jeypore
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It is not easy to recall another international leader touching millions of Indians in the way President-Elect Barack Obama has. For a country where politics is a national passion, India has enthusiastically followed every twist and turn in Obama's historic journey since he launched his presidential campaign two years ago.
Obama's simultaneous assertion of minority identity and his promise to transcend identity politics have cut to the very heart of India's politics, where a million mutinies are playing themselves out. No other country has reveled in the relentless mobilization of a thousand clashing identities as India has. No surprise, then, that Obama's victory has been hailed by every major minority group in India.
From the Dalits, or India's lowest castes, whose oppression over millenniums makes slavery and racism look like a recent passing fancy, to the Muslims--whose assertion as a religious minority shaped the formation of the modern state-system in the Subcontinent and continues to animate the internal politics of India--Obama's victory marks a triumph of hope over desperation.
The Hindu upper castes, which form the bulk of modern India's dynamic and globalized community, have rooted for Obama, in much the same way as the upper reaches of America's professional and middle classes.
It is not just the Hindus and Muslims, upper castes and lower castes who have taken to Obama. Even India's Stalinist left, carrier of the last residues of the nation's anti-colonial and anti-Western tradition, has been moved by Obama's ability to build a winning political coalition in America.
Yet even as the full spectrum of India's political classes celebrate his victory, Obama seems all set to finger the sorest spot of modern Indian nationalism--its conflict in Kashmir, and its enduring dispute over Kashmir with Pakistan.
As a series of recent statements from Obama on Kashmir get front-page treatment, India is waking up to the prospect of a major spat with the next administration in Washington over Kashmir. If India's national neuralgia over Kashmir is reignited under an Obama administration, America will risk losing all the recent gains in its relationship with India under President George W. Bush.
Do recall that barely a few weeks ago, amid a gathering financial crisis, the Congressional Democrats rallied behind Bush to quickly approve a controversial nuclear cooperation agreement with India. The incoming vice president, Joseph Biden, has been a strong champion of the Indo-U.S. nuclear deal, and Obama, too, endorsed it, citing the importance of the strategic partnership between the two countries.
What then is driving the Obama foreign policy team to pick a new fight with India on Kashmir? It is not that the old liberal internationalists are back at wanting to solve all the world's problems. It may not even be that the South Asia hands who served under President Clinton are stuck in a time warp about Indo-U.S. relations.
The potential conflict between India and the new administration stems from some of the big ideas Obama has articulated about America's national security priorities. Obama has said he wants to shift America's military energies from a needless war of choice in Iraq to the faltering war of necessity in Afghanistan.
Obama has also sensed, rightly, that the U.S. cannot stabilize Afghanistan unless it fixes Pakistan's profound insecurities and gets its Army to level with the U.S. and stop supporting America's enemies in Afghanistan. Few Indians disagree with Obama's reasoning that the threats to Pakistan's security are internal and do not come from India.
But many are beginning to get anxious about the third step in Obama's logic: To get Pakistan to cooperate with the U.S. in Afghanistan, Washington must actively seek to resolve Islamabad's problem with New Delhi over Kashmir. Put simply, the Indian fear is that they are being asked to pick up the political tab for America's failed policy in Afghanistan, and for the Pakistan Army's deliberate betrayal of U.S. interests there.
Obama appears poised to make the same mistake that he had accused Bush of--mollycoddling Pakistan's now fallen strongman Gen. Pervez Musharraf and relying on his Army rather than the democratic forces in that nation to fight the war on terror. Obama is now buying into the Pakistan Army's argument that it cannot fight on two fronts--on the east with India and on the west against the Taliban and al-Qaida.
The argument that Obama's people have bought into ignores a simple truth. India's prime minister, Manmohan Singh, has presided over a productive peace process with Pakistan and has been engaged in important back-channel negotiations with its leaders on resolving the Kashmir dispute. Pakistan's new civilian leaders, too, are enthusiastic about normalizing relations with India.
The only institutional force that remains hostile to India in Pakistan is its army; it is a pity, then, that the Obama team is ready to buy into its new story about the link between Kashmir and Afghanistan. The sources of the troubles of the United States, Afghanistan and India stem from the unwavering dominance of the Army over national security politics of Pakistan.
If Obama were to focus on changing the civil-military relationship in Pakistan and develop a joint set of initiatives with India for the stabilization of the region, New Delhi will be eager to respond. But if Obama's foreign policy team insists on a unilateral approach to Kashmir, the resistance from India might be fierce and the new president might set himself up for an early foreign policy defeat.
C. Raja Mohan is a professor of South Asian studies at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Nanyang Technological University, in Singapore, and a contributing editor of The Indian Express, New Delhi.
Obama And India - Forbes.com
Obama's simultaneous assertion of minority identity and his promise to transcend identity politics have cut to the very heart of India's politics, where a million mutinies are playing themselves out. No other country has reveled in the relentless mobilization of a thousand clashing identities as India has. No surprise, then, that Obama's victory has been hailed by every major minority group in India.
From the Dalits, or India's lowest castes, whose oppression over millenniums makes slavery and racism look like a recent passing fancy, to the Muslims--whose assertion as a religious minority shaped the formation of the modern state-system in the Subcontinent and continues to animate the internal politics of India--Obama's victory marks a triumph of hope over desperation.
The Hindu upper castes, which form the bulk of modern India's dynamic and globalized community, have rooted for Obama, in much the same way as the upper reaches of America's professional and middle classes.
It is not just the Hindus and Muslims, upper castes and lower castes who have taken to Obama. Even India's Stalinist left, carrier of the last residues of the nation's anti-colonial and anti-Western tradition, has been moved by Obama's ability to build a winning political coalition in America.
Yet even as the full spectrum of India's political classes celebrate his victory, Obama seems all set to finger the sorest spot of modern Indian nationalism--its conflict in Kashmir, and its enduring dispute over Kashmir with Pakistan.
As a series of recent statements from Obama on Kashmir get front-page treatment, India is waking up to the prospect of a major spat with the next administration in Washington over Kashmir. If India's national neuralgia over Kashmir is reignited under an Obama administration, America will risk losing all the recent gains in its relationship with India under President George W. Bush.
Do recall that barely a few weeks ago, amid a gathering financial crisis, the Congressional Democrats rallied behind Bush to quickly approve a controversial nuclear cooperation agreement with India. The incoming vice president, Joseph Biden, has been a strong champion of the Indo-U.S. nuclear deal, and Obama, too, endorsed it, citing the importance of the strategic partnership between the two countries.
What then is driving the Obama foreign policy team to pick a new fight with India on Kashmir? It is not that the old liberal internationalists are back at wanting to solve all the world's problems. It may not even be that the South Asia hands who served under President Clinton are stuck in a time warp about Indo-U.S. relations.
The potential conflict between India and the new administration stems from some of the big ideas Obama has articulated about America's national security priorities. Obama has said he wants to shift America's military energies from a needless war of choice in Iraq to the faltering war of necessity in Afghanistan.
Obama has also sensed, rightly, that the U.S. cannot stabilize Afghanistan unless it fixes Pakistan's profound insecurities and gets its Army to level with the U.S. and stop supporting America's enemies in Afghanistan. Few Indians disagree with Obama's reasoning that the threats to Pakistan's security are internal and do not come from India.
But many are beginning to get anxious about the third step in Obama's logic: To get Pakistan to cooperate with the U.S. in Afghanistan, Washington must actively seek to resolve Islamabad's problem with New Delhi over Kashmir. Put simply, the Indian fear is that they are being asked to pick up the political tab for America's failed policy in Afghanistan, and for the Pakistan Army's deliberate betrayal of U.S. interests there.
Obama appears poised to make the same mistake that he had accused Bush of--mollycoddling Pakistan's now fallen strongman Gen. Pervez Musharraf and relying on his Army rather than the democratic forces in that nation to fight the war on terror. Obama is now buying into the Pakistan Army's argument that it cannot fight on two fronts--on the east with India and on the west against the Taliban and al-Qaida.
The argument that Obama's people have bought into ignores a simple truth. India's prime minister, Manmohan Singh, has presided over a productive peace process with Pakistan and has been engaged in important back-channel negotiations with its leaders on resolving the Kashmir dispute. Pakistan's new civilian leaders, too, are enthusiastic about normalizing relations with India.
The only institutional force that remains hostile to India in Pakistan is its army; it is a pity, then, that the Obama team is ready to buy into its new story about the link between Kashmir and Afghanistan. The sources of the troubles of the United States, Afghanistan and India stem from the unwavering dominance of the Army over national security politics of Pakistan.
If Obama were to focus on changing the civil-military relationship in Pakistan and develop a joint set of initiatives with India for the stabilization of the region, New Delhi will be eager to respond. But if Obama's foreign policy team insists on a unilateral approach to Kashmir, the resistance from India might be fierce and the new president might set himself up for an early foreign policy defeat.
C. Raja Mohan is a professor of South Asian studies at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Nanyang Technological University, in Singapore, and a contributing editor of The Indian Express, New Delhi.
Obama And India - Forbes.com
