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Action, as distinct from rhetoric, has been far from accepting of India as a major power, much less the equal of countries such as France and Germany. Statements are about as substantial as the gaudy trinkets that the early colonizers of the Americas brought with them to give the natives as proof of benign intentions. Actual policy on the ground has, in contrast, resembled the pox-filled blankets or the syphilis that too were freely handed over to the locals.
The first such "blanket" has been the Bush administration's policy of relying on Pakistan as its principal South Asian ally in the War on Terror. Although much is being made in books written by and for denizens of the Beltway about the way in which a handful of CIA and DIA agents guided the Northern Alliance to victory over the Taliban in 2001, the reality is that the warlords were held back from attacking Mullah Omar's forces until their patience snapped and they cut through an enemy that admittedly had been pulverized by NATO bombardment. Even the move into Kabul was delayed for weeks, while the Bush administration was waiting for a "moderate Taliban" to emerge. Here too, the Northern Alliance entered the city against the intentions of the U.S. administration.
Luckily for the Taliban, a southern sanctuary was created for them by the decision of the Bush administration to bully the alliance into halting its onward roll-up of the Taliban irregulars, even as the hard core were escorted out of Kunduz and other locations by Pakistani craft with the consent of the United States.
Today, from the only part of Afghanistan where the warlords were denied access in 2001, Mullah Omar's jihadis are once again fanning out across the country, setting up nests even in Kabul. While this has been to the benefit of the Pakistani army -- which retains its link to the Taliban through kin and other groups -- it has had a severe negative impact on the future of Afghanistan as a moderate state.
Oddly, despite the fact that India and the United States have common enemies within the region, under President Bush it is Islamabad and not New Delhi that is the partner of choice, even to the extent of gifting Islamabad with nuclear-capable F-16s, billions of dollars in aid and "major non-NATO ally" status, a level of partnership denied to India.
Although much has been made of the Vajpayee regime's "refusal" to send 18,000 troops to Iraq, those knowledgeable about the situation claim that although political exigency -- the Congress Party under Sonia Gandhi fiercely opposed such a deployment -- was cited as the reason for this decision, the actual culprit was Colin Powell's insistence that Indian troops in Iraq should function under joint U.S.-British command. Given the colonial history between Britain and India, accepting British overlordship of its military would have been political suicide for the Indian government. The thin skin of the post-colonial Indians meant that only giving them a status equal to Britain's would have smoothed the way for the world's most effective anti-insurgent army to have gone to Iraq, but that was never on the table.
Due perhaps to the U.S. establishment's insistence on behaving as a Western rather than a global power, a double standard has been inserted into most diplomatic forays. For example, although Japan has done much more heavy lifting for the United States than Germany, it is Berlin and not Tokyo that is invited to Middle East initiatives, while the U.S. armed forces continues to see India's development as a strategic power in negative terms. Indeed, in a recent Department of Defense publication edited by Henry Sokolski, Richard Speier makes the outlandish claim that "the target of an Indian ICBM would be the United States," and hence cooperation with the country's space program should continue to be throttled. This comes at a time when all three wings of the Indian military are going to unprecedented lengths to share their operational experience with their U.S. counterparts. Both they as well as the Indian intelligence services grumble that the exchange thus far has largely been one way, with very little reverse flow from the U.S. side.
Because of the U.S. unwillingness to accept India as a strategic partner with the same level of capability as France or Britain, thus far the much-promised high-technology cooperation in space and other sectors has been little more than hot Texas air. Of course, outdated aircraft such as the F-16 -- though not the versions available to NATO -- are on offer, though not more modern systems that can better compete with state-of-the-art Russian equipment such as SU-35MKI aircraft.
Not only has the Bush administration refused to give technology and equipment to India when neighboring -- and hostile -- Pakistan is being showered with goodies, it has leaned on the Israelis and the Russians to slow down their own exports to the country. A few weeks ago, in a calculated snub to the Indian authorities, the US indicted two businessmen of Indian ethnicity for allegedly purchasing "sensitive" items. Predictably, this has given more ammunition to those within the Indian establishment who say that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is acting like Pollyanna in his oft-expressed view that George W. Bush is "a good friend of India."
Indeed, the effort of the Bush administration to railroad India into signing a nuclear deal that would in effect end New Delhi's quest for both a deterrent against China and self-sufficiency in energy through the use of (locally abundant) thorium rather than (scarce) uranium as a fuel, has convinced all but hardcore U.S. boosters such as planning chief M. S. Ahluwalia that the Bush administration continues to follow the traditional policy of seeking to retard and destroy strategic capabilities in any non-Western country. This includes India, which has the world's largest English-speaking population after the United States, and has remained a democracy ever since freedom from foreign occupation in 1947.
Unfortunately for U.S. diplomats, the age of wampum seems to be over, and unless there is substantive evidence that the Bush administration's claim of welcoming India as a global player is not just tall talk, more and more of those who favor an alliance between India and the United States will move to the side of those looking toward Moscow and Beijing as partners against the dominance of the West.
