India's place in the new U.S. world view By Malini Parthasarathy
The Hindu (January 30, 2001)

CONVENTIONAL WISDOM amongst Delhi's diplomatic and strategic analysts has it that a Republican administration in Washington best suits India's interests because unlike the Democrats who are said to thrust too assertively their agenda of nuclear non- proliferation, the Republicans are thought to be less concerned with advancing such goals and instead more interested in exploring the potential for expanding economic engagement. This thinking has indeed coloured the approach of policy-makers in Delhi to the newly inaugurated Bush administration with a good deal of optimism and anticipation. Thus while the establishment in Delhi acknowledges that it was a Democratic administration in Washington which reinvigorated the ossified context and structure of the Indo-American relationship, there is now a conscious effort at the higher levels of policymaking to locate new premises of engagement with which to reach out to the administration of Mr. George W. Bush. But if the world view that was unveiled in the testimony of the new Secretary of State, Gen. Colin Powell, is any indication, those in India's political establishment seeking to sustain the high cordiality and the warmth that was generated in the Clinton era between the two countries will have to reckon with a number of strategic realities that might not have figured in the breezy generalities of the Clinton worldview. In view of the strategic stakes that the Vajpayee regime placed in the relationship with Washington, particularly in relation to its strategy of ``containing'' Pakistan, the lack of any countervailing strategic emphasis on the part of the Clinton administration in its focus on Asia did make it easy for New Delhi to push ahead with its assertive engagement of Washington, counting as it did on Mr. Bill Clinton and his aides to go along with India's view of a truculent and subversive regime in Islamabad.   But as Gen. Powell's testimony which had unmistakable echoes of the Gulf War era in America's foreign policy made clear, Washington's strategic focus in Asia has changed subtly. If the Clinton administration had a more upbeat view of its engagement with China and was in fact seen as courting Beijing, the Bush administration is already sounding decidedly wary. The evangelical tone of the new Secretary of State's remarks on China, which must surely grate on Chinese ears, suggests a throwback to a decade or more earlier in American foreign policy. According to Gen. Powell, ``I hope that with full membership of the WTO, with increasingly responsible behaviour in the region and in the world and most vitally, hopefully with increased freedom for the Chinese people, China may yet fulfill the promise that Sun Yat Sen laid out almost 100 years ago.'' Apart from this gratuitous endorsement of a Kuomintang icon, likely to be seen as a provocative reference by the People's Republic, the new Secretary of State also said emphatically ``in the meantime, we will treat China as she merits... a strategic partner China is not but neither is China our inevitable and implacable foe...''

Gen. Powell's testimony made it amply evident that the Bush administration is likely to draw heavily upon the moral universe that was in operation during the administration of the President's father, the former President, Mr. George Bush Sr., with the concepts of democracy and capitalism held out as ``twin lasers working in tandem all across the globe to illuminate the last dark corners of totalitarianism and dictatorship''. The new Secretary of State has also hinted strongly that the Bush administration will give new emphasis and life to ties with Japan and Indonesia, implying that these were given lower priority by the previous administration which had concentrated on engaging China. It is more than likely that given the return of emphasis to a strategy that eyes China warily even as it prefers to anchor itself to the reliables of yesterday such as the alliances with Japan, Indonesia and Australia in Asia, the scope for the engagement of other powers in Asia, including India, will be clearly defined. In the Clinton era, it might have been possible for India to build a relationship with the United States on fresh premises and even to resist the temptation of offering itself as a potential counterweight to China, because the Clinton administration was not interested in creating such a countervailing force. But now for India to acquire real strategic value in the eyes of the Bush administration without becoming a pawn in the American strategic calculus in the Asian region hinges ironically on whether India can jettison its own strategic dependence on the U.S. to advance its interests in relation to Pakistan.

Today, Indian diplomacy has managed to coopt the global powers to its perspective that a Pakistan which is sponsoring ``jehad'' is an untrustworthy interlocutor. New Delhi has, in fact, created the absurd paradox that while it still claims that it is against external mediation of the dispute over Kashmir, it continues to shy away from engaging the Musharraf regime in Pakistan. So successful was the Vajpayee-Jaswant Singh engagement of Clinton's Washington that at the end of the Prime Minister's visit last September, the Clinton administration officials had almost unquestioningly bought India's argument that there could be no talks with Pakistan until cross-border terrorism ceased completely. Thus there was an amended version of the famous ``Four R's'' of Mr. Clinton which included a ``return to dialogue'' on India's part, which reflected in the post-Clinton- Vajpayee summit briefings by administration officials who predicated the ``return to dialogue'' formulation on the premise that it must be ``at the appropriate time when the atmosphere is correct.'' Small wonder that the officials in the Prime Ministerial delegation returned home flushed with the success of their diplomatic coup of sorts in Washington.

The question today is that with a new administration in Washington that has its own ideas about its strategic priorities in Asia but which has of course made it clear that it is more than willing to sustain the high level of interest in engaging India, will it be possible for the Vajpayee administration to have the same strategic expectations of the Bush establishment as it had of the Clinton administration, without having to fulfill similar strategic expectations from the other side? If indeed Mr. Vajpayee and his colleagues have been leaning on Washington to put pressure on Islamabad to contain militancy in Kashmir and to accept New Delhi's perspective of the strained context of relations with Pakistan, would it be realistic to believe that the new Bush administration might not have the unstated but implied calculation that India would begin to play the role, albeit subtly, of a countervailing force in the Asian region against China? The Vajpayee administration has already shown that it is not above the temptation of tapping into the residual Sinophobia that exists in the corridors of power in America, as demonstrated in the Prime Minister's remarks to the U.S. Congress last September. The real challenge for the Vajpayee regime now will be to ensure that the pressure on his Government from hardliners to adopt a combative policy towards Pakistan does not result in a succumbing to the temptation of playing up to the Sinophobia that looks to be on the ascendant in American foreign policy considerations.

However it must be underlined that the initial indications from those who will be at the helm of shaping the new Bush administration's policy towards India and South Asia have been weighted in India's favour. Gen. Powell has acknowledged that ``India has to be a high priority for foreign policy activities of the U.S.'' and that the U.S. will have ``to engage more broadly with India.'' Others expected to play an influential role in the Bush foreign policy establishment such as Mr. Richard Armitage and Mr. Richard Haas have specifically suggested greater attention to India as an emerging power. Mr. Haas has gone further to say that India should not be viewed only within the South Asian paradigm but given strategic emphasis as ``a potential partner of the United States and.. potentially even a global actor for the U.S. to engage.'' The key test of India's engagement with the new administration will be to see that the paradigm envisaged of India as an emerging global power is maintained with India engaging the world's leading powers on its own terms. It is in India's hands to ensure that the relationship with the U.S. is not reduced to an arena for strategic trade-offs but that can only happen if Indian diplomacy acquires true autonomy by taking upon itself the necessary challenge of dealing directly with Pakistan.