India The Awakening of An Asian Power

By Ross H. Munro

Taking off from an air base five miles from the Taj Mahal at Agra, a fleet of Soviet-built Il-76 jet transports streaked southward across the subcontinent and then out over the Indian Ocean. When the planes landed four hours later on one of the 1,200 coral atolls that make up the Republic of Maldives, hundreds of elite Indian troops charged out onto the tarmac, rifles at the ready. But the mere sight of the Indian planes had struck panic among a band of mercenaries trying to bring off a coup d'etat against the government of President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, and they quickly fled in boats. Three days later, commandos from an Indian frigate forced the high-seas surrender of the mercenaries.

India's swift suppression of the pocket coup in the Maldives last November attracted only mild notice in much of the world. Not so with India's increasingly nervous neighbors: for them, the operation was but the latest indicator that the sleepy giant of the subcontinent is determinedly transforming itself into a regional superpower. India's new stature has profound implications for the strategic and diplomatic balance of the area and raises a host of foreign policy challenges for the U.S.

India is fast emerging as a global military power. New Delhi's defense budget has doubled in real terms during the '80s and has in fact outstripped the government's ability to fund it. The 1989-90 budget, unveiled earlier this month, froze defense spending at $8.5 billion, though some estimate the actual figure to be as high as $11 billion. Indian scientists and engineers are immersed in nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs. The 1,362,000- strong armed forces, the fourth largest in the world (after the Soviet Union, with 5,096,000 troops; China, with 3.2 million; and the U.S., with 2,163,200), are raising four additional army divisions to boost combat strength by 80,000. In the southern state of Karnataka, a superport is developing to service submarines, surface vessels, including a planned 30,000- ton aircraft carrier, and long-range reconnaissance aircraft capable of patrolling as far away as Africa and Australia.

Since 1986 India has ranked as the world's largest arms importer: in 1987 it purchased weaponry from abroad valued at $5.2 billion, more than Iraq and Iran combined and twelve times more than Pakistan. Largely to gain the foreign exchange needed to pay its military imports bill, India is preparing to enter the world arms bazaar as an exporter.

As India's military muscle has grown, so has its willingness to employ force in disputes with other nations. In 1984 Indian troops occupied the no- man's-land of Kashmir's 20,000-ft.-high Siachen Glacier, where at least 100 Indian soldiers have since died every year. By the summer of 1985, for the first time since the 1960s, Indian jawans penetrated into unoccupied and disputed territory along the China-India border, provoking what Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi later called an "eyeball-to-eyeball" confrontation with China.

In July 1987 Sri Lanka bowed to pressure from New Delhi and allowed Indian forces to occupy the north and east of the island. Some 80,000 soldiers remain deployed there, trying with limited success to suppress Tamil separatist guerrillas who, ironically, were initially encouraged, armed and trained by India.

But it was the Maldives strike that best illustrated India's proclivity to take on the role of regional policeman. If the affair provoked unease among India's neighbors -- Pakistan accused New Delhi of having stage-managed the coup attempt -- it garnered approval in more distant quarters. Ronald Reagan, then in the White House, congratulated New Delhi for a "valuable contribution to regional stability."

The aborted coup reinforced the view of a number of key officials in Washington that the U.S. -- and other nations -- must come to terms with India's growing military and political clout in South Asia and the Indian Ocean. Said Richard Armitage, then the U.S. Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs: "It doesn't make sense for the U.S. not to have a congenial relationship with the largest democracy and the dominant military power in the subcontinent -- and with a country that will clearly take its place on the world stage in the 21st century."

But the question remains: What does India intend to do with all that power? Ever since the India-Pakistan war of 1971, which led to the breakup of Pakistan and the transformation of East Pakistan into independent Bangladesh, New Delhi officially maintains that its arms buildup is needed to remain strong against Pakistan. The two nations have been at war three times since India gained its independence in 1947. Most analysts agree, however, that India has pulled well ahead of its archfoe: its modern combat aircraft, for example, now outnumber Pakistan's by as many as 5 to 1. China is sometimes invoked by Indian officials as the "real threat." But most analysts note that apart from maintaining its close ties with Pakistan, Beijing has taken no military or diplomatic action since the 1970s that could be construed as ! threatening by New Delhi.

