Presidents may come… they may go

In the post-9/11 context, George W. Bush has turned out to be a good friend of India. He has emphatically resisted protectionist sentiments on out-sourcing and has tried hard to craft a nuclear deal with India. While he has been careful to publicly support the Pakistani leadership, his cabinet members have leaned on that government to deal with their position as the source of much terrorism.

At one level, we should have no interest in the elections of another country. But if a country is our largest trading partner, largest source of investments, largest destination for our students and our emigrants and also happens to be today’s hyper-power, we have no choice but to take interest. More importantly, we have to develop a balanced set of views that cold-bloodedly take into account our national interests. We cannot be obviously partisan and must ensure we are on good terms with any eventual winner.

Our paramount interest with the US is as a stable trading partner and the most important destination of our exports of both goods and services. Anyone who is a protectionist — under the guise of defending American workers or