Pax Indica: India and the World of the Twenty-first Century

by Shashi Tharoor

  In any case, the strategic traffic is not merely one-way. Washington too has a national interest in Indian strategic autonomy, which would be buttressed by a wider range of external partnerships, including with the European states that will be the beneficiaries of the aircraft tender. Though India is rightly allergic to being seen as a US-supported counterweight to a rising China, in practice it is avidly courted by Southeast Asian countries anxious to balance Beijing, a development which suits Washington’s interests. President Obama’s 2010 visit cemented a perception that the two countries shared an increasingly convergent worldview, common democratic values and a thriving trade. None of this will cease to be relevant if India buys a European fighter plane.

  In fact the potential for India–US collaboration in a variety of areas—military and non-military—would probably be enhanced by this decision. Turning the United States down this time actually frees the hands of the Indian government to pursue other aspects of the partnership, immune from the charge that it is too responsive to US pressures. So New Delhi hasn’t foreclosed its options; it has in fact enlarged them.

  The MMRCA deal was, however, only one of several issues that arose between the two states that created the impression of a downturn in India–US relations after the heady days of the Bush Administration, when Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had even publicly declared to the American leader, ‘Mr President, the people of India love you.’ India’s positions on the MMRCA order and its rejection of the nuclear liability legislation advocated by Washington remain what Americans like to call the ‘poster children’ for the argument that the relationship with India is not yielding the rewards its advocates had predicted, or at least implied. But those who make this point in Washington fail to see that neither is specifically anti-US in conception—both involve India taking positions based on its own understanding of its own national and security interests within a specific domestic political context, exactly what democracies tend to do. The same is true of the more general disappointments that are being voiced in Washington, notably over India’s timidity in pursuing economic reforms that would open its market further to US firms—something that affects all potential foreign investors and not just Americans. (And yet it is US companies, more than others, that could conclude that the Indian market is less attractive than they had imagined, since Americans are quickest to complain that the lure of the potential of the Indian market needs to be matched by its performance.)

  Meanwhile, the reality of extensive defence cooperation is masked by the rejection of one American combat aircraft. In fact India relies significantly on American platforms for its long-range maritime patrol aircraft, very heavy lift transport aircraft, advanced special operations tactical transport aircraft and heavy attack helicopter requirements—all implying a degree of Indian dependence on American defence technology, and American willingness to supply it, that would both have been inconceivable just two decades ago. And India’s attitude to the American troop presence in its own neighbourhood—which has gone from outright rejection during the Cold War to publicly welcoming American troops in Afghanistan as a source of security and stability and seeking their prolongation—is proof of an astonishing metamorphosis in Indian perceptions of America.

  At the same time, if American analysts can point to the aircraft deal and the nuclear liability legislation as evidence of India not trying hard enough, there is just as much cause for disappointment on the other side of the equation. Many Indians had expected more from the new strategic partnership with the United States than has been forthcoming. Major irritants from an Indian point of view include America’s excessive generosity to the Pakistani military—some $11 billion since 2001, ostensibly for security against terrorism but much of it spent on weapons aimed at India—its continuing sale of conventional arms to Pakistan, US inattention to Indian interests in Afghanistan, the Obama Administration’s assiduous cultivation of China and the continuing reluctance in Washington to transfer cutting-edge defence technology to India. On China, Indians saw a clear contrast from the start with the Bush view of Beijing as a power to be contained; on Obama’s inaugural visit to Asia as President in November 2009, he spent four days in China and left after signing a joint statement that declared Beijing to be the key to ‘peace, stability, and development in South Asia’, a distinction that surely ought to have been accorded to India. The visit was accompanied by some suggestions that this was a far more important relationship to Washington than the one with India, and even loose talk of a ‘G2’ condominium between the United States and China to manage the world. India was kept waiting another year for a visit.

  There were, of course, various reasons for a change in the priority that had been accorded to India under Bush, apart from Obama’s diagnosis of China’s importance to American interests. The huge pressures of America’s domestic financial problems were always bound to loom larger than foreign policy concerns to the beleaguered Obama Administration, while the economic choices underpinning enthusiasm for India (support for free trade and the advantages to the American consumer of outsourcing and offshoring to India, for instance) were diluted by a more protectionist American approach focused principally on generating jobs in the United States. The Democrats are also more reflexively anti-nuclear and less likely to share Bush’s enthusiasm for the India–US civil nuclear deal; they are also more evangelical on climate change issues than the Republicans, making them less predisposed towards India’s position. On Afghanistan, too, both the logistical indispensability of Pakistan for the resupply of NATO forces and the domestic compulsions to bring the troops home were always going to weigh more heavily in US policy-makers’ minds than India’s interests.

