Neglected India: Why Is Washington Ignoring the World’s Largest Democracy?
On a balmy day in February last year, I sat down for lunch with one of India’s most prominent political columnists at the India International Centre in New Delhi, a place where left-wing academics, journalists, and Congress Party supporters like to congregate. My friend, however, is a lady whose politics lean to the right, and I often consulted her for advice on political matters. She also happens to be very pro-American. So I asked her what she thought of the US-India relationship under President Obama. “It might be time for us to distance ourselves a bit from Washington,” she mused. Putin’s Russia was mentioned as a possible friend, as were cultural links to Ahmadinejad’s Iran. I almost choked on my tea. Was she serious?
The short answer is yes, she was—and for good reason.
The prevailing wisdom inside the Beltway today is that there are inexorable forces pulling the world’s two largest democracies toward each other. These forces include shared values (democracy), a common language (English), and coincidental strategic goals in Asia-Pacific (containing Communist China). However, the logic that assumes a stronger bond is inevitable believes also that it’s better for Washington to throw its energies into strengthening relationships with nations in Asia-Pacific that don’t share US values or strategic goals (China, North Korea, Pakistan) because India will continue to drift closer to Washington as a matter of course. It has nowhere else to go. And as everyone knows, negotiating with New Delhi’s famously argumentative and long-winded politicians—who also face domestic, democratic political constraints—is always a trial.
ASEAN encourages the sovereignty of its members. That’s probably why China can exploit it so easily. It’s also probably why its members want to hedge Beijing with closer US ties — ties Washington is all to happy to grant.
But things aren’t going exactly as planned. It’s been more than two and a half years since the Obama administration took office, and there’s not a single major India initiative on the table. If anything, the two parties have disagreed more than they’ve agreed in public. In what was billed as a major policy speech in Chennai in July, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton admitted that the US and India “from time to time, disagree as any two nations or, frankly, any two friends inevitably will do” and entreated India to “lead” in East Asia. That’s hardly a vision for the future, nor a ringing endorsement of an intensified bilateral policy.