Some of the American experts on South Asia believe that Narendra Modi’s astounding electoral victory has put the United States in an “awkward position”, given its prolonged boycott of the BJP leader that has just ended with President Barack Obama’s congratulatory phone call.
“Nonetheless, the visa issue, and Modi’s grudge over it, will linger,” says Michael Kugelman of the Woodrow Wilson International Centre, stressing that Washington now needs to “pull out all the ceremonial stops, including a high-level diplomatic visit to New Delhi”.
A similar suggestion that President Obama must send his Secretary of State John Kerry on a salvage mission to New Delhi has separately been made by the Carnegie Endowment’s top South Asia scholar Ashley Tellis.
Kugelman, writing in the los Angeles Times, goes on to say that the Obama administration must now appoint a strong India-friendly envoy to India in place of the outgoing Ambassador, Nancy Powell.
“It should be a prominent name with unassailable pro-India credentials — in the mould of Nicholas Burns, a top diplomat who negotiated the nuclear accord,” he notes, urging Washington to embark on the fast forward path to reset relations with New Delhi.
“Predictably, Washington and New Delhi are abuzz about the implications of the BJP’s victory for the US-India relationship, which has suffered in recent months,” Kugelman notes in an obvious reference to the protracted spat over the arrest and strip-search of Indian diplomat Devyani Khobragade that plunged relations into a deep crisis.
In the assessment of Mark Sappenfield, another American writer on South Asia, Modi’s assumption of reins represents a new problem for President Obama. “It’s a new complication for the already rocky US-India relations,” Sappenfield writes in the Christian Science Monitor. After all, as he points out, Modi happens to be “the only person ever to be banned from travelling to the United States under the International Religious Freedom Act”.
“The question for the White House is no longer whether to embrace Modi, but how. And after India was enraged last December by US treatment of an Indian diplomat in New York charged with visa fraud, Obama must step carefully,” he stresses.
As Modi prepares to take the high office, former Foreign Secretary Kanwal Sibal has a piece of advice for Washington: Take a larger view of US-India relations, and not let it be subordinated to narrow commercial interests of Corporate America.