In the aftermath of the near warlike India-Pakistan conflict it is clear that China has firmly established itself as Islamabad’s benefactor. The role that the United States played in bankrolling and indulging Pakistan throughout the 1980s during Soviet occupation of Afghanistan between 1979 and 1989, will be increasingly played by China with India as their common nemesis. In fact, Pakistan has been America’s client state since the 1950s, proving to be a conduit to China in the 1970s, including facilitating President Richard Nixon’s historic visit to Beijing in 1972.

In this context, this passage in the archives of the U.S. State Department is highly instructive. It says, “According to Henry Kissinger, "When the Nixon administration took office, our policy objective on the subcontinent was, quite simply, to avoid adding another complication to our agenda." As events developed in South Asia, that goal proved to be an increasingly difficult objective to achieve. A political crisis in Pakistan developed out of Bengali demands for autonomy for East Pakistan, demands which were highlighted by the results of the general election in December 1970. The subsequent crisis, which roiled the subcontinent in conflict from March to December 1971, led to warfare between India and Pakistan, and eventuated in the evolution of the east wing of Pakistan into the new nation of Bangladesh. The United States, with Pakistan at the time as a conduit in conducting secret negotiations with China, sought to defuse the crisis and prevent fighting between India and Pakistan. When the fighting developed, the Nixon administration "tilted" toward Pakistan. The tilt involved the dispatch of the aircraft carrier Enterprise to the Bay of Bengal to try to intimidate the Indian Government. It also involved encouraging China to make military moves to achieve the same end, and an assurance to China that if China menaced India and the Soviet Union moved against China in support of India, the United States would protect China from the Soviet Union.”

Growing strategic cooperation

In the current context, at the operational level, the China-Pakistan partnership would mean the transfer or sharing of military and other technologies as well as growing cooperation between the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and the Pakistani military. The aggressive narrative being pushed by Islamabad that its Chinese-supplied Chengdu J 10C fighter jets gave India a run for its money and even reportedly shot down two French-made Rafale jets is in keeping with bolstering this arrangement.

The world is witnessing Pakistan’s transition from being a supplicant to the U.S. for decades to being a supplicant to China. Since the Pakistani narrative that it stood up to India, thanks to strategic support from Beijing, has sold in certain gullible quarters in the world, China has nothing to lose letting it spread. It sees value in keeping up pressure on New Delhi via Islamabad.

The Chinese making inroads into Pakistan for a while now may also be a significant factor behind President Donald Trump not taking an unambiguously supportive position towards India. Trump’s comments have been calibrated to achieve equivalence between India and Pakistan and quite strikingly handed Islamabad some bragging rights by offering to intervene in resolving the Kashmir issue. This is notwithstanding the much-ballyhooed bonhomie between him and India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Conflicting US, India narratives

It is highly illustrative that Modi has studiedly neither given Trump any credit in the so-called ceasefire nor even acknowledged it tacitly. If anything, the Indian government has generally described the pause in the hostilities as an understanding even as some form of military engagement as part of Operation Sindoor has continued after Trump’s dramatic announcement that Washington had mediated a ceasefire. Even the U.S. president’s claim that the ceasefire was partly a result of him offering trade concessions to both countries has been disputed by India.

“The issue of trade didn’t come up in any of these discussions,” Randhir Jaiswal, the spokesman for India’s Ministry of External Affairs, said on May 13 referring to the behind-the-scenes conversation between Modi and U.S. Vice President J D Vance.

Clearly, the Modi government generally and the prime minister personally do not want the narrative that they yielded to pressure from Trump to take hold domestically. It is highly unpopular among Modi’s core support base, many of whom were raging at the fact that India did not carry out a more destructive retaliation to the Pahalgam massacre of April 22.

Geostrategic considerations 

The prime minister’s core base had convinced itself - somewhat naively perhaps - that the Pahalgam killings offered him a decisive opportunity to unleash the might of the Indian armed forces akin to what Prime Minister Indira Gandhi did during the 1971 war which led to Pakistan being split into two with the creation of Bangladesh. The fact that practical geostrategic considerations came in the way of their expectations has caused a great deal of disquiet among Modi’s supporters.

As for China, the latest fighting offered a great opportunity to field-test its weaponry, especially the J 10C fighter jets and the PL 15 missiles. If they did indeed bring down two Rafale jets deployed by India, then Beijing would see that as a major message to the West and America about its capabilities. China has consistently declared its intention to some day grab Taiwan which it regards as its territory. Any demonstration of its military prowess in an active war theater of the kind the India-Pakistan standoff provided has ramifications beyond the region.

(The writer is Chicago-based journalist, author and commentator. Views expressed are personal. By special arrangement with Indica)