India and the US need each other. But reading the American ambassador’s dismissal of the insults to Meera Shankar and Hardeep Puri, I wonder whether the US is psychologically ready yet for a genuine partnership with an Asian country whose rulers are not pensioners and petitioners like Syngman Rhee, Ferdinand Marcos and the Shah of Iran.
Oh yes, I know all about Franklin D Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms, the commitment of both countries to pluralism, religious liberty and dissent, and the world’s oldest and largest democracies being “natural allies”. But if those platitudes had meant anything, India and the US would not have had to wait till Barack Obama’s visit in 2010 to discover each other. It would be absurd to make heavy weather of race in Obama’s US. Prejudice is a dying phase rooted in domestic demographics. But no British or German envoy would be similarly treated. Nor can it be reconciled with the privileges American diplomats take for granted in India.
But the history of discrimination bears repeating. Rabindranath Tagore declared after encountering San Francisco immigration that the US would refuse Jesus Christ admission “because, first of all, He would not have the necessary money and secondly, He would be an Asiatic”. US-born Amar Bose, globally famous for his sound system, recalled his childhood, “The big problem was colour. There wasn’t a restaurant in Philadelphia where I could be served. In those days you couldn’t even rent a house.”
Sikhs were called “ragheads”. Ethnic Indians could not acquire US citizenship until the Oriental Immigration Act was revised in 1949. In 1955, the white woman manager of Houston international airport’s restaurant refused to serve one of Meera Shankar’s predecessors, G L Mehta, and his secretary in the dining room because she thought them Negroes, as today’s African-Americans were called then.
More important than any of this, however, is the practice of studiedly downgrading Indian diplomatic and military officials when they visit the US. A defence team once came away without taking part in the meeting for which it had gone because its members were paired with Americans below their rank. South Block officials complain of regularly having to talk to officials who are junior to them. Indians who object to this demotion are called touchy and status conscious.
More From This Section
On one occasion many years ago the State Department noted smugly it had hoodwinked the Indian military attaché who had been asking to be taken into confidence on military matters by classifying India “upwards to the category of countries receiving ‘restricted’ US military information” and making “a deliberate effort to furnish” him “with relatively harmless but somewhat impressive military information …” India was fobbed off with a sleight of hand like a pestering child!
There are more serious impediments to closer understanding — Pakistan and the support that US arms and money indirectly gives to terrorism for instance. One shudders to think what will happen when US forces abandon the mess in Afghanistan, as Obama promises they will in 2011. The gun that fires in only one direction hasn’t yet been invented, as Krishna Menon put it.
I am stressing the human factor more because no diplomat is saintly enough to say when making policy, “They may be nasty to me but are good for my country.” Diplomacy is the sum total of personal responses. Timothy J Roemer’s “I regret any inconvenience that may have resulted for either Ambassador as a result of recent incidents” after meeting Shiromani Akali Dal (Badal) representatives reminds me of appearing before the West Bengal Assembly’s privileges committee because of something one of my staff had written. When I said we were sorry if we had given offence, the chairman politely but firmly told me a conditional apology was no apology.
William S Cohen, the defence secretary, announced at the turn of the century, “America begins the new millennium as the sole superpower, the indispensable nation.” True enough, and indispensable for India in economics and defence. But despite the lure of the Green Card and though US security concerns merit allowance, Indians expect a less superior partner.
It used to be said during the Cold War that India was too big to be America’s protégé like the Philippines or South Korea but not big enough to be an ally. Times have changed, as Obama’s job-seeking visit proved. India has every right now to demand treatment as an equal. That was the theme of my book, Waiting for America: India and the US in the New Millennium. India is still waiting.