Is India being its old prickly non-aligned self again? Is appeasement of India’s notoriously anti-American politicians more important to a beleaguered Indian government than winning Washington over? Is India’s traditional obsession with preserving its own strategic autonomy always going to limit its usefulness as a partner to the United States?
The questions are unfair. Surely India — US relations are greater than any single arms purchase. Why should the financial value of one deal be the barometer of a strategic partnership? It is simply narrow-minded to reduce American policy towards India to the bottom lines of US defence salesmen.
Nor is there any military estrangement between the two countries. Even if this deal didn’t work out for the United States, it is still a leading arms supplier to India, having won bids to provide ships, reconnaissance aircraft and advanced transport planes. The Indian Army, Navy and Air Force still conduct more exercises with US defence forces than with those of any other power. The two countries’ worldviews on the big issues confronting the planet are not incompatible.
In any case, the strategic traffic is not merely one-way. Washington too has a national interest in Indian strategic autonomy, which would be buttressed by a wider range of external partnerships, including with the European states that will be the beneficiaries of the aircraft tender. Though India is rightly allergic to being seen as a US-supported counterweight to a rising China, in practice it is avidly courted by Southeast Asian countries anxious to balance Beijing, a development which suits Washington’s interests. President Obama’s 2010 visit cemented a perception that the two countries shared an increasingly convergent worldview, common democratic values and a thriving trade. None of this will cease to be relevant if India buys a European fighter plane.
In fact the potential for India — US collaboration in a variety of areas — military and non-military — would probably be enhanced by this decision. Turning the United States down this time actually frees the hands of the Indian government to pursue other aspects of the partnership, immune from the charge that it is too responsive to US pressures. So New Delhi hasn’t foreclosed its options; it has in fact enlarged them.
The MMRCA deal was, however, only one of several issues that arose between the two states that created the impression of a downturn in India — US relations after the heady days of the Bush Administration, when Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had even publicly declared to the American leader, ‘Mr President, the people of India love you.’ India’s positions on the MMRCA order and its rejection of the nuclear liability legislation advocated by Washington remain what Americans like to call the ‘poster children’ for the argument that the relationship with India is not yielding the rewards its advocates had predicted, or at least implied. But those who make this point in Washington fail to see that neither is specifically anti-US in conception — both involve India taking positions based on its own understanding of its own national and security interests within a specific domestic political context, exactly what democracies tend to do. The same is true of the more general disappointments that are being voiced in Washington, notably over India’s timidity in pursuing economic reforms that would open its market further to US firms — something that affects all potential foreign investors and not just Americans. (And yet it is US companies, more than others, that could conclude that the Indian market is less attractive than they had imagined, since Americans are quickest to complain that the lure of the potential of the Indian market needs to be matched by its performance.)
Meanwhile, the reality of extensive defence cooperation is masked by the rejection of one American combat aircraft. In fact India relies significantly on American platforms for its long-range maritime patrol aircraft, very heavy lift transport aircraft, advanced special operations tactical transport aircraft and heavy attack helicopter requirements — all implying a degree of Indian dependence on American defence technology, and American willingness to supply it, that would both have been inconceivable just two decades ago. And India’s attitude to the American troop presence in its own neighbourhood — which has gone from outright rejection during the Cold War to publicly welcoming American troops in Afghanistan as a source of security and stability and seeking their prolongation — is proof of an astonishing metamorphosis in Indian perceptions of America.
At the same time, if American analysts can point to the aircraft deal and the nuclear liability legislation as evidence of India not trying hard enough, there is just as much cause for disappointment on the other side of the equation. Many Indians had expected more from the new strategic partnership with the United States than has been forthcoming. Major irritants from an Indian point of view include America’s excessive generosity to the Pakistani military — some $11 billion since 2001, ostensibly for security against terrorism but much of it spent on weapons aimed at India — its continuing sale of conventional arms to Pakistan, US inattention to Indian interests in Afghanistan, the Obama Administration’s assiduous cultivation of China and the continuing reluctance in Washington to transfer cutting-edge defence technology to India. On China, Indians saw a clear contrast from the start with the Bush view of Beijing as a power to be contained; on Obama’s inaugural visit to Asia as President in November 2009, he spent four days in China and left after signing a joint statement that declared Beijing to be the key to ‘peace, stability, and development in South Asia’, a distinction that surely ought to have been accorded to India. The visit was accompanied by some suggestions that this was a far more important relationship to Washington than the one with India, and even loose talk of a ‘G2’ condominium between the United States and China to manage the world. India was kept waiting another year for a visit.
There were, of course, various reasons for a change in the priority that had been accorded to India under Bush, apart from Obama’s diagnosis of China’s importance to American interests. The huge pressures of America’s domestic financial problems were always bound to loom larger than foreign policy concerns to the beleaguered Obama Administration, while the economic choices underpinning enthusiasm for India (support for free trade and the advantages to the American consumer of outsourcing and offshoring to India, for instance) were diluted by a more protectionist American approach focused principally on generating jobs in the United States. The Democrats are also more reflexively anti-nuclear and less likely to share Bush’s enthusiasm for the India — US civil nuclear deal; they are also more evangelical on climate change issues than the Republicans, making them less predisposed towards India’s position. On Afghanistan, too, both the logistical indispensability of Pakistan for the resupply of NATO forces and the domestic compulsions to bring the troops home were always going to weigh more heavily in US policy-makers’ minds than India’s interests.
Within US policy-making circles, two constituencies have been less than helpful in building India — US ties — the so-called non-proliferation ayatollahs, whose attitude towards India is predicated entirely upon hostility to its nuclear programme, and the ‘hyphenators’, who view India entirely through the lens of US relations with Pakistan and ‘hyphenate’ the two subcontinental neighbours, subordinating US interests in New Delhi to the logic of its strategic focus on Pakistan. Pakistan had been a vital Cold War ally, a member of both CENTO and SEATO, the take-off point for Gary Powers’ famous and ill-fated U-2 spy flight over the USSR in 1962 and for Henry Kissinger on his epoch-changing clandestine opening to China in 1971. Years of Cold War policies have given Washington a ‘Pakistan-centric’ bureaucracy, at the State Department, the Pentagon and the CIA, who have long links to their counterparts in Islamabad and argue that closeness to India undermines traditional US objectives in the region. Their arguments — in a nation which is still run largely by institutions and policies set up in the Cold War era — have been buttressed by the US dilemmas in Afghanistan and the conviction that the road to peace in Kabul lies through New Delhi, and in particular to forcing Indian concessions to Pakistan on Kashmir. The result has been some active bureaucratic resistance in Washington to the attempts to change US policy in a more India-friendly direction.