Arms and the Ban

Relations between India and the U.S.--uneven at best in recent years--turned worse last week. Reason:

Washington lifted its decade-old arms embargo on Pakistan, paving the way for Islamabad to buy antitank and anti aircraft missiles, as well as multipurpose fighter-bombers, on a cash basis. In return, there is speculation that Pakistan may give the U.S. a naval base at the Arabian Sea port of Gwador.

The arms-embargo decision had been more or less expected ever since Pakistan Premier Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's visit to Washington last month. Essentially, the Administration's rationale for lifting an embargo that has applied to all countries of the subcontinent since 1965 was that 1) Pakistan, which was Henry Kissinger's bridge to a rapprochement with China in 1971, has proved itself a good friend to Washington; 2) India, in addition to manufacturing its own arms, receives sophisticated weaponry from the Soviet Union, giving it virtual military dominance over the subcontinent; and 3) Bhutto warned Washington that Pakistan might try to develop a nuclear bomb to counter India's atomic capacity if the U.S. did not assist it in acquiring more up-to-date weapons.

India, which technically can also buy U.S. arms now, though it is unlikely to do so, reacted immediately and bitterly to the Washington move. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi spoke out against "Pakistan's new belligerence," and at week's end visiting Soviet Defense Minister Andrei Grechko joined with New Delhi in a communique ex pressing "grave anxiety at the actions taken by certain quarters to step up the arms race." Indian Foreign Minister Y.B. Chavan, who was scheduled to pre side with Kissinger over the first meeting of an Indo-U.S. Joint Commission that had been set up to improve ties, canceled out.

New Delhi's angry response to the embargo repeal was inspired in part by a feeling that Pakistan would not have attacked India during the 1965 and 1971 wars unless it had been well supplied with American arms.

Whatever the reason, India's resentment about what it feels is a renewed Washington "tilt" toward Pakistan will not make life easier for William Saxbe, the U.S. new Ambassador to India, who was in Bangkok when the embargo was lifted. Saxbe went to some pains to point out that he opposed the Administration's decision, although he said he was obliged to support it. Even though ranking State Department officials are confident that the storm "will blow over pretty soon," the spectacle of the U.S. ambassador sightseeing in Thailand to delay taking up his post in India is a poor omen for his tenure.

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