  Within US policy-making circles, two constituencies have been less than helpful in building India–US ties—the so-called non-proliferation ayatollahs, whose attitude towards India is predicated entirely upon hostility to its nuclear programme, and the ‘hyphenators’, who view India entirely through the lens of US relations with Pakistan and ‘hyphenate’ the two subcontinental neighbours, subordinating US interests in New Delhi to the logic of its strategic focus on Pakistan. Pakistan had been a vital Cold War ally, a member of both CENTO and SEATO, the take-off point for Gary Powers’ famous and ill-fated U-2 spy flight over the USSR in 1962 and for Henry Kissinger on his epoch-changing clandestine opening to China in 1971. Years of Cold War policies have given Washington a ‘Pakistan-centric’ bureaucracy, at the State Department, the Pentagon and the CIA, who have long links to their counterparts in Islamabad and argue that closeness to India undermines traditional US objectives in the region. Their arguments—in a nation which is still run largely by institutions and policies set up in the Cold War era—have been buttressed by the US dilemmas in Afghanistan and the conviction that the road to peace in Kabul lies through New Delhi, and in particular to forcing Indian concessions to Pakistan on Kashmir. The result has been some active bureaucratic resistance in Washington to the attempts to change US policy in a more India-friendly direction.

  Of course it is true that the impact of such resistance can be exaggerated in Indian minds. In any case the tendency in India to overreact to every development, real or imagined, in the US–Pakistan relationship reflects an anxiety that many in Washington see as paranoia and does the country no favours. Instead there ought to be a recognition in New Delhi that US interests in India are driven by a logic of their own, independent of Pakistan, just as we would wish the United States to understand that our relations with China have little or nothing to do with our relations with the United States. Indians have perhaps been too sensitive to the perception that the Obama Administration offers India symbolic gestures like the first state dinner of his administration for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, while reserving substance for China and aid for Pakistan. Some Indian commentators scoffed at what they saw as empty symbolism: ‘We get the state dinners, while Pakistan gets $11 billion worth of weapons.’ Though events like the first US–India strategic dialogue (started y
ears after a similar dialogue was initiated with China) were initiated, critics felt they offered sound bites, not solid actions. The United States, in this reading, could have done better had it seized the opportunity afforded in 2009 by the end of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s dependence for parliamentary survival on the support of communist parties to offer something major to New Delhi. That is hardly fair, since both countries have been increasingly looking inward, and opportunities have been missed by both sides.

  Still, things have moved a very long way from the estrangement of the Cold War years. Today, the basic forward thrust of the relationship is not in dispute, and momentum is strongly supported by the influential Indian-American community in the United States. Americans should not expect as much from India as they would from a close ally like Israel, but they are no longer the recipients of non-aligned diatribes from India, and New Delhi has voted with the United States more often than had once seemed likely on key issues before the UN Security Council, notably backing a US resolution on Syria in early 2012 rather than joining Russia and China in their opposition. Even when they disagree, as they did on Libya and Iran, there is much more mutual understanding than before, and a respect for Indian ways of thinking on world issues that did not previously exist in Washington. On Myanmar, for instance, the United States, a staunch critic of India’s appeasement of its generals (so much so that Obama even mentioned India’s unsatisfactory Myanmar policy in his otherwise laudatory speech to the Indian Parliament), has gradually veered around to the Indian point of view favouring engagement with Naypyidaw. The two countries consult each other on a wide range of subjects and at a significantly high level, in ways that simply were inconceivable a couple of decades ago. And when things go wrong for one country, the other one tends not to fish in troubled waters, as New Delhi’s refusal to be drawn into the recent US–Pakistan tensions testifies.

  This is not to suggest that the relationship is perfect, or could not be improved. Many Indians feel that the United States could be doing more to give its friends in New Delhi ammunition in their efforts to resist the reflexive suspicion of ‘imperialist’ Washington in many influential circles in India. Many in Washington despair at what they see as India’s reluctance to oblige the United States tangibly on issues that matter to it. One can also point to India’s own seeming reluctance to take domestic decisions (from economic reform to market access issues to military realignments) that would make it a more worthwhile partner for the United States. The sympathetic Ashley Tellis is probably fair in saying that India’s positive gestures towards the United States

  are often hesitant, precarious, incomplete, and at constant risk of backsliding—dangers that are exacerbated by the currently troubled state of Indian domestic politics, the discomfort with the United States still persisting among elements of the Indian political class, the native Indian conservatism with regard to doing anything to ‘shape’ the world, and the still significant limitations in analytic, bureaucratic, and decisional capacity affecting the Indian state.

  Tellis concludes that ‘as India’s capacity and confidence grows, New Delhi’s ability to more effectively partner with the United States will only increase further’.

