While the obsessive engagement/appeasement of the United States by Congress and BJP leaders alike produces less-than-satisfactory results overall, it encourages American meddling in Indian politics, and stunts India’s indigenous emergence and growth as a great power. In the history of the modern world, no nation made another a great power, if it didn’t debilitate it. But it does not cease Indian political pilgrimages to the US, in which Pranab Mukherjee and Arun Jaitley (both, significantly, PM aspirants) figured this summer, and that returns us to Manmohan Singh’s previous regular visits to Washington, preceded by AB Vajpayee and Jaswant Singh’s intensive engagement of America.
An exception could be made of the 14 rounds of Jaswant Singh-Strobe Talbott talks to blunt the impact of US sanctions following the May 1998 Pokhran tests. The sanctions were perhaps unavoidable, but they weren’t adequately factored in the post-test justifications, which, in a secret communication to the then US president, Bill Clinton (promptly leaked), blamed threats from China and Pakistan. The Chinese anger, in fact, herded the US to take a harder position against India (and Pakistan), increased the pressure to sign the CTBT, and probably contributed to AB Vajpayee’s conciliatory (and unfelt) hyperbole that India and the US were “natural allies”.
In Manmohan Singh, there was no such hesitancy apropos the United States. But for the Left’s opposition within the UPA-I ruling structure, he would have allied India’s political, economic and military interests closer than now to the United States, with disastrous consequences. Manmohan Singh was less than truthful about the finer points of the Indo-US nuclear deal with Parliament, and won a corrupt trust vote in July 2008 to get it through. But the chickens have come home to roost. The nuclear deal that had already lost its shine post the Fukushima meltdown in Japan is further unraveling with new Nuclear Suppliers’ Group (NSG) conditions for export of enrichment and reprocessing (ENR) technologies. Those will be banned to countries that have not signed the discriminatory Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Under the nuclear deal, India claimed to have won a “clean waiver” on ENR exports. Not so, says the NSG now.
The point is not that India needs ENR technologies. But it is the principle. While the US insists the “clean waiver” still operates, it did not stop the NSG from making NPT a condition for getting them. Indeed, Barack Obama encouraged its adoption early in his presidency when he took a tough line against non-proliferation and viewed the Indo-US deal less-than-favourably (as a senator, he opposed it). The deal itself was sold by the visiting US secretary of state (in 2005), Condoleezza Rice, to Manmohan Singh as an American vehicle to make India a global power. That this was rhetoric mattered little to the PM, who went on to declare the Indian peoples’ “love” for Rice’s boss, the then US president, George W Bush, which should have surprised Bush himself.
What’s with this slavish adoration of America? The certainties of Cold War rivalries conceivably transformed after the Soviet bust into the fruitful certainties of worshipping the sole victor of it all, the United States. But in the same period, China, which gained so much from US-Soviet differences, indulged in no such veneration, learning from Russia’s immediate post-Cold War blunders, and powering its market via Deng Xiaoping’s dodgy principle of “socialism with Chinese characteristics”. Whatever India is today is because of the Indian people’s entrepreneurial genius unleashed by Manmohan Singh’s deregulation of the early 1990s. But sadly, he seems to want to give credit for this to the West and especially the US. Nothing Indian seems to satisfy Manmohan Singh very much, and he appears looking for approval certificates from the US. Ditto is the case now with Pranab Mukherjee and, at a remove, Arun Jaitley.
Whether true or not, it has been standard fare in Delhi’s political circles that America would prefer Manmohan Singh as PM for as long as he wants to hold that office. It is also openly said that anyone who aims for the top job has to have US backing. This sentiment is especially pervasive in the Congress party and is cited as one robust reason (among others) for Arjun Singh’s unsuccessful challenge of Manmohan Singh. Does Pranab Mukherjee’s visit to the US (whatever the official cover) have a connection to his strong 2012-2014 PM ambitions? And it seems hardly coincidental that Arun Jaitley should have been strenuously engaging the US this summer even as he competes in the PM’s race with Sushma Swaraj who, of the two, is closer to the anti-imperialistic CPI-M.
The United States inarguably has some deplorable political, economic and military prescriptions for India, and in this country’s present internal turmoil, it would be doubly foolhardy to speak about them, let alone implement them. India has ultimately to go its own way in Afghanistan and secure against Pakistan’s terrible but unstoppable denouement.
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