India-US ties: What if Modi were to suddenly disappear from the scene?

Was the Modi-Obama summit the panacea for all that troubles the India-US relationship? Experts don’t think so, Aziz Haniffa finds



In the first major conference dissecting the Modi-Obama summit in New Delhi -- that is being touted as the cementing of the India-United States strategic partnership -- leading policy wonks and experts, including some who served in US administrations, have warned that a surfeit of euphoria is misplaced.

The conference coincided with the release of a report by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, titled 'Unity in Difference: Overcoming the US-India Divide'. 

The report was authored by the think tank’s Senior Associate Ashley Tellis, one of the America’s foremost strategic experts, who served in the George W Bush administration and was an architect of the Indo-US civilian nuclear deal.

Tellis acknowledged that the Modi-Obama summit was ‘a moment in the Indo-US relationship, which is very positive.’

He continued, ‘There is bad news, however; we have seen moments like this before, and if you look at the history of Indo-US relations, it is not a history of continuous, systematic growth in partnership.’

For someone like him who has ‘been in the trenches’ and watched this relationship for decades, Tellis wondered, ‘Is the India-US relationship condemned really to these perpetual bouts of alternation, where moments of great satisfaction of being at a peak are inevitably succeeded by being in the trough?’

‘And, the bad news,’ Tellis added, ‘Is yes, we are condemned to such a relationship at least for a while longer.’

Tellis said, ‘The central challenge that both countries have to manage if they want this relationship to work, really has nothing to do with the specific issues that we are often obsessed about -- whether it be Af-Pak (Aghanistan- and Pakistan), or China or climate change or the environment.’

‘We will always have disagreements, we will have agreements on these issues and so on and so forth,’ Tellis said. ‘The fundamental issue that we have to wrap our hands around is the question of reciprocity in the bilateral relationship. Because India and the United States, although being sovereign equals in formal terms, are materially countries with radical different power political capabilities.’

Consequently, Tellis declared, ‘India will continue to depend on the United States in a way that is not true in reverse. And, so, one is led to the conundrum where the United States sees the rise of India as being in its interests, but Washington policymakers have not yet achieved a consensus on what price they are willing to pay to assist India’s rise.’

Tellis said, ‘And, of course, India has extravagant expectations that American assistance will be generous and forthcoming. But, there is no assurance that those expectations will be met consistently over time.’

Thus, he argued, ‘What we need is a different way of thinking about the problem.’

He said that’s why the report was titled Unity in Difference, he said.

Tellis said, ‘If the United States really believes that the rise of India is in its own interests, for global and regional reasons, then it must be prepared to be generous to India, without automatically lapsing into expectations of repayment, because India will not simply have the capacity to repay us in the way that we often expect, and often times will be unwilling to repay us in the way that we expect. So, that’s policy for Washington.’

India, Tellis said, ‘needs to do things too that provide incentives for the United States to be generous, because we are ultimately in a competitive international system where nobody does anything for free. And, so, the argument here is that India needs to discover what the (former prime minister Atal Bihari) Vajpayee government has done with such success in the years 1998 to 2004, which is to walk the extra mile with Washington and for Washington and thereby reward US policymakers.’

Tellis said they had to ‘be incentivised to be generous with India in ways that they otherwise might have not been if Vajpayee had not taken initiatives of that kind.’

Vikram Nehru, senior associate at Carnegie, argued, ‘The binding constraints to India’s rise are internal.’

He said, ‘India’s reticence to integrate its economy with the world economy, India’s problem with capacity to deliver on infrastructure, and these sorts of things, that the United States can necessarily have any instruments to support India -- that has to come from the Indian side.’

He said, ‘The reason why India is not part of any regional trade arrangement is because India doesn’t want to be part of any such trade arrangement.’

Daniel Markey, academic director and senior research professor, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, said much sophistication is required by US policymakers if India is to be elevated at par with Washington’s most durable strategic partners.

‘It’s not so simple as the message we’ve been hearing in the not so distant past about potential for our relationship,’ said Markey, who is also adjunct senior fellow for India, Pakistan and South Asia, Council on Foreign Relations. 

‘It is one of a kind of constrained ambition in terms of expectation -- and that is hard to pull off.’

He said in such a scenario, ‘How does a mediocre US-India relationship look -- is it so bad?’

Markey said there is no denying that ‘there is a real conundrum here, and if we can’t say the costs of doing less is sufficiently high to elevate action on the part of top level US policymakers, then I fear we are condemned to repeat the mediocrity of the past.’

Alan Kronstadt, specialist in South Asian Affairs at the Congressional Research Service -- the United States Congress’s own think tank -- argued that since the Bharatiya Janata Party lacks a ‘deep bench’, if Prime Minister Narendra Modi were to suddenly disappear from the scene, the prevailing US optimism on India would rapidly dissipate.

Kronstadt argued that America’s engagement with India ‘is predicated on some questionable assumptions... there doesn’t seem to be another Modi in India.’

Kronstadt also said, ‘The grand sweep of US engagement with India is also predicated on significant economic growth in that country of 5-6 percent… what the US would think of as fantastic growth, wouldn’t cut it for a country like India with its youth bulge, and education and power needs.’

Thus, he said, if the Modi government, ‘Takes all the action it can and still finds that India is not growing at a significant rate,’ it was questionable ‘how the United States would look at India.’

Ashley Tellis, senior associate at Carnegie, whose report, Unity in Difference: Overcoming the US-India Divide, was the basis of the discussion, agreed about the BJP.

‘The bad news is that all of this could go for a six -- as they say -- if something were to happen to Modi because there is no one in India in his party, who has the capacity to mobilize the nation and win the number of seats that he does and shares that conviction of India’s transformation,’ Tellis said. 

‘You have a lot of people who care about India’s transformation, but they can’t mobilize the country enough to win seats in Parliament and run policy.’