  For India to continue to be regarded as an important friend in the United States, however, it is not enough to rely on an American interest in helping India to displace sufficient weight in the world as to balance, or help constrain, less friendly powers. The two countries will have to develop the habits of substantive cooperation that make each turn naturally to the other on issues engaging both. Indian public opinion is generally more favourably disposed to the United States than influential political leaders are, and this is particularly true of the younger generation, which has grown up without the anti-imperialist rhetoric of earlier years and sees much to admire in America’s free-enterprise culture. The shared values of democracy, the two countries’ use of a common language (with Indian English becoming increasingly Americanized) and congruent strategic goals should strengthen these ties. India’s increasing economic opening will help, as will policies that provide more incentive to US businesses to invest in, and trade with, a market whose middle class is estimated by McKinsey as likely to reach 525 million by 2025. The social links between Indians and Americans have also been deepening over the years, especially with the integration of the thriving Indian diaspora into the American mainstream, and the corresponding increase in American interest in the land of their forebears. (That diaspora is particularly prosperous—the median income of an Indian-American family is almost 79 per cent higher than the national median—and therefore disproportionately influential.) Economic engagement in the era of globalization has reinforced these bonds, as more and more categories of people in both societies interact with and learn from each other.

  The two countries’ affinities also transcend their domestic politics. In New Delhi, Congress party rule has witnessed a continuation and strengthening of openings doggedly pursued by the BJP-led government (notably in the extensive dialogues conducted between then foreign minister Jaswant Singh and the US deputy secretary of state Strobe Talbott, who chronicled the talks in affectionate detail). In Washington, Clinton, Bush and Obama were all broadly on the same page; gone are the days when only Democrats were thought to be interested in improving ties with India. The right-of-centre American commentator Mary Kissel has observed tartly that India’s still-socialist Congress party, in power again since 2004, has a ‘kindred spirit’ in Obama: ‘a left-leaning big spender who thought that America should take a back seat in foreign affairs and stop dictating terms to its friends, both new and old’. Polemics aside, though, if Democrats see that kind of affinity with India, today’s Republicans, unlike their Nixonian predecessors, have even more strategic assumptions in common with India, whether run by the Congress party or its opponents. The increasingly significant informal relationships between power brokers in the United States and business leaders in India are another manifestation of this trend. Indian business leaders often attend the exclusive Bohemian Grove retreats, for instance, and the Aspen Institute has done an effective job of promoting strategic dialogue between the countries’ elites. The US India CEO Forum, set up by the two countries’ heads of government, is an example of harnessing the power of such relationships.

  These factors underlie the comfort—some might say complacency—with which Indians are regarding relations with the United States in the lead-up to the 2012 presidential elections. And yet there remain some potential flies in the proverbial ointment. One is undoubtedly the notoriously short-term American attention span to foreign affairs issues that do not appear to impinge directly on the country’s immediate security or welfare. A more inwardly focused domestic orientation, a more benign relationship with China and a post-Afghan-withdrawal indifference to South Asia could all lead Americans to forget the enthusiasm for India of the Bush years. President John F. Kennedy once memorably said, ‘The cost of freedom is always high, but Americans have always paid it.’ The problem for many Americans is that in recent years it seems that cost has been paid with a credit card. Many are understandably unwilling to keep racking up the bills internationally when debt and unemployment are mounting at home. But it would be disingenuous to think that increased ‘America-first’ism would not have consequences for Washington’s bilateral relationships with countries whose economies have become increasingly dependent on it, especially India’s.

  There is also the ever-present risk of competing US priorities clashing with the Indian relationship; a desire to accommodate China, along the lines advocated by Henry Kissinger, could again prompt the United States to steer a more Pacific course. Washington does not always appreciate that India cannot move faster on certain issues than it is currently doing, however frustrating that might seem to Americans (the nuclear liability issue is a case in point). India’s own stubborn emphasis on its independence of thought and action, while respected in principle by Washington, can sometimes grate there: as became a
pparent on the issue of sanctioning Iran, Washington may not always understand or fully appreciate India’s inability to agree with it, leading many to think of India as a false friend. And there is always the risk of complacency on the other side: the notion that the United States need not make more of a special effort with India since it has nowhere else to go but towards Washington, and that in any case it is too cussed to go far enough to make additional attention worthwhile.

  There is an additional risk. America’s own gradual transformation from a globe-straddling superpower to something less could have an impact on the relationship. An America in decline, if that is indeed what transpires, will both have less interest in India and be of less use to it in the world as a partner in its own rise. This may not be a likely scenario in the foreseeable future, since even America’s loss of sole-superpower status is unlikely to mean its ceasing to be a global power in the imaginable future. But it is something else that cannot be ignored.

  So the current scenario suggests that the transformation of India–US relations that began with the end of the Cold War is continuing its gradual course towards the evolution of a ‘special relationship’ between New Delhi and Washington. But the overall report card remains mixed.

  There are strong reasons for congruence and powerful arguments for continued closeness. India is clearly going to join the United States among the top five world powers of the twenty-first century. Both nations are anchored in democratic systems, and are committed to the rule of law, diversity and pluralism, and the encouragement of innovation and enterprise. The engagement of the two countries with each other is reinforced by the growing Indian presence in America—the 100,000 Indian students (who form the largest foreign student community there) supplementing the flourishing and influential 3-million-strong Indian-American community, who enjoy the highest median income of any American ethnic group and who are playing an increasingly prominent role in politics and government.