Thursday, 02.28.08
All Geopolitics Is Local
Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images
The new nationalist movement in India
October 1908
Jabez T. Sunderland introduces Atlantic readers to the awakening of nationalist sentiment in India.
The eve of independence
April 1946
An Atlantic writer reports on the tense lead-up to Indian independence from Britain.
Uncertain objects of desire
March 2000
Chitra Divakaruni documents changes in a modernizing India through marriage columns.
Gates's setback says more about the frailties of Indian coalition politics than about a cooling of bilateral ties. The U.S. and India are much cuddlier strategically than during my days as a foreign service officer in Bombay in the late 1980s, when the CIA station chief had to use a rickety sailboat from the Royal Bombay Yacht Club to snoop on India's western fleet (or maybe that was just his excuse to go sailing on Uncle Sam's dime). From 2006 to 2007, U.S. military assistance to India more than quadrupled to more than $1 billion (up from near zero in my day), the Indians recently agreed to buy six C-130 cargo planes, and the U.S. may win a $10 billion deal to supply fighter jets. (Last year, India was -- after China -- the world's second biggest buyer of military hardware, mostly from Russia and Israel.) And Indians feel a lot warmer toward the United States than your average Pakistani, despite billions in assistance over the years to that putative "ally."
But even if India and the U.S. have good reason (as in a rising China) to make common cause, old subcontinental suspicions and resentments linger. The current ruling coalition can't move the nuke deal forward because its die-hard Communist members find repugnant the idea of anything American (except, perhaps, a visa); meanwhile, the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party -- proud detonators of the "Hindu bomb" nuclear tests in 1998 -- objects to what few controls the U.S. still wants to put on the proposed nuclear technology exchange. (The Bush administration is already happy to rewrite, or sidestep, both U.S. laws and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty for India.) Ironically, it may be the return to power of the right-wing BJP, whose nuclear shenanigans a decade ago triggered U.S. sanctions, that ends up consummating a U.S.-India strategic partnership -- at a price likely to distress fans of global nonproliferation regimes.
"Indo-U.S. love-fest"Praful Bidwai condemns India's Congress government for cozying up to the United States, arguing that it is part of a broader betrayal of the Indian masses. |
Not his empireThat same year Arundhati Roy declared that President Bush was not welcome in India, and that his visit was not unlike pouring "blood on the memory of Gandhi." |
Nuclear bumblerFred Kaplan, writing in Slate, described Bush's nuclear deal with India as a short-sighted strategic blunder. |
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wow. what a waste of words. No wonder why American policy towards India went nowhere -- the practitioners are clueless.
Maybe the author should point out it was the BJB who started this entire nuclear deal, and then ponder the miracle of Indian politics which causes the opposition to OPPOSE anything -- even things they propose.
Posted by charlie | February 28, 2008 6:06 PM