Edward Heath, Great Britain’s Prime Minister, felt the words wash over him, hot like a dragon’s breath: “The United States had received nothing from India except a kick in the teeth, in exchange for $¾ billion last year,” President Richard Nixon raged. The Indians, Nixon went on, thought “the white nations had no choice but to come in and bail India out.” Alarmed, British Foreign Secretary Alec Douglas-Home stepped in. “The Indians were admittedly intolerably high-minded,” he accepted. “But there was an important common interest in preserving Indian independence from Soviet and Chinese domination.”
The invective against Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and her nation, provoked by her refusal to back down on Bangladesh, continued in the privacy of Nixon’s office, though: “A slippery, treacherous people,” “bastards,” “old witch,” “b*tch”.
Even as the political leadership in both countries raged against each other, the relationship between the Central Intelligence Agency and the Research and Analysis Wing remained robust, historian Paul McGarr writes. In 1973, the head of Prime Minister Indira’s secretariat, Prithvi Nath Dhar, and the chief of R&AW, Rameshwar Nath Kao, lobbied for CIA chief William Colby to visit New Delhi.
As President Donald Trump appears to be leading the India-United States relationship into an abyss from which there is no return—adding restrictions to the outsourcing of jobs on the back of crippling tariffs—the period between 1971 and 1973 shows the two countries have been locked in airless places before. The intelligence services of both countries, though, found ways to bypass potholes and cul-de-sacs, ensuring strategic conversation continued.
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The security relationship
Little understood, India-US intelligence ties flourished in the shadow of the Cold War, as New Delhi resolutely proclaimed its commitment to non-alignment. Late in the summer of 1949, India was struggling to contain its first post-Independence insurgency, an uprising by communists in the Telangana region. The Indian Army, sent to Hyderabad to battle the Nizam’s armies, found itself at war with peasant insurgents in Telangana. Thousands died in the brutal conflict, Jonathan Kennedy and Sunil Purushotham have recorded, as the Army herded Adivasis into concentration camps in near-starvation conditions.
Less than forty-seven years old and with little experience in global politics, an unassuming police officer was tasked with helping India find the right tools to deal with the crisis. TG Sanjeevi, earlier a Superintendent of Police in Madras, and now Director of the Intelligence Bureau, was ordered to make a three-week visit to Washington.
For decades before Independence, the Intelligence Bureau had been relentlessly focused on the threat of communist terrorism. Telangana was its first challenge after Independence—and, it seemed, its first potential failure. To Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, it seemed that the threat was transnational and a danger to the survival of the Indian republic.
The colonial legacy meant India had a substantial relationship with the United Kingdom’s intelligence services. The Security Service, popularly known as MI5, was a critical source of assistance in the first years after Independence. India became debilitatingly reliant on this relationship, Avinash Paliwal has recorded. “This is satisfactory,” an MI5 memo on general dependence smugly noted—but India understood the need to widen its partnerships.
George Kennan, then director of policy planning at the State Department, agreed with Prime Minister Nehru’s assessment. To address the challenge, Kennan recorded, Sanjeevi would have to “look beyond India’s borders and seek to influence policy in regard to dangers from without.” This meant that, despite Nehru’s socialism, America would help him push back against the Communist threat.
The visit did not begin well, though. Sanjeevi was affronted by the imperious behaviour of the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, J Edgar Hoover, and vowed never to allow contact between the Intelligence Bureau and the FBI. The damage was contained, however, during his subsequent meetings with the Central Intelligence Agency. Sanjeevi came away with positive impressions of his meetings with Colonel Richard Stilwell, Kermit “Kim” Roosevelt, and the director of central intelligence, Roscoe Hillenkoetter.
Taming the dragon
Even though the two countries clashed over questions of ideology and global politics, the alignment of their interests wasn’t particularly opaque. India’s government provided arms and training to Tibet’s ramshackle military after 1949, and even considered deploying troops in support of its independence. The problem was that the Indian Army just didn’t have the resources. In 1954, India formalised this reality, ceding many of its colonial-era rights, like stationing troops in Lhasa, historian Karunakar Gupta has written.
The Intelligence Bureau, though, looked the other way, as the CIA supplied weapons and equipment to Khampa insurgents from 1958 on, historian Claude Arpi has written. India’s also ignored CIA flights in support of Tibetan insurgents, which crossed over its territory en route from Dhaka. Langley supported the founding of the Special Frontier Force, intended to harry the PLA along the China-India Line of Actual Control. The CIA also oversaw the insertion of nuclear-powered surveillance equipment to gather intelligence on China’s nuclear-weapons programme.
Even as this intelligence cooperation continued, Prime Minister Nehru publicly complained that the United States was interfering in Indian politics, “buying up newspapers and spreading a network of publicity organisations.” Later, Prime Minister Indira assailed foreign powers plotting to “run down India.” CIA agents, American intelligence officer Russell Jack Smith wrote sharply, “were to be found according to Madame Gandhi, beneath every charpoy and behind every neem tree.”
Even as Prime Minister Indira frequently railed against CIA intervention to bring about regime change—and public outrage erupted when the journal Ramparts disclosed CIA funding for Indian anti-Communist political parties in 1967—the relationship carried on in the darkness, as it were. As Sanjeevi told CIA interlocutors in 1950, “he frequently had to take independent action without the knowledge of his government”.
The intelligence relationship survived even in the face of contradictory United States objectives. For example, CIA personnel told India they had detected signals linking the jihadist warlord Sirajuddin Haqqani with the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate after the 2008 bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul, journalist Carlotta Gall has revealed. And although the FBI failed to pass on credible intelligence that Lashkar-e-Taiba operative David Headley was a terrorist, it later helped the National Investigation Agency tie the 26/11 attack to Pakistan.
Even though President Trump’s administration has shown little interest in building a deeper counter-terrorism relationship—seeing jihadist violence as a secondary concern, unless it directly threatens the United States—the ties built between intelligence services are likely to prove durable.
Will the intelligence relationship solve the broader crisis in India-US ties? Almost certainly, no. But it does mean there are strong pillars that will hold up the relationship until a saner political leadership takes charge.
Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. His X handle is @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Theres Sudeep)