Foreign Correspondence

[Amaunet]

A new era in India-US ties
By Tarun Basu




WASHINGTON: It was an unprecedented meeting at the White House between an American president, an Indian prime minister as well as a group of 20 hard-nosed, singularly business-driven top CEOs from both the countries.

In what appeared to be a freshly minted strategic gospel, George W. Bush told them that the US was looking at India in a new light, with a new respect - as a multi-ethnic, multi-religious democracy, a responsible state with nuclear technology, a growing science and technology partner and a country that is one of the world's fastest growing economies.

It made eminent sense for the US to see India more closely as a business and investment destination than they had hitherto been doing. And when this advice came from the country's chief executive, the American CEOs knew the way the nation's diplomatic orientation and strategic thinking were turning.

In the historic meeting between President Bush and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in Washington on July 18 shortly before the meeting with the CEOs, Bush told the Indian leader that his administration sees India emerge as a world power in the 21st century and wants to work with it in a "global partnership" in a wide range of areas - from civilian nuclear cooperation to defence and military matters, to frontier areas of high-technology and space, energy security, economy, combating AIDS, joint front against terrorism and to spread of democracy. If there was any area of collaboration that was left out, it was hard to find.

The new relationship between India and the US, defined in a joint statement issued after that meeting, "will promote stability, democracy, prosperity and peace throughout the world. It will enhance our ability to work together to provide global leadership in areas of mutual concern and interest".

If there were signals in this for the rest of the world, it was not hard to fathom. The US was going to see the world from a different prism that it had not resorted to earlier and perhaps reorder its foreign policy perspective to suit its new international thinking.

An immediate fallout of the new US thinking was perhaps reflected in Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice skipping the annual meeting of the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) at Vientiane, the Laotian capital, last week. Many read in this absence - the first time in more than two decades - a sign of a diminishing American commitment to the region and even a signal of its disapproval of its prevailing polity and values.

Rice, who had authored the pro-India tilt in the White House, did not have much difficulty in convincing her close friend, the president, of the merits of this thinking. For decades, stability and security have stood as the twin bedrock of America's strategic philosophy, leading to the support of tinpot dictators and banana republics so long as it suited the larger American foreign policy purpose.

But, with 9/11, which shook the foundations of many philosophical orthodoxies, there came a realization in sections of the strategic establishment that there was need to have a re-look at established thinking that governed American foreign policy, that beneath the stability facade of autocratic regimes often lay a suppressed social volatility whose eruption often had national and international consequences.

India, which long bemoaned the lack of American attention despite being a fellow democracy and having a growing civil society relationship linked by the increasing presence of an affluent and productive Indian American community, had to wait for two watershed situations to fundamentally alter the basic tenets of American foreign policy.

One was, of course, 9/11. The second was the outsourcing boom that, in the words of columnist Thomas Friedman, led to an India whose image has been "recalibrated".

"India only 20 years ago... was known as a country of snake charmers, poor people, and Mother Teresa," said Friedman in his celebrated book "The World is Flat" that has had a profound impact on American popular thinking since it was published three months ago.

"Now it is also seen as a country of brainy people and computer wizards."

Friedman goes on to say that though Indian democracy had its many imperfections, "to have sustained a functioning democracy with all its flaws for more than 50 years in a country of over one billion people who speak scores of different languages is something of a miracle and a great source of stability for the world".

Other American pundits, not necessarily Republicans in persuasion, also tend to agree.

Dick Morris, a former adviser to Democrat president Bill Clinton, wrote that "India, not China, is the coming giant of the 21st century. And India, unlike China, has no history of imperialism or inclination to global domination.

"It has never focused on aggrandizement or gaining regional power. With the visit of India's prime minister to the White House, we should focus on its increasing ascendancy and celebrate the fact that we will, indeed, have to deal with an Asian giant, but it won't be China... India will likely make a great global partner for the US."

Bush was already a converted man when he met Manmohan Singh at the Oval Office on an unusually warm morning redolent of an Indian summer. In fact, some in the Bush administration were surprised that the Indians were not seeing themselves as a future world power that the US was ready to anoint it as. A man whose lack of verbal fluency is masked by sharp and often unpopular decisions had only one directive to his administration: India is going to be our global partner and I don't care what it takes to support its aspirations (including in the hitherto taboo area of nuclear energy and technology), even if it means changing American laws to do that.

"India and the US are separated by half a globe," Bush told Manmohan Singh. "Yet today our two nations are closer than ever before."

Even as there is skepticism in some quarters about Washington's intentions in embracing India and there is carping in Congress from Left-liberal circles and non-proliferation theologians on the global impact of the US move on cooperation in nuclear energy and technology, including on nations like North Korea, Iran and Pakistan, the administration is going on overdrive to explain the rationale of its decision.

Nicholas Burns, the under secretary of state for political affairs, was quoted in The New York Times as saying that the exception was made for India because "India is unique".

He and other officials have said the decision to sell India nuclear energy and technology, despite it not being a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), was because the Bush administration sees India as a "counterpoise" to the growing economic and military might of China - a nation increasingly viewed here as a long-term threat to Washington's strategic interests.

Writing in the conservative Washington Times, analyst Bruce Fein simply said: "President Bush should embrace India as the key strategic partner of the US in Asia."

He said American bureaucrats "foolishly" persist in treating Pakistan and India as equals, refusing to recognize that the Cold War is over; and while Pakistan is an important short-term ally in defeating Al Qaeda and Taliban, India is vastly more in the long-term strategic battle against global terrorism and non-proliferation.

He further said the Pakistan had "assisted" the nuclear and missile programmes of North Korea, Iran and Libya; and its "madrassas continue breeding terrorists at an alarming rate".

After the National Intelligence Council (NIC) report last year proposed that the US should adopt India as a long-term strategic ally, another strategic expert, Ashley Tellis, outlined a broad vision in a paper that called India a "New Global Power". It pushed for geo-strategic cooperation between the countries, including in military sales and support for New Delhi's growing arsenal, so that India can take on the might of China that would become a formidable nuclear weapons power by 2025.

"Bush has a vision for India that we in India often don't have," said a senior Indian diplomat who was party to the protracted negotiations for nearly eight months that preceded the landmark pact. "With Europe in decline and China rising, the US sees India as a future global power with the ability to maintain power balance in the 21st century."

John S. Wolf, a former assistant secretary of state for non-proliferation affairs, said he expected US allies in Europe as well as Russia and China to support the Indian nuclear deal simply because it gives them a major commercial opportunity. "Whatever they're saying now about this agreement, they'll be in New Delhi tomorrow," Wolf was quoted as saying.



--Indo-Asian News Service

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