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Early India visit is a priority for Bush

Aziz Haniffa
India Abroad Correspondent in Washington

Two senior officials of the United States administration have asserted that President George W Bush's intent to visit India early next year is part of a tangible commitment to further strengthen Indo-US ties.

In separate presentations at a conference on the 'New Era in US-India Relations', jointly sponsored by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry and the Indian American Forum for Political Education, Torkel Patterson, senior director on Asia in the National Security Council, and Undersecretary of Defence Dov Zakheim said a trip to India early in his tenure was a foreign policy priority of Bush.

Patterson acknowledged that during the Cold War, when the US saw India as a surrogate of the erstwhile Soviet Union. But today the commonalities between New Delhi and Washington have come to the fore and "I don't see any obstacles in our relationship".

He said that earlier South Asia was always thought of "as a problem" region. "[But] this president wants to be different. He wants to think about it dynamically and when we have to think about South Asia, we have to think about the opportunity and growth."

Patterson declared that Bush was planning to visit "India early next year" to maintain the momentum in the relationship.

Zakheim, who was a senior official in the Reagan administration in the mid-1980s when Pakistan was considered a strategic ally of the US and India an ally of Moscow, said, "We were seeing the world from different ends of the telescope."

All that has changed now and, he declared, relations between the two countries are now on a solid footing.

Zakheim remembered that during the Bush presidential campaign when he and the likes of Condoleezza Rice, now national security adviser, and Paul Wolfowitz, deputy secretary for defence advised Bush on foreign policy, India figured quite prominently.

"We had a number of discussions with Governor Bush and all of us unanimously felt his vision had to include India... If we are going to discuss great powers of the future, then we have to discuss India."

Thus, he said, "We are going to get beyond platitudes. Our relationship has been marked by too much patronizing stuff... we need to get into real substance now."

Zakheim also echoed Patterson's declaration that Bush would visit India early in his term. "I was not in the least surprised that [External Affairs] Minister Jaswant Singh had such a good meeting with the president."

When Singh visited Washington on April 6 and met Rice at the White House, Bush dropped in on the meeting and invited Singh for a forty-minute tete-a-tete on a range of topics -- bilateral, regional and global -- and also accepted Vajpayee's invitation to visit India.

Zakheim also claimed that President Bush's proposed National Missile Defence system was in sync with India and that since it "vibes with Indian thinking" it did not surprise Washington when India gave it qualified support.

He predicted that "what will be even more surprising to the world community in the future is our strategic views hold so much in common".

Zakheim said the relationship today between the US and India is shorn of all the earlier hang-ups. "In our relationship of today, many of the axioms of the past are no longer visible". What is evident are the commonalities not only between the countries but on issues like counter-terrorism, for example.

Discounting the growing perception that the US is cultivating India as a counterweight to China, Zakheim said, "It is not directed either against Russia or China..."

"I don't think ours is a strategic alliance directed against China," he asserted. Instead, what you have now is "a new agenda where we see commonality after commonality".

Meanwhile, he appealed to the powers that be on the FICCI delegation to help change the perception of American businesses that doing business in India is very difficult and often frustrating. "There are too many lingering memories on both sides. We have to clear those cobwebs," Zakheim said.

Another panelist, Dennis Kux, author of the highly acclaimed 'The United States and India: Estranged Democracies', who has just published his newest book on a similar vein titled 'The United States and Pakistan 1947-2000: Disenchanted Allies', acknowledged that Indo-US relations had undergone a sea change.

But he warned against running away with the idea that both countries have now entered an alliance.

He said the relationship ought to be viewed as a "long-term partnership among equals".

Zakheim said if the relationship has to be sustained, both countries should "define fairly precisely what they want and what they do not want".

India's Ambassador Lalit Mansingh said India and the US have turned "a new chapter and this time the partnership will be strong... We are now looking at what is uniting us and not what is dividing us."

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