But such teething troubles are inevitable in any new group, and the seeds of future cooperation have already been sown. Making a success of an association that unites large countries and small ones, island states and continental ones, Islamic republics, monarchies and liberal democracies, and every race known to mankind, represents both a challenge and an opportunity. This very diversity of interests and capabilities can easily impede substantive cooperation, but it can also make such cooperation far more rewarding. In this diversity we in India see immense possibilities.
The brotherhood of man is a tired cliché; the neighbourhood of an ocean is a refreshing new idea. The world as a whole stands to benefit if eighteen littoral states can find common ground in the churning waters of a mighty ocean.
Chapter Six Red, White, Blue and Saffron: The United States and India
As presidential elections loom in the United States of 2012, perhaps the most striking aspect of them from an Indian point of view is that no one in New Delhi is unduly concerned about the outcome. There is now a widespread consensus in Indian policy-making circles that, whoever wins, India — US relations are more or less on the right track.
Democrats and Republicans in the White House have both been responsible for this development. President Obama’s successful visit to India in 2010 and his historic speech to a joint session of Parliament capped the most significant recent milestone in India — US relations. This was his sixth encounter with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in various forums since his assumption of office eighteen months previously, but his first in New Delhi, and it set the seal on the consolidation of a relationship that has changed dramatically over the last decade.
Throughout the Cold War, the world’s oldest democracy and its largest were essentially estranged. America’s initial indifference was best reflected in President Harry Truman’s reaction when Chester Bowles asked to be named ambassador to India: ‘I thought India was pretty jammed with poor people and cows round streets, witch doctors and people sitting on hot coals and bathing in the Ganges … but I did not realize anybody thought it was important.’ If that was bad enough, India’s political orientation was worse. The American preference for making anti-communist allies, however unsavoury, tied Washington to a series of increasingly Islamist dictatorships in Pakistan, while the non-aligned democracy drifted towards the secular Soviet embrace. Non-alignment was regarded with distaste in Washington; the views of Eisenhower’s secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, cited in Chapter One, were simply blunt expressions of general sentiment. In a world divided between two uncompromising superpowers, India’s temporizing seemed like appeasement at best, and providing aid and comfort to the enemy, at worst. Pakistan, on the other hand, became an essential element in the United States’ containment of the Soviet Union and in its later opening to China. From India’s point of view, the United States’ indulgence of Pakistan turned into overt hostility when Washington sent the Sixth Fleet into the Bay of Bengal in support of Pakistani genocide in Bangladesh in 1971. Tempers cooled soon enough after that, but New Delhi was always regarded as tilting towards Moscow in its general inclination, hardly a recommendation for India in American eyes.
With the end of the Cold War and India’s reorientation of its foreign policy, as well as its increasing integration into the global economy, a thaw set in, but India’s explosion of a nuclear device in 1998 triggered a fresh round of US sanctions. Bill Clinton began to turn things around with a hugely successful India visit during his last year in office, in 2000. The Bush Administration took matters much further, with a defence agreement in 2005 and a landmark accord on civil nuclear cooperation in 2008 that remains the centrepiece of the transformed relationship.
The nuclear accord simultaneously accomplished two things. It admitted India into the global nuclear club despite our principled refusal to sign the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty. More important, it acknowledged that US exceptionalism had found a sibling. Thanks to the United States, which strong-armed the forty-five countries of the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group into swallowing their concerns that special treatment for India could constitute a precedent for rogue nuclear aspirants such as Pakistan, North Korea and Iran, there is now an ‘Indian exception’. Few things could have been more gratifying to a deeply proud nation that was tired of being constantly hyphenated by Washington with its smaller, dysfunctional neighbour Pakistan.
Under Obama, nothing quite so dramatic was possible: there were no spectacular breakthroughs conceived or executed, nor could many have been imagined. But Obama, who as a senator had displayed a photograph of Mahatma Gandhi in his office, carried a locket of the Hindu god Hanuman in his pocket and spoke often of his desire to build a ‘close strategic partnership’ with the world’s largest democracy, knew how to strike all the right symbolic chords. (His familiarity with India precedes his presidency: when my friend Arun Kumar attended an Obama campaign meeting with a small group of South Asian supporters, he told them that he ‘could cook a mean daal, but the naan, I will leave to someone else’. He introduced himself as a ‘desi’, pronouncing the ‘s’ in just the right way. The person who taught him to make daal, his room-mate at Occidental College, Vinai Thummalapalli, is currently US ambassador to Belize.)
So on Obama’s visit to India in November 2010, he hit all the right notes in his speech to Parliament. The references to Mahatma Gandhi, Swami Vivekananda, and even Dr Ambedkar, the quotes from Tagore, the Panchatantra and the Upanishads (though he wisely didn’t attempt to pronounce the ancient Puranic dictum ‘vasudhaiva kutumbakam’, contenting himself with saying it in English, ‘all the world is one family’) and the game utterances of ‘bahut dhanyavad’ and ‘Jai Hind’ won over many a sceptical Indian heart. And the President’s speech conveyed two substantive assurances: support for India’s aspirations to a permanent seat on the UN Security Council and an unambiguous declaration that safe havens for terrorists in Pakistan were ‘unacceptable’.
The latter was particularly welcome. The Obama Administration’s understandable concerns in Afghanistan have made Pakistan loom much larger in the US consciousness than India. Obama understands that there is no successful outcome in Afghanistan possible without Pakistan, and his administration has therefore been attentive to Islamabad’s priorities in ways that New Delhi finds occasionally irritating. This statement went a long way towards reassuring India that Washington is conscious of the fundamental danger to Indian security emanating from that side of the border and is committed to addressing it with its friends in Pakistan.
Over the last year, there has also been progress on other fronts — the small but significant steps that add up to strengthening the sinews of a relationship. Agreements on seemingly mundane subjects like agriculture, education, health and even space exploration and energy security testify to enhanced cooperation, and the two governments have also proclaimed ‘initiatives’ on clean energy and climate change as well as educational linkages between American and Indian universities. The Obama visit consolidated all these gains, and the announcements in Mumbai of significant trade and investment deals confirmed that each nation is developing a more significant stake in the other than ever before. The United States is India’s largest trading partner, if you take goods and services together. American exports to India have, in the last five years, grown faster than to any other country. The Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) estimates that services trade between the two countries is likely to grow, despite the recent global financial crisis and the US recession that sparked it, from the present $60 billion to over $150 billion in the next six years.