The Hindu : Opinion / Leader Page Articles : From Eisenhower to Clinton to Bush

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Mar 01, 2006

Opinion

Opinion - Leader Page Articles

From Eisenhower to Clinton to Bush

Harish Khare

The India-U.S. relationship cannot easily graduate into a strategicjugalbandhiwithout all shades of Indian nationalism feeling comfortable with Washington's global agenda.

BY THIS evening George W. Bush will have landed in New Delhi to a mixed reception. Dwight Eisenhower, the first American President to visit free India, drove in an open car to a tumultuous welcome. That was in 1959, the Cold War was still raging fiercely, the United States was not particularly friendly to us, we felt sentimentally close to the Soviet Union; yet the Indian people turned out in huge numbers to welcome the visiting American President. That kind of reception certainly does not await Mr. Bush. His visit, instead, has invoked all the dormant emotions Indians feel towards the U.S.: outright hostility, unspoken suspicion, and a grudging admiration for the American model.

India has changed since President Eisenhower's visit; it has changed even more dramatically since President Bill Clinton came in the summer of 2000. In between these two visits, India learnt how to cope with a cultivated animosity in Washington towards New Delhi. Successive Indian political elites, spread across various parties, managed to devise ways of warding off the overbearing Americans and succeeded in preserving and furthering national interest as they saw it. Since 1991,when the Indian economy underwent a paradigm shift, the Americans began sniffing considerable profits in doing business with India. After initial fears and apprehensions about globalisation, the Indian elites — political, economic, and bureaucratic — have developed a knack for standing up to the demanding American. Perhaps nothing has helped more to produce a mental comfort level than the experience of former American Ambassadors returning to New Delhi as salesmen for assorted business interests. Our regional political entrepreneurs have shown how easy it is to procure the presence of a former American President. The India to which Mr. Bush comes is a country that is curiously self-assured, able to take in its stride any visitor, however pretentious.

Both President Bush and his host, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, will do well to understand the depth of suspicion the average Indian has traditionally entertained about the U.S. Without addressing the nature of this estrangement, neither Mr. Bush nor Dr. Singh will be able to take the India-U.S. partnership to a new level. To the traditional suspicion has been added an intense discomfort over what Mr. Bush has been doing in Iraq and over what he is threatening to do in Iran.

Since 1991, Indian nationalism has got divided into two streams. First, there is metropolitan nationalism, which can be sited in the new Indian middle class. The 300-million-strong group is often inclined to define its interests mostly in economic terms. These Indians have aspirations to improve their lifestyle many times over in their lifetime, and they believe that a serious and sustained economic engagement with the U.S. is the key to those aspirations. Though these metropolitan nationalists have bought into the American dream and its partial replication in India — shopping malls, computers, cell-phones, metro trains, shining cars, and comfortable apartments — they also remain anchored in a vague "India first" ethos. The metropolitan nationalist is willing to give the U.S. the benefit of the doubt when Washington professes a democratic kinship, but it remains sceptical when it comes to American intentions on accommodating the hardcore Indian sovereign agenda like a nuclear state status, Kashmir, and national unity.

The metropolitan nationalism of the new Indian middle class is less phoney than that of the old bureaucratic elites. In the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s the elites sent their children for education and better life chances to the U.S. while back home they shouted the loudest against American perfidies. Today the hypocrisy has melted away, mostly because the new Indian middle class has come to believe in itself and its capacity to work its way around a globalised world.

The metropolitan nationalist sports a quiet confidence and would not be taken in by the tricky American salesman. The American connection has become a workable — and a paying — proposition for this newly empowered middle class. The metropolitan nationalist is morally at ease in his admiration for the U.S., partly because there is no Soviet Union to make a countervailing claim on his emotions. China remains too distant and too much of a nationalist rival to be accorded any kind of joyful salute.

