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To the Editor:

Sadanand Dhume has done an excellent job updating the status of the often complex relationship between India and the U.S, and he gives reason to believe that the countries’ shared democratic values will bring them closer in the coming years [“Is India an Ally?,” January].

Politically, however, the key question is what each country seeks from the other. India’s economy may come to equal America’s in size by 2050, but India will never be a serious contender as a “global superpower” the way Great Britain used to be or China aspires to be. India is basically a mercantile nation that has no designs on a grand partnership with any military power other than for protecting its own domain. For two millennia India was invaded, scavenged, colonized, and broken up, only to rise again without any heightened sense of nationalism or interest in influencing geopolitics.

Americans should not expect India to be a reliable ally if that means linking up in the global chess game of superpower diplomacy. India may acquire or develop sophisticated weapons systems, including nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles, but historically its outlook has never gone beyond its own neighborhood, where it expects to be treated as the prime regional power. Indeed, the friction between the U.S. and India in the past was driven by America’s attempts to play “zero-sum games” in the Indian subcontinent.

There is talk today of India serving as a counterweight to China; this, in my view, is futile. Nor should one look to India to settle America’s political differences with Iran. These two civilizations have been dealing with each other long before most Western nations even existed, and it is unrealistic to expect that their relationship would evaporate because that is the “right thing to do” at the moment.

If, on the other hand, the effort is about promoting commerce, providing aid to poorer countries, advancing democracy and the rule of law, and working multilaterally to reduce global threats ranging from weapons of mass destruction to terrorism to emerging biological challenges, I believe the U.S. will find a willing ally in India.

Vijay K. Sazawal
Indo-American Kashmir Forum
Potomac, Maryland

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To the Editor:

Sadanand Dhume is right to ask whether Washington’s new love affair with New Delhi is premature, given India’s history of “non-alignment,” its lingering post-colonial sensibilities, and its inability (to date) to take advantage of the Bush administration’s generous civilian nuclear deal. Should Manmohan Singh’s government ultimately fail to deliver its end of the nuclear bargain, the next occupant of the White House will think twice before investing much new political capital in the U.S.-India relationship.

Mr. Dhume should also be commended for dispensing with the notion that India is immune to Islamist extremism because of the quality of its democratic institutions. If the smallest fraction of India’s Muslim minority views terrorism as a legitimate political tool, India will face a heightened security threat from trans-national Islamist groups. But even though India’s Muslim community is in fact more prone to radicalization than boosters like Thomas Friedman are willing to admit, Mr. Dhume overstates its political power, particularly in the realm of foreign policy. It is hard to discern the “enormous influence” of Muslim voters in New Delhi’s policies toward Israel and the United States, or even, for that matter, toward Iran. In each instance, perceived national interests—military, political, and economic—weigh more heavily.

Nor are India’s socialists quite the menace Mr. Dhume identifies them as. The leftism of intellectuals like Arundhati Roy and the Left Front parties that have temporarily stalled the U.S.-India nuclear deal is actually losing its popular appeal and its ideological coherence in the face of India’s growing economy. Just as in neighboring China, the ruling “Communists” in Indian states like West Bengal have essentially dumped the economic policies of the past in order to court foreign investment and pursue rapid growth.

It is true—and unfortunate—that New Delhi’s more ideologically driven leftists have stymied Prime Minister Singh’s latest efforts at economic reform. But this fact says more about the weakness of his Congress party than about the Communists’ strength. Today the defining dynamic of Indian politics is the decay of Congress and the emergence of regional parties. In this devolution of electoral power, the leftists have maximized their limited leverage by playing between the seams of the governing coalition and the opposition led by the Bhara-tiya Janata Party (BJP). But the Left Front’s tactical maneuvers, however successful in the near term, are unlikely to translate into lasting gains.

In sum, the roadblocks to India’s continued ascent (and the ascent of the U.S.-India partnership) are less likely to be ideological or religious, as Mr. Dhume argues, than structural. Weak local and national institutions have compromised India’s capacity to move ahead with economic reforms and ambitious foreign-policy undertakings. For an aspiring global power, India has thus far underinvested in the tools required to support world-class policymaking, such as higher education in the social sciences, research centers, and a robust, highly trained foreign service.

Daniel Markey
Council on Foreign Relations
Washington, D.C.

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To the Editor:

Sadanand Dhume’s cogent and timely essay is a useful corrective to a certain irrational exuberance about India’s growth prospects and its supposed willingness to cast its lot with the United States after years of pursuing pseudo-socialist economic policies and “non-aligned” foreign policies. His discussion of the politics of India’s Muslim minority is refreshingly forthright. Still, I would note a few instances in which he overstates his case.

While Mr. Dhume is correct that India still suffers from a plethora of economic woes, including endemic poverty, the statistics he cites tell only part of the story. The main story is that India’s fitful embrace of a market-oriented strategy of economic growth has contributed to a dramatic reduction in both urban and rural poverty. In 1991, close to 33 percent of the population was below the official poverty line. Today that figure has declined to 26 percent. When one considers that the national population has grown in the same period from 850 million to 1.3 billion, the achievement is nothing short of stunning. Sustained economic growth, which now hovers at around 9 percent, coupled with investment in public health and primary education, could contribute to still more rapid alleviation of poverty.

At another level, Mr. Dhume overstates the political influence of left-wing Indian intellectuals. To be sure, many of them hold Luddite views of industrialization, remain viscerally anti-American, and are given to political bombast. But they command a small, declining audience within India, and are more likely to win accolades among fashionably left-wing faculty of elite American universities than among the Indian electorate. (Needless to say, their disdain for America generally stops short of refusing lucrative fellowships on American campuses.)

Mr. Dhume also fails adequately to appreciate the sea change that has come about in India’s foreign policy. Even though the BJP and the Communists have placed the Indo-U.S. civilian nuclear deal in jeopardy, U.S.-India relations are better today than they have been in the past 60 years. The two countries now share significant political, economic, and diplomatic interests. Even feckless American support for the duplicitous Musharraf regime in Pakistan has not undermined this.

In this context, Mr. Dhume’s criticism of India’s highly calibrated relationship with Iran is off the mark, the reprehensible Ahmadinejad notwithstanding. Contrary to his assessment, India’s reasons for engaging Iran are strictly pragmatic. Shiite Iran serves as a counterweight to Sunni Pakistan, is a major supplier of natural gas, and helps ensure the political quiescence of India’s substantial Shiite community. As Indian policymakers are wont to underscore, Washington for its part has few qualms about maintaining a robust relationship with Saudi Arabia, a state known for populist anti-Americanism and unremitting hostility toward Israel.

Sumit Ganguly

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