AMERICA'S NEW ALLY: INDIA.

[Guest guest]

Here below is an engaging article from THE NEW REPUBLIC by Senior

Editor, Lawrence Kaplan.

 

Although the second paragraph touching on the past history of US-

India relations is oversimplified and not wholly correct, the

substantive subsequent parts reflecting on the dynamics of the

evolving current state of US-India engagement is indeed stimulating.

 

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http://www.thenewrepublic.com/080601/kaplan080601.html

 

THE NEW REPUBLIC, Issue date 08.06.01

 

AMERICA'S NEW ALLY: INDIA.

Missile Defense's Children

 

by Lawrence F. Kaplan

 

Post date 07.26.01 |

 

Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage--a walking anvil who bench-

presses more than 400 pounds, served three tours in Vietnam, and

clomps around Washington like a bureaucratic pit bull--has been

called many things. A marshmallow isn't one of them. But that didn't

dissuade the prestigious Times of India, in a May article that could

just as easily have been written for Teen Beat, from extolling

Armitage as "a gentle giant who turns into marshmallow around

children." The piece also gushes that "much of New Delhi has been in

thrall of the Bush team's other great strategist Deputy Secretary of

Defense Paul Wolfowitz." And that's tame compared with the accolades

coming from the Indian government, which in recent months has been

praising the United States in terms unthinkable a decade ago.

Moreover, the Bush administration has returned the compliment--

racing, in the face of an increasingly hostile China, to put to rest

a half-century of bitter relations with the world's largest

democracy. Quietly, fitfully, but unmistakably, a new alliance is

being born.

 

For U.S. policymakers used to napping through the anti-imperialist

diatribes of their Indian counterparts, all this comes as a welcome

surprise. Taking their cue from the prewar British left, India's

first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, and his successors spent much

of the cold war peddling Fabian socialism at home and neutrality

abroad, which in practice meant strangling the Indian economy and

routinely siding with America's foes. For decades, no epithet was too

coarse for India's leading opinion makers to employ against the

United States, and no amount of garish praise seemed adequate to

describe the virtues of the Soviet Union. And with the exception of a

brief period during the early '60s, when U.S. and Indian interests

converged in the fight against Chinese aggression, the United States

responded in kind--supplying vast quantities of arms to India's

mortal foe, Pakistan.

 

So what changed? "India placed its chips on the Soviet Union,

economic autarky, and military might," writes the Brookings

Institution's Stephen P. Cohen in his insightful forthcoming book,

India: Emerging Power. "It lost all three bets." Now, craving foreign

investment and wary of an increasingly powerful China, a new

generation of Indian policymakers is placing its bets on the United

States. The most telling example came in May, when President Bush

unveiled his missile defense initiative. While the rest of the world

carped that the plan would provoke a new arms race, India took a mere

six hours to declare its support. And Indian Foreign Minister Jaswant

Singh, who less than a year earlier had complained that missile

defense "undermines ... global strategic stability," now boasts that

New Delhi and Washington "are endeavoring to work out together a

totally new security regime which is for the entire globe."

 

But if Indian officials seem eager to repair relations with

Washington, Bush sounds like he's ready to move the ranch to

Rajasthan. W.'s charm offensive began in April, while the rest of the

world waited to see whether China would release the crew of the U.S.

EP-3. Though barely noticed in the American press, Foreign Minister

Singh was in Washington at the time and met with National Security

Adviser Condoleezza Rice at the White House. According to a senior

White House official, the Bush team had agreed the president

would "drop by" the discussion. But Bush didn't just drop by; he

pulled a surprised Singh out of the meeting and took him for a stroll

in the Rose Garden and then back to the Oval Office, where they

talked about missile defense, China, and plans for improved ties. "He

was beaming from ear to ear," says a Bush adviser who saw Singh

emerge from the Oval Office. From there, Singh went to the State

Department, where he continued the conversation with Colin Powell and

Armitage. Finally, he was taken to the Pentagon, where Secretary of

Defense Donald Rumsfeld welcomed him with a full honor guard.

 

A steady stream of U.S. officials has been jetting between New Delhi

and Washington ever since. In the last two months, Joint Chiefs of

Staff Chairman Henry Shelton has traveled to India twice to shore up

defense ties; Armitage has visited to consult on missile defense; and

Bush has dispatched Robert Blackwill, one of his senior foreign

policy advisers on the campaign trail, to India as his ambassador.

More important, the administration has said that it plans to lift

sanctions against India (despite grumbling from the State

Department's Nonproliferation Bureau), that it won't meddle in the

Kashmir dispute, and that President Bush will visit New Delhi this

winter. And the parade of Indian officials traveling to Washington

hasn't abated either. When it comes to our relations with India, says

Armitage, it took the Clinton administration "seven years to get to

the point that Mr. Bush has gotten to in two months."

