For New Delhi, it’s as good as it gets: Rice as Secy of State, Hadley as NSA

Foreign Secretary Shyam Saran, who is heading to Washington for high technology talks tonight, will meet Hadley and other senior officials and get a finer appreciation of the prospects for Indo-U.S. relations over the next four years.

While Hadley’s succession will ensure continuity at the White House, Rice’s new job as America’s top diplomat should help India deal better with the traditionally difficult political terrain in the State Department.

Rice, a close personal friend of the Bush family, has been in regular touch over the phone with her counterparts in New Delhi—Brajesh Mishra during the rule of the National Democratic Alliance, and since then with J N Dixit. It is not mere personal bonhomie that makes New Delhi cheer the appointments of Rice and Hadley, who have been India’s most trusted interlocutors over the last four years.

Rice, a former provost of Stanford University, in fact, laid the foundations for a fundamentally different approach in Washington towards New Delhi.

As the main foreign policy adviser to candidate Bush in the presidential campaign of 2000, Rice argued in an article published in Foreign Affairs that America ‘‘should pay closer attention to India’s role in the regional balance.’’

She went on: ‘‘There is a strong tendency conceptually (in America) to connect India with Pakistan and to think only of Kashmir or the nuclear competition between the two states. But India is an element in China’s calculation, and it should be in America’s, too. India is not a great power yet, but it has the potential to emerge as one.’’

It is Rice’s recognition of India’s prospect as a global power and her determination to discard the South Asian prism that helped shape the paradigm shift in US policy towards India under the Bush Administration.

In the controversial National Security Strategy document unveiled by the Bush Administration in September 2002, the White House, for the first time, put India in the section of global powers rather than in the traditional chapters reviewing US regional policy.

Rice’s unconventional view of India prevailed despite the fact that the US needed Pakistan to pursue its objectives in Afghanistan after September 11, 2001. She took a sustained interest in ending the nuclear differences with India that had hobbled bilateral relations for decades.

It was Hadley who flew into New Delhi in September 2003 on an unannounced visit to present the framework of what later came to be known as the Next Steps in Strategic Partnership. Despite US disappointment with India’s reluctance to send troops to Iraq in the summer of 2003, Rice and Hadley persisted with the implementation of President Bush’s commitment to end the nuclear dispute with India.

Through the NSSP, Rice and Hadley have helped renew civilian nuclear and space cooperation with India and liberalise high-technology transfers.

Rice and Hadley also demonstrated considerable empathy towards India’s concerns on terrorism in Jammu and Kashmir and kept up the pressure on Pakistan to stop cross-border infiltration.

Together with Robert Blackwill, the energetic US Ambassador to India during 2001-2003, they made the US declare for the first time that the elections in Jammu and Kashmir in 2002 were free and fair.

India has every reason to be happy with the staffing of the Second Bush Administration.

It is up to New Delhi now to take advantage of the new correlation of forces in Washington by being a lot more creative and a little less afraid of its own shadows when it comes to relations with the United States.