Obama Presidency: why for India, too, it’s turning the page

As he infuses a new meaning into such old ideas as equality of opportunity and reinvents the notion of citizenship in a globalised world, Obama opens the door for elevating the Indo-US partnership to a new level.

The United States and India are among the few states in the modern world that have successfully forged democratic nations out of extremely differentiated populations. Obama’s emergence is a celebration of two similar concepts — America’s ‘E pluribus Unum’ or ‘out of many, one’ and India’s ‘unity in diversity’.

As Obama declared in his victory speech today, “the true strength of our nation comes not from the might of our arms or the scale of our wealth, but from the enduring power of our ideals: democracy, liberty, opportunity and unyielding hope”. That could be said with equal conviction about India.

The millions of Indians who rooted for Obama may have had a better sense of America’s big moment and its long-term significance for India than the foreign policy community so preoccupied with measuring the differences between Republicans and Democrats, say on free trade and nuclear arms control.

India will surely engage the Obama Administration on all the traditional issues. The real challenge for India, however, lies in matching the broader foreign policy vision that Obama will bring to Washington.

Although Indian diplomacy had a great run during the last eight years of Republican rule, the unpopularity of the Bush Administration around the world and the hostility it elicited from key segments of Indian opinion, especially the Muslims and the Left, limited New Delhi’s ability to look beyond the civil nuclear initiative.

If he puts America at ease with the world, Obama will expand the political space in New Delhi for more intensive cooperation with Washington.

Obama has promised a renewed emphasis on diplomacy, as opposed to the more muscular policies of the Bush Administration that sought to brand nations as ‘rogue states’, isolate them, and threaten military action.

Obama’s readiness to engage adversaries, including those in Iran, should generate more options for the US and make it easier for countries like India to join international coalitions in defence of common interests like nuclear non-proliferation.

Obama is also likely to redefine, if not discard, the Bush Administration’s controversial post-9/11 concept of the ‘Great war on terror’. Whatever might have been Washington’s intentions, the conception and implementation of the anti-terror campaign created deep anxieties around the world, particularly in the Middle East and Asia.

India’s own internal and regional struggle against terrorism got inevitably mixed with the controversies surrounding the US war on terrorism. Under an Obama presidency, the US and India should be able to win wider political support against the extremists and terrorists.

Obama wants to refocus America’s military energies away from Iraq and confront the real threats to American security in Afghanistan. This in turn might open up new possibilities for substantive Indo-US strategic cooperation.

Nothing, however, will be more consequential for India, than Obama’s diagnosis of Pakistan’s strategic malaise. Unlike Bush, who until a year ago was prepared to blindly trust the Pakistan Army, Obama appears determined to engineer fundamental changes in our western neighbourhood. While India might have differences over Obama’s tactics, there is no denying the new convergence of Indian and American strategic objectives in Pakistan. As Obama prepares America for an activist foreign policy, India must produce its own new thinking on a range of issues — from the future of Indo-Pak relations to the management of the global nuclear order, and from the construction of a new global financial architecture to mitigating the consequences of climate change.

(C Raja Mohan is a Professor at the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, and a Contributing Editor of The Indian Express)