It may be too much to hope that the invitation to Barack Obama to be chief guest at the next Republic Day ceremony will put an end to anguished moaning about the United States forever linking India and Pakistan. The link however is less in US actions than in our thinking, a manifestation of both India’s diplomatic immaturity and the obsession with Pakistan. But Narendra Modi’s invitation will serve a useful purpose if it makes Indian foreign policy less opaque and more straightforward so that this other love that dare not speak its name can be openly acknowledged.
It is not only in emergencies like the 1962 war or the drought and food shortage during Lyndon Johnson’s presidency that India cannot do without American help. The US is permanently necessary for trade, investment, energy, technological expertise and fighting terrorism. Strong India-US ties reinforce India’s bargaining position with China, Pakistan and the rest of the world. George W. Bush’s cooperation with Manmohan Singh’s nuclear policy, ending India’s isolation in the nuclear world, confirmed that the Lone Superpower alone can perform certain services. Thus, although in itself the invitation may achieve little, the symbolic gesture conveys goodwill and a desire for stronger relations.
A similar surprise invitation to Singapore’s Goh Chok Tong in 1994 marked the beginning of P.V. Narasimha Rao’s activated Look East policy and India’s closer ties with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. Mr Obama’s presence in New Delhi on January 26, 2015, could mark the beginning of another phase in the evolution of our foreign policy. It will not be altogether new for though this is not admitted and therefore isn’t widely known, India was courting the Americans even before 1947. It was the US that rebuffed us. Asaf Ali, whom Jawaharlal Nehru sent to Washington as India’s first ambassador, discovered that soon enough when secretary of state George C. Marshall ignored his proposal for a treaty of friendship, commerce and navigation.
Follow-up overtures by Sir Girja Shankar Bajpai and other Indian diplomats were also rejected. Once in 1949, the state department noted smugly it had cleverly solved “the problem” (of Indian importuning “to establish a formal blueprint of relations” that would mean sharing military secrets) by classifying India “upwards to the category of countries receiving ‘restricted’ US military information” and making “a deliberate effort to furnish the Indian military attaché (in Washington) with relatively harmless but somewhat impressive military information...” Nevertheless, Ram Jethmalani suggested Atal Behari Vajpayee should clinch a military pact when Bill Clinton visited India.
Mr Modi’s invitation may raise some eyebrows because the US refused him a visa for so long. There is no exceptional dichotomy here however. The Vietnam War slogan “Yankee go home but take me with you” well expresses Indian ambivalence towards America. “When I call on Cabinet ministers, the President, or governors, they all love to talk about their sons, sons-in-law and daughters in the United States and how well they’re doing and how well they like things,” mused William B. Saxbe, American ambassador in the Seventies. “The next day I read in the papers the very same people are denouncing the United States as a totally different kind of country.”
As I noted in my book, Waiting for America: India and the US in the New Millennium, “Private yearning in India went hand in hand with public loathing.” Project Star Sapphire to build radar defences on the Nepal-Tibet border and nuclear-powered sensor devices on the Nanda Devi and Nanda Kot mountains to eavesdrop on China’s Lop Nor tests were two instances of secret collaboration between the Indian and American intelligence agencies that no Indian leader would ever admit. The CIA helped to organise India’s own intelligence agency, the Research and Analysis Wing, and, especially, its Aviation Research Centre. India helped it to recruit Tibetans who were trained in guerrilla warfare and infiltrated into Tibet. According to Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, former ambassador to India, the US twice funded Indira Gandhi who was most vociferous in damning the CIA as the “Foreign Hand” and her Congress to fight Communists in West Bengal and Kerala.
A difference between public rhetoric and private action is characteristic of many politicians and governments. It just happened to be more marked in India because many of our leaders were astutely aware that the socialist commitment and Afro-Asian and non-aligned solidarity they ostentatiously cultivated for political reasons did not best serve India’s economic and military interests. So they tried to keep several lobbies happy simultaneously, giving an impression of inconsistency and opportunism. Yet the desire for closer US ties was so compelling that I would not be surprised if a similar invitation hasn’t been thought of before. South Block’s once strong pro-Soviet lobby may have shot it down. Or — this seems more likely — New Delhi may have received informal indications that Washington would not welcome an invitation. Rather than court a snub, India affected to ignore the US.
Development being his mantra, as Mr Modi said in Kashmir on Saturday, he must have great hopes of an Obama visit. But as American businessmen told him in September, they need concrete inducements to do business in India. Land must be generously available. Labour must be both productive and disciplined. Taxes must be rationalised. Roads, railways, ports, telecommunications — all aspects of the infrastructure in short — must be brought up to 21st century world standards. Red tape must be eased. Mr Obama’s presence will not otherwise yield the expected dividend.
I hope it does. But I also hope it doesn’t encourage ingratiating servility like a Bihar MP vowing not to wash for three months the hand that Mr Clinton had shaken.
The writer is a senior journalist, columnist and author
