Partners or Strategic Allies?

Mumbaikars are getting really confused as the city gears up for the Obama swing through India’s “commercial and financial capital.” They have read that this will be the longest visit the U.S. president has made to any country and the earliest to India of any predecessor. They recall that our Prime Minister’s visit to Washington last year was the first occasion for the first State visit by any leader so the two countries must be very close.

It is rumoured that the President’s programme will touch all the right buttons. The delegation will stay at the Taj Hotel in remembrance of the victims including six Americans, almost exactly two years after the terrorist attack on Mumbai. He will speak to the captains of industry under the auspices of the U.S. India Business Council, probably at the Trident which was also one of the targets. He will address the people of Mumbai at the Gateway of India, because it is the gateway to India and a fine backdrop for American TV channels who will, no doubt, deface it with their billboards. He cannot visit Chattrapati Shivaji Terminal or the Chabbad House because they would justifiably be regarded as security nightmares. Nor the Leopold café because nobody could figure out what message that could send. But the places left out will, no doubt, be visited by numerous American and Indian TV channels as they seek to rewrite the dreadful carnage that occurred. He would also bless Indo-U.S. Naval cooperation from a distance in time and space.

As if that’s not enough to set the average head spinning, newspapers in Delhi have been providing space for the last many weeks to the agenda-setters for the talks with the Prime Minister. The usual suspects among the vast and growing tribe of analysts and commentators, which I want to be part of, have proffered every kind of advice.

Keep the big picture in mind but don’t forget to take up the HIB Visa fee hike which will cost the $60 billion Indian IT industry all of $200 million.

Discuss Afghanistan with the Americans, who are hell bent on leaving next year, even though Forward Operating Base(s) building goes on at a feverish pace all over Afghanistan and contracts worth millions are being handed out, sending a different message. Explain our superior understanding of the reality on the Afghan ground but be resolute about our aid programmes which the Afghans love. Advise against false dichotomies between good and bad Taliban.

Take up the exponentially exploding American arms aid to Pakistan, since General Kayani insists that their threat perception remains India-centric and former President Musharaf recently chimed in to assert that of course they had used American aid to arm themselves against India.

Meanwhile strengthen defence and security relations by concluding our arms purchases, running into billions of dollars and helping to sustain American jobs but do not sign the inter-operability agreements the Americans are, inexplicably, so keen on.

Conclude further agreements on cooperation in Space in the hope that ISRO and it’s affiliates and subsidiaries will be taken off the “Entities” list when the U.S. ‘reforms” it’s export controls on dual use items and technologies so that India can become a partner not a target. About time think Mumbaikars who did not know that India was ever a target of anything for the Americans.

Most important of all fulfill the potential of the strategic partnership by operationalizing the Indo-U.S. –Civil Nuclear Energy Agreement but definitely do not amend the recently passed Civil Nuclear Liability legislation because we can surely explain to the Americans that it is compatible with the international regime.

Oh, and Jammu and Kashmir is an internal matter in which we really don’t want anyone to interfere but we can inform the Americans, for the nth time, of how Pakistan sponsors and instigates violence in the Valley.

American think tanks are also weighing in with advice to President Obama. Announce support to India’s bid for permanent membership of the Security Council even though UN reform is , at least, twenty years away, so he can win Indian hearts at no cost.

Reassure the Indians on Afghanistan now that the strategic dialogue with Pakistan is out of the way, billions of dollars of new and repackaged arms aid announced, a Presidential visit in 2011 announced and some unannounced Agreements concluded.

Then there are the global commons about which Indo-U.S. interest are generally assumed to coincide. After all we do have a shared interest in keeping open the sea lanes, especially in the Indian Ocean. But we must cooperate without naming the one who is not rising so peacefully, after all.

The short list of global issues on which our interests do not coincide include climate change, the Doha round of trade talks, the role of Pakistan as the epicenter of terrorism and how it foments periodic outbursts of violence in Srinagar, the proliferation of nuclear weapons and technology to and by our neighbours etc.

Then there are countries such as Cuba, Iran, Myanmar which the Americans still call Burma on which we have vastly different perspectives. Thank God apartheid and colonialism are out of the way otherwise there would be even more to disagree about.

Officials from both sides are saying that there is a rich Agenda for the talks including defence, climate change, science and technology, trade, market access and hi-tech exports. Rich indeed, say Mumbaikars but strategic?

With all this confusion Mumbaikars are falling back on their famous ‘jugaad’ to somehow enjoy the visit and get a glimpse of this most unusual of American Presidents and his equally remarkable First Lady about whose programme the rumour mills are just beginning to grind.

Neelam Deo is Co-founder and Director, Gateway House: Indian Council on Global Relations, Mumbai and is a former Indian Ambassador. She has served in the Indian Embassy in Washington D.C. as well as Consul General of India in New York.

This article/blog was exclusively written for Gateway House: Indian Council on Global Relations. You can read more exclusive content here.

For interview requests with the author, or for permission to republish, please contact outreach@gatewayhouse.in.