Comment: Obama and India

[RabzonKhan]

Comment: Obama and India

Mira Kamdar
November 13, 2008

India has stood out around the world for being one of the few countries indifferent to America’s presidential election. Indeed, an astounding 87 percent of Indians polled said that they did not think the election mattered to them.

President-elect Barack Obama will have to deal with disasters on many fronts as his administration takes over the reins of government. India, presumably, will not be one of them. If there is one bilateral relationship that the Bush administration is seen to have handled successfully, it is that with India.

This impression is no accident. A powerful lobbying effort included millions of dollars spent to support passage of one of the crowning achievements of Bush’s foreign policy: the United States-India Civil Nuclear Cooperation Agreement. Senator Obama voted for the deal, as did Senator Joe Biden, one of its champions as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

In the heady first months after it came to power, the Bush administration laid out a bold new vision that gave India — a rising Asian democracy on China’s border, proximate to the shipping lanes of the Indian Ocean and to the epicentre of Islamist terrorism — a starring role in US foreign policy. The argument to India was essentially this: You need us to realise your ambition to become a major world power, and we share a concern over China’s rise and Islamist terrorism, so let’s work together.

But the Bush administration’s vision was, and remains, flawed, for it regards the US-India relationship solely as a strategic one that enhances both countries’ military reach. Indeed, India’s $5 billion of US weapons purchases accounts for an astonishing 20 percent of the $24.8 billion in US arms sales in 2007.

The flaw consists partly in viewing China, India’s largest trading partner, as a threat. Moreover, while it is true that the US and India face terrorist threats, both have erred in their approach to dealing with them.

America’s mistakes include the Patriot Act, the invasion of Iraq, the mishandling of Afghanistan, the torture committed at Abu Ghraib, and the prison at Guantánamo Bay.

India’s list of misguided responses to terrorism is almost as long. Its Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA), enacted after the September 11, 2001, attacks on America by the then ruling Bharatiya Janata Party-led government, contains many of the features enshrined in the Patriot Act: an overly vague definition of what constitutes terrorism or unlawful acts, immunity from prosecution for law-enforcement or government agents, and expansion of wire-tapping.

This law remained in effect until the current Congress Party-led government repealed it in 2004. But the BJP may well win India’s national elections next spring, and has pledged to bring back POTA, or something even more draconian.

At the same time, in the face of an alarming increase in the number of terrorist attacks, Manmohan Singh’s government has also indulged in a heavy-handed response to suspected Islamist terrorists, who are hauled off on flimsy evidence and killed before they can be convicted of any crime. Meanwhile, a commission that the government charged with investigating the state-condoned massacres of Muslim citizens in Gujarat in 2002 produced only a whitewash, absolving the perpetrators of any wrongdoing — and fuelling a further rise in home-grown terrorism by deeply disaffected Indian Muslims.

This sort of behaviour has had terrible consequences for the moral credibility of democracy, for security in India, and for regional security in South Asia. The Obama administration should make as bold a break with the Bush administration’s policy toward India as the Bush administration did with its predecessor by refocusing the relationship on tackling the real sources of insecurity.

President Obama must shift the fundamental basis of the US-India relationship away from a strategic partnership based on a militarised notion of security toward a holistic vision of human security in which military force plays an appropriate but not a defining role.

A new vision of the US-India relationship would focus on global warming, the collapse of industrial agriculture, the widening gap between rich and poor, the conventional and nuclear arms race in Asia, and the intensification of ethnic and religious conflict.

The elements of a new Obama vision for the US-India relationship would be: an emergency joint task force to fast-track the development of sustainable solutions to meet India’s and the world’s burgeoning energy, water and food needs. It also should build a partnership for the elimination of nuclear weapons within a set time frame in which the US must take a leadership role. A vigorous new commitment to protecting the rights and freedoms of all citizens and residents and a zero-tolerance policy toward any state collusion with or tolerance of ethnic cleansing, torture, summary detention, citizen surveillance or other insults to democracy, is also necessary.

A McCain presidency would have offered no hope for a radical break with the military swagger and crony capitalism of the Bush years, on which the bilateral relationship with India was built. For the sake of the future of the people of the world’s oldest and largest democracies, let’s hope that an Obama presidency fulfils this hope. —DT-PS

Mira Kamdar, a Senior Fellow of the World Policy Institute, is a Fellow at the Asia Society and the author of Planet India: The Turbulent Rise of the Largest Democracy and the Future of Our World.

 

[RabzonKhan]

Excellent, I could not agree more.


Comment: Fading magic

Saeed Naqvi
November 20, 2008

The trouble with magical moments is that they fade. Was Barack Obama’s election one such magical moment?

Some friends organised a champagne breakfast on November 5 (that is when results were known in India because of the time difference) to celebrate the Obama victory.

None of us had ever celebrated the victory of an American President earlier. What was so special on this occasion?

Indeed, we had never been inspired ever to celebrate even an Indian election.

Obama’s, in other words, was not just an election victory. It was a transformational happening, an unbelievable event like something brought down the chimney by Santa Clause. The world vibed with the American dream.

I would be dishonest if I included all the Indians in the corporate world, bureaucracy, politics, journalism (and the Maruti plus middle class) in the ranks of those deliriously happy at Obama’s victory.

