India-US relations are important for both countries. They relate to a wide domain and are worth cultivating. But they need to be nurtured with care.
John Kerry’s first visit to India as US secretary of state naturally took up the key formal points on the bilateral agenda, but perhaps failed to ignite passion as regards the strategic aspect of the relationship between the two countries.
All the right buttons were pressed, India’s external affairs minister Salman Khurshid played the gracious host to a fault, the secretary of state himself was the picture of courtesy, but the public impact of the three-day visit for the strategic dialogue with India was somewhat limited.
A part of the reason is that India was preoccupied with the tragedy in the Himalayas with the Uttarakhand disaster eating up emotional — and media — space in this country. But a significant reason is also America’s current preoccupation with preparing for its 2014 exit from Afghanistan, which has led it into the parlour of Pakistan and the Taliban.
This, of course, has been a public relations disaster for the US due to the concessions — inadvertent or otherwise — made in respect of the status of the Taliban’s newly-opened Doha office. Some of Mr Kerry’s New Delhi discussions were devoted to undoing the impressions that Washington was playing footsie with Islamabad and the Taliban, and in the process disadvantaging both India and Afghanistan.
Some part of the joint statement on the fourth India-US strategic dialogue got locked down due to this factor, a needless diversion. Good sense prevailed in the end, and the US reiterated its “red lines” on dealing with the Taliban, which appeared to have been eclipsed. This, in a sense, helped save the Kerry mission. Of course, India has to be wary that theory and practice do not diverge.
There is an impression that the secretary of state has strong sympathies for the Pakistani military. A sense here that this could be a factor that might hurt India overall, including in the Afghan theatre, could have undesirable consequences for India-US relations, which in no small measure were thwarted by the Pakistan factor over a very long period. Any leadership in Washington — Democratic or Republican — should be sensitive to this. India-US relations are important for both countries. They relate to a wide domain and are worth cultivating. But they need to be nurtured with care, especially given their relative newness and the “estranged democracies” backdrop.
It is positive that a September timeline was broadly agreed upon for US nuclear reactor companies to begin setting up shop in India. This was long overdue. The scheduled visit of US vice-president Joe Biden is also a positive as it keeps up the momentum of high-level interactions and political comprehension of mutual concerns, besides helping oil the operational elements of the relationship.
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