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If in 10 or 15 years—or sooner, but 10 or 15 years—China begins to act aggressively externally and in a hostile way, these two countries [India and the US] will come together naturally. So they do not have to plan for it; they’ll come together.… So they don’t have to plan for it; it will happen, it seems to me, because they are natural allies.

—Robert Blackwill,

former US ambassador to India, 2006¹

Engagement with the United States is essential in the world that we live in.… This is not an alliance against any other country.… We are not part of any military alliance and we are not ganging up against any other country, least of all against China.… I wish to dispel this opinion which may exist that what we have done with the United States is at the cost of China or any other country.

—Manmohan Singh, prime minister of India, 2005²

On January 25, 2015, at 9:38 a.m., US president Barack Obama stepped off Air Force One onto the tarmac at Delhi’s Palam airport. Departing from protocol, Indian prime minister Narendra Modi was there to receive him. While the sky overhead was gloomy, the state of US-India relations was not. Visible signs of how much the relationship had deepened over the previous decade and a half were everywhere, from the two leaders’ embrace on the tarmac to the reason for Obama’s visit—the first American president to be invited to be chief guest at India’s annual Republic Day celebrations—to the American strategic airlift and maritime reconnaissance aircraft acquired by India and featured in the parade. It was also evident in the two leaders’ declaration that a closer US-India partnership was not just important for their countries but “indispensable” for the peace, prosperity, and stability of the Indo-Pacific. But left unsaid and unseen was a crucial factor that had been driving this partnership: China.

In recent years, as China has continued to rise as an economic, political, and military power, the US and India have been increasingly interested in developing a strategic relationship in response. Most have seen this as a relatively recent framework for building US-India relations after five decades of viewing the bilateral relationship either through a US-India-Pakistan lens or a US-India-Soviet one. For example, during the 2000 presidential election campaign, Condoleezza Rice argued that American foreign policy should move beyond the India-Pakistan conceptualization, emphasizing that the US “should pay closer attention to India’s role in the regional balance” in Asia given China’s rise.³

However, this strategic framework is not just a recent one. It echoes the framing from the first half of the Cold War, when the US in no small part viewed India through a China prism. The “loss” of China in 1949 had Time label India as the “anchor for Asia”⁴ and the New York Times emphasize that the US had a stake in India because it was “potentially a great counterweight to China.” The concept of a “fateful race” between the two Asian giants took hold,⁵ with the Eisenhower administration noting in its 1957 statement of policy on South Asia that “the outcome of the competition between Communist China and India as to which can best satisfy the aspirations of peoples for economic improvement, will have a profound effect throughout Asia and Africa.”⁶ Consequently, the US needed to help India win the race—one of the few issues on which 1960 presidential contenders Senator John F. Kennedy and Vice President Richard Nixon agreed. This view endured through the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and then dissipated with Nixon’s 1971 rapprochement with China, only to reappear three decades later in the George W. Bush administration.

Even in India the China and US relationships were not treated in a stovepiped fashion. Indian policymakers, for example, used American concerns about China turning communist to elicit aid from the US. But they, too, bought into the idea of a development race and worried about the strategic consequences of falling behind. Initially, they saw the US as crucial to building India’s economic capabilities to deal with the symbolic and potentially strategic challenge that China posed. Later, when that country posed a military challenge, they turned to the US for assistance and assurance as well, even signing an air defense agreement in 1963 that called for mutual consultations in the event of a Chinese attack on India. Sino-US rapprochement put an end to this source of convergence, but it has reemerged in the two decades since Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee argued in 2000 that, “above all,” shared interests in Asia demanded a closer US-India partnership.⁷

While China played a significant role in shaping US-India relations in the past, this history has not been explored in any great detail. Most studies of US-India relations have focused on the impact of Pakistan, the former Soviet Union, personalities, economics, culture, or the two countries’ foreign policy traditions or ideologies. They have largely offered more explanation for estrangement than engagement, and for continuity than change, in the bilateral relationship.

Overall, in these analyses, consideration of the role of the other elephant—or, rather, dragon—in the room has been largely missing. The link between US relations with China and India, and India’s relations with China and the US has been left unexamined. A few scholars have assessed how China shaped the US-India relationship, but only in the context of limited events, such as the 1962 Sino-Indian War or the 1971 Indo-Pakistani War, or very briefly as part of a broader study. Others have even dismissed this role. One scholar, discussing US relations during the Cold War, for example, stated, “Washington’s policy toward India and Pakistan had its own trajectory that followed a different and separate path from that of US-China policy.”⁸

As this book will demonstrate, however, those paths were not distinct. Washington’s China policy shaped its India policy, and Delhi’s perception of China affected how it dealt with the US. China was at times a source of tension in the relationship. However, it also helps explain, in large part, why the two countries continued to engage with each other, despite what an Indian official called a “range of irritants” in the relationship.

