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.
We will return to these aspects in greater detail, but it is useful to note not just the geopolitical background against which much of the relationship has evolved, but the policy advocacy in Washington that has underpinned it. India has come a long way, in American eyes, from the days when I went there as a graduate student in 1975. I recall watching a three-hour NBC television special that year on ‘America and the World’: after long sections on the United States and the Soviet Union, the United States and Europe, and so on, a series of shorter sections on less important parts of the world followed. I kept waiting for ‘the United States and India’: it never came. India, in those days, did not even figure on the US radar screen, let alone its television screens. Today, it’s a different story: high-level visits proliferate in each direction, stories from and about India can be found everywhere on the US media and, as the well-heeled, 3-million-strong Indian-American community flexes its political muscles, few US political candidates can afford to be indifferent, let alone hostile, to relations with India.
The Indian diaspora in the United States, some 3 million strong and thriving, is a huge factor in the relationship. The first Indian to set foot in the country was a sailor in the 1770s, whose presence aroused much curiosity, and in the 1890s shiploads of Sikhs settled on the Pacific coast and established thriving farming communities in California, but racist immigration restrictions (prompted by such events as anti-Indian riots in the state of Washington in 1907) kept Indian migration low till the 1960s. A thin trickle of students made their way to the United States after the 1920s, but most returned to India; indeed, as late as 1935, signs on the doors of certain California establishments declared, ‘No Jobs for Japs or Hindus’. It was only with the opening of the sluice gates under the liberal Immigration Act of 1965 that a larger number of Indians began to arrive, mainly as students, an increasing proportion of whom stayed on, bringing high levels of academic attainment and valuable scientific and engineering skills to their new country. By the early 1970s the still-small Indian minority had the highest per capita income of any ethnic group in the United States, and even today the median family income of Indian-Americans exceeds that of white Americans. Working-class Indians found their way into the United States for the first time from the end of the 1970s, toiling on construction sites and as farm labour, taking over newspaper kiosks, operating rundown motels, cooking and serving in Indian restaurants, and driving taxicabs. Many arrived (or stayed on) illegally, but as the numbers grew, a pair of ‘amnesties’ in the 1990s gave them the legal status they needed to bring their families over, and today this ‘third wave’ of Indian immigrants accounts for perhaps half the desi diaspora in the United States.
Though there are Indian-American doctors and scientists of considerable renown (including three Nobel Prize–winners born and brought up in India), the newer Indian immigrants are demonstrating an entrepreneurial spirit that has created a wider impact on the community’s fortunes. The spirit of enterprise has also affected the professional classes, especially the Indian engineers who brought from India a solid grounding in their field and excelled in the freedom afforded to them in the United States. An Indian invented the Pentium chip, another created Hotmail, a third started Sun Microsystems, and Indians have been involved in some 40 per cent of the start-ups in Silicon Valley. Over time, the Indianness of engineers and software developers began to be taken as synonymous with mathematical and scientific excellence. Today, Americans speak of the IITs—the elite engineering schools from which many of these migrants came—with the same reverence they used to accord to MIT. The imag
e of India has changed from that of a backward developing country to a sophisticated land that produces engineers and computer experts.
The prosperity this engendered has also translated into political activism. Indian-Americans are among the most prominent fund-raisers in both major parties, and their active involvement in politics is now translating into elective office at various levels, including two state Governors, Bobby Jindal of Louisiana and Nikki Haley of South Carolina. But neither has chosen to identify much with their Indian origins or Indian causes; indeed, their acceptability to their right-wing political base has hinged on de-emphasizing their foreign origins. Indian-Americans have found greater success in influencing mainstream non-immigrant American politicians by sensitizing them to issues of importance to the Indian diaspora. The rising financial clout of the community and its collective willingness to flex its political muscles has seen many non-Indian candidates for political office running targeted campaigns aimed at Indian-American voters and donors. The pole positions held by Indians in the boardrooms of corporate America are also a tangible source of influence at high levels of the country’s decision-making processes. The result of all this is apparent in the size and strength of the India Caucus on Capitol Hill; the political desiderata for many American Congressmen now includes the need to demonstrate interest in Indian-American issues and goodwill towards India.
So India is now undoubtedly an important country to US policy-makers; but what, from a US point of view, are the main ‘drivers’ of the India–US relationship? One can quickly dismiss the typical tendency of some American politicians to see geopolitical relationships in crude transactional terms. Some US senators have had a pronounced inclination to demand quid pro quos in relation to any act of seeming US generosity—if Washington supported New Delhi’s claims to a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, would India support the US policy on sanctions against Iran? Such questions are not easily answered at all, let alone in a simple affirmative, since a country like India would always reserve the right to take its own decision on such issues, on a case-by-case basis. If India–US relations had to be judged by such old-fashioned yardsticks as counting the number of UN votes on which New Delhi agreed with Washington, the partnership would never get off the ground. Blatant reciprocity—expecting that, as a beneficiary of US goodwill, India would, for instance, favour US aircraft in its defence procurement (a subject to which we will return)—is simply untenable in evaluating relations between two large, complex and proud nations.