Remember, this country has been split down the middle ever since the Indo-US nuclear deal dominated all discourse for the past three years. Indeed at a time when George W Bush’s popularity ratings in the US, Europe, Latin America, Africa and the Muslim world were in free fall, Israel and India were the only countries holding aloft the Bush banner.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was echoing this reality when he told President Bush in September that “The people of India love you”. The gushing statement would have been sustainable in the event of a McCain victory (which is clearly what the PM’s men expected) but is a trifle embarrassing now that Obama has won.

It requires a sort of psychological dissention to understand the response of those who rejoiced. Race does not explain the thrill. The race divide has been progressively overcome. Martin Luther King Jr, Andrew Young (President Carter’s adviser), Kofi Annan, Colin Powel, Condoleezza Rice and, above all, Nelson Mandela have all exemplified emancipation from racial prejudice. But Obama’s success has taken the process to another level.

First of all, the American people have clasped the hands of the world’s citizens who were despairing at the US having turned its back on the ideals spelt out by the Founding Fathers. It was almost criminal the extent to which the neo-con-driven Bush Presidency was responsible for the disenchantment with America among folks like us.

The Obama success reassures all of us about the American people’s capacity for renewal, almost reinvention.

American people have recoiled on years of war, and images of death and destruction on their TV screens. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Americans, like the rest of the world, looked forward to a benign superpower leading an increasingly interconnected world towards multicultural harmony.

The dream was first shattered by TV images of Iraqi humiliation in Operation Desert Storm, Intefadas, Palestinian kids with catapults facing Israeli tanks, and five years of daily brutalisation of Bosnian Muslims. Global Muslim anger was at fever pitch when 9/11 happened, followed by the attack on Afghanistan and the occupation of Iraq. The doctored world media toned down the destruction. The global networks joined the “war effort”.

But even sanitised news could not conceal the daily stories about entire towns being wiped out, women, children, innocent old men bombed in their homes, followed by daily apologies from US field commanders at the “mistake” due to poor intelligence. This went on for years without a break.

Then in the Lebanese and Georgian conflicts, the side supported by the US lost. An unbroken string of heart-rending images of attacks, weeping children, and mothers beating their breasts, was now being followed by American defeats. And in the backdrop, right through the past eight years, were Guantanamo Bay, Bagram Air Base off Kabul and those dreadful “renditions” of terror suspects to countries where “torture” is legal.

The dismantling of the liberal-democratic state and the trampling of citizens rights were all disgusting realities for the world and the American people. The slogan of “Change” propelled the voters to remove the ***** associated with this past.

I have deliberately not mentioned the economy because Obama’s victory was assured even prior to the Lehman Brothers and AIG fiascos.

The economic meltdown places on Obama’s head the thorniest crown. This economy cannot be revived with tinkering and bailouts. The giant wheel of money circulation has collapsed. It is like rail tracks having been removed from India’s railway networks. Bailouts are pontoon bridges on which railway networks cannot hurtle around.

So, a new co-operative architecture of global finance has to be negotiated. This itself will test Obama. It will also provide him with an opportunity to embark on other themes where global co-operation (as opposed to Bush’s unilateralism) will have to be brought into play.

Wait a minute. Why did I at the outset talk of the ‘fading’ magical moment? Well, because the lengthy transition is looking lengthier in this instance and a defeated Washington establishment is inserting stories which create the frightful illusion of its trying to muscle its way back to be in influential proximity to Obama.

The writer is one of India’s leading columnists

 

[Zaheerkhan]

I am really not a big fan of Indo-U.S relations, history is evident to the fact that USA is the most self-centric country of the world. I mean look what they are doing to Pakistan, a country that helped them fight the soviets!!!

Make friendship with them, who dosent want good relations with other countries?? make natural,mutual and real friendship, not make friendship just for the heck to causing trouble somebody else. The UPA govt. has done a big mistake to trust the Americans.

 

[daredevil]

Morality doesn't work in geo-political strategies, power projection does. This is what US is doing.

 

[AgNoStiC MuSliM]

The way I see it, the flaw of the Neo-Con's was that they remained stuck in an absolutist cold war mind set. They couldn't get beyond 'US vs them' and the 'them' merely changed shape and re-energized the Neo-Cons after 911 - gave them the purpose so to speak, that their mindset cannot quite get beyond.

So we saw an entirely new wave of unilateralism - the US was infallible, just and righteous in its pursuit of a self defined world order. A world order that was self evidently true (You unpatriotic, terrorist sympathizing, white flag waving liberal fools, can't you see that!). Those that disagreed should were cowards or degenerate ingrates. Heck, we even needed to change the names of popular foods if they were associated with the unmentionable ingrates.

And so the US blundered through with its Afghan policy, as its absolutist world view required making a strategic ally of India, while turning the opportunity to help the establishment under Musharraf turn around Pakistan into a colossal fck up. The sad part is that both could have been achieved.

 

[su-47]

I am really not a big fan of Indo-U.S relations, history is evident to the fact that USA is the most self-centric country of the world. I mean look what they are doing to Pakistan, a country that helped them fight the soviets!!!

Make friendship with them, who dosent want good relations with other countries?? make natural,mutual and real friendship, not make friendship just for the heck to causing trouble somebody else. The UPA govt. has done a big mistake to trust the Americans.

Ok, i know this has been repeated a trillion times here, but there are no permanent friends or enemies in international politics, only interests. Its in India's best interest to be in friendly terms with USA now, what with us getting nuke deal, US willing to give us technology it previously denied us etc.

The government is not stupid. they are not going to trust USA blindly. Indo-US relationship will remain strong as long as we have mutual interests.