When Barack Obama arrives in India on November 6 he’ll be the sixth sitting US president to visit India. American presidents don’t generally come calling to third world countries like India during their first term, but Obama is doing so after having already granted Prime Minister Manmohan Singh the honour of hosting him at his first state dinner as president in November 2009. India and the United States also held their first-ever strategic dialogue in Washington in June this year, symbolizing a sort of diplomatic parity for India with China.
At the strategic dialogue, Under Secretary of State William Burns went on record saying that the US government was ‘deeply committed to supporting India’s rise and to building the strongest possible partnership between us.’ (However, the Indo-US strategic dialogue took place days after the US-Pakistan dialogue, suggesting that Washington continues to hyphenate India and Pakistan.) In the same speech, Burns moved the US closer than ever before towards openly supporting a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council for India.
Yet despite these gestures, Obama’s India glass still stands half-empty, and it’ll require lot of grit on his part to make this visit transformational, rather than rhetorical. Obama is going to be landing in India with the baggage of past missed chances to deepen relations with Asia’s third-largest economy. After all, Obama started his presidency with a chance to take bilateral relations with India to a new high after inheriting a solid legacy from his Republican predecessor George W. Bush, who doggedly navigated US-India relations with the goal of bringing the world’s most powerful democracy together with the world’s largest democracy in an effective united front against a rising China (including through a historic civilian nuclear cooperation agreement).
But nearly two years later, there are more red lines than green lights in US-India relations. Obama’s please-all approach in his Asian diplomacy will likely displease all major actors in the region: China, Japan, India and Pakistan. His China policy is a particular case in point. The most notable problem is his administration’s idea of co-ordinating its South Asia policy with China, which raises a major red flag for India. The Indian government finds it absolutely unacceptable to give any monitoring role to any power—least of all to China, which has been increasing its stakes in South Asia as well the Indian Ocean region despite it being neither a South Asian power nor an Indian Ocean country.
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Hariharan
Excellent article. Sumit Ganguly has written a fine piece in Newsweek this April that “Barack Obama is in danger of reversing all the progress his predecessors, including George W. Bush, made in forging closer U.S. ties with India. Preoccupied with China and the Middle East, the Obama administration has allotted little room on its schedule for India, and failed to get much done in the short time it did make.” While some initial baby steps are commendable, President Obama’s administration hasn’t done enough to enhance US-India relations. The main issue here is that his team has tried too hard to cooperate with China in addressing regional and global challenges and has not done enough to bolster India. http://carnegieendowment.org/events/?fa=eventDetail&id=3062
Washingtonian think tanks suggest that the US can best serve its interests and those of India by ensuring that its policies toward India do not undermine the pursuit of wider international cooperation on these global issues. IMO, there’s some ultra-cautiousness dealing with India, and way too lax when it comes to China. It should be the other way around, and that’s just plain common sense, given where things are headed. New Delhi hasn’t pointed this out, neither has there been an effort on Indian think tanks to lay out convergence of interests, which has been somehow read as divergent interests in Washington.
Washington’s argument has been that the US can only contribute marginally to India’s success or failure. New Delhi needs to come clear that what is been asked for is as simple as avoiding a Beijing-Washington consensus before making calls on various issues. The fruitlessness of such a posture is evident.
Three of the five permanent members of the UNSC — Russia, the United Kingdom, and France — had already endorsed India’s candidacy, leaving only the US and China “as strange bedfellows that have resisted the inclination to support New Delhi’s claims.” This is the time for President Obama to refuse kowtowing to Chinese pressure and categorically state that it is in US interests to openly support a UNSC permanent seat for India, and also get the job done. At the same time, President Obama should also accelerate India’s assimilation into global non-proliferation bodies such as the Nuclear Suppliers Group, the Missile Technology Control Regime, the Australia Group, and the Wassenaar Arrangement.
Most likely the House will go to the Republicans in next week’s elections leaving another two years for President Obama to deliver game changing results at home and abroad. Indeed, not just Americans, but the world awaits on his promise of hope and change we can believe in. Unless quality output comes out of think tanks, for the foreseeable future, the three states will simply operate a triangular relationship, with none of them being close partners of the others.
Shahenshah
India and a Third Worlde Nation? Times have changed. The conditions, too, are changing. She is a developing country now.
Nathan
India is the biggest lemon being oversold to the world! It’s a sham democracy and a failed state which is gonna balkanize itself by 2050 yet Indians and the western media constantly proclaim India Shining…..yeah shoes!
Hariharan
Going by the popular but wrong definition of the term, India has characteristics of the first, second, and third world. Indeed, India is a country of contradictions.
The term ‘Third World’ arose during the Cold War to define countries that remained non-aligned or not moving at all with either capitalism and NATO (which along with its allies represented the First World) or communism and the Soviet Union (which along with its allies represented the Second World). This definition provided a way of broadly categorizing the nations of the Earth into three groups based on social, political, and economic divisions. [Source: Wikipedia]
A highly recommended book — The Second World: How Emerging Powers Are Redefining Global Competition in the Twenty-first Century:
http://www.amazon.com/Second-World-Redefining-Competition-Twenty-first/dp/0812979842
This should give a good perspective on what the term ’second world’ means today.
Satrap
China not “a South Asian power”? Recall that China is a part of SAARC and has borders with almost all South Asian countries. Recall that China is the largest trading partner with almost all South Asian states including with India. There is no use pretending this is not the case just because you wish it weren’t so.
Rajeev Sharma
@Satrap China is not a member of the 8-nation SAARC, though it wants to become. And since when volume of trade has become an indicator of geography. By that logic, China should be known as an American power too because the China-US trade is currently $ 325 billion!!!