Clinton's India visit a low-key success
By David J Karl
Much of the media coverage of United States Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton's whirlwind five-day tour of Mumbai and New Delhi last month focused on
high politics. The rebuff over climate policy issued by India's environment
minister was well publicized, though his words seemed directed as much to the
domestic audience as to Clinton.
Announcements pertaining to defense and nuclear cooperation also garnered much
attention. The end-use monitoring agreement opens the door for large-scale
Indian purchases of sophisticated US military technology, further bolstering
the security (tacitly anti-China) partnership that has sprung up in recent
years. And the Indian announcement that US firms would have exclusive rights to
build nuclear power plants at two sites represents New Delhi's payback for
Washington, allowing it to escape pariahtude under the international
non-proliferation regime.
The "low politics" of the trip were largely ignored even though they are every
bit as important for the future of bilateral relations. First, Clinton was very
attentive to the private-sector and societal linkages that are the foundation
for the new era in US-India affairs. Headlines about nuclear cooperation,
expanding military ties and convergent geopolitical interests obscure the
critical role that these non-governmental connections play in building ties.
Clinton spent a good part of her visit away from the Indian capital and made a
conscious effort to engage a wider range of people than traveling secretaries
of state usually do. For example, corporate chieftains, film stars, village
artisans, educators, agricultural researchers, green technology enthusiasts and
university students.
Second, the trip resulted in two initiatives aimed at enhancing research and
scientific cooperation, a natural area of collaboration that the George W Bush
administration failed to exploit. Both governments agreed to activate a US$30
million endowment designed to spur joint undertakings in industrial research
and development, a program that was originally announced with some fanfare
during Bush's trip to India in March 2006 but then remained in bureaucratic
limbo for three years.
An agreement also was signed to expand civilian space cooperation, another
promising but overlooked field for joint action. Finally, Clinton emphasized
agricultural development as a key item on the bilateral agenda, an important
but often ignored area of partnership that would have a positive impact on
global food security concerns. Despite the rhetoric Washington once attached to
the 2005 Agriculture Knowledge Initiative with India, the US funding commitment
was allowed to expire in late 2008.
Third, the trip culminated in the creation of a US-India strategic dialogue
that will be co-chaired by Clinton and Indian Foreign Minister S M Krishna. The
dialogue, which consolidates dozens of existing consultative mechanisms but
also promises to bring high-level focus to a range of new topics, is
symbolically important. Since the US has established strategic dialogues with
only a handful of countries, the announcement will help reassure
status-conscious Indians who fret that the Barack Obama administration is not
as attentive to their needs as its predecessor was.
And because the dialogue in some ways mirrors the high-level discussions that
the Obama administration has launched with Beijing, New Delhi can claim some
level of emblematic parity with that other rising power in Asia. This is all
the more important since Clinton co-hosted the inaugural meeting of the Obama
administration's dialogue with China just a week after departing India.
The new US-India dialogue will also serve a useful substantive function if it
revitalizes the institutions managing US-India economic affairs. For all the
Bush administration's focus on India, the high-profile Strategic Economic
Dialogue (SED) it launched with China offered a stark contrast to the languid
US-India economic exchange. The SED was driven by a top-ranked, hard-charging
cabinet secretary, while the much less prominent National Economic Council was
the lead US agency for the economic dialogue with India. Although bilateral
trade and investment flows have increased markedly in recent years, they have
yet to reach critical mass and remain a small fraction of the US-China level.
Fourth, the Clinton trip underscored how the secretary has taken ownership of
the India portfolio in the Obama administration, filling an important void at
the top levels of the US government that has existed for several years. True
enough, Bush himself displayed an unusual personal commitment to strengthening
bilateral relations and his leadership was critical in pushing the landmark
civilian nuclear agreement through an often-cantankerous US bureaucracy. But
the focus on nuclear matters also diverted senior policy attention from other
important aspects of the relationship, including the critical economic and
societal bonds that Clinton rightly emphasizes.
In many ways, Clinton is the right person to fill the vacancy. She and her
husband Bill are well known and admired in the country. As first lady, she
undertook a high-profile visit to India in 1995 that was the forerunner of
president Bill Clinton's breakthrough journey five years later. She co-founded
and co-chaired the Senate India Caucus (the first country-specific caucus in
the senate) and is so identified with Indian causes that Obama's presidential
campaign staff sought to malign her as "the senator from Punjab".
A political heavyweight and celebrity in her own right, she makes no secret of
her India-philia. During the trip she even confessed to over-indulgence in
Indian cuisine ("I eat way too much of the food every chance I get"), leading
the Times of India to remark that the "US secretary of state seems to be going desi[native]".
The Clinton visit is no elixir for all the challenges facing the US-India
relationship. Old irritants - the impasse over global trade negotiations and
differential approaches to Afghanistan and Pakistan - continue. New frictions
over climate change and the global non-proliferation system are already
evident. And much will depend on how much energy and imagination both
governments pour into the new strategic dialogue, including in the areas of
"low politics" that provide significant ballast to the entire relationship.
But the trip did accentuate the often-ignored factors that create an important
stake in enduring ties, and which limit the risk that momentary political and
diplomatic aggravations could disrupt the overall US-India partnership.
David J Karl (dkarl@pacificcouncil.org) is director of studies at
the Pacific Council on International Policy and project director of the Joint
Task Force on Enhancing India-US Cooperation in the Global Innovation Economy,
whose just-released report is available at www.pacificcouncil.org.
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