The Obama administration has begun to neglect India as it mends US relations with NATO Europe and Russia, reengages China, soothes Japan, and focuses its military energies to save Afghanistan and Pakistan from the Al-Qaeda and Taliban. The Indo-US nuclear deal which took bilateral relations to its apogee in the previous Bush administration has also fallen off president Barack Obama’s priority list, and may indeed be in danger with his pursuit of CTBT, because it puts India under tremendous pressure to test its imperfect deterrent.
When prime minister Manmohan Singh extolled George W.Bush in office as the best presidential friend for India, he spoke truly but narrowly. While the two men’s “crowning achievement” was the nuclear deal, it both defanged and (purportedly) propped up India as an emerging global power to counter China. The second was only hinted at but never acknowledged and even denied by both India and the US, and they were forced to come to terms with China’s rise. But the defanging of India was real, because nuclear commerce with it has been permitted provided it adheres to its “unilateral moratorium” not to test.
Where the Indian prime minister got unreal about Bush and the US is that India’s unique position makes it unfitted for any meaningful long-term strategic alliance with another great power. India flirted with the Soviet Union in the Seventies and early Eighties and became a regional power in consequence but understood the limits of their friendship. While the end of the Cold War removed US suspicions about India, US stakes in Pakistan-Afghanistan and India’s reasonably independent foreign policy pursuits since Independence prevented both the world’s largest and the most powerful democracies from becoming “natural allies”. Contrary to convention wisdom, this writer had argued in an earlier Opinion Asia piece, “Democracy divides India and the United States” (22 February 2008), that their fierce internal practice of democracy would keep India and the US apart, and under the Obama administration, this has come true.
Beyond humanitarian assistance and non-military aid, India cannot contribute to easing the situation for the US and NATO in Afghanistan. It is out of question that Indian military boots will stamp Afghan ground. And India objects to Obama linking the Kashmir dispute with the Afghanistan-Pakistan crisis. Their origins are different and causes separate, and the only link at all is the failing state of Pakistan, which today needs to be divested off its nuclear weapons before they fall to the advancing forces of Talibanization and extremism. While the United States is clear about the danger building up in Pakistan, it is neither willing nor able to execute a bold rescue plan, in which Indian contributions with ideas, intelligence and covert action could be significant.
India and the United States only have a long-term strategic fit, where India becomes an independent great power, but naturally friendly to the US. This is not unreasonable to expect, because a shared stake in democracy bonds them, plus there are deep economic and market dependencies, and these can only grow. But the natural instinct of one great power to oppose another’s rise would inform Indo-US relations, and it is a tussle India cannot shrink from or lose. The silver lining in cooling Indo-US ties under Obama is that India is slowly but painfully adjusting to the new reality, and any show of pique at this point would be counter-productive.
For example, there is no reason for India to tom-tom (as a special representative of the PM did some days ago) that it demarched the incoming Obama administration to keep India/ Kashmir out of the tough-minded US Afghanistan-Pakistan pointman, Richard Holbrooke’s brief. On the other hand, India is quietly sewing up nuclear power and fuel deals with Russia and France, because market conditions, liability requirements and sanctionary fears make tie ups with US private firms distant at this point. And yet, India will have to confront the US if Obama pursues CTBT, a verifiable FMCT and a worldwide ban on intermediate-range missiles (IRMs), all central to its rise. Going beyond IRMs to ICBMs and an operational triad are a must, therefore, and so too speedier accumulation of weapons’ and fissile material stockpiles. Another test to overcome the failure of the Pokhran II thermo-nuclear weapon cannot be anymore delayed too. But obviously, it brings consequences which must be weighed against such benefits as flow even now from lowered Indo-US relations.
These issues will confront a new Indian government in June sooner than it has time to settle down. Which is why it would be eminently sensible for the Congress and BJP leading the two biggest coalitions to the general elections privately to discuss these issues to provide continuity and perhaps realistic road-maps ahead.