With Obama coming, India-US ties set to bloom
Prime Minister Narendra Modi's invitation to US President Barack Obama to be the chief guest at next year's Republic Day celebrations, and the latter's enthusiastic acceptance, reflects positively on the personal equation that the two leaders have come to share in a short period of time, and signals significant improvement in bilateral ties.
The visit will be unprecedented on two counts: This is the first time that an American President will be attending the Republic Day parade and it will also be the first time that he'll be visiting India twice in the course of his presidency. The sheer symbolic meaning of this visit outweighs any criticism of it being low on ‘substance’ (Mr Obama is perceived to be a lame duck President), and needs to be understood on two levels: The contemporary and the historical. In the first case, one only has to go back a few months to see how poorly the India-US bilateral was performing.
The diplomatic debacle surrounding Devyani Khobragade hurt both New Delhi and Washington, DC, and exposed how the two were drifting apart. The relationship had become brittle and listless: Trade had stagnated; agreements, hailed as path-breaking endeavours when inked, were yet to operationalise; and public optimism of the early-2000s had given way to bureaucratic inertia. The rise to power of Mr Modi, a man who had been blacklisted by the US, was expected to complicate matters further. So, the manner in which the relationship has picked up pace from that low point less than a few months ago is phenomenal. Mr Modi's US tour was a huge success; his Government's recent deal with the US that resolves India's farm subsidy dispute and paves the way for the approval of the global Trade Facilitation Agreement is another diplomatic win. These developments have revitalised the atmospherics of the India-US bilateral today.
Beyond the contemporary, however, it is the historical element that adds weightage to the fact of an American President participating in India's Republic Day ceremony. Given the trajectory of India-US relations, and more so the kind of currency that Americana has in this country, it is easy to forget that things were not always this hunky dory. After Independence, a newly de-colonised India had an inherent opposition to great power politics and painstakingly refused to pick a side; when it did (albeit unofficially), it chose the Soviet Union. Though much water has flowed since then, the nostalgia for India's pro-Soviet past and its concurrent anti-US posture remains in some bureaucratic and political quarters.
The Republic Day celebration is perhaps the best example of this: The parade in itself is a Soviet-style event; much of the military hardware that is exhibited during the show is of Soviet-make. Even the display of nuclear weapons has a complicated history, given that the Americans had sanctioned India after the Pokharan tests.
And that is not all: America's relations with India have traditionally been hyphenated with Pakistan, and even though the de-hyphenation process has now reached a level of maturity, the two elements are not quite fully separated. That President Obama, after accepting India's invite, had to make a mollifying phone call to the Pakistani Prime Minister is proof of this. Having said that, there is also no denying that the Pakistan factor is slowly but surely being neutralised from the India-US ties: For example, the parity tours that American Presidents made to Pakistan after visiting India, have consistently become shorter, with Mr Obama dropping Pakistan from his itinerary altogether.