A better place to gauge the new American approach to India would be the views of two members of the Washington policy community who have been associated with an increasingly influential school of thought that recognizes the strategic utility of the two nations’ shared political values and advocates a broadly pro-Indian policy for the United States in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. These two prominent American strategic analysts, both at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, argue for two distinct approaches to relations with India. One, George Perkovich, puts his views most clearly in an essay published in the Washington Quarterly in 2003. Perkovich, recognizing both New Delhi’s modest military and strategic capacity and its traditional disinclination to seem to be acting on anyone else’s behest, acknowledged that India does not ‘have the interest or power to augment US interests in many areas’. Yet India was ‘too big and too important in the overall global community to measure in terms of its alignment with any particular US interest at any given time’. In other words, support for India promoted US strategic goals not by direct support of American aims but rather by a general congruence of approaches on issues of global order. As Perkovich put it, ‘It matters to the entire world whether India is at war or peace with its neighbors, is producing increasing prosperity or poverty for its citizens, stemming or incubating the spread of infectious diseases, or mimicking or leapfrogging climate-warming technologies. Democratically managing a society as big, populous, diverse, and culturally dynamic as India is a world historical challenge. If India can democratically lift all of its citizens to a decent quality of life without trampling on basic liberties and harming its neighbors, the Indian people will have accomplished perhaps the greatest success in human history.’
This argument seems to assume more American altruism than many realist Indian analysts find plausible. In such an analysis, the United States would essentially leave India alone to pursue its own interests, so long as these upheld a liberal world order; when, in Perkovich’s view, they did not, as (in his view) with the US–India civilian nuclear agreement, Washington should oppose India (as Perkovich himself did in advocating rejection of the deal). In such a reading of Washington’s interests, any attempt to cajole India into a ‘strategic partnership’ would of course clash with India’s own view of its strategic autonomy and fierce independence on the international stage, but it would also be unnecessary. What would be best, therefore, would be a loose partnership on global issues, rather than anything resembling an alliance, with the only litmus test on each issue being the contribution that India would make to the kind of world order the United States sought to build.
An alternative view that embraces many of the same premises but goes beyond them was that of the Indian-American scholar Ashley Tellis, also at the Carnegie Endowment, who advocated in Washington that the United States should support India in a ‘calculated contribution to creating, in Condoleezza Rice’s famous phrase, a “balance of power that favours freedom”’. As Tellis argued, ‘assisting India to develop its national capabilities is intended not merely to uplift its humanity’ but rather ‘to advance the vital US interest in preserving a stable geopolitical balance in Asia and globally’. He goes on:
To the degree that the American partnership with India aids New Delhi in growing more rapidly, it contributes—along with Japanese, Australian, and Southeast Asian power—towards creating those objective structural constraints that discourage China from abusing its own growing capabilities, even as Washington preserves good relations with Beijing and encourages all its Asian partners to do the same. American strategic generosity towards India, thus, remains an investment in its own geopolitical well being.
In this view, the United States should support policies to strengthen India—including the nuclear deal—even if India remained wilfully independent on certain issues, because it would be good for the United States to do so. To Tellis, ‘the real issue boiled down to how Washington could assist the growth of Indian power so as to secure its larger global aims at lowest cost to itself’.
Neither scholar succumbs to the crude ‘what can India do for us?’ reasoning of many American politicians; Tellis, in effect, suggests that the United States has a stake in India’s success even when no direct benefits to Washington accrue from it—since a successful India is an asset for the United States’ own geopolitical vision of the future world order and ‘itself becomes New Delhi’s strategic bequest to Washington’. Tellis’s only caveat is that his argument for backing Indian success applies ‘so long as it is not used to undermine America’s vital interests’. In turn, Tellis ‘expects that New Delhi would see cooperation with Washington as being fundamentally in its own interest—and, by extension, act in ways that confirm this expectation whenever possible. Such responses would materialise not so much out of gratitude to the United States but because aiding the preservation of the American-led global order, in contrast to, say, acquiescing to the rise of a Chinese alternative, is necessarily consistent with India’s own vital national interests.’
Tellis served as an adviser to the Bush Administration and to its ambassador in New Delhi, Robert Blackwill, and it is safe to accept that his view both informed and reflected the administration’s thinking on relations with India. It helped, of course, that Indian economic reforms since 1991 had transformed the land of the tortoise-like ‘Hindu rate of growth’ into a rising economic power by the time Bush was elected, and a decade of post–Cold War geopolitics had ended all tr
aces of the sympathy in New Delhi for the Soviet Union that the Republicans used to despise. India’s democracy was itself a source of deep fascination for President Bush, as was the country’s pluralist way of dealing with its own diversity (he was known to have remarked with admiration upon the fact that in 2004 India’s elections were won by a woman of Italian Catholic background who made way for a Sikh to be sworn in as prime minister by a Muslim President). Bush could see no reason why the two giant democracies could not make common cause in pursuing compatible global interests, and he had little patience for the non-proliferation orthodoxies that had ostracized India after the 1998 nuclear tests. The Indian exception was born.
In Tellis’s telling, Washington under Bush perceived a ‘strong compatibility in values’ which was ‘reinforced by the growing recognition that India’s interests increasingly converged with those of the United States’. Abstract considerations of a global balance of power favouring ‘freedom’ were supplemented by far more hard-headed considerations of both countries’ targeting by the forces of Islamist terrorism, especially after 9/11. Tellis puts it well when he suggests that ‘American and Indian interests were similar even if they were not always perfectly congruent’. As an Indian-American, he probably had a higher tolerance for the areas of policy difference between the two states than many of his Washington colleagues, but his President, too, was quite willing to cut India some slack in this area. And there were, with the end of the Cold War, the new Indian relationship with Israel and the pragmatic recalibration of relations with Southeast Asia embodied in the ‘Look East’ policy, no longer any major differences on issues that the United States would have seen as affecting its own vital interests. In President Bush’s view, therefore, Tellis avers, ‘having India in the stable of America’s friends and allies was preferable to being without it’.
Pax Indica: India and the World of the Twenty-first Century Page 27