Obama's Regional Strategy and India

The year was 2002. The Indian Parliament had been attacked by terrorists suspected to have links with Pakistan-based Jehadi organizations. India’s Prime Minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, made a list of demands on Pakistan and threatened severe repercussions if those demands were not met. He also ordered massive mobilization of Indian military troops to back the threat. The Clinton administration asked the Indian government to show restraint and followed the message of restraint by a travel advisory to its citizens against travel to India or Pakistan. The travel advisory, though mentioned both countries, was widely interpreted as a message primarily to Indians as no one was visiting Pakistan at that time with or without a travel advisory. India’s fledgling IT industry, on the other hand, could be significantly impacted by such an advisory.

Fast forward to 2009. The leader of the Pakistani banned organization, Jamaat’ud Dawa, Hafiz Mohammad Saeed, is released from the house arrest by a Pakistani court. Two days later, the US administration issues a travel advisory against India citing increased risk of terror attacks against Indian targets. The travel advisory asks US citizens “resident in the country or traveling to India that there is a high threat from terrorism throughout India.� Like in 2002, though a similar advisory has been issued for Pakistan, the effect would be almost wholly on India as there are hardly any foreigners visiting Pakistan these days. It has also revived among Indians the old hyphenating of India with Pakistan by the US administration. On the other hand, the US administration has remained more or less quiet on the release of Saeed whose organization is widely believed to have sponsored the November 26 attack on Mumbai. The US envoy for AfPak, Richard Holbrook, after initially expressing lukewarm criticism of Saeed’s release, quickly retracted his statement and said instead that it was a matter for the Pakistani courts to decide.

There are other pointers of Obama’s coolness towards India. The Indo-US nuclear deal has been passed by the Congress but is languishing somewhere in the administration for the bilateral agreement to be signed by India and US. Obama has ignored India in all his important foreign policy pronouncements since taking office. Even the appointment of a US ambassador to India was given a low priority, with the US embassy functioning without an ambassador since early January. A low-profile US Congressman has since been nominated as the new ambassador to India.

This is a huge change from the Bush era. India had a prominent place in the Bush administration’s worldview. Bush viewed India as a natural ally in his war against terror as he viewed India as a victim of the same forces of terror that were targeting America. He believed that democracy was the cure-all for all problems in the world and was quite impressed with how India had managed her democracy. He bought line, hook and sinker Thomas Friedman’s oft-repeated statement that, despite having the second largest Muslim population in the world, there was no Indian Muslim in Guantanamo Bay prison and there was no Islamic terrorism in India because of India’s democratic system. He considered India to be a counterweight to the rising power of China and was quite willing to let her increase its stockpile of nuclear weapons and a virtual parity with recognized nuclear weapon states; with that objective, he spent considerable political capital to push the Indo-US nuclear deal with utmost speed against powerful anti-proliferation lobby in the US. He helped India get an observer status in the group of G8 countries and was instrumental in starting G-20 group of countries and in giving India a prominent place in it. There was also talk of America supporting India’s bid to get a seat on an expanded Security Council of the United Nations. That era ended with Bush.

Obama too had envisaged a prominent role for India in his regional strategy. His view was, and is, that the Taleban in Afghanistan cannot be defeated as long as they are supported by powerful elements in Pakistan. He also understands that Pakistan views Afghanistan as an important strategic country where it wants to install a friendly regime such as Taleban, in order to confront India. He also agrees with the Pakistani elite that the support of Taleban in Afghanistan is exacerbating Islamic extremism in Pakistan and the primary cause of this extremism is the Pakistani agencies’ sponsorship of jehadi elements whose activities were directed against India. The key to ending Islamic extremism in Pakistan, in this analysis, therefore, lies in ending Pakistan’s confrontation with India and the key to ending that confrontation is to resolve the Kashmir dispute. Therefore, long before Obama entered the White House, he had said that his Afghanistan strategy would be a regional strategy and, to implement that strategy, he would be appointing a regional envoy for India, Pakistan and Afghanistan. India and Indian lobbyists in Washington, however, made it clear to Obama that this approach would be unacceptable to them. Realizing that his regional envoy would not get the needed cooperation from India, Obama had to drop India from the envoy's formal job description. India’s rebuff was bound to miff Obama.

Kashmir is important for Obama for another reason: He has made it a high priority for his administration, and a personal high priority, to bring America closer to the Islamic world. While Kashmir does not raise the same kind of passion in the Muslim world outside Pakistan as the plight of Palestinians, it is nevertheless considered important enough to merit a routine resolution in support of Pakistan in the 58-member Organization of Islamic states.

Obama also does not share Bush’s long-term view of China as a rival. He seems instead to be more interested in winning China’s cooperation in resolving important political and economic challenges confronting the world today. There have recently been a few trial balloons floating the idea of a G-2 summit between China and the US to supplant G-8 and G-20 summits. If this happens, it would greatly reduce the importance of the G-8 and G-20 groups of countries, which include India, among others.

What are the implications for India of its being placed on a back burner by the Obama administration? Fortunately for India, her development will not be significantly affected by this neglect by the US. The signing of Indo-US nuclear deal might be delayed but it hurts US business interests more than it hurts India: thanks to Bush, India is already out of the sanctions imposed upon it by the nuclear club; it has signed nuclear deals with France and the USSR and is in the advanced stages of doing so with Germany and Canada. Foreign Direct Investments in India are more or less independent of the official bilateral relationship and depend largely upon the investment climate in India, especially the improvement in its economic infrastructure and the speed of needed economic reforms. In any case, India has a fairly influential Indo-American lobby and an India caucus in the Congress which is the second largest such caucus in Washington. If India is adversely affected at all, it would be because of Obama’s America First policy directed against outsourcing, especially for any projects or companies that benefit from any of the several programs of large scale spending and subsidies being doled out by the US administration to pull America out of the current deep recession.

India should concentrate on putting its house in order. It should continue to expand its social and economic infrastructure, deepen economic reforms and ensure that the benefits of the larger pie are shared equitably and spread to those regions and sections of the society that have not benefited adequately from the fruits of economic growth. If they succeed in this endeavor, international recognition will come to them without hankering after it.