By Mira Kamdar

Mira Kamdar, the author of Planet India: The Turbulent Rise of the Largest Democracy, is currently a fellow at the Asia Society.

New Delhi – India has stood out around the world for being one of the few countries indifferent to America’s presidential election. Indeed, an astounding 87% of Indians polled said that they did not think the election mattered to them.

President-elect Barack Obama will have to deal with disasters on many fronts as his administration takes over the reins of government. India, presumably, will not be one of them. If there is one bilateral relationship that the Bush administration is seen to have handled successfully, it is that with India.

This impression is no accident. A powerful lobbying effort included millions of dollars spent to support passage of one of the crowning achievement of the Bush’s foreign policy: the United States-India Civil Nuclear Cooperation Agreement. Senator Obama voted for the deal, as did Senator Joe Biden, one of its champions as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

In the heady first months after it came to power, the Bush administration laid out a bold new vision that gave India – a rising Asian democracy on China’s border, proximate to the shipping lanes of the Indian Ocean and to the epicenter of Islamist terrorism – a starring role in US foreign policy. The argument to India was essentially this: You need us to realize your ambition to become a major world power, and we share a concern over China’s rise and Islamist terrorism, so let’s work together.

But the Bush administration’s vision was, and remains, flawed, for it regards the US-India relationship solely as a strategic one that enhances both countries’ military reach. Indeed, India’s $5 billion of US weapons purchases accounts for an astonishing 20% of the $24.8 billion in US arms sales in 2007.

The flaw consists partly in viewing China, India’s largest trading partner, as a threat. Moreover, while it is true that the US and India face terrorist threats, both have erred in their approach to dealing with them.

America’s mistakes include the Patriot Act, the invasion of Iraq, the mishandling of Afghanistan, the torture committed at Abu Ghraib, and the prison at Guantánamo Bay. India’s list of misguided responses to terrorism is almost as long. Its Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA), enacted after the September 11, 2001, attacks on America by the then ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led government, contains many of the features enshrined in the Patriot Act: an overly vague definition of what constitutes terrorism or unlawful acts, immunity from prosecution for law-enforcement or government agents, and expansion of wire-tapping.

This law remained in effect until the current Congress Party-led government repealed it in 2004. But the BJP may well win India’s national elections next spring, and has pledged to bring back POTA, or something even more draconian.

At the same time, in the face of an alarming increase in the number of terrorist attacks, Manmohan Singh’s government has also indulged in a heavy-handed response to suspected Islamist terrorists, who are hauled off on flimsy evidence and killed before they can be convicted of any crime. Meanwhile, a commission that the government charged with investigating the state-condoned massacres of Muslim citizens in Gujarat in 2002 produced only a whitewash, absolving the perpetrators of any wrongdoing – and fuelinga further rise in homegrown terrorism by deeply disaffected Indian Muslims.

This sort of behavior has had terrible consequences for the moral credibility of democracy, for security in India, and for regional security in South Asia. The Obama administration should make as bold a break with the Bush administration’s policy toward India as the Bush administration did with its predecessor by refocusing the relationship on tackling the real sources of insecurity.

President Obama must shift the fundamental basis of the US-India relationship away from a strategic partnership based on a militarized notion of security toward a holistic vision of human security in which military force plays an appropriate but not a defining role. A new vision of the US-India relationship would focus on global warming, the collapse of industrial agriculture, the widening gap between rich and poor, the conventional and nuclear arms race in Asia, and the intensification of ethnic and religious conflict.

The elements of a new Obama vision for the US-India relationship would be: an emergency joint task force to fast-track the development of sustainable solutions to meet India’s and the world’s burgeoning energy, water and food needs. It also should build a partnership for the elimination of nuclear weapons within a set time frame in which the US must take a leadership role. A vigorous new commitment to the protecting the rights and freedoms of all citizens and residents and a zero-tolerance policy toward any state collusion with or tolerance of ethnic cleansing, torture, summary detention, citizen surveillance or other insults to democracy, is also necessary.

A McCain presidency would have offered no hope for a radical break with the military swagger and crony capitalism of the Bush years, on which the bilateral relationship with India was built. For the sake of the future of the people of the world’s oldest and largest democracies, let’s hope that an Obama presidency fulfills this hope.

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Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2008.
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