New Delhi, Oct 9 (IANS): India-US ties for much of the past quarter-century were anchored in the belief that a stronger India served a larger American strategic purpose by helping sustain the balance of power in Asia, diversify supply chains and strengthen a free and open Indo-Pacific, a report has stated.
It noted that while differences have always existed, the broader strategic rationale was considered strong enough to withstand them, but that assumption is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain.
“The present difference between India and the United States is about more than oil. There is perhaps a deeper disagreement over the meaning of partnership. Washington often treats strategic convergence as a reason to demand political compliance. In New Delhi, partnership is understood as cooperation between sovereign powers that will continue to differ over Russia, Iran and the management of China,” former Indian Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao wrote in India Narrative recently.
“Once those differences are revealed as public tests of loyalty, diplomacy yields to theatre. Accommodation becomes harder precisely because it is made to look like submission,” she added.
Rao noted that New Delhi had spent years trying to move away from Washington’s traditional tendency to view India and Pakistan as part of the same regional equation. Trump’s repeated claims of mediating between the two countries, she said, revive conversation to that outdated approach.
“The objection is more than just a matter of pride. India has global economic, technological and maritime interests that cannot be understood chiefly through the narrow prism of its quarrel with a neighbour. But old habits of thought can survive decades of diplomatic effort, particularly when they serve a President’s political obsessions,” the former Indian diplomat stated.
The report cited External Affairs Minister (EAM) S Jaishankar’s remarks in New York recently, where he laid out India’s position clearly.
Addressing the Asia Society, EAM Jaishankar said India remained committed to taking its partnership with the US to greater heights, while cautioning that a failure to understand one of its foremost security concerns could affect bilateral ties. He described terrorism from a neighbouring country as a deliberate policy maintained over decades.
According to the report, India’s response should not be driven by wounded nationalism. The real test of strategic autonomy, it said, is not how loudly external pressure is denounced, but how effectively the country can withstand it.
“That requires diversified defence supplies, greater energy security, technological capability, manufacturing strength and institutional resilience. Autonomy without those foundations would be rhetoric resting upon dependence. India must understand the costs it could bear and build the means to bear them,” Rao wrote in India Narrative.
Stressing that none of this calls for a retreat from the United States, she mentioned, “India needs American technology, investment and cooperation in sustaining a favourable Asian balance. The United States, for its part, needs an India capable of resisting Chinese predominance. Both countries have reason to preserve what they have built, and neither gains when each disagreement becomes a public referendum on the relationship.”
