India–United States relations

Prominent leaders of India's freedom movement had friendly relations with the United States which continued well after independence from the United Kingdom in 1947.

Quotes

• Our military supply policy toward Pakistan has, more than any other single issue, contributed to the sharp deterioration in Indo-US relations.
  • Henry Kissinger to Richard Nixon, quoted in Bass, G. J. (2014). The Blood telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a forgotten genocide. ch 14

• The peptalk about India and the US being "natural allies" as "the biggest and the oldest democracy" has little impact on real-life policies...
  The American state is arming Pakistan, and even if it were to fully stop arms deliveries to Pakistan, it still carries a legacy of having armed the Pakistani Army and trained the Pakistani secret service, agents of terror against Indian citizens and the Indian state. The guilt for keeping Indo-American relations unfriendly is entirely on the American side...
  For those who look at facts rather than at newspaper headlines, it is obvious that there is no danger whatsoever of the US giving the impression of valuing a Muslim life less than a Hindu life. Rather the reverse, and this consistently for decades. In 1971, the Pakistani Army was butchering Hindus in East Bengal by the hundreds of thousands (many times the total number of victims of Hindutva since then), yet the USA stood by Pakistan and did nothing to rein their Islamic allies in. Throughout the 1990s and till today, Pak-backed terrorists have been butchering Hindus in numerous shootings and bomb attacks and ethnically cleansing them from the Kashmir Valley, yet the USA have not used their leverage with Pakistan to stop this continuous terror wave. Dr. Hathaway's misrepresentation of this highly unbalanced American policy adds insult to injury.
  • The Problem with Secularism (2007)

Bass, G. J. The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide (2013)

• Nixon was baffled and annoyed by Americans’ popular sympathies for India, which he repeatedly described as a psychological disorder. He scorned a “phobia” among some Americans that “everything that India does is good, and everything Pakistan does is bad,” and once told the military leader of Pakistan, “There is a psychosis in this country about India.” The Americans who most liked India tended to be the ones that Nixon could not stand. India was widely seen as a State Department favorite, irritating the president. He recoiled from the country’s mystical fascination to the hippie counterculture, which he despised. Henry Kissinger thought that Nixon saw Democratic “obsequiousness toward India as a prime example of liberal softheadedness.”
  • Nixon quoted from Bass, G. J. (2014). The Blood telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a forgotten genocide. ch 1

• Nixon’s anti-Indian leanings had been reinforced when John Kennedy took a warmly pro-India line. India seemed a cause for the Democrats. This point was once driven home by George H. W. Bush, Nixon’s ambassador at the United Nations, who knew how to play up to his boss. Bush said that a friend of Kennedy’s had explained that “Kennedy spent more time on India, and the mystique, I know they didn’t like us, but it was a kind of a liberal mystique.” That, Bush and Nixon agreed, was what they were up against.
  • G. H. W. Bush, quoted in Bass, G. J. (2014). The Blood telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a forgotten genocide. ch 1

• But then he said, “Now let me be very blunt,” and ripped into Kenneth Keating: “Every Ambassador who goes to India falls in love with India.” (This direct presidential attack was so far out of bounds that Kissinger and Saunders censored it out of their official record of the conversation for the State Department.) Nixon told the senior State Department officials that they “have to cool off the pro-Indians in the State Department and out in South Asia.” He added that fewer Americans swooned for Pakistan, “because the Pakistanis are a different breed. The Pakistanis are straightforward—and sometimes extremely stupid. The Indians are more devious, sometimes so smart that we fall for their line.”
  • Nixon quoted in Bass, G. J. (2014). The Blood telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a forgotten genocide.

• In one of the awkward alignments of the Cold War, President Richard Nixon had lined up the democratic United States with this authoritarian government, while the despots in the Soviet Union found themselves standing behind democratic India.
  • Bass, G. J. (2014). The Blood telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a forgotten genocide.

• Nixon and Kissinger actually drove their South Asia policies with gusto and impressive creativity—but only when silencing dissenters in the ranks, like Blood, or pursuing their hostility toward India. They found no appeal in India, neither out of ideological admiration for India’s flawed but functioning democracy, nor from a geopolitical appreciation of the sheer size and importance of the Indian colossus. Instead, they denounced Indians individually and collectively, with an astonishingly personal and crude stream of vitriol. Alone in the Oval Office, these famous practitioners of dispassionate realpolitik were all too often propelled by emotion.
  • Bass, G. J. (2014). The Blood telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a forgotten genocide.

• Nixon and Kissinger bear responsibility for a significant complicity in the slaughter of the Bengalis. This overlooked episode deserves to be a defining part of their historical reputations. But although Nixon and Kissinger have hardly been neglected by history, this major incident has largely been whitewashed out of their legacy—and not by accident. Kissinger began telling demonstrable falsehoods about the administration’s record just two weeks into the crisis, and has not stopped distorting since. Nixon and Kissinger, in their vigorous efforts after Watergate to rehabilitate their own respectability as foreign policy wizards, have left us a farrago of distortions, half-truths, and outright lies about their policy toward the Bengali atrocities.
  • Bass, G. J. (2014). The Blood telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a forgotten genocide.