Unusually in the run-up to the US presidential elections, nobody is really asking if the Democrats would be better for India, or the Republicans. The two terms of the Republican President, George W.Bush, have seen the signing but not fructification of the nuclear deal, several combined and joint military exercises, and market-driven growth in economic relations, particularly in the IT and BPO sectors. To cap it all, the rupee has appreciated significantly against the dollar in the last one year.
By the time Bill Clinton demitted office eight years ago, Indo-US relations had stabilised after being rocked by the May 1998 nuclear test. The fourteen rounds of strategic talks between Jaswant Singh, the then foreign minister, and Strobe Talbott, the US Deputy Secretary of State, had given some sense of appreciation to the US about the compulsions propelling India’s military nuclear programme.
Certainly, the US remained opposed to the programme, trying to hold India to its declaration of maintaining a minimum nuclear deterrent, offering it limited civilian nuclear cooperation if it signed and ratified the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and so forth. But at bottom, it realised that India could never be pressured or persuaded to “cap, rollback and eliminate” its strategic weapons’ programme.
So, at least the seven-plus years of the Bush presidency, and the final two or so years of the Clinton government, have revealed to the US that India cannot be deflected from its growth path and that it will fiercely safeguard its strategic autonomy.
In that sense, whether a Republican again or a Democrat becomes the next US President, India’s course won’t materially alter, although one suspects that the Indian government would prefer a John McCain because it will ensure some continuity to Republican-inspired good relations with India, and remove the unpredictability of a Barack Obama presidency.
But however America votes, it is unlikely that the next US President will be unfriendly to India. At the same time, the friendliest American President after George Bush won’t likely succeed in making India and the US “natural allies” or even “strategic partners”.
Both nations would have to contend with cyclic and market-driven economic relations, steady but unspectacular military-to-military ties, and any extraordinary breakthrough in strategic cooperation, particularly a successful Indo-US nuclear deal, or significant trade in dual-use materials and technologies, will not materialise in the foreseeable future.
The reason for this is because, apart from other factors, democracy, their common form of government, does not bring them together, but counter-intuitively prevents a cementing of ties.
Outside of its Cold War democratic allies, the US has had a more natural fit with dictatorships. And even those Cold War allies, Fred Kaplan, the noted foreign policy analyst, has said, have drifted from the US after the death of their common Cold War enemy, Soviet Russia.
On the other hand, India’s most significant and long-standing partner during and after the Cold War has been Soviet and then Putin’s authoritarian Russia. The parallel with the US is unfortunately apparent. It would appear that rather than any concert of democracies, the opposite of controlled regimes attract the US, and to a lesser degree India.
But this symmetry is less significant than what keeps, and will keep for a time, India and the US far and near. Both fought and won their freedom from the same coloniser, Britain, which determines their doughty independence of spirit. Almost as long as India has been independent, it took the US to overcome its natural instinct for isolationism and lead the American peace at the end of World War II. As cautionary as it was in taking over the reins of the world from Britain, so it has precipitately exhausted itself under Bush.
India’s rise, on the other hand, has not been as calculated as it has been fortuitous. Border wars, separatism, political factionalism, economic stagnation and food insecurities made nation-building in the initial decades traumatic and discontinuous even as India struggled not to get involved in the Cold War. The muscular nationalism of the 1970s was but mostly abandoned in the next two decades.
Between the only two tests of the nuclear deterrent, a generation elapsed. But through all this, especially during the reigns of Nehru, Indira Gandhi, P.V.Narasimha Rao and A.B.Vajpayee, a sense of strategic sovereignty and autonomy has lived on. Manmohan Singh most recently and most seriously sought to compromise this with the Indo-US nuclear deal. But not only did the otherwise fractionated political opposition resist him, the exceptionally well-informed and deep public debate on the nuclear deal exposed the lies of the government.
The irony is that India is emerging powerful in a coalition era strongly marked by political fragmentation. At the same time as this prevents an intelligent exploitation of America’s decline (such intelligence being non-existent at the best of times), the intensely competitive nature of coalition politics disallows any Manmohan Singh-like sellout either.
Coalition politics, you could say, roughly approximates the tension between Congress and the US President to get the best deal for America. But while this is an institutionalised process with firm targets and delivery, coalition politics makes foreign policy dealings in particular, so much harder, open-ended and without scope for personal glory that by default it raises the stakes for the country, or, at any rate, has, for India.
To convert these raised stakes into gains, you may well need a majority government, but without an effective Parliament to check or goad it, the stakes may never be raised high enough to make a great deal. Contrary to conventional wisdom, therefore, a coalition arrangement has produced an internal churning that has been in India’s best interest internationally. But to make good the gains, a strong executive and strong, sometimes adversarial, sometimes complementing, legislature is essential and inescapable.
And yet, as India grows sophisticated in espousing its cause, it will typically have less meeting ground with the US, another democracy. It is no surprise that India, despite Manmohan Singh, has signed up with Russia for four more reactors at Kudankulam, even while the US grows further inflexible about its conditional civilian nuclear trade, an outcome of its democracy.
Like repels like. Don’t expect India and the US to get any closer than now, regardless of whoever becomes America’s next President.