The importance of being USS Nimitz

JYOTI MALHOTRA
July 2007

In the exact week that the American aircraft-carrier, the USS Nimitz, will anchor off Indian waters off the coast of Chennai, West Bengal CPI(M) secretary Biman Bose will be in the US city of Detroit, attending the Uttar America Banga Sanskriti Sammelan.

To be sure, this is not the first time that Bose is traveling to the US, still considered by some of his party colleagues as the heart of Western imperialism. But he will restrict himself to meeting Bengali-Americans, not officials from the US government.

In fact, even though party comrades have in recent times allowed themselves to holiday in exotic destinations in Europe and the Middle-East like other ordinary Indians, they have mostly refused to make official visits to the US. West Bengal finance minister Asim Dasgupta was an exception last year, and it is said that India’s ambassador to the US Ronen Sen has been trying to persuade chief minister Buddhadev Bhattacharjee to go. And if state commerce & industries minister Nirupam Sen had not cancelled an appointment with the US-India Business Council in Washington this week, he may even have exchanged doodles with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

Still, from Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to the BJP government’s National Security Adviser Brajesh Mishra, the Indian establishment is hardly paying much heed to the controversy raised by the Left on the US aircraft-carrier’s visit to India.

In fact, most people feel the Nimitz visit constitutes the last gasp of anti-American opinion at home, especially in the middle classes, which has been voting with both feet to upgrade ties with the US. Then defence minister Pranab Mukherjee was an early votary when he signed an upgraded defence relationship in 2005. New Delhi’s choice of America as partner for a nuclear agreement – and not its old friend, Russia – is clear acknowledgement that only the US will be able to bring India into the new world order.

Chairman of the National Security Advisory Board M K Rasgotra, who has just written a book on Asian power dynamics, pointed out that the ``Asian century is actually the American century in Asia.’’

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who launched Rasgotra’s book on Wednesday, pointed out that the ``international system is not a morality play, it is about power relationships between various powers.’’ He confirmed that he would be visiting New York in September for the UN General Assembly and meeting George Bush.

The PM, refusing to get drawn into the controversy over the Nimitz, however told `The Telegraph’ that an American aircraft carrier visiting Indian waters was hardly such a big deal. ``There have been other aircraft-carriers in the past, this is just one more. In any case, it is not carrying any nuclear weapons on board.’’

Strategic thinkers, in fact, agree that India has come a long, long way from 1971, when then US President Richard Nixon was so furious that Indira Gandhi had decided to go to war with Pakistan over Bangladesh, that he ordered the USS Enterprise to sail into the Bay of Bengal.

In fact, according to India’s foremost strategic thinker, K. Subrahmanyam, the significance of the Nimitz visit is really ``intended to wipe out the negative memories a generation of Indians have grown up with, about the Americans.’’

Declassified documents in US archives on those colourful days in the run up to the 1971 war and the creation of Bangladesh, detail Nixon’s infamous ``tilt’’ in favour of Pakistan and against India.

Subrahmanyam, a key aide of Indira Gandhi at the time, said he remembers shouting at Henry Kissinger, then assistant to Nixon, when he visited India in July 1971. Nixon had already declared to the Pakistanis that ``Yahya is a good friend,’’ referring to then Pakistani president Yahya Khan, and had authorized illegal arms supplies to Pakistan, even when he knew these would be used against the Bangladeshis.

``I told Kissinger,’’ said Subrahmanyam, ``that at least you should understand what the Bangladeshis are doing, and why they are fighting for liberation from Pakistan. You are a Jew and a refugee, you should know better.’’’

Subrahmanyam said Kissinger and he were now good friends and had met many times since.

In fact, Kissinger has also since publicly apologized for remarks he had then made about Mrs Gandhi. ``While she was a bitch, we got what we wanted,’’ Kissinger has been quoted as saying in the declassified documents. On another occasion, while he and Nixon speculated in 1971 about the coming war with Pakistan, Kissinger said, ``The Indians are bastards anyway.’’

The arrival of the USS Nimitz in India, more than three decades after USS Enterprise’s failed visit, Subrahmanyam said, is a manifestation not only of the depth of the Indo-US relationship today, but of the road India had since traveled.

``Left leaders are well aware of how India has changed, but they cannot forget the past,’’ Subrahmanyam said.

M K Rasgotra pointed out, ``It is not as if the Seventh Fleet itself is sailing into India’s waters.’’

The Nimitz itself will not carry any nuclear weapons, only 5000-odd young sailors who will stream into Chennai – the aircraft-carrier is a veritable floating city, the size of three football fields -- threatening to buy anything they can lay their hands on. Estimates of American sailors spending around $3 million or Rs 12 crores when they touch land, after being months at sea, are common.

ENDS