 

Actually, that overstates Clinton's achievement. "The first six years

of the Clinton administration are years most Indians would like to

forget," says Gopalaswami Parthasarathy, the recently retired Indian

high commissioner to Pakistan. "United States policies were

exclusively aimed at curbing our nuclear independence or meddling in

our relations with our neighbors." Relations went from bad to worse

in the wake of New Delhi's 1998 atomic tests, when Clinton slapped

sanctions against India and, for good measure, admonished it

to "define the greatness of India in twenty-first-century terms, not

in something we've left behind." His administration even joined China

in threatening to keep America's fellow democracy off the U.N.

Security Council. During Clinton's final year in office, ties

improved after the president visited India. But, even then, the

Clintonites were mostly interested in chasing India's markets.

 

The Bush team brings to Washington a very different worldview, one

closer to India's own. Gone is the Clintonite passion for arms

control and the empty speechifying about a strategic partnership with

Beijing. Gone too is the contempt for geopolitics that distinguished

Clinton's approach to the international scene. In fact, geopolitics

is precisely what the rapprochement with India is about. "The United

States now sees India as an alternative to China," explains

Cohen. "And Indian hostility toward China has become an asset." The

Bush team insists that the thaw in relations with India isn't

about "containing" Beijing. But White House and Pentagon officials

concede that it is part of a strategy of "hedging" against the

possibility. (Japan has a role to play as well.) "As China's power

grows," explains a Bush adviser, "a strong India will provide

stability and balance."

 

China figures in the calculations of Indian policymakers, too.

Prevailing wisdom in the United States assumes that Pakistan poses

the greatest threat to India. But that's not the way Indian

policymakers see it. In their telling, the greater peril lies with

the fledgling superpower and longtime adversary to their north; in

fact, that's how then-Defense Minister George Fernandes justified

India's atomic tests in 1998. Today, China and India share a disputed

border across which they fought a war in 1962; the two countries are

engaged in an escalating rivalry for influence in Southeast Asia;

China continues to provide Pakistan with weapons and lobbies to keep

India off the U.N. Security Council; and Beijing and New Delhi

routinely trade accusations about Chinese repression in Tibet and

about the haven India provides the Dalai Lama. Not surprisingly,

then, as U.S. policymakers fret more and more about Beijing, their

Indian counterparts have rushed to offer support. "Nato, the United

States, and India will be on one side," Indian strategist Brahma

Chellaney predicts. "China and rogue states, including Pakistan,

Burma, and North Korea on the other side."

 

And what of India's longtime adversary and our cold war ally,

Pakistan? It's not an ally anymore. "There's less and less of a

reason for a friendly relationship with Pakistan," says Richard

Perle, a Bush campaign adviser and chairman of the administration's

Defense Policy Board. On his recent visit to India, Armitage lumped

Pakistan in with other "rogue states," declared that our past

friendship with the country was a "false relationship," and worried

about its nuclear program while expressing no similar concern about

India's. And administration officials say they intend to keep in

place sanctions against Pakistan, even as they lift those on India.

This would never have happened during the cold war, when Washington

blithely overlooked Islamabad's procession of military regimes. But

today it's less forgiving, particularly since Pakistan's current

military dictatorship provides aid and comfort to a host of terrorist

organizations and to Afghanistan's ruling Taliban, which shelters

Osama bin Laden. It has also aligned itself ever more closely with

China and against the United States. Thus, even as Armitage was

visiting New Delhi, Chinese Premier Zhu Rongi traveled to Pakistan,

where President Musharraf pleaded for China's "active role" in

maintaining the region's "strategic balance," signed a stack of

agreements with Beijing, and inveighed against America's missile

defense plan.

 

But the rapprochement between Washington and New Delhi isn't only

about global politics; it's also about domestic politics. American

companies like Microsoft and Cisco continue to boost levels of U.S.

investment in India. The Bush team also recognizes the growing clout

of Indian-Americans. And groups like the Congressional Caucus on

India, which boasts 120 senators and representatives, haven't been

shy about weighing in on South Asia policy. Meanwhile, on the Indian

side, the spectacular achievements of the growing Indian-American

community have made the United States the destination of choice for

young elites looking to move abroad. And if America the place appeals

to India's younger generation, so does America the idea. In fact, New

Delhi's new policymakers have little use for either the socialism or

the anti-Americanism of their predecessors.

 

There are, to be sure, exceptions, including many members of India's

political opposition and its intellectual class. One of these, New

York Review of Books contributor Pankaj Mishra, rails that India's

embrace of America "is poodlism, pure and unashamed" and condemns

its "craven desire to suck up to the Americans." But they don't read

The New York Review in New Delhi. And, leftist critiques

notwithstanding, the most compelling argument for closer ties between

India and America is neither political nor economic. It is moral.

India, like Taiwan and Israel, is a thriving democracy surrounded by

hostile dictatorships--a multiethnic, multireligious federation that

has much in common with our own. And, having finally recognized this

kinship, India's current government views the United States as less

an imperialist bully than a fellow democracy and, yes, a strategic

partner. Which is exactly what it's becoming.

 

LAWRENCE F. KAPLAN is a senior editor at TNR.