(From THE FAR EASTERN ECONOMIC REVIEW) By Harsh V. Pant
Barack Obama says he regards India and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh "as part of his family." "This is the reason why I decided to invite Manmohan Singh, who I admire a lot, on the first state visit of my presidency on Thanksgiving Day," Mr. Obama told prominent Indian-American leader Sant Chatwal recently. Indian media prominently carried this statement, and given the importance Indians tend to attach to family connections, much is being read into the symbolism of Obama's invite.
As the Indian prime minister prepares to be the first state guest of the Obama presidency on Nov. 24, both sides are leaving no stone unturned to ensure that the visit lives up to the hype. Will all the pomp and ceremony be sufficient to gloss over widening policy differences between the two states? The visit comes at a time when there is a real concern that Indo-U.S. ties are adrift. Even a year after Mr. Obama's victory, Indians have yet to gain comfort with his presidency. India continues to pine for George W. Bush, whose single-handed reversal of the entrenched U.S. hostility towards India on Kashmir and nonproliferation makes him one of the most important U.S. presidents for India.
Indeed, the strengthening of U.S.-India relations might turn out to be one of the most significant achievements of the Bush administration's foreign policy. Whether he was preventing the non-proliferation lobby from wrecking the hugely significant civilian nuclear energy cooperation pact, or using his clout to bring recalcitrant nations in the Nuclear Suppliers Group around, Bush was ready to spend any amount of political capital to build a new partnership with India. For eight years, India occupied a pride of place in the strategic calculus of the US. India was wooed as a rising power. It was seen as a pole in the emerging global balance of power and as the primary actor in South Asia, de-hyphenated from Pakistan. And then it was given what it had long desired -- a de facto status as a nuclear weapon state.
On the other hand, Mr. Obama's tryst with India started on a wrong note. His tough stand against outsourcing during his presidential campaign and talk of a tax agenda punishing companies who "shop jobs overseas" did not go down well in India. The Indian Prime Minister apparently was not on the first list of leaders to receive a call from Mr. Obama after his victory, and Indian strategic elites, obsessed with symbolism in international diplomacy, thought that India would not be viewed as an important player. In the beginning, Mr. Obama only mentioned India when discussing how to sort out Kashmir to find a solution to America's Afghan troubles. The talk of a strategic partnership all but disappeared.
The immediate challenge of dealing with a growing Taliban threat in Afghanistan and Pakistan led the Obama Administration to adopt a very different set of priorities in which India seemed to have a marginal role. When Mr. Obama decided to make Asia the new pivot of his foreign policy, it didn't appear as though India had a place on his agenda. Instead, his administration flirted with the idea of G-2, a global condominium of U.S. and China whereby China could be expected to look after and "manage" the Asia-Pacific.
But the administration soon began to recalibrate its policy response toward India. The U.S. started to backtrack after it said it would play an active role in the resolution of the Kashmir conflict, saying that it was neither trying to "negotiate" a dialogue between India and Pakistan nor pressuring the two to resume bilateral talks. It also underlined that India's role was vital for the success of U.S. AfPak strategy, but none of India's inputs were accepted when the Obama administration formulated its strategy toward the region.
Though many Indians continue to believe that India and the U.S. share a common interest in tackling terrorism and extremism, the U.S. remains lukewarm to the idea of involving India in its larger strategy towards AfPak for fear of antagonizing Pakistan. India feels that it showed great restraint in the aftermath of the Mumbai terror attacks in November 2008, yet Washington seems intent on sidelining Indian concerns even as India is now being targeted directly in Afghanistan by the extremists for its reconstruction works. Gen. Stanley McChrystal's view that "increasing Indian influence in Afghanistan is likely to exacerbate regional tensions" is seen as indicative of U.S. attempts to marginalize India in its Afghanistan strategy. Meanwhile, Pakistan continues to drag its feet in bringing the masterminds of the Mumbai terror attacks to justice as demanded by both India and the U.S.
Hillary Clinton's visit to India in July aimed at re-stabilizing Indo-U.S. ties, and she managed to secure several concrete agreements. The two countries finalized a deal which allowed U.S. companies to sell sophisticated weapon systems to India. Space cooperation also got a boost with an agreement that facilitated the use of U.S. satellites and satellite components on Indian launch vehicles. As a framework for future talks, Ms. Clinton announced a six-pillared bilateral strategic dialogue covering issues ranging from defense and nonproliferation to education and agriculture, the most wide-ranging and comprehensive dialogue "that has ever been put on the table" between the two states. Yet as Ms. Clinton found during her talks in New Delhi on climate change, the divergence between the two democracies is growing on three critical issues of global significance -- climate change, global trade negotiations and non-proliferation. All three are priority areas for Mr. Obama and the next few months are likely to see much multilateral activity on these fronts.
