Blackwill, on balance

He may have finally succeeded over two years in getting the P-word out of conversations with his New Delhi guests, but he seemed to have failed with his Washington DC hosts. Arriving at the threshold of a new relationship between the world’s largest democracies, Blackwill tried many a balancing act.

To begin with, he attempted to square his Kissingerian worldview with Galbraithian instincts. He wanted to be remembered as a later day J.K. Galbraith, one of the most popular US ambassadors to be posted to India, even though he drew his academic inspiration from Kissinger. His second balancing act was to exert adequate pressure on India to resolve its differences with Pakistan without making the P-word the centrepiece of his policy. In many public speeches he emphasised the larger global framework within which he viewed India-US relations.

His third balancing act was to try and ease post-Pokharan economic sanctions and promote India-US defence cooperation without upsetting the Ayatollahs of non-proliferation in Washington. The one area of bilateral relations where he didn’t have much to do apart from leaning heavily on one side was on bilateral economic relations. Frustrated at the slow pace of economic liberalisation in India and unmindful of the fact that US President George Bush’s trade policies were not exactly helping bilateral trade, Blackwill complained that India-US business was ‘‘as flat as a chapatti’’, even while his critics complained that his ego was ‘‘as puffed up as a puri’’!

Whatever the reasons for Blackwill’s decision to return home, no successor of his can ignore his perspective on India-US relations—that they must be based on the appreciation of the fact that both are major powers, with a role to play in world affairs, and that both can and must make common cause in the fight against terrorism.