On Obama and India

Source: Polaris National Interest

By Vivek

Over the past two years I seem to have spilled much ink on Obama’s every utterance related to India, much of it speculative or informed by discussions with his campaign policy advisors. I’ve been severely critical of his linking Kashmir to the war in Pakistan-Afghanistan especially in public, as I felt it demonstrated a lack of understanding of India’s sensitivities, not a good sign for a potential U.S. president. This was something that Obama’s team should have drilled into him early on. I also know that one of his top South Asia advisors had been writing along similar lines as early as 2006, before Obama even announced his candidacy for president, so the inspiration for his Kashmir-related statements appeared rather obvious. I’ve been told that the team didn’t push this issue, but that Obama imbibed that message from their briefs and digested it whole.

That said, the enormous outcry in India in early November seems to have sent the appropriate message to the campaign/transition team/new administration in Washington. The last Kashmir reference, to my knowledge, by Obama was in his Time magazine interview as ‘Person of the Year’ (a star for anyone who can find one since the New Year!). His advisors have toned down their discussion of Kashmir - see this interview, for example - and the same senior advisor whose focus on Kashmir appears to have served as inspiration has himself admitted in private that a U.S. special envoy is a bad idea. Of course, there remains the odd exception.

Now turning to the second piece. I disagree somewhat with Brahma Chellaney’s analysis that the newfound U.S.-India relationship was mostly personality-driven: a love affair, as he describes it, between Manmohan Singh and George W. Bush. The reality was that the United States could not afford the world’s second largest country, a stable democracy, with the fourth largest GDP by purchasing power to be outside the nuclear mainstream. The deal was done as much for the benefit of the United States and other great powers, as for India itself. India, I should emphasize, gains immensely from it.

Even a Democratic administration, I believe, would have had to have eventually considered a similar deal, although it is immensely doubtful that it would have offered such favourable terms.During the last two years of the Clinton administration, the U.S. stuck to its demands that India meet five benchmarks before sanctions be lifted, benchmarks which in retrospect seem ludicrous (ballistic missile curbs, a dialogue with Pakistan on Kashmir, India’s CTBT signature, a fissile material freeze and world class export controls). As it turns out, the Indians - led ably by Jaswant Singh - completely outmaneuvered the United States, and India was able to get away unscathed. Under Bush, India got much much more than what the Clinton administration was considering, despite meeting only one benchmark: aligning its export controls, something it would probably have done on its own accord. While only Bush would have given India this sweet a deal, I’m certain a Democratic administration - with pressure from the U.S. Congress - would have eventually swallowed what to them would have been a bitter pill, although it would have made life much more difficult for whatever government was in power in New Delhi.

I know I’ve only covered two narrow aspects of the U.S.-India relationship (Kashmir and non-proliferation) but those two have the most potential for divergence between Republicans and Democrats. In most other realms there will, I believe, be broad continuity due to economic and societal ties, the role of the American bureaucracy, and India’s continuing allure as a partner.

I should add that Chellaney - in my opinion - is also too much of a partisan for his analyses of Indian foreign policy to be taken too seriously, although I have much respect for his thinking as a strategist on topics such as water wars. He clearly believes himself to be NSA material - as his evidently self-written Wikipedia entry indicates - under an NDA government. Moreover, his writing smacks of obvious bias, which is mostly absent in the best contemporary analyses of Indian foreign policy.