A Win-Win Partnership

President George W. Bush's visit to India has brought the relations between the United States and India to an unprecedented level of cooperation and interdependence. The domestic debate about the results, including the issue of nuclear cooperation, should be conducted in the context of the seminal contribution this partnership can make to international peace and prosperity.

It is strange that this relationship should have taken so long to develop. Both countries are democracies. English is India's working language, and the educated classes speak it with rhetorical flourish. The Indian bureaucracy is well trained and competent, albeit slow-moving.

Yet until very recent years, relations between the two great democracies have been wary. It is important to understand the reasons if the new relationship is to realise the opportunity before it.

India straddled the Cold War crises in the name of a nonalignment that proclaimed the moral equivalence of the two sides; on most concrete issues it either tilted toward the Soviet side or remained aloof. America's attitude toward India was similarly beset by ambivalence: between respect for the moral quality of Indian leaders and irritation with Indian day-to-day tactics. The democratic institutions that the two countries shared did not determine political choices.

If the emerging partnership is to flourish, each side needs to understand what has brought them together beyond their domestic institutions. Such an analysis should not be seen as part of the contemporary controversy about the feasibility of spreading democracy. It is an appraisal of a specific emerging partnership to enable us to develop its congruencies, deepen common objectives, and define its limits.

Americans think of their country as "the shining city on the hill"; its political institutions are perceived to be both unique and relevant to the rest of the world as guarantees of universal peace. Crusades on behalf of democracy have been implicit in American political thinking and explicit in American policy periodically since Woodrow Wilson - and especially pronounced in the George W. Bush administration.

That is not the way Indians view their international role. Hindu society does indeed also consider itself unique but, in a manner, dramatically at variance from America's. Democracy is not conceived as an expression of Indian culture but as a practical adaptation, the most effective means to reconcile the polyglot components of the state emerging from the colonial past.

The defining aspect of Indian culture has been the awesome feat of maintaining Indian identity through centuries of foreign rule without, until very recently, the benefit of a unified, specifically Indian, state. China gradually imposed its culture on its conquerors until they became indistinguishable from the Han people. India, which, in its present dimensions, was never a single state until the post-colonial period, retained its identity not by co-opting foreigners but by segregating them and finding room for their variety. Huns, Mongols, Greeks, Persians, Afghans, Portuguese and, in the end, Britons, conquered Indian territories, established empires, and then vanished, leaving behind multitudes clinging to the impermeable Hindu culture. The Hindu religion accepts no converts; one is born into it or forever denied its stringencies and its comforts.

India, striving neither to spread its culture nor its institutions, is thus not a comfortable partner for global ideological missions. What it analyses with great precision is its national security requirements. And these owe more to traditional notions of equilibrium and national interest - partly a legacy of British rule - than to contemporary ideological debates.

India seeks a margin of security within which its culture can thrive and its polyglot nationalities work together for practical goals. This has produced various levels of Indian involvement in international affairs.

With respect to its immediate neighbours and smaller states like Bhutan, Sikkim, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and even Bangladesh, Indian policy has been comparable to America's application of the Monroe Doctrine in the Western Hemisphere - an attempt to maintain Indian hegemony, if necessary, by the use of force. American policy has rarely been engaged in these efforts - except over Bangladesh 30 years ago, due to a particular constellation of Cold War elements.

In the north, India faces the Chinese giant across the intractable barrier of the Himalayas and the Tibetan massif. Here India has pursued the traditional remedy of a great power confronted by a comparable rival - a security belt against military pressure. The border clash in 1962 was about the so-called MacMahon line, a buffer zone created by Britain between China (or Tibet) and the historic demarcation line. Neither China nor India has so far engaged in a diplomatic or security contest over pre-eminence in the heartland of Asia. For the foreseeable future, both countries, while protecting their interests, have too much to lose from a general confrontation. Too often America's India policy is justified - occasionally with a wink - as way to contain China. But the reality has been that so far both India and America have found it in their interest to maintain a constructive relationship with China. To be sure, America's global strategy benefits from Indian participation in building a new world order. But India will not serve as America's foil with China and will resent any attempts to use it in that role.

In the region between Kolkata and Singapore, India seeks a role commensurate with its economic, political and strategic significance, its magnitude influenced to a certain extent by proximity to India's frontier (thus a greater concern over Myanmar and Bangladesh than, say, Vietnam or Malaysia). India is well aware that the future of Southeast Asia will be determined by economic and political relationships in which China, America and Japan will, together with India, be the principal actors. A developing Association of Southeast Asian Nations is or should be in their common interest. Attempts at hegemony are likely to lead to countervailing pressures. Here American and Indian interests are - or could be made to be - quite congruent.