The second stream of Indian nationalism is to be located in the vast mofussil India. This part of India remains unimpressed and uninterested in the U.S. for the simple reason that the "American dream" has no relevance for 700 million Indians who struggle everyday with deprivations and discomforts. In small and medium towns like Sitapur, Moradabad, Ambala, Kota, Kozhikode, and Dharwad, the U.S. remains a distant country that can only wish ill for this nation. The mofussil nationalist has not been given any reason to revise his traditional view that suspects Washington of resenting our rise as a great power. It was this streak of suspicion that has even questioned Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's ability to protect our national interests in the on-going nuclear deal negotiations.

To this reservoir of traditional suspicion has been added intense discomfort over what the U.S. has shown it is capable of doing to a country — Afghanistan, Iraq — in the name of "a regime change." In particular, the minorities in India — as elsewhere — have come to question the anti-Islam bias in the American formulations and policies. Not just the minorities, mofussil India does not like the idea of any nation, however powerful, beating up another country. There is a joyful resentment against the U.S. in these small and medium towns. And the political parties like the Communist Party of India (Marxist), the Communist Party of India, the Samajwadi Party, and the Bahujan Samaj Party cannot be blamed for wanting to tap these natural resentments.

It is too much to expect that Mr. Bush can say or do anything during his short stay in India to put at ease the mofussil nationalist. One can only hope that he will not be so self-absorbed as to want to make a case for his neo-con agenda, an itch that would annoy even the metropolitan nationalist. It remains to be seen if Mr. Bush can find the words to begin the process of convincing the Indians that Washington accepts New Delhi as an honourable high table partner.

Mr. Bush will be gone in a few days, but the Prime Minister will still be left with the daunting task of bringing about reconciliation between the two versions of Indian nationalism when implementing a foreign policy agenda. The controversy over the recent "Iran vote" is a classic manifestation of the disjoint between the two varieties of Indian nationalism. But the divergence became more pronounced because of the presumed American breathing down the Indian neck. The disquiet on the Manmohan Singh Government's stance towards Iran has not quite as much to do with the minorities' dismay as with middle India's resentment of American presumptuousness.

No Indian Prime Minister, certainly not one from the Congress stable, need be too solicitous of the minorities in matters of foreign policy. Like the majority, the minorities, too, have always had divisions and differences. For instance, even at the height of the 1971 confrontation between India and Pakistan the Muslim leadership was split into two groups. One group, headed by the Majlis-e-Mushawarat, was unwilling to blame General Yahya Khan's atrocities in East Pakistan as the core of the crisis, while the other section, headed by the Jamiat-ul-Ulema, had unequivocally condemned the military dictator. Minorities never had — nor claim to have — any kind of veto power over foreign policy. The Indian democratic polity is vibrant enough to be able to sort out the Iran vote complexities without having to subscribe to Mr. Bush's post-9/11 categories of friends and enemies. All that is required of the Indian leadership is to do a convincing and credible job of promoting our national interests in a manner that all shades of Indian nationalism can appreciate.

For any Indian Prime Minister the trick would be to bring about a harmony between two manifestations of Indian nationalism and American interests. In 1974 Indira Gandhi had written to Patrick Moynihan, who had just finished an ambassadorial assignment in New Delhi and characterised her father, Jawaharlal Nehru, as anti-American. She pointed out: "There were elements in America of which he certainly disapproved. But he did realise that these attitudes were not confined to the U.S. We find them amongst the people of other affluent countries and indeed in some sections of our own people ... But he had the greatest admiration for the vision which guided America's Founding Fathers." Now Mr. Bush invokes the Founding Fathers to seek to spread democracy around the world.

Has India acquired enough collective self-assurance to accept Mr. Bush's hand of friendship, do a nuclear deal with him without getting sucked into Washington's imperial misadventures across the globe? The India-U.S. relationship cannot easily graduate into a strategic jugalbandhi without all shades of Indian nationalism feeling comfortable with Washington's global agenda. This is as much to do with the churning in a changing India as with the contentions within the minuscule strategic community. The Bush visit can at best help decide the limited debate over the nuclear deal but the larger project of the India-U.S. relationship will remain contingent upon our internal élan.

Printer friendly page
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Opinion

News Update

Stories in this Section

When silence speaks just as loud

From Eisenhower to Clinton to Bush

Was Bush speech a warning on separation?

For mature, strong bonds

Back to the villages in China

Nuclear separation scenarios