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 past 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.
Preference for McCain
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.
But 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.
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.
- OpinionAsia. Full article on OpinionAsia.com.
N.V. Subramanian is the Editor of NEWSInsight, an Indian public affairs magazine.
