Author: James Clad
Publication: The Los
Angeles Times
Date: September 15,
2000.
More than 2 million Indian
Americans, many of the richest U.S. corporations and both presidential
candidates are closely interested in the visit today of Indian Prime Minister
Atal Behari Vajpayee to Washington.
The Vajpayee visit straddles
two agendas for future U.S.-India ties. The old familiar agenda,
a plaything of bureaucrats and foreign policy specialists, remains in thrall
to various anxieties. India's nuclear ambitions alarm the nonproliferation
specialists in Washington. President Clinton has described the Kashmir
region, disputed between India and Pakistan since 1947, as "the most dangerous
place in the world."
The "old" India agenda
also focuses on poverty and social issues. Thirty percent of the
world's poorest people live in India. Child labor, societal attitudes
toward women, coal-generated electricity causing global warming concerns
and fears about the AIDS pandemic also figure prominently in the list of
worries.
By contrast, a newer
but narrower agenda is transforming the U.S. connection with this
rising Asian power. In recent months, business journalists have gushed
over info-tech entrepreneurs in India and the U.S. The sheer size
of India's domestic market mesmerizes American companies. India's
6% growth performance since 1997 has shamed the East Asian "miracle economies."
Enormous infrastructure
needs, especially electricity shortfalls, beckon technical solutions and
financing from outsiders. Major U.S. corporations expanding
business in India these days include General Electric, ExxonMobil, Ford,
Enron, IBM, Unocal, Citibank and Chase.
To be sure, India's glacial
pace of change can be maddening. During the 1990s, China attracted
45 times more foreign investment than India. And Indians still joke
that theirs "is the country of the future, and always will be." But India's
once-shuttered markets are nonetheless yielding to the demands of global
commerce.
A crucial element in
the new India agenda is the dynamic place of Indian Americans. They
figure, in this election year, both as conscientious voters and generous
donors. These 1970s-era arrivals have become the richest single immigrant
group in the U.S.; they include the entrepreneurs who created hotmail.com
and E-Lock Technologies, a firm pioneering secure electronic commercial
transactions.
In my meetings with Vajpayee
in recent years, I've been struck by two of his attributes: simplicity
and focus. Indians point out that he has "neither family nor a firm"--meaning
that, in an Asia with legendary nepotism and political-business interests,
there's no way to "get to" Vajpayee. During long years in the political
wilderness, Vajpayee was one of the very few prominent Indian politicians
who dared attack India's pro-Soviet leanings during the Cold War.
And his parliamentary peers have never forgotten his solo filibuster more
than 30 years ago, when he shamed India's legislators into passing a motion
of condolence for Israeli children killed in a terrorist school bus attack.
Vajpayee wants to merge
the old with the new. In talks during his visit, he will not dodge
anxieties over South Asian tensions and nuclear competition. These
are real enough. But India's leader hopes for forward-looking discussions
about U.S.-India ties. In this respect, the last but most important
part of the "new agenda" turns on an important strategic potential.
While Clinton's April visit to India helped move U.S. policy beyond
old habits of thinking about India, much remains to be done.
For 50 years we spoke
and thought about "India and Pakistan" as if the two were joined at the
hip. But the old Cold War rationale leveraging Pakistan into implicit
parity with India has now disappeared. True, the bitter Kashmir dispute
and dual nuclear weapons possession still buttress this mental habit.
However, every measurement of economic prospects, GDP growth, national
power projection and even basic welfare, such as women's literacy, favors
India.
Still, we cannot and
should not accept India's pretensions to automatic Great Power status.
Old habits die hard in Delhi, where senior bureaucrats still obstruct neighboring
countries' development plans. During Vajpayee's visit, Clinton and
advisors to both presidential candidates should speak to India's leader
about re-creating the enormous economic area once encompassed by an undivided
British India that stretched from the Khyber Pass to Burma (now known as
Myanmar). Enormous potential awaits the Indian subcontinent in energy,
water management, transport and other cross-border linkages.
Above all, Vajpayee's
visit should help us to rethink basic U.S. relationships in Asia.
India's influence in Asia has been expanding in the last few years.
We need to stay focused on new agenda opportunities just as much as on
old anxieties.
(James Clad, a Professor
of Asian Studies at Georgetown University, in the 1990s Was South Asia
Correspondent for the Far Eastern Economic Review)