Once again, Pakistan has behaved stupidly and everyone is wondering why it is so consistent. I may have found an answer.
Earlier this week, quite by accident, I attended a lecture by an old friend, Madhavan Palat, who is a scholar of international relations. He was speaking at the Madras Institute of Development Studies.
He spoke, among other things, about 'boss' countries and how control is exercised by them. For everyone except this 'boss' country, he said, sovereignty is a fig-leaf. The US, for example, is clearly the 'boss' in the Western Hemisphere.
I wanted to tell him that this is called suzerainty but decided to do so at some other time. Suzerainty is when a 'boss' country allows other countries under its influence to exercise some degree of sovereignty, which may vary from country to country.
Suzerainty is, if I may put it in my usual crude but effective manner, like keeping dogs. Different dogs are used by the suzerain for different purposes.
Some, like the really small ones, are for show. Some are for performing tricks. Some keep the rest in check. And one or two are for the exercise of proxy power.
This last type of dogs are powerful because they are fed better and encouraged to be threatening. They can, from time to time, even be told to bite someone to serve some collateral purpose the owner might have.
Their usefulness is judged by two criteria: they should always obey you and they should not bite you. The moment such dogs infringe this rule they are got rid of.
A budding suzerain
The history of the 20th century is instructive in this canine context. It was a world driven by just one commodity: oil. The rest was hot air.
Until 1945, the suzerain for large swathes of the globe was Britain and between 1900 and 1945, it did everything in its power to retain its control over oil. Creating new countries with puppet regimes in the Middle East after World War I that were obedient or violent (or both, as needed), was the chosen instrument of control.
After 1945, Britain's domination ended, but it passed the baton on to its cousin, the United States. And before going, Britain divided us into India and Pakistan, which in 1955 formally became a member of the American 'kennel' called CENTO.
In that same year, North Korea became the only member of China's 'kennel'. North Korea is still the only one in that region, violent, powerful, and constantly growling and threatening Japan and South Korea. But no North Korean super boss has ever annoyed China and how it always comes to heel when commanded!
More recently, in keeping with its economic size, if not power, China has acquired Pakistan by paying vulgarly large sums of money to it. Pakistan's job is to bark and growl in this part of the world.
The reason is the old one: oil. China has built a port in Gwadar and is building a road from that area into China. The non-pecuniary reward for Pakistan, the equivalent of getting scratched behind its ear, is support against India.
China has helped both its pets build nuclear capability, not so much to attack the neighbours as to ensure that they are not attacked by the neighbours. So far this plan has worked just fine.
India and Pakistan
For the last 67 years, India has been trying to make peace with Pakistan, which claims Kashmir as its own, to no avail. In 1948, the British, who owned it, encouraged Pakistan to grab a piece of Kashmir, a piece of which it has surrendered to China.
Next the Americans fed Pakistan, helping it grow from being an annoying and noisy pup to a full-sized Rottweiler. They looked away when it built its nuclear weapons programme with help from China and North Korea. Iran was the enemy then. Oil was the asset that needed protection from then USSR, which had invaded Afghanistan.
Then Pakistan broke the rules: it stopped obeying the US and even went on to bite it. So America, now secure in shale oil, is handing it over to China which doesn't care how Pakistan behaves as long as it obeys it and doesn't bite it. The US-China-Pakistan relationship goes all the way back to 1971.
So what should India do? What can it do? Only as much as any decent neighbour can do with the neighbour's irritating pet -appeal to the neighbour.
Appealing to the pet is useless.
Disclaimer: These are personal views of the writer. They do not necessarily reflect the opinion of www.business-standard.com or the Business Standard newspaper
