This week, Dr Singh will welcome US President Barack Obama to India, and to a heightened partnership, economic and strategic — no doubt with an increasingly assertive, even aggressive, China on the minds of both men, even if everyone around them denies that that’s the case.
Mr Obama comes to India after having hosted Dr Singh as his first White House guest in November last, a visit that pundits have since declared was high on symbolism and not so high on substance.
Perhaps, it was just that Mr Obama’s predecessor, George Bush, had raised the bar on warmth towards India too high for a new president, admittedly one with a different calculus and caught in a different set of circumstances, for Mr Obama to match it so early in his term.
But that question has persisted: Does Mr Obama value America’s relationship with India as much as the more classically geopolitically-oriented Bush administration? If he does, will he make it known and felt during his visit to Delhi?
White House and State department spokesmen have already said that their president’s trip to India will be an “extraordinary milestone” in the bilateral relationship. So, what should India expect?
India and the US have moved, since former president Bill Clinton’s visit to India in 2000, from being “estranged democracies” to “engaged democracies” to, under Mr Bush, “strategic partners” or even “natural allies”, with the civilian nuclear deal as the high-point. So, what can Mr Obama do to make this visit an “extraordinary milestone”?
President Obama comes to India with a host of think-tanks – including the Centre for New American Security, his preferred ideas factory — and US business leaders encouraging him to announce America’s endorsement of India for a UN Security Council seat. Nothing else, of course, would come close to making this summit — between the leaders of the two countries whose bilateral relationship is pivotal to 21st century world order — an “extraordinary milestone”.
It may well happen. US spokesmen have already indicated a significant shift in America’s thinking on the “India for UNSC” question, especially in the wake of the overwhelming support for India demonstrated by 187 of the 191 countries in the UN that elected it to a two-year term on the Security Council weeks ago. From doubts over whether India has what it takes to be at the high table to stalling UN reforms just so that the question of new members does not even arise, the US, under Mr. Obama, has moved to: “Given India’s rise and its significance, we believe India will be a central part of any consideration of a reformed UN Security Council”.
It is about as much government spokesmen can say without pre-empting their president. So, watch carefully for movement, even if it be nuanced, on this core Indian expectation when Mr Obama addresses Parliament in Delhi on November 7. In a sense, therefore, America has made a determination on the substance of the question. What remains now is for the US and India to work out how to get there. That may look simple enough, but as Clausewitz would remind us: Just it because it looks simple does not mean it’s easy to get done.
For, Mr Obama also comes at a time of grave economic worries in the US, and he has already given enough signals — including his so-called “letter of expectations” to Prime Minister Singh — that during this visit, “America’s business is business”. It might be more pertinent, therefore, for the Indian leadership to ask itself, as one Indian-American observer of the relationship put it recently: What has Delhi done lately for Washington?
To be sure, though, the Obama visit will not be about either America unilaterally satisfying India’s biggest desire or India having to give Americans everything they wish for without getting anything in return. Indeed, New Delhi must derive satisfaction from the fact that Mr. Obama hasn’t let the edifice of strategic partnership, or even the nuclear deal, fall through as was feared when he came into office. Indeed, in his own cool and more calculated way, he has built on the foundations that presidents Clinton and Bush laid, expanding the idea and agenda of strategic partnership beyond military exercises and defence deals to such areas as clean energy and technologies and a knowledge partnership. Dr. Singh should also be looking to receive a president whose love for India — if it can be called that — goes beyond interests to values, beyond Washington’s necessity of wooing India for geopolitical reasons to looking for a partnership based on shared values of democracy.