American Ambassador to India Eric Garcetti declared on Wednesday while visiting a World War II museum in Arunachal Pradesh that “Today how can we not but step up to be a great friend to India, to recognise her borders, all of them, and to respect them and to call on the world to do the same.” The media focused on how the US’ recognition of this state as an integral part of India challenges China’s decades-long claims to it but overlooked two important parts of US policy that contradict his statement.
The most obvious one is the State Department’s official world map, which recognizes the Line of Control (LOC) in Kashmir as the international border and therefore undermines India’s claims to the Pakistani-controlled part of this region. To be sure, it also shows all of Arunachal Pradesh as India and includes Chinese-controlled but Indian-claimed Aksai Chin in the same color as the rest of South Asia despite showing the Line of Actual Control (LAC), but the preceding observation still undercuts Garcetti’s claim.
As for the less obvious one, this concerns the US’ hosting of a Delhi-designated terrorist-separatist that the Justice Department just officially accused an Indian government official of conspiring to assassinate. Their threats to Indian diplomats and even recently its national airline didn’t result in any charges, and the latter were made months after June’s reported incident, during which time this dual US citizen might have been under federal protection. These facts suggest tacit US support for separatism in Indian Punjab.
Taken together with the State Department’s map, it can therefore be concluded that Garcetti was lying when he said that his country “recognize(s) [India’s] borders, all of them”. The US officially doesn’t recognize Delhi’s claims to Pakistani-controlled Kashmir, is ambiguous regarding its ones towards Aksai Chin, and nowadays arguably exhibits similar such ambiguity towards Indian Punjab. By contrast, Russia unambiguously recognizes all three and Arunachal Pradesh as Indian despite its strategic ties with China.
If the US doesn’t want its long honeymoon with India to finally end as a result of the latest charges against one of its officials, then it could take a page from Russia’s playbook by unambiguously recognizing those three regions as Indian too, though it’s unlikely to do so. The incipient Sino-US thaw might make it reluctant to apply this policy towards Aksai Chin, while it risks weakening its newly restored hegemony over Pakistan if it abruptly changes its position towards the LOC in Kashmir.
It’s also unlikely that America will clarify its newfound ambiguity towards Indian Punjab after having speculatively protected and hitherto indisputably eschewed pressing charges against the individual at the center of this scandal despite him threatening Indian diplomats and even its national airlines. Considering all of this, Garcetti’s rhetoric should be interpreted as a hollow attempt to divert the Indian public’s attention from his country’s latest charges against one of its officials, which makes it dishonest.
