These factors underlie the comfort — some might say complacency — with which Indians are regarding relations with the United States in the lead-up to the 2012 presidential elections. And yet there remain some potential flies in the proverbial ointment. One is undoubtedly the notoriously short-term American attention span to foreign affairs issues that do not appear to impinge directly on the country’s immediate security or welfare. A more inwardly focused domestic orientation, a more benign relationship with China and a post-Afghan-withdrawal indifference to South Asia could all lead Americans to forget the enthusiasm for India of the Bush years. President John F. Kennedy once memorably said, ‘The cost of freedom is always high, but Americans have always paid it.’ The problem for many Americans is that in recent years it seems that cost has been paid with a credit card. Many are understandably unwilling to keep racking up the bills internationally when debt and unemployment are mounting at home. But it would be disingenuous to think that increased ‘America-first’ism would not have consequences for Washington’s bilateral relationships with countries whose economies have become increasingly dependent on it, especially India’s.
There is also the ever-present risk of competing US priorities clashing with the Indian relationship; a desire to accommodate China, along the lines advocated by Henry Kissinger, could again prompt the United States to steer a more Pacific course. Washington does not always appreciate that India cannot move faster on certain issues than it is currently doing, however frustrating that might seem to Americans (the nuclear liability issue is a case in point). India’s own stubborn emphasis on its independence of thought and action, while respected in principle by Washington, can sometimes grate there: as became apparent on the issue of sanctioning Iran, Washington may not always understand or fully appreciate India’s inability to agree with it, leading many to think of India as a false friend. And there is always the risk of complacency on the other side: the notion that the United States need not make more of a special effort with India since it has nowhere else to go but towards Washington, and that in any case it is too cussed to go far enough to make additional attention worthwhile.
There is an additional risk. America’s own gradual transformation from a globe-straddling superpower to something less could have an impact on the relationship. An America in decline, if that is indeed what transpires, will both have less interest in India and be of less use to it in the world as a partner in its own rise. This may not be a likely scenario in the foreseeable future, since even America’s loss of sole-superpower status is unlikely to mean its ceasing to be a global power in the imaginable future. But it is something else that cannot be ignored.
So the current scenario suggests that the transformation of India — US relations that began with the end of the Cold War is continuing its gradual course towards the evolution of a ‘special relationship’ between New Delhi and Washington. But the overall report card remains mixed.
There are strong reasons for congruence and powerful arguments for continued closeness. India is clearly going to join the United States among the top five world powers of the twenty-first century. Both nations are anchored in democratic systems, and are committed to the rule of law, diversity and pluralism, and the encouragement of innovation and enterprise. The engagement of the two countries with each other is reinforced by the growing Indian presence in America — the 100,000 Indian students (who form the largest foreign student community there) supplementing the flourishing and influential 3-million-strong Indian-American community, who enjoy the highest median income of any American ethnic group and who are playing an increasingly prominent role in politics and government.
The way in which the two countries are economically useful for each other’s basic objectives was crisply brought out in a recent speech in Washington by India’s National Security Adviser Shivshankar Menon, who declared that ‘the US is a crucial partner in our enterprise to abolish mass poverty within a democratic framework and open society, while respecting human rights and rule of law’. In turn, he added, ‘India offers a large and growing market for the US, creating jobs in both economies, adding competitiveness to US firms, and synergy in innovation and technology.’
Nonetheless, there is a perception among critics, not just in India, that these are ‘soft’ and ‘feel-good’ aspects of the relationship that mask a lack of substantive progress on the hard strategic, political and security issues that analysts here consider more important. How understanding is the United States of India’s security concerns, especially vis-à-vis Pakistan? Here President Obama’s statements, particularly in Delhi, have inspired confidence that the United States does indeed pay serious attention to India’s core national security interests. But some hard content still needs to be defined. One example lies in the continuing restrictions on the sale of US high technology to India; New Delhi’s endeavours to seek the liberalization of US export controls have encountered significant delays and obstruction in Washington, inevitably having a dampening effect on the publicly announced plans to cooperate in nuclear and space technology.
There has been some American appreciation for India’s role in Afghanistan but greater receptivity to Pakistani objections than New Delhi considers reasonable. New Delhi remains seriously concerned about the possibility of a US withdrawal from Afghanistan that implicitly leaves the country to the mercies of the Pakistani ISI, which has been known to foment and guide terrorist actions against India. Cooperation between India and the United States on counterterrorism has improved after 26/11, but the two countries have not gone much beyond information sharing (though the access somewhat belatedly granted to the Pakistani-American terrorist enabler David Coleman Headley helped overcome Indian misgivings about the depth of this cooperation). This is one area where real teeth could be added, not least to reassure Indians that the United States’ understandable desire to cut its losses in ‘Af-Pak’ would not leave our country more vulnerable to the depredations of those who stand to gain from an American departure.
The United States could also show more interest in resisting China’s irredentist claims to Indian territory, particularly its habit of dubbing Arunachal Pradesh as ‘South Tibet’, an issue on which the United States has stayed conspicuously neutral. The question of the strategic content of the relationship goes beyond the subcontinent. Obama’s support in the Indian Parliament for New Delhi’s claims to a seat on a reformed Security Council has not been followed by any instructions to American diplomats around the world to execute this commitment or even to pursue this objective. The suspicion remains that what Indians saw as a substantive triumph during Obama’s visit in fact amounted to little more than a rhetorical flourish.
Strategic partnerships are tricky to conceive and implement. There is, to begin with, a definitional challenge for Washington: what does the US national security apparatus understand by the concept of a ‘partnership’ such as the one it touts that it enjoys with India? Clearly, New Delhi is not going to sign on to anything resembling a traditional Cold War— era ‘ally’, but if the ‘partnership’ means anything, it has to amount to something more than the two countries merely being not hostile to each other. The need to define a suitable mid-point between ‘friend’ and ‘ally’ could not be more acute, but equally important is the need to give the term ‘partner’ some real operational content, and to create the necessary bureaucratic architecture to sustain such a partnership.