Abdullah has accepted the accession of Kashmir to the Indian union and abandoned his call for a plebiscite. Pakistan, which controls a third of Kashmir, resents the binding of the rest closer to India. Besides their long-standing dispute over Kashmir, and the bitterness of the war and eventual secession from Pakistan of Bangladesh (seen by some Pakistanis as an Indian plot to weaken Pakistan), the religious diiferences and Pakistan’s suspicions of Indian ambitions as a world Power remain. These suspicions have been greatly increased by the explosion of the atomic device by India. India’s protests that the bomb is for peaceful purposes is not believed even by those whose relation with India is friendly and geographically distant. After all if India wants to build canals and dams it has the world’s largest supply of unemployed people. Other countries on the sub-continent see the blast as threatening them. Part of the response is to seek the reassurance of weapons. But as insecurity may so ca^s f° r more arms may not, and the perilous path of constant arming pursued’ The only victors may be those who deal in arms.