A more comprehensive assessment of China’s role is essential to understanding the past trajectory of US-India relations. It can also shed light on the China-India-US triangle of today and of tomorrow. Moreover, it can help answer the often-asked question these days about the fate of this triangle: whether India and the US can and will ally or partner against China, given converging concerns about its rise, intentions, and actions.

This book shows that China’s centrality to US-India relations is not a recent phenomenon; it dates back to the beginning of the two democracies’ relations. Indeed, the story of that relationship and its ups and downs cannot be adequately told without systematically considering the China effect.

This book explores and disentangles how American and Indian perceptions of and policy toward China shaped US-India relations during a formative period: 1949–1979. Why these three decades? The onset of this period was when the Chinese Communist Party–led People’s Republic of China came into existence. It was also a crucial time in the development of US perceptions of newly independent India and vice versa. Over the next three decades and multiple American and Indian administrations, in direct and indirect ways, Delhi and Washington’s perceptions of Beijing affected how they saw and behaved toward each other. In 1978–1979 the ascension of Deng Xiaoping and the onset of reform constituted a turning point for China. It marked the formal US recognition of China, and a key milestone in the normalization of India’s relations with China after the 1962 Sino-Indian war. Developments then set the stage for the US-China-India triangle of today, a topic deserving of its own book.

It was China, and not Pakistan’s military alliance with the US, as is commonly understood, that brought the Cold War to India’s doorstep. And between 1949 and 1956, China was a key driver of US-India divergence. It did not have to be that way—after communists took over China, the Truman administration indeed hoped that India would play a critical role in the US strategic script as a geopolitical counterbalance and ideological democratic contrast to the Soviet Union’s Asian ally. However, the Indian government, led by Jawaharlal Nehru, had a different perspective and would not play the role that the US envisioned for it. Delhi worried about development competition with communist China, but believed that any geopolitical threat was years away. And it thought that engaging China and encouraging it to be a responsible stakeholder in the international community would be the best way to delay, mitigate, or eliminate that threat.

During this period, both India and the US under Truman and then Eisenhower came to see the other’s attitude and actions toward China as, at best, hindering or, at worst, harming their broader strategies. Those attitudes were shaped by their different priorities, geographies, histories, capabilities, commitments, and experiences with China, as well as their differing views of the importance of ideology in shaping Chinese policymakers’ decisionmaking. The two countries’ differences over perception and approach were evident on questions such as the recognition of China, in the discussions over what to do about Tibet, and in the debate over China’s role in the Korean War.

From 1956 to 1962, broad agreement on China was a significant reason for US-India engagement. There was a convergence in the two countries’ views on the nature and urgency of the China threat, as well as on the ways and means of dealing with it. Eisenhower in his second term and the Kennedy administration came to see China not just as a direct security threat but also as a symbolic and ideological threat to American interests if it won the development competition. And assertive Chinese behavior caused Indian leaders, like their American counterparts, to see China as a geopolitical threat. The two democracies also agreed on what was required to meet such a threat: close partnership with each other, and the strengthening of India’s military and economic capabilities.

During the subsequent phase from 1963 to 1968, American and Indian threat perceptions of China were largely similar, but the two countries’ assessment of the ways and means required to tackle the threat once again diverged. Their common interest in containing China kept their disillusionment from resulting in complete disengagement. But while the countries’ agreement on ends laid the basis for cooperation, their disagreement on the ways and means to contain China stalled their alignment.

The two countries disagreed about the optimum balance of resources that should be devoted toward Indian development versus defense to strengthen the country against China. In a role reversal, the US, led by Lyndon Johnson, believed that the China threat called for more Indian investment in its economy, and more American aid to India’s development rather than to its defense effort. On its part, the Indian government, first led by Lal Bahadur Shastri and then by Indira Gandhi, envisioned significantly more defense expenditure than before. Furthermore, the US believed that with China as the primary threat, India should seek a rapprochement with Pakistan. India, however, believed Pakistan was part of its China problem rather than a means to solving it. Finally, India’s preferred strategy of diversifying its dependence with a partnership with the Soviet Union proved to be an obstacle to deeper US-India relations.

