Getting India to Act Its Size

While the candidates argued about almost everything in the recent U.S. presidential campaign, there was one point on which they agreed: the need to deepen the U.S. relationship with India. When Congress ratified the U.S.-India nuclear deal this fall, that too showed overwhelming bipartisan support. All this suggests that the next president is likely to preserve at least one aspect of George W. Bush's foreign policy: his unprecedented engagement with the world's largest democracy.

Bush's open embrace of India as a friend and a modern, growing democracy—one that promises to exert a stabilizing influence far beyond its borders—was a continuation of a process Bill Clinton started. But Bush did it his way, all faith, instinct and commitment to an idea. Because he didn't waste time on the nuances, he was able to achieve something India and America had been waiting for: a dehyphenated relationship, unhinged from Washington's old India-Pakistan policy. This could turn out to have been Bush's one big foreign-policy success.

So how should his successor capitalize on it? India is complex, and a complicated partner to work with. Like all emerging powers, it thinks big but is not always able to match its ambitions with action. Over the past decade, India has shed much of its old, socialist, inward-looking xenophobia. But many Indians remain worried about the future, including post-Bush America. India is not only a stable, noisy democracy of a billion—mostly poor—people, but also has the third-largest Muslim population in the world. Yet it's also perhaps the only big country where both Islamophobia and anti-Americanism are declining. This makes it a uniquely promising partner for Washington.

While India—which has lost more lives to terrorism since 9/11 than any other nation but Iraq—still has serious national security concerns, the essential character of those concerns has changed in recent years. Indian foreign policy is no longer focused exclusively on Pakistan's external actions—and how to thwart them. New Delhi is today more concerned with what happens inside Pakistan and how to help Indians and Pakistanis both feel more secure, stable and prosperous. While the Indian government shares Washington's concerns about terrorism, it also shares an interest in Pakistan's well-being. Six decades of animosity are coming to an end.

Also changing is the surly defensiveness that long characterized Indian diplomacy and its foreign-policy debates. India is now developing a new world view, with much greater enthusiasm for multilateral cooperation on issues ranging from trade to peacekeeping. India has begun to recognize that its real clout comes not only from its size but also from the durability of its democratic institutions and its economy. But this transformation is by no means complete, and Washington should encourage it—including by not making any moves, like giving Pakistan access to high-tech military equipment, that would inflame Indian sensitivities.

While India's banks have not vaporized like America's, its economy has also suffered in the recent financial crisis. Yet keep in mind how much progress has been made. The mere fact that an economy long derided for its "Hindu rate of growth" (1 to 3 percent) now complains when growth "slows" to 7.5 percent, as it did in 2008, is a sign of how far India has come. While the recent crisis may weaken the hand of domestic reformers, the new U.S. administration should acknowledge India's turnaround and do nothing to unsettle its pride. The anti-outsourcing rhetoric that emerged during the U.S. presidential campaign needs to be given a quick burial. Popular support in India for globalization remains fragile, despite its benefits; if Washington seems to make a move to limit it, the negative reaction would be intense.

Once the dust from the current crisis settles, the world will return to more long-term concerns: reviving the WTO, climate-change negotiations and nuclear nonproliferation. Over the past decade India has become more active on all these issues. The new U.S. president should encourage it to become an even more active and confident partner, not a suspicious blocker of international initiatives.

Of course, success will depend on India's own upcoming general elections. The new American president may find himself faced with a complex, fractious governing coalition in New Delhi that makes the last two look simple by comparison. Things could prove especially difficult if one of India's many regional leaders, such as Mayawati (chief minister of Uttar Pradesh and builder of a high-caste/low-caste coali-tion), gets the top job. Even if the new coalition is led by the Congress party and the BJP, the process of political devolution that started in 1989 is likely to continue, making India even more complex. This process will produce more-autonomous states and more-powerful regional leaders, all of whom must be courted. Many of them will have unfamiliar names, and some won't even speak English. But together they will represent the aspirations and energy of the new India. And the new U.S. president will have to learn to do business with them, no matter how bafflingly complex that proves to be.

Gupta is editor in chief of the Indian Express.

© 2008