India's growing military machine, meanwhile, has gained the uneasy attention of its neighbors along the rim of the Indian Ocean, like Australia and Indonesia. India's lease of a nuclear-powered Soviet submarine and its acquisition of Soviet-built long-range reconnaissance planes have raised anxiety in the Australian Parliament. In Jakarta an army colonel describes his government as "concerned" about India's longer-term intentions. For that reason, he explains, Indonesia is planning to build a large naval base on Sumatra to gain quick access to the Bay of Bengal.

Rajiv Gandhi has presided over much of the expanded military-spending program since he became Prime Minister in 1984. But he claimed in an interview with TIME late last year that India had no desire to dominate its neighbors: "We don't think in terms of dominance, we don't think in terms of spheres of influence. The right direction was what Gandhiji, Mahatma Gandhi, gave us. I see India today as being one of the prime movers toward a nonviolent, nonnuclear world."

Most Western analysts doubt that New Delhi has developed the capacity -- or the inclination -- to launch a sustained military action outside its immediate neighborhood. Today the territory that India most covets is purely psychological. Says a West European diplomat in New Delhi: "More than anything else, India wants to be taken seriously. It wants to be viewed as a world power. That is an end in itself."

Indians have long taken umbrage over China's standing in the international community, which includes membership in the nuclear club and a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council. Asks A.P. Venkateswaran, a former Foreign Secretary: "Why is China's power -- its huge army and its intercontinental ballistic missiles -- considered absolutely acceptable while India's is not? There's no reason why India should not have military power commensurate with its size, as China does."

Also fueling India's wider ambitions is the desire to alter the common perception, particularly in the West, that it remains a backward nation mired in superstition and squalor. In fact, alongside the impoverished land of beggars and cardboard shacks there has risen a high-tech, postindustrial state led by an army of self-confident and efficient engineers, scientists and military officers. In the southern city of Bangalore, the two exist side by side: women collect tree branches for firewood, while a short distance away, some of India's brightest technicians hunch over an IBM 3090 mainframe computer to design cross sections for the light combat aircraft. The aim of the LCA project is to develop India's own fighter aircraft at a low cost and, potentially, to export the plane to other countries.

The U.S. is deeply involved in the program. General Electric has sold eleven F404 engines to power LCA prototypes, and Allied Signal, Litton and Honeywell are among the front runners in the bid to provide flight control and other sophisticated systems. Reflecting Washington's desire to forge closer ties with India, the U.S. Air Force will provide training, consulting and testing facilities for the LCA. Washington hopes the agreement will render India less dependent on the Soviet Union; New Delhi still relies on Moscow for many of its weapons imports and most of its co-production deals. Says a Pentagon official: "U.S. policy is to help India become self-sufficient in defense technology."

India is considerably less open about its capability to build nuclear bombs, though many analysts believe the country has atomic components on the shelf. One official close to the Prime Minister claims that India can produce a nuclear bomb "overnight," though Gandhi said in 1986 that it would take "maybe longer than . . . a few weeks" for India to deploy A-weapons. In February 1988 India successfully tested the Prithvi, a 150-mile-range ballistic missile that can carry a payload of 2,000 lbs., more than enough for a nuclear warhead.

Despite India's pacifist roots in the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi, Indians crying "Ban the bomb!" are a minority. "If you are living in a world of nuclear powers, then you must have it ((the bomb))," says Krishnaswamy Subrahmanyam, leader of the pronuke lobby.

The diplomatic stakes are high for the U.S., which finds itself caught in a three-way tug-of-war between two allies who distrust each other. New Delhi still resents the pro-Pakistan "tilt" that has marked U.S. policy since the 1971 war. U.S. military aid to Pakistan is cited by Indians as the main reason why they embarked on their own buildup.

In the U.S., meanwhile, policymakers are divided on the proper response to India's arms buildup. Says the University of Illinois's Stephen P. Cohen, a leading U.S. scholar on South Asian security issues: "A strong India could act as a regional stabilizer, and this would be in the U.S. interest. But an India that is a regional bully threatening China or Pakistan would not be in American interests." Until India makes its long-term intentions clear, the U.S. and other countries are likely to continue to prepare for either possibility.