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China Gains in U.S. Eyes, and India Feels Slights
NEW DELHI — The statement [Joint Statement on U.S.-China Relationship], on its surface, seemed like any other bland missive released at the end of a polite visit by a head of state. It was put out by the united States and China after President Obama’s visit there, and said that the two countries would “work together to promote peace, stability and development” in South Asia.
But on the eve of the visit to Washington by the Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh, (…) the words rank as one of several perceived slights that have dampened hopes for a new chapter in the sometimes rocky relationship between the United States and India.
The vague statement has been widely interpreted here as an invitation to China to meddle in India’s backyard, and prompted howls of dismay across the political spectrum. (…)
Beyond the surface issues, however, lies a deeper tension, in which India sees a warmer relationship between Washington and Beijing under the Obama administration as a threat to its rise as a global power, and worries that India is being relegated to a regional role on par with its troubled neighbors, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
(…) “There is, underneath the surface, a suspicion that the Americans are scared or too dependent on the Chinese.” (Lalit Mansingh, a former foreign secretary and ambassador to Washington)
India and the United States grew closer than at any time in their history during Mr. Bush’s presidency, spurred in large part by a pact on nuclear technology that tacitly legitimized India’s nuclear weapons program and will allow India to import technology to build much-needed nuclear power plants. The Bush administration saw democratic India as a natural counterweight to a rising autocratic China.
The Obama administration has been received more coolly. While Mr. Bush saw India as a singular and vital ally, Mr. Obama “has tended to use Pakistan as the fulcrum of South Asia, and sees India as one knotty strand in the Afghanistan tangle,” said a disapproving editorial in the newspaper Indian Express on Monday.
Indeed, with America deeply mired in the Afghan war, and with Pakistan’s growing chaos increasingly inseparable from the Afghan morass, India worries that it will once again become merely a variable in a very complicated regional equation.
In this context what is seen as American reluctance to confront China on tricky issues has created the impression that the United States worries more about its pragmatic interests with China, to which it owes $800 billion, than standing up for the values it shares with India, analysts and former diplomats here said. (…)
These tensions in many ways predate both Mr. Bush and Mr. Obama. India and the United States would seem to be natural allies — both are vast, multiethnic and religiously diverse nations that embraced democracy after throwing off the British colonial yoke. Indeed, the United States was an early supporter of Indian independence.
But the relationship has always been rocky, and has foundered on precisely the same grounds: India’s prickliness at being seen as anything but a singular nation with a unique destiny. (…)
Obama administration officials have taken pains to paint the United States-India relationship as essential and to be respectful of India’s separate path. (…)
Mr. Singh himself sought to play down any disenchantment with the new administration. (…)
China, meanwhile, has signaled that it has no intention of playing a role in mediating India’s longstanding quarrels with Pakistan. And despite the joint statement, it has not expressed any interest in getting involved in Pakistan’s domestic troubles.
Indeed, the relationship between India and the United States encompasses so many spheres that it is difficult to imagine any serious rupture, analysts said. Beyond billions of dollars of trade, there are millions of Indians and people of Indian origin in the United States, studying at universities, building microchips, curing disease, writing novels and even serving in the Obama administration.
Since the attacks on Mumbai last November, cooperation between Indian and American intelligence and law enforcement agencies has been growing, with each providing the other with vital information on terrorist threats and networks.
Salman Haidar, a former foreign secretary, said that the natural alliance between India and the United States, frustrated for so long by historic events, is now too strong to be shattered by perceived blunders. (…)
