American foreign policy specialists have urged the Obama administration to take proactive steps to intensify relations with India in all spheres, including defence and economy as part of the strategy to counter China’s rise.
At a Congressional hearing, Walter lohman, director of Asian Studies Center at Washington’s Heritage Foundation, wanted the Obama Administration to facilitate India’s active involvement in regional diplomatic architecture.
“As India refines its strategic interests, it is good for the US to have all its options for cooperation with regional powers fully developed,” he said and stressed that American policymakers must be realistic about operational role US-India relations can play in successfully managing China’s entry in the political life of the region.
“India cares far more about its immediate neighborhood than the Western Pacific. And as any Indian MEA official will tell you, they have many ‘strategic partnerships’, even with China and Russia,” lohman commented and added that India will not serve, except passively, as part of an American policy to balance China. And anytime the foreign policy establishment there feels it is being pulled in that direction, it will recoil.”
At the hearing, convened by the House Committee on Foreign Affairs’ Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific, Indian-American lawmaker Ami Bera said that India had a critical role to help maintain gains made by the US towards stability in South Asia as it withdraws from Afghanistan next year.
Sadanand Dhume, Resident Fellow at American Enterprise Institute, noted that if the strategic goal of America’s pivot in Asia is to counter the rise of China as a global power, Washington ought to nurture economic, defence and diplomatic ties with New Delhi. “A fast-growing democratic and pluralistic nation of 1.2 billion people acts as an obvious counterweight to any hegemonic ambitions an authoritarian China may hold,” he said.
Warning against the potentially negative impact of the US withdrawal of forces from Afghanistan, Dhume said that India cannot pivot away from the badlands of the Af-Pak region. “If the US is seen as cutting and running by its Islamist foes, and this results in an upsurge of violence in both Afghanistan and India as in the 1990s, it will reduce trust between Washington and New Delhi,” he said.
Vikram Nehru, Senior Associate at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, advocated engaging India with the same intensity as China said, “India’s pre-eminent position in South Asia makes the US-India relationship central to maintaining a counterpoint to China’s emergence as Asia’s predominant economic and military power.”