In the region between Mumbai and Yemen, Indian and American interests in defeating radical Islam are nearly parallel. Until 9/11, governance in the Islamic world was largely in the hands of autocrats. Indian leaders used nonalignment to placate their Muslim minority by cooperating with the autocratic Muslim states. Gamal Abdel Nasser, at the height of his confrontation with the West, always enjoyed a close relationship with Nehru and his successors.

That condition no longer prevails. Indian leaders have seen fundamentalist Islam reaching into the subcontinent. They know that fundamentalist jihad seeks to radicalise Muslim minorities by undermining secular societies through conspicuous acts of terrorism. Contemporary Indian leaders have understood that if this demonstration of global restlessness spreads - even more, if it succeeds - India will sooner or later suffer comparable attacks. In that sense, even if India had preferred some other battlefields, the outcome of the American struggle against terrorism involves Indian long-term security fundamentally. America is fighting some of India's battles, and the two countries have parallel objectives even where their tactics differ.

A geopolitical confluence of interests has emerged as well. India was able to adopt the role of balancer during the Cold War because the conflict between the US and the Soviet Union threatened India only indirectly. Either the US would deal with the challenge or it would fail. India's contribution would be marginal, and the attempt to line up with America would risk the hostility of the other nuclear superpower only a few hundred miles distant, which might back Pakistan, then - and to a considerable extent still - India's security obsession. India also relied on the Soviet Union for military supplies.

But in the current period, Russia is no longer a superpower nor an adversary of the US. China has emerged as a major and growing geopolitical player with considerable ties to America - especially in the economic field. With the emergence of a more assertive Japan as an ally of the US, India's Cold War attitude of aloofness - and historical Congress Party attitudes - toward the US ran the risk of leading to Indian isolation in the new configuration of power and influence in the world.

Globalisation has reinforced the incentives for cooperation. For much of the 1990s, a combination of Indian bureaucracy and protectionism limited private investment in India. In the past decade, reform-minded administrators from both major Indian political groupings have increasingly linked India to the world economy. Therefore, the basic dilemma of globalisation will increasingly have to be addressed by Indian and American leaders: Globalisation frequently imposes unsymmetrical sacrifices in the sense that benefits and costs affect different elements of society differently. The losers in that process will seek redress through their political system, which is national. The success of globalisation breeds a temptation for protectionism and the need to combine technical achievement with human concern. India and America have an opportunity to overcome these temptations by joint efforts.

While democracy is not what has brought the two countries together, it will surely facilitate their ability to elaborate the relationship. One summit can only define the task; its implementation requires dealing with the vast agenda outlined above.

Relations with Pakistan are a special case. At independence, British India was partitioned between Pakistan and India. But since Partition could not separate the Muslim and Hindu populations entirely, 150 million Muslims live in India today, and the reaction of India to Pakistan, and vice versa, will always differ from that of other countries. For Indian nationalists the Pakistan state appears not only as carved out of what they consider their historic patrimony; it is also a standing challenge to the Indian state by implying that Muslims cannot maintain their identity under Hindu rule and therefore must seek a separate political entity. Balancing the role of Pakistan in the war against terrorism with the emerging partnership with India will require extraordinary sensitivity and an ability to keep in mind that each country's national obsession is the other and that they will interpret American actions not by America's pronouncements, but by their own preconceptions.

Nuclear cooperation with India should be considered in the light of these principles. In 1998, I opposed the sanctions against India's nuclear tests, suggesting that India should be treated as a nuclear country whose progress in the nuclear field had become irreversible. In such a context, nuclear cooperation with India is appropriate. But it needs to make explicit an Indian commitment not to spread nuclear materials to other countries, such as the United States itself has undertaken. The scope of the nuclear cooperation should avoid the rhetoric and the reality of a nuclear arms race in which China could be tempted to support nuclear programs in Iran and Pakistan as a counterweight. The goal should be an Asia that navigates between an unacceptable hegemony by any power and an arms race that replicates in Asia the tragedies of Europe, only with fiercer weapons and even vaster consequences.

In a period preoccupied with concerns over terrorism and the potential clash of civilizations, the emerging cooperation between the two great democracies, India and the US, introduces a positive and hopeful perspective.