With a new United Nations climate treaty due to be agreed in Copenhagen in December, Washington and Delhi are trying to bridge their differences on how to curb greenhouse gas emissions. The United States wants developing countries such as India and China to control the emissions being produced by their rapidly growing economies, setting time-bound targets to this effect. Yet India argues that it has one of lowest emissions per capital. It maintains that the U.S. proposal would hurt its economic growth and wants the industrialized world to curb its pollution as well as fund new technologies in the developing world. Not only will it be politically difficult to agree on binding targets, it will also be near-impossible for the Indian government to abide by any such targets.
One of the major stumbling blocks in global negotiations on climate change has been the reluctance of the developed world to make adequate transfers of finance and to enable technology in the developing world. This would help the developing world reduce emissions without incurring as many out-of-pocket costs. India is seeking a bilateral arrangement with the U.S. on this issue with an understanding that it can serve as a model for an agreement between the developed and developing world at Copenhagen.
The World Trade Report 2009 has suggested that world trade may shrink by an unprecedented 10% this year. Given this bleak outlook, a revival of the Doha round of trade talks can send the right kind of signals to various stakeholders in the global economy. Both the United States and India have hinted that they are ready to re-launch efforts to reach a new global trade deal under the Doha negotiations.
The Doha talks collapsed last year after coming very close to an agreement primarily because of differences between Washington and emerging economies, led by India, over proposals to help farmers in poor nations. The U.S. and India have serious differences on the level of protection that can be given to farmers as and when the global market for farm products is opened up. The U.S. suggested that developing nations such as India need to provide greater market access for the talks to advance. India argues that it cannot compromise on food security and livelihood concerns even as the U.S. and the EU remain hesitant about scaling down their own agricultural subsidies. It is possible that India would be more willing to make unpopular concessions at home for the sake of collective economic gains, but this can happen only if the developed world provides reciprocal concessions by phasing out its own agricultural subsidies, which is highly unlikely given the current economic turmoil. Though the dismal state of the global economy and the need to revive global trade may prompt the U.S. and India to rethink their earlier strategies, domestic political constraints remain as strong as ever.
The G-8 statement on non-proliferation at the L'Aquila summit in July came as a major surprise for India. The statement committed the advanced industrial world to implementing on a "national basis" the "useful and constructive proposals" towards strengthening controls on enrichment and reprocessing (ENR) items and technology. It underscored the importance of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), insisting that those states that have not yet signed the treaty join. It was just last September that the Nuclear Supplier's Group (NSG) had agreed to grant India a clean exemption, thereby allowing nuclear exports of sensitive technology under safeguards to India.
The G-8 agreement on banning the ENR items to countries that are not signatories to the NPT effectively puts the future of the landmark U.S.-India nuclear deal of 2005 in jeopardy. While India will still be able to buy nuclear fuel and reactors from the G-8 or NSG countries, questions have arisen about the intentions of the Obama Administration regarding the future of the deal, and whether it would try to further dilute the bargain contained in the "India exemption" of the NSG waiver of last year.
The Obama Administration cannot make meaningful progress on its non-proliferation agenda unless it brings India into the fold of the global non-proliferation regime. With the administration trying push through the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and the Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty, the trouble for India might just be beginning. Though Washington has made it clear that it will honor the commitments of the nuclear pact, the text remains open to interpretation, and Delhi fears that it will be a particularly restrictive reading of the text under the present political dispensation. For India, the fact that it is already negotiating with the Russians and the French mitigates some of the impact of this uncertainty. There is also hope that the American private sector will not allow any dilution of the text for fear of becoming less competitive, underscoring the conflicting commercial and non-proliferation agendas within the U.S. system.
In many ways, these developments underline the unique position that India holds in the global nuclear hierarchy. It is an outlier in every way. While the non-nuclear weapon states resent the special treatment granted to India by the U.S.-India nuclear pact, they are reluctant to allow the emergence of another nuclear state. The Bush Administration recognized the importance of resetting the terms of global nuclear discourse and of bringing India into the larger non-proliferation framework as a responsible nuclear state with an advanced nuclear technological base. Mr. Obama has decided to take a more traditional view of the problem, linking the issue of nuclear proliferation to the strengthening of old treaties. This has again put India on the defensive. A defensive India surrounded by two nuclear adversaries who have been colluding on nuclear issues for the last three decades is never going to be a part of the 1968 nuclear non-proliferation regime.
These underlying differences between the U.S. and India are now forcing a re-assessment of their relationship. While economic and social relations will retain their momentum, political frictions are likely to intensify in the near future. Burgeoning defense ties between the two notwithstanding, India's domestic politics as well as its desire for "strategic autonomy" make it highly unlikely that this country will ever emerge as a close ally of the U.S. in the traditional sense. If Americans are hoping to cultivate another ally, India, for sure, is not the right candidate on which to expend its energies. For all the hype about India and the U.S. being "natural partners," neither country is used to partnerships among equals. India remains too proud, too argumentative and too large a nation to offer itself as a junior partner to any state, including the U.S. How the two democracies adjust to this reality will shape the future of their relationship. A mere Thanksgiving invite to the Indian Prime Minister will not be of much help.
---
Harsh V. Pant teaches at King's College London and is the author, most recently, of Contemporary Debates in Indian Foreign and Security Policy (Palgrave Macmillan).
