The New New Thing in U.S.-Indian Relations?

B. Mathur/Reuters

Sometime early in the last decade, official Washington discovered India's “strategic” value. The emblem of this revelation was the Bush administration's civil-nuclear agreement, unveiled with great fanfare in 2005. The agreement was technically designed to allow peaceful nuclear cooperation with India despite its status then as a nonproliferation pariah, but the real purpose, as one architect of the accord put it, was to “forge the strategic partnership based on common values that had eluded both countries for many decades” and demonstrate how valua ble Washington “deemed the U.S.-Indian partnership to be in meeting U.S. grand strategic objectives.”

It was an act of faith: two big, diverse, sometimes exasperating democracies, the United States and India would surely find a way to do wonderful things together. India would be an ally in global causes, a counterweight to China, a shining example of democratic development.

Since then, the official pronouncements have gotten grander and more sweeping - the United States-India relationship, President Obama proclaimed to the Indian Parliament in 2010, “will be one of the defining partnerships of the 21st century” - while a chorus of skepticism, in both capitals, has gotten louder and more pointed. In Washington, the relationship is derided as oversold, wilting, adrift; India can't deliver on an agreement, refuses to open its markets to our companies, undercuts us in international negotiations, remains unshaken in its fealt y to old ideologies and “strategic autonomy.” In New Delhi, the Americans are bemoaned as impatient, myopic, fickle, the United States as too set in its domineering ways to treat India as an equal partner. Both sides lament the absence of the next big thing, a new undertaking on the order of the civil-nuclear agreement, to give the partnership some splash.

Those complaints greatly overstate the difficulties and downplay the progress in what was long a very tense relationship. Yet they add up to a bloc of opinion that John Kerry will have to confront when he arrives in New Delhi on Sunday for his first visit to India as secretary of state.

Mr. Kerry and India's minister for external affairs, Salman Khurshid, will devote most of a day to the India-U.S. Strategic Dialogue, an endeavor started by Mr. Kerry's predecessor, Hillary Clinton, in 2009. As American and Indian officials righ tly and insistently point out, the range of issues that dozens of representatives of the two governments will discuss would have been almost unthinkable 15 years ago: energy and the environment, terrorism and cybersecurity, development cooperation and higher education, trade that has roughly quintupled in a decade, and security cooperation that now includes both frequent military exercises and booming military sales. Easily belittled, often deadly boring to sit through, these proceedings serve a prosaic but essential function: they force top officials to take the time to communicate and bureaucracies to make the effort to cooperate. They are, the insiders say, “action-forcing events.”

But no matter how long the list of joint projects, technical dialogues and substantive agreements, there is a nagging sense that until a major new initiative is found, charges of drift and divergence â€" the “widespread” impression that “relations are on a plateau, if not in the doldrums,” as a former Indian ambassador to the United States observed on Thursday â€" will dog the relationship. The Brookings Institution's Tanvi Madan has warned of “India fatigue” among those in Washington who expect a headline project and short-term returns. So diplomats and policy makers are pressed to find that next big thing to quiet the doubters.

That search hasn't shown much promise. Even as the civil-nuclear agreement gets tangled up in the details of liability rules, candidates for the next big thing promise at best modest progress and at worst mutual recrimination. Heightened energy cooperation, especially a United States decision to allow natural-gas exports to India, would be useful but hardly transformative in the short term. The key economic iss ues, supposedly at the top of Mr. Kerry's agenda, are largely divisive.

In advance of his trip, the top Democrat and the top Republican on the Senate Finance Committee wrote to Mr. Kerry, “We cannot afford to sit back and watch as India adopts policies that adversely impact U.S. innovative and creative industries, and threaten the greater stability of the international trading system.” A coalition of American businesses went to the White House with complaints that “India is discriminating against a wide range of U.S. exports, jeopardizing domestic jobs and putting at risk a growing bilateral trading relationship.”

An investment treaty and expanded foreign direct investment, longstanding items on Washington's wish list, are as fanciful as ever as India 's elections approach next year. “We just have to get beyond,” one Indian official said, “depending on big ideas.”

The more traditional “strategic” topics don't allow for easy feel-good interaction, either. In the most crucial foreign policy areas, Afghanistan and China, there may be long-term convergence between American and Indian interests, but at the moment, tactical differences lend the discussions an air of apprehension. Indians have long worried about what the United States might do as it heads for the exits in Afghanistan, particularly that it will cut a desperate deal with the Taliban or Pakistani security services like the Inter-Services Intelligence spy agency, or ISI. “That's what gives us the creeps,” one senior Indian diplomat said. And for many, this week's aborted unveiling of talks with the Taliban (or the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, as they pro claimed from their Qatari outpost) looked like exactly that: “The ISI and the Taliban are getting everything they want from the Americans.”

Indian officials have talked of East Asia as the “strategic glue” that will hold the relationship together, but that raises another set of anxieties. For some Indians, United States policy toward China risks becoming too hard; for others, too soft. It takes a lot of reassurance and explanation to persuade them that Washington wants a policy that is just right. That means, on the one hand, that the United States has no interest in pressing the Indians into some kind of neo-containment regime directed at China and, on the other, that it will not retreat and abandon them to Chinese hegemony.

Even many sophisticated Indian observers wonder whether the United States will eventually have little choice but to accede to a “G-2,” with Beijing and Washington divvying up Asia and leaving India out in the cold. “That fear i s always lurking in the back of our minds,” one recently retired top diplomat said. After President Obama's meeting with China's president, Xi Jinping, in California (and the recent Chinese-Indian standoff in Ladakh), it seemed to creep to the front, with a former Indian intelligence chief snidely referring to the meeting “as the Big Boys' Club … dividing the world into spheres of influence and power” and speculating about a secret declaration that would constitute “Asia's Yalta.”

Yet if the quest for the next big thing is futile, the disagreements and difficulties inherent in these “strategic” discussions should not be causes for discouragement or reasons to skirt hard issues for the sake of proclaiming Mr. Kerry's visit a great success and the relationship as sunny as ever. In fact, a focus on these issues would be less a sign of drift than a sign of progress. They represent the basic purpose behind the grand claims for the “strategic partnership”: a testament to its maturity as well as a test of its seriousness.

The validity of those claims will hinge not on an endless search for the next big thing, the next headline-grabbing breakthrough, but on whether the two sides can address these sorts of differences, manage them and find complementary (which will not always mean cooperative) policies that serve common longer-term interests. In the process, Americans should remember that some of the United States' most important partners in the past have demonstrated plenty of “strategic autonomy” â€" think France during the cold war â€" and were still crucial in supporting shared goals.

When two difficult democracies, each with its own chaotic and often dysfunctional politics, try to do all of this together, the process becomes even more complicated. For diplomats, democracy can seem as vexing in pra ctice as it is uplifting in theory, as much a curse as a blessing â€" whether in thwarting big deals (as was nearly the case with the civil-nuclear agreement in 2008) or in blocking bilateral discussions (a persistent complaint of American economic officials). Yet it also means Americans can take considerable comfort in the fact that, according to recent polling, Indians view the United States more positively than they do any other country (while 83 percent view China as a threat). Whatever the disagreements, whatever the foiled aspirations and diplomatic spats, that bodes well: ultimately, the United States supports India more for what it is than for what it does.

Daniel Kurtz-Phelan, a member of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's policy planning staff from 2009 to 2012, is a senior visiting fellow at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi.