Bush Fired up

By Nitish Chakravarty

Perhaps it was his speech at the abandoned Purana Qila in New Delhi that puts Bush’s India visit in perspective. For most Delhiites the eerie place was a strange choice by a person who is the No.1 target of pretty much every Islamic terrorist worth his gun and RDX. So when Bush said he would deliver a public lecture at an open air gathering with the sky as the canopy, many thought the President was lapsing into dim-witted behaviour.

Bush’s two-day visit was a significant presidential trip for both strategic and economic reasons. Relations between the United States and India have never been more important, thanks to global terror in the post-September 11 world, the search for sustainable energy resources and the United Nations’ pledge to halve world poverty by 2015.

The United States is at an important crossroad in its relations with India, home to more than one billion people and an economy that is growing at around 6 per cent every year. 

For decades after India’s independence American policy towards this huge country was one of adversarial neglect. During the Cold War Washington viewed India through the narrow prism of the geopolitics of that era. And since the collapse of the Soviet Union, things haven’t gotten that much better. Relations between the United States and India chilled when India tested a nuclear bomb in 1998, going further south after Washington imposed punitive sanctions. Now the Bush administration appears to be looking at India primarily as a counterbalance to China’s growing ascendancy. Against that backdrop, Bush would be well employed simply building bridges between the world’s two largest democracies and focusing on economic issues of common concern.

The president planned the obligatory trip to a centre of high technology, although White House strategists, mindful of election-year fears in the United States about call centres and outsourcing, chose the more diversified city of Hyderabad instead of the call-centre capital, Bangalore.

Then there’s the nuclear deal, which has stood the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty on its head. The NPT’s basic bargain has been to reward countries that renounced nuclear weapons with the opportunity to import sensitive nuclear technology to help meet their energy needs. For decades, America has imposed nuclear export restrictions on India—and Pakistan, for that matter—in response to the two countries’ refusal to sign the NPT and their open development of nuclear weapons.

This carrot-and-stick approach has dissuaded many other countries capable of building or buying nuclear arms from doing so, from South Korea to Turkey to Saudi Arabia. Now President Bush wants to carve out an exception for India. This time Pakistani sensibilities and fears were summarily waved away. Pakistani officials, requesting the same deal for their country, had few sympathisers among the Americans.

“We are looking forward to working with India in an advanced energy initiative,” Bush said in a statement announcing the agreement between the two countries on civilian nuclear power cooperation. The civil nuclear cooperation agreement is the offshoot of a pact the US and India signed on July 18, 2005, during the visit of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to Washington.

“As we develop our technology, we look forward to working with India as we want to end dependence on fossil fuels which are resulting in rising prices in our countries,” the president said during his interaction with the media.

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April 2006