As it nervously watches the prospect of a ?re-hyphenation? with Islamabad under the administration of President Barack Hussein Obama, New Delhi should devote some attention to the danger of Washington ?de-hyphenating? India from China in its Asia policy.
The intimations of a fundamental change in the US relations with India?s most important neighbours, Pakistan and China, underscore President George . Bush?s very positive legacy on the US relationship with India.
It is not for nothing that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh chose to publicly express India?s deep affection towards Bush, who engineered two big changes in American geopolitical thinking about India.
Bush declared that he will not view New Delhi through the narrow prism of its conflicts with Islamabad. Instead, Bush promised to deal with India as a rising power that had the potential to reshape the Asian balance of power and contribute to the management of all major global issues.
Under the first premise, Bush took Jammu and Kashmir off the table in the US engagement with India; the second led to a conscious strategy of strengthening New Delhi as a counter weight to Beijing in Asia. Without these two core assumptions of Bush, there would have been neither the Indo-US nuclear deal nor the decision to open up the American arms store for India. While there has been much debate on the former there is not adequate appreciation of the latter in New Delhi.
America?s decision to sell advanced weapons to India and maintain the Western arms embargo against China underlined the essence of the US commitment to alter the Sino-Indian balance in New Delhi?s favour.
As Obama repudiates many of Bush?s foreign and domestic policies, there is some basis for the apprehension that both the triangular relationships?the one between US, India and Pakistan and the other among Washington, Beijing and New Delhi?might face turbulence. While the triangle involving Pakistan invariably stirs political passions in New Delhi, it is the other involving China that may define India?s strategic environment in more enduring ways.
As rising powers, China and India are bound to have many areas of difference with the US. But both of them value their bilateral ties with the dominant power in the international system. Not surprisingly, Beijing and New Delhi are also deeply wary of Washington?s ties with the other. Even the subtlest shift in US policy towards Asia calls up intense reactions from New Delhi and Beijing. Recall June 1998, a month after India?s nuclear tests, when President Bill Clinton traveled to Beijing and declared that the US and China will work together in reversing India?s nuclear programme. In a visceral reaction, New Delhi denounced what it called the attempt to create a ?Sino-American condominium? over Asia.
Under Bush, it was Beijing?s turn to protest the deepening Indo-US relationship. Beijing believed that the Indo-US nuclear deal was less about energy and more about building an anti-China alliance between the two nations. No wonder Beijing tried so hard to wreck the deal.
In the first peek into the foreign policy of the Obama Administration, the new Secretary of State Hillary Clinton suggested more continuity than change in the Bush policies towards India and China. India figures in the list of friends and allies in Asia, after Japan, Korea and Australia. Clinton said ?We will build on our economic and political partnership with India, the world?s most populous democracy and a nation with growing influence in the world.?
China, however, remains in the doubtful category of neither friend nor foe. Clinton reaffirmed American commitment to building good relations with Beijing but insisted that ?this is not a one-way effort. Much of what we will do depends on the choices China makes about its future at home and abroad.?
While the democracy factor works in India?s favour in Washington, the economic factors have tended to compensate China, and then some. The current economic crisis is bound to weaken the American geopolitical standing and make it even more dependent on China in sustaining its massive and growing deficits.
It is this changing balance between Washington and Beijing that should be of deep concern for New Delhi. Many leading American analysts and policy-makers are calling for the formation of a ?Group of Two??the US and China?to manage the economic crisis and reorder the structures of global governance.
If it comes to pass, the G-2 will undermine the very basis of Indo-US strategic partnership in Asia and could relegate India to the status of a bit player on the world stage. Forestalling the formation of what has been called ?Chimerica? should now be at the very top of India?s national security strategy and diplomacy.
The author is a professor at the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore