Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh: By obtaining a waiver for India’s nuclear program which operates outside the rules of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty -with powerful American help – he has just won the greatest victory of his entire career. Some Indians are asking, ‘Why is Washington so good to us?’
What’s behind the Bush Administration’s overwhelming support for India? After this weekend’s watershed decision by the Nuclear Suppliers Group to approve a waiver that will permit India to obtain modern nuclear supplies and fuel for its reactor program, Sagarika Ghose writes for the Hindustan Times of of why these ‘once-estranged democracies’ have so rapidly become such avid partners.
“In the aftermath of the landmark waiver from the Nuclear Suppliers Group and efforts by the United States to have it passed, it seems clear that America, for reasons best known to itself, sees India as the “good guy.” And in its anxiety to emigrate, study and imitate the U.S., the Indian middle class seems to have shed all reservations about America. Today, the Left’s hatred of America and the [Hindu] Bharatiya Janata Party’s artificial diatribes against U.S. ambitions seem incongruous in the face of a massively pro-American middle-class, in which it would be difficult to find a family that doesn’t have at least one member residing in America.”
Beyond burgeoning business ties and the ‘increasingly influential Non-Resident Indian community in America, distinguished by individuals like PepsiCo chief Indra Nooyi, Citicorp CEO Vikram Pandit, Newsweek editor Fareed Zakaria and Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal,’ one of the intriguing reasons Ghose cites revolves around China:
“They have both discovered, quietly, and almost at the same time, a common enemy. The rise of China, with its ruthlessly pragmatic foreign policy, its lack of compunction in arming militias in Sudan or dictators in Pakistan, its cheap exports and its scant respect for democracy are no source of comfort to the U.S. For India, China is the uneasy neighbor at odds with a globally important India. Beijing tried to block the Nuclear Suppliers Group waiver, kept India out of gatherings like APEC and the East Asia summit, and has never supported India in its bids for membership on the U.N. Security Council.”
By Sagarika Ghose*
September 9, 2008
India – Hindustan Times – Original Article (English)
A decade ago, Jairam Ramesh wrote an insightful essay entitled Yankee Go Home But Take Me With You . It was an analysis of the elaborate hypocrisy of the Indian political establishment, which publicly preached a loud anti-Americanism and privately yearned for all things Starred and Striped.
The Indo-U.S. nuclear deal signals an end to this hypocrisy. Today, the preachy sanctimoniousness about American imperialism is restricted to the Left. MPs now take crash courses in leadership at Yale University under the India-Yale parliamentary leadership program. Many of the government’s key economic advisors are bureaucrats and academics who have had long tenures at the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund or Ivy League universities. When George W. Bush came to visit in 2006, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said that as far as America and India were concerned, there were “no limits on partnership.”
Attitudes toward America have transformed as rapidly as Indian society. In the ’60s and ’70s, the Nehruvian elite [adherents of Nehru ] studied at [Britain’s] Oxbridge, scorned upward mobility, was proud of non-alignment and believed that proximity to the Soviet Union was India’s manifest destiny. Now a rapidly globalizing India in the throes of an upwardly mobile revolution has adopted America as its subconscious role model, notwithstanding the radical chic’s protestations about Bush.
READ ON AT WORLDMEETS.US, along with continuing foreign press coverage of the India-U.S. nuclear deal and its ramifications.