Between 1969 and 1972, the changing US attitude toward China became a major source of tension in the US-India relationship. Initially, this tension was caused by a divergence in threat perception. On the US side, China started sliding down the threat list, whereas it remained the major challenge on India’s horizon. With the reduced need to counter China, India’s importance to the US decreased. The US moreover came to see India as hindering Sino-US rapprochement. On India’s end, its efforts to normalize relations with China had preceded those of the US but had not borne fruit. When Sino-US rapprochement did succeed in the midst of the 1971 Bangladesh crisis, policymakers saw what would today be called a G-2 problem (i.e., the US ranged with China [and Pakistan] against India). With its American insurance policy against China expiring, Delhi instead sought to tackle the threat from China through an alignment with the Soviet Union.

After Sino-US rapprochement, between 1973 and 1979, the US framework for Asia reduced, if not eliminated, the US desire and need to seek an Indian role as a counterweight or contrasting model to China. And wariness of overdependence on the Soviet Union caused India to seek to improve its relations with China, while the Indian leadership simultaneously pursued a nuclear weapons program to ensure an independent deterrent. The US and India also sought to reestablish and maintain a working relationship to limit or balance the Soviet role in India, but, with China no longer looming as large, the US and India slid down each others’ priority list for the remainder of the Cold War.

This book does not argue that China was the only factor that mattered in the US-India relationship, but it demonstrates that China’s role in the US-India script was as a leading actor and not in the form of a cameo or guest appearance. American and Indian perceptions of and policies toward China shaped the US-India relationship in significant ways. And this impact was neither simple nor episodic.

Divergence on China was a key source of friction in the bilateral relationship. This divergence was not, as is sometimes argued, because the two countries lacked an understanding of the other’s perspective. Rather, one side sometimes simply believed the other was wrong.

On the other hand, convergence on China could drive the two countries together. The shared perception of an external threat was a necessary condition of a China-driven US-India alignment. But that alone was an insufficient condition. The US and India pursued such an alignment only when they agreed on the nature of the threat that China posed, the urgency of that threat, and how to address the threat. Thus, when it came to partnering to balance China, it was necessary for the two countries to agree on both the diagnosis and the prescription.

Key elements in the US-Indian debate about the right prescription included whether engagement or containment was the best strategy toward China. Relatedly, was the use of force or diplomacy—and in what proportion—most appropriate? Also, was Pakistan a part of the China problem or part of the solution? Furthermore, how should resources best be distributed between defense and development, based on assessments of whether internal or external balancing was the best approach? Finally, was collective security—through alliances or alignments—or a diversified and wide-ranging set of partnerships the best way to deal with a China challenge?

In order to assess whether or not the US and India can and will ally or partner in the context of a China challenge, it is key to understand this need for agreement on both ends and means. In recent years, some, like former US ambassador to India Robert Blackwill, have argued that a China-driven US-India partnership is inevitable. They see shared anxiety about China as naturally leading to US-India alignment. Others, like former prime minister Manmohan Singh, have suggested that a China-driven US-India alignment is highly unlikely, if not impossible; that, because of its strategic culture, India does not “do” alliances.

This book argues that a US-India partnership to tackle a China challenge is neither inevitable nor impossible. India has partnered and even aligned with countries against China—with the US in 1962–1963 and the Soviet Union in 1971. On the other hand, at other times, even when American and Indian policymakers have believed China to be a major threat, the countries’ alignment has not been sustainable. The two countries have come together against China, but only when certain conditions are in place (i.e., when they have agreed not just on the nature and urgency of the threat, but also on how to deal with it).

While the US-India-Pakistan triangle has received a fair amount of historical attention, the US-India-China triangle has not. To some degree this is not surprising, given that policymaking organizations have structurally separated East and South Asia. This separation had the effect of placing India in a South Asia box in terms of scholarship as well. And that lens reinforced the traditional argument that the US-India relationship was characterized by estrangement during the Cold War and engagement after it. That, in turn, has shaped the narrative in academic and policy circles that the two countries have moved from being estranged democracies historically to engaged democracies in the present era.

By broadening the lens, however, this book reinforces the argument of more recent scholarship on the US-India relationship: that the two countries did engage during the Cold War. Moreover, this engagement was not just episodic. Indeed, estrangement and engagement were constantly competing elements in the relationship. Thus, even while the two countries had major disagreements on the Korean War—often differences over China that would spill over to other areas of the relationship—they were engaging at the working level, including with the US using India as a channel to and from China. Similarly, during periods of cooperation between the two countries on China, sources of estrangement like Pakistan and the Soviet Union had not disappeared. But their shared concern about China incentivized the two countries to deemphasize or manage those differences more effectively.

Those shared concerns also helped them overcome—or even helped change—the preferences of personalities, which are sometimes given too much weight in US-India narratives. This book does not argue that individuals did not matter, but it does show that structural factors could alter or overcome individual preferences. They explain, for example, how John Foster Dulles—long portrayed as anti-India—went from criticizing and resisting India’s role in Asia to arguing on Capitol Hill that to bolster US interests in Asia it was crucial to strengthen India.

As this indicates, this book also seeks to take the US-India relationship out of the South Asia box and consider the broader Asian setting in which it played out. Today, there is much discussion of the new link between the Asian subregions, of India as a democratic anchor in the Indo-Pacific, and of Delhi’s Act East strategy. However, even in the first few decades of the Cold War, American and Indian policymakers saw the broader region as connected.

Indian officials worried about instability in broader Asia affecting India’s interests. They did not believe it would stay contained in East and Southeast Asia, and they thought it would constrain the time and space India needed for nation-building at home. Thus, seeking stability, Delhi was active on a number of Asian issues, including the Korean and Vietnam Wars. At times, it played a leading role, such as when it helped convene the Bandung Conference of Asian and African countries. At other times, it played an intermediary role—for example, during and after the Korean War—and on the International Control Commission that supervised the implementation of the Geneva Accords in Southeast Asia. At yet other times, it resisted joining groupings in the region. And throughout, its objectives in Asia shaped its approach toward China and the US.

US policymakers, in turn, thought about India in the Asian context. Their domino theory envisioned India as part of the chain of Asian dominoes that could fall to communism and shift the balance of power in the Soviet Union’s favor. It is why they worried about Indian failure. But they also saw a successful democratic India, even if it was nonaligned, as showing other Asian countries that the communist Chinese model was not the only alternative.

American and Indian policymakers did not always see regional developments in the same light. Delhi’s postcolonial and Washington’s anticommunist prisms at other times led to different interpretations and disagreements. This meant that each sometimes sought a larger role for the other in Asia—as a stabilizer, balancer, or influencer—but sometimes resisted it as being unhelpful.

This book aims not just to reinsert India into the Asian story but also to reinterpret aspects of its China policy and its foreign policy more broadly. The view of China in India was at best a dominant one, but there was never a consensus. China policy was constantly contested within the Indian government and polity. The debate is usually framed as revolving around differences on whether or not China was a challenge. But this book shows that concern about China was more widespread—even Nehru, considered to be naïve about China, believed it would pose a challenge. The key difference was the kind of challenge, and how to deal with it. For example, India’s first deputy prime minister, Vallabhbhai Patel, believed China was a geopolitical threat and needed to be confronted with the buildup and use of force, and possibly even alliances. Nehru, on the other hand, mistakenly believed that China would think like India and would seek development at home and peace in its periphery. That meant a geopolitical challenge was some ways off and that India had time. He was more concerned about the threat of ideas and subversion from China in the short term.

Like Patel, Nehru advocated the strengthening of border infrastructure and defenses. However, prioritizing autonomy over capacity building, a greater focus on the Pakistan problem, and a concern about diverting funds from development to defense meant that his government neglected or delayed making the required investments to strengthen itself vis-à-vis China—a lesson that current and future Indian foreign policymakers would do well to remember.

It is also worth remembering, as this book shows, what nonalignment was and was not. It was not merely or even primarily a result of principle, but was driven by pragmatism. It was a strategy that Indian leaders, acting from weakness and operating under political and economic constraints, used to expand their options by diversifying their portfolio of partners and thus their dependence. This was important to Indian foreign policymakers because, even as they sought security and prosperity, they also wanted strategic and decisional autonomy.

The policymakers of a recently decolonized India found themselves facing a geopolitical, economic, and ideological climate that was significantly shaped by the Cold War. Their diversification strategy helped create space in this competitive context. It was not a result of trying to “avoid entanglement,”⁹ but of recognition that, unlike the US in its early years, India was connected to the world and could not help but be involved in and affected by global and regional developments.

The external dynamics did bind India’s options, but they also created opportunities for Indian policymakers. They were not passive spectators and sought to shape their environment. And they used the Cold War and American fears after the “loss” of China for India’s benefit—including by eliciting military and economic aid from Washington and getting the US to serve as a frontline state when they faced a China challenge.

The Cold War in this one sense benefited India. Its importance to both Moscow and Washington derived in no small part from the superpower competition. One cannot answer the counterfactual about whether India would have been as important to them in the absence of the Cold War, but one cannot take it as a given that these countries would have seen it to be in their interest to invest heavily in India absent their competition.

