ONE OF A KIND LOVE AFFAIR:

Why Bush Loves India: a review of India as a New Global Power: An Action Agenda for the United States By Ashley J. Tellis (C RAJA MOHAN, August 07, 2005, Indian Express)

Are you surprised by the rapid rapprochement between India and the United States, so visible during Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s visit to Washington last month? After all, who isn’t? If any one had told you a couple of months ago that the weakest Congress government in India’s independent history, which survives on the support of the Left parties so hostile to Indo-US relations, would sign two unprecedented pacts with the United States in a matter of three weeks, you would have asked him to go get his head examined.

But that precisely is what has happened. India signed a 10-year defence pact with the US on June 29 and a nuclear pact on July 18. The former lays out a sweeping agenda for defence cooperation and the latter unveils a road map for the resolution of the nuclear disputes which hobbled relations between India and the US for nearly three decades.

If you are looking for some intelligent answers to why and how Indo-US relations are being transformed so quickly under President George W Bush, here is the tract for you. And there is no better than Ashley Tellis, the India-born American analyst, to tell the story of how more political business has been done between India and the US in the last four-and-a-half years than in the previous five decades.

Tellis is not only the finest among his generation of American strategists, but he was also deeply involved in shaping the Indo-US relations in the first term of Bush Administration.

As special adviser to Ambassador Robert Blackwill in New Delhi during 2001-03, Tellis had a key role in defining a new agenda for Indo-US relations in the early Bush years. Unlike many of his American peers, who saw India and South Asia through the prism of Kashmir and non-proliferation, Tellis came to the region with a sense of geopolitical realism and the conviction that the structural change in international system has opened the doors for the first time in the last six decades for a productive relationship between Delhi and Washington.

While Bush came to power in 2001 with a positive approach to India, the preoccupations in Afghanistan and Iraq prevented a focused approach to transforming the relationship with Delhi. In the second term, he has now moved decisively to recast Indo-US relations. The defence and nuclear accords of the last few weeks are the consequence.

Tellis’s thesis depends on a simple premise — strengthening a rising India’s power capabilities is in America’s interests.

There can be no better basis for an alliance than the convergence of Anglospheric heritage, geopolitical reality, democratic idealism and economic opportunism.

Posted by Orrin Judd at August 7, 2005 12:00 AM