Obama’s visit to India
by
AJ Philip |
Shedding baggage of the past
AS this column appears on Monday, US President Barack Hussein Obama would be winding up his three-day visit to India and leaving for Indonesia, where he spent four years of his boyhood. That his visit to India is his longest, outside the US, since he took over as the 44th president two years ago is not accidental.
Considerable planning had gone into making Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s visit to Washington about two years ago, the first state visit since Obama’s historic inaugural. In another gesture of great diplomatic significance, Obama dropped in on External Affairs Minister SM Krishna, while he was visiting his counterpart at the State Department.
During the interregnum, Manmohan Singh and Obama have met at several multilateral forums and held as many one-on-one meetings. It is a measure of the evolving relationship between the two largest democracies that among the six US presidents who visited India since India’s Independence in 1947, three of them made their visits during the last 10 years. A few days before the visit, Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao made a statement of fact, rather than wish, that no “big-bang breakthrough” was expected in India-US relations during Obama’s visit.
In fact, India’s expectations from the visit were limited, in comparison to the hopes nursed by the American side. As Obama made it clear before he set out for Mumbai in Air Force One and while addressing businessmen in Mumbai, his aim was to strike business deals that would create new jobs in the US.
Of course, Obama would have known that his assertions on creating jobs in America while campaigning for the Democratic Party in the recent elections to the US Congress and state offices did not go down well with Indian businessmen in general and IT professionals in particular. “Boston, not Bangalore,” Obama sloganeered while threatening to impose restrictions on outsourcing.
It is true that out of $60 billion that Indian IT companies earn by way of export of goods and services, 60 per cent comes from the US. The increasing restrictions on issue of visas to IT professionals from India have forced the IT industry to give a letter of protest to the US Ambassador in India.
In the rhetoric on jobs, what is overlooked is that outsourcing is a two-way process that benefits both countries. For instance, today the American IT major IBM has more employees in India than in the US. In the early nineties when the first Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet was opened in Bangalore, a violent protest forced it to close down. Today, KFC outlets are dime a dozen in India’s IT capital.
As more and more American companies like General Electric and Bristol-Myers open research and development offices in India, there is no fear of US multinationals taking over Indian business. In the past, Leftist parties used to wax eloquent about the dangers of a possible US takeover of Indian business. Now, everyone knows that it is the Indian companies that are taking over American firms. Equally significant, India’s economic growth rate is an impressive 8 per cent against US’s barely 2 per cent.
The volume of trade between the two countries has been steadily growing. Last year, India and the US did business worth $60.2 billion which is only a fraction of the US-China trade of $434 billion. The trade is more or less balanced in the case of India and the US while it is lopsided in the case of China and the US.
Despite such favourable trends, some perceptions of each other remain unchanged. The New York Times hinted at it when it editorialised, “Indians are still feeling anxious and insufficiently loved”.
Rightly or wrongly, Indians believe that it is easier to do business with a Republican administration than a Democratic one. Small wonder that India found the less articulate George Bush more responsive to Indian concerns than his loquacious predecessor Bill Clinton.
The nuclear deal that Manmohan Singh and George Bush signed is now stuck on the Americans’ inability to address India’s concerns over the liability of the manufacturers of nuclear reactors if something goes wrong with them. The US considers India’s demands unreasonable by international standards.
On its part, the Indian government cannot overlook the anxiety of its parliamentarians, given the unwillingness of the American multinational Union Carbide to own up responsibility for the world’s worst industrial disaster at its Bhopal plant 25 years ago.
It is true that Obama’s hands are tied as the US Congress has to give approval to any concessions on nuclear sales to India. This has forced India to look for alternative sources like Russia and France. Politically, an assurance that the US would support India’s claim for a permanent seat in the UN Security Council would have gone a long way to change perceptions about the US intentions.
Equally important, India has genuine concerns over the policies the US has been pursuing with regard to Afghanistan and Pakistan. During the whole of Cold War, India remained closer to the erstwhile Soviet Union than the US, though India preferred to call itself “non-aligned”. It is not easy to dispense with the baggage of the past and forge what is called strategic partnership.
At a personal level, Obama remains very popular in India. If security had not stood in the way, millions of Indians would have come out on the streets to cheer him in Mumbai and New Delhi.
With two more years to go for Obama’s Presidency to end, he is in a position to transform Indo-US relations in conformity with the aspirations of the people of the two countries. Will he or will he not? That is the question.
Oman Tribune |
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