Dinesh Kamath's Editorial 'Indo-US relations' that was published in Newsband

Indo-US relations         

Thrice an attempt was made to draw India and the US closer, but each time it only partially succeeded.

In 1962 the India-China war, seriously threatening Indian security, drove Nehru into the arms of John F Kennedy.

Indira Gandhi managed a breakthrough at her Cancun meeting with Ronald Reagan in 1981 based on personal chemistry. It opened the path for some high-technology trade. But Indians felt hurt when Pakistan became a frontline ally of the US against the threat of communism and Islamic fundamentalism.

The third and last attempt was made by Rajiv Gandhi, who initiated political and economic cooperation.

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 and the pulling down of the Berlin wall finally cleared the way for meaningful Indo-US engagement. An accidental Prime Minister P V Narasimha Rao took charge in 1991. He instituted structural changes in the Indian economy and foreign policy. The re-engagement with US was serious, wide-ranging and done while retaining strategic autonomy on the most critical national security issues while working out compromises on the rest.

The 1998 nuclear tests dealt a serious blow to the bilateral relationship. However they also opened the door, for the first time to a really serious engagement – not ducking security and strategic issues but confronting them. The US had to accept India as a possible important component in a new Asian security order.

President George Walker Bush came into office in 2001 barely knowing the name of the Indian Prime Minister. He was drawn to the region after the 9/11 terror attacks masterminded from Afghanistan and Pakistan. He rightly saw India as a possible strategic ally helpful to the US interests.

President Bush correctly identified that India needed to be unshackled from the technology denial and sanctions regimes of Cold War vintage. A stronger, resilient India was beginning to be seen as supportive of the US’s global and regional interests. The Indo-US nuclear deal hence was not really about energy and climate change; it was actually a sine qua non of deep strategic engagement.

The Obama presidency has usherd in the next and more complex phase of bilateral engagement.

The recent visit of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave a boost to Indo-US ties. The visit to India of Richard Holbrooke – the Af-Pak special envoy – and by Under Secretary Richard Burns tried to bridge the attention-deficit. However it was Secretary Clinton who attempted to infuse fresh life into a languishing engagement. One now could see the opening of the Indian market for high-technology US defence and nuclear components and systems.

The US administration needs to understand that India would be a handy partner in furthering the visionary ideas that President Obama has spelt out in his Prague address on a nuclear weapon-free world. The overlap in the strategic interests and vision of India and the US is considerable.

Common interests rather than reprisal must drive the Indo-US relationship. The US president himself has attested a firm belief that the Indo-US relationship — bound by shared interests and shared values — will be one of the defining partnerships of the 21st century, both being democracies menaced by terror. Both India and the US are promised prosperity if they work together and impairment if they indulge in retaliatory pettiness.

The challenge for the Obama administration is to ensure that while pursuing its new priorities, the US policies remain, and are seen in India to be, helpful for the emergence of India as a major global power.