Bush's India Triumph

Shortly before George W. Bush left office, Harvard historian Sugata Bose told me that strengthening U.S. relations with India "may turn out to be the most significant foreign-policy achievement of the Bush administration." It is an achievement that Indians greatly appreciate: In mid-February, a spokesman for the ruling Congress party said that Bush deserves India's top civilian award, the Bharat Ratna ("Jewel of India"), an honor rarely conferred on non-Indians.

"The people of India deeply love you," Prime Minister Manmohan Singh told Bush last September. In the 2008 Pew Global Attitudes survey, India was one of only three countries out of 24 in which a majority of respondents expressed "a lot" or "some" confidence in Bush to "do the right thing regarding foreign affairs." (The others were Tanzania and Nigeria.)

Unfortunately, Indian officials have notably less confidence in Barack Obama than they had in Bush. And so far, Obama has done little to assuage their worries. "There's no question that the Indians are uncertain about this administration," says a Democratic Senate aide who works on foreign-policy issues. "They had such a good relationship with Bush, and [Obama] ran as the anti-Bush." Since Obama's election, an accumulation of perceived slights -- some more trivial than others -- has intensified New Delhi's anxiety and fostered an atmosphere of "deteriorating trust."

The most historic element of Bush's India policy was a bilateral civilian nuclear agreement, which received final approval from U.S. lawmakers in the fall of 2008. Last June, when the agreement was stalled, an Obama adviser told the Financial Times that his candidate was "highly ambivalent" about it, even though Obama had backed the nuclear deal in a 2006 Senate vote. A month later, Obama told an Indian magazine that despite his initial concerns over how the nuclear pact would affect the global nonproliferation regime, he supported it because "India is a strong democracy and a natural strategic partner for the U.S. in the 21st century."

Yet Indians still had their doubts about Obama. They knew he had sought to modify the nuclear accord in 2006 to limit India's access to nuclear fuel. Indian foreign-affairs scholar C. Raja Mohan has written that Obama's proposed amendment "almost wrecked the nuclear deal." Daniel Twining, who worked on South Asia policy at the State Department in 2007 and 2008, says it was a "poison-pill amendment."

Though the International Atomic Energy Agency, the Nuclear Suppliers Group, and the U.S. and Indian governments have taken the necessary steps to permit bilateral civilian nuclear cooperation, policymakers must negotiate key aspects of that cooperation. Obama has tapped veteran State Department hand Robert Einhorn to be the senior arms-control official at Foggy Bottom. Einhorn has been a sharp critic of the U.S.-India nuclear agreement. In November 2006, he was one of 18 signatories to a letter urging the Senate to "address serious flaws" in its India nuclear-trade bill. --
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A billion people that would be 'on your side' and you just let that go? Such a poor idea.

In case you wanted to know about the award and who has received it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bharat_Ratna