When William Burns, the United States under-secretary of state, told a Washington DC audience last week, on the eve of the India-US strategic and economic dialogue, that “India’s strength and progress on the world stage is deeply in the strategic interest of the US”, he was echoing the decade-old words of former US secretary of state, Condoleeza Rice. Ms Rice had famously written in Foreign Affairs in 2000 that the time had come for the US to invest in India and favour its rise. That view defined the Bush doctrine on India and shaped the India-US civil nuclear energy agreement. If the Indian economy has to grow at upwards of 8 or 9 per cent per year over the next decade and more, India needs access to new and non-conventional sources of energy and so opening India up to normal trade in nuclear power became the lynchpin of that strategy. The Democratic Party was never convinced. While there were honourable exceptions like the present US vice president, Joe Biden, and the present chairman of the senate foreign relations committee, John Kerry, neither President Barrack Obama nor secretary of state Hillary Clinton were great believers in the Bush-Rice doctrine on India. To add to their skepticism, the trans-Atlantic financial crisis and the global economic slowdown forced the US to hallucinate about a new bipolar world in which the US and China would help each other and run the rest of the world — the so-called G-2. At the same time, President Obama’s misguided strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan required a distancing of India and the downgrading of India’s concerns. All this contributed to the second ice age in India-US relations.
Mr Burns has raised some questions about what animates Indian foreign policy — does India see itself as a G-77 member or a G-20 power? As in any democracy there are different views in India. But Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has clearly articulated on more than one occasion that Indian foreign policy is shaped by India’s developmental aspirations. These aspirations are today best realised within the framework of the G-20. Strengthening the G-20, or some variation of it as the grouping evolves, has become a strategic priority for India.
It is however still not clear what exactly has shaped Washington DC’s new thinking about India, because nothing much has changed in Asia or the world in the past few months. There is, of course, no reason to disbelieve the Obama administration when it now says that the US has a stake in India’s rise. The fact is so obvious to anyone who understands geo-politics and geo-economics that it is surprising that it has taken an year-and-a-half for a senior administration official to say it. Both countries have things to do, on their part, to renew the old warmth. India has to take some commercial decisions on getting US investments into India, in nuclear power, financial and retail sectors and in defence, while the US has still to get rid of high-tech export controls and adopt a more practical approach on the so-called Af-Pak issue. The summer and monsoon months of 2010 will have to see considerable movement on these fronts in both capitals so that by November, when President Obama visits New Delhi, he can get as warm a reception as his predecessor did.