That superpower rivalry, and the related geopolitical and ideological contest between China and India, indeed made India less peripheral to the US than was earlier believed. Some have asserted that “Americans seldom regarded India as special. Their prior perceptions did not place India on the same plane as China. Few appreciated the value to American interests of a strong, independent and nonaligned India.”¹⁰ It is true that India moved up and down the US priority list, but this book shows that there was a significant period of time when the US did see India as special and sought to build and support a strong India.

And Indian foreign policymakers, in turn, realized that for defense and development, India had to seek a little (military and economic) help from its friends. Autonomy could not be the primary goal, and at times the two more important objectives—security and prosperity—even meant seeking alignment.

India tilted twice during the period this book covers: 1962–1963, when India sought American aid against China, and the two countries signed an air defense agreement that called for mutual consultations in the event of a Chinese attack against India; and 1971, when, with a looming China-Pakistan threat, India signed a treaty with the Soviet Union that envisioned mutual consultations if either country was attacked. These Indian alignments took place when five elements coincided: an imminent threat; India’s inability to deal with the challenge on its own; a willing partner; the lack of other partners (thwarting India’s desire to diversify); and sufficient political will and capacity to undertake a tilt.

In both cases, it was China that represented that threat and drove India toward alignment. Even in the US-India case, that alignment was not just momentary. It might not have constituted a full-blown alliance, but before and after 1962, it facilitated close cooperation in the military, intelligence, and economic spheres. This was a period when each country showed a greater tolerance toward the other’s approach toward partnerships. But there were also missed opportunities that are worth heeding today.

This book details those missed opportunities, and aims to offer a broader set of insights for present and future policymakers about the US-India-China triangle—an even more fateful one with regional and global implications. It provides historical context for many of the challenges and opportunities related to the bilateral and trilateral relationships facing Indian and US policymakers today. And it offers lessons—of possibilities, limitations, and caution—from past experience that can inform current and future policies.

A few notes on what this book is not: it is not a study of China as an actor in the US-India relationship, but of when and how China was a factor shaping the relationship; whether, why, and how Chinese policymakers actively sought to shape US-India relations merits further study, but it is beyond the scope of this book. Also, while it includes information on public opinion where available, it is a book about high (geo)politics, not a view from below. Finally, the book does not seek to be the final word on the subject—as more information becomes available, there will no doubt be additional aspects and interpretations that come to light.

This book builds on existing scholarship of the relationships between these three countries. It also uses primary sources. In the US, these include official papers available through the presidential libraries, the National Archives, and document collections such as the Foreign Relations of the United States series. In India, sources include the official documents and private papers of senior policymakers accessible at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, the more limited Ministry of External Affairs papers available at the National Archives of India, and documents in the Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru series. There remain gaps in the availability of documents, but the papers that are available allow a better reconstruction of the Indian perspective than has been possible in the past. Oral histories and newspaper accounts also helped with triangulation.

The book takes a chronological approach. It is organized into parts to reflect the different states of the Indian and the US relationships with China over time, and to explore their impact on the US-India relationship in each period. The parts cover when (1) Sino-Indian relations were neutral to positive while Sino-US relations were negative; (2) both Sino-Indian and Sino-US relations were negative; (3) Sino-Indian relations were strained, while Sino-US relations improved; and (4) both Sino-Indian and Sino-US relations were thawing.

Part I (Divergence) covers chapters 1 and 2, titled as all the chapters are, using Economist article titles from the time. It focuses on the period from 1949 to 1956, when Indian and US perceptions of and policies toward China cast a relatively dark shadow on the US-India relationship. Part II (Convergence), with chapters 3 and 4, examines shifting Indian and US attitudes and actions toward China between 1956 and 1962, which drove the two countries together. Part III (Dependence and Disillusionment), covering chapters 5 and 6, considers the period from 1963 to 1968, when Delhi and Washington’s perception of China as a major threat held the US and India together, but their different views of the right approach limited their partnership. Part IV (Disengagement) includes chapters 7 and 8. The former examines the impact of the shift in US and Indian perceptions of and policy toward China on the US-India relationship between 1969 and 1972, when India found itself with a G-2 problem. Chapter 8 covers the period between 1973 and 1979, a time of developing détente between each of the countries in the triangle. The conclusion brings the story up to the present day, with a view of the impact of China on the US-India relationship in the last four decades, and offers some insights of relevance to current and future policymakers.