India And The U.s.

One of the less talked-about ironies of recent times is that the India-US relationship was firmed up by a Republican President. Ironic because for many decades the things that defined India for Americans-unworkable ideas against unspeakable realities-were liberal causes, not conservative concerns. I was once in the habit of leafing through the index pages of books by conservative intellectuals I admired in the hope of finding ‘India’. It rarely appeared. It was as if the country to which I belonged never occurred to the people whose ideas seemed so urgently relevant to it.

So it is nothing short of startling that it was a conservative Republican President who decided to push, in the face of stentorian criticism, the Indo-US relationship into an entirely different realm. Whatever his other failures, President Bush triumphed in shaping what may turn out to be the 21st Century’s most consequential alliance. It is instructive that even as America’s popularity slumped in other parts of the world, in India it scaled unprecedented heights: successive surveys have identified India as the most pro-American country in the world.

This newfound warmth has inspired enthusiasm, but it has also generated disappointment. Americans are often frustrated by India’s reluctance to acknowledge the commonalities between its security threats and those facing the rest of the world. Mumbai may have changed that. The hatred which animated the Mumbai attackers was the same hatred that led Mohammed Atta to fly a plane into the World Trade Centre: it was hatred supposedly sanctioned by scripture, and beyond the reaches of reason. For the first time in India’s immemorial history-and that too in the city of Nissim Ezekeil, the father of modern Indian poetry and a proud Jewish Indian- Jews were slaughtered for being Jews. This was not the consequence of a local conflict.

But here’s the irony: just as Indians are coming round to the idea that they are part of a global war on terror which can only be won by fighting, Washington is departing from it. The incoming administration has dropped more than a hint to suggest that it sees this as a local problem which can be fixed by negotiations and deal-making. Presumably, if India gives up its position on Kashmir, and allows a part or whole of it to slip permanently into the cauldron that is Pakistan, the men who sponsored the Mumbai attacks might have a change of mind. Grateful Islamabad might then wholeheartedly support the mission in Afghanistan. This is appeasement-at best a palliative prescription, not a permanent cure, to the problem of terrorism.

Pakistan-held Kashmir is home to terrorist training camps where children as young as 12 are recruited in the cause of jihad. Indian Kashmir just witnessed an election in which 1,354 candidates from 273 political parties canvassed over 6 million voters for 87 seats in the State Assembly. Nearly four million Kashmiris, defying calls by separatists to boycott the election and braving gelid weather, cast their ballots, electing as their Chief Minister the emphatically Indian (and strident opponent of the America-hates-Muslims trope) Omar Abdullah. President Bush was often criticised for his allegedly dichromatic worldview, but in Kashmir the choices are starkly clear: standing up for democracy versus surrendering to extremism.

For all the external problems, India is also being pulled internally in directions that are completely antithetical not just to this relationship but also to its founding character as a pluralist democracy.

First, there are the communists. They have embraced capitalism, but are still animated by anti-Americanism and want India to shun the US and boycott Israel. Coalition politics make it possible for the communists to enjoy power grossly disproportionate to the votes they actually receive. Then there are the Hindu chauvinists, represented by the BJP. The intellectual underpinnings of the BJP are perfectly fascistic. The state of Gujarat, for instance, is the poster child of India’s growing economy, but religious minorities there live in segregated ghettos. The state’s Chief Minister, Narendra Modi, is the BJP’s rising star. Raised on vegetarian bigotry, he sees all non-Hindus as fifth columnists. If Mr. Modi becomes the Prime Minister of India-which he may-India’s cherished pluralism will become the first victim. The third, and perhaps the most dangerous, element is the stolid indifference with which first-world India treats third-world India. If this is not addressed, India’s greatest asset-its youthful demography-will become its biggest liability.

Thankfully, India has a miraculous way of transcending the inadequacies of Indians.

Is this relationship, in spite of the difficulties, worth it? The only country to have mirrored the United States, right from its constitution to its film industry, is, in many ways, India. Both countries crushed colonialism, wrote constitutions entrenching the rule of law, fought segregation, and firmly established themselves as unbreakable democracies in which every citizen, no matter what her ethnicity or religion or political proclivity, is promised equal treatment. Both have emerged as multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multi-religious democracies in a world which is finding it increasingly difficult to cope with heterogeneity. It won’t be easy, but the answer is a resounding yes.