India's Vietnam Policy, 1946-1979

Abstract

INDOCHINA HAS OCCUPIED the attention of much of international politics since the second world war. Vietnam has generally been at the center of such attention, from the sustained fighting begun in December 1946 between the French and the Vietminh, through the formal and forcible reunification of the country over 1975-1976, to the fighting between the communists in the region in 1979. In the event, Vietnam acquired and retains for many a symbolic value that exceeds the strategic importance of the country. The focus of study in this paper is narrower than the conflicts in Vietnam per se. Indeed, the direct object of interest is not war in Vietnam but Indian foreign policy-that is, to discuss a regional conflict not for its own sake but in order to look at the factors underlying the conduct of Indian foreign policy in respect to a crisis of international significance. For this purpose, it is useful to conceive of Indian external relations with the great powers in particular. India's Vietnam policy always operated within the context of its general foreign policy, as one would expect. Somewhat less obviously, fluctuations in its Vietnam policy can be shown to have been direct reflections of changes in its relations with major powers. Although this mesh of relations with great powers and bilateral policy towards Vietnam received its most dramatic manifestation in the 1979 Chinese incursion into Vietnam, the argument is valid for the entire period. Consideration of the last point necessitates breaking the study into time periods. The broad, chronological division is a sixfold derivative of both the internal logic of the conflicts themselves and of factors exogenous to Vietnam: the French Indochina war from 1946 to 1954; the five years following the Geneva Agreements of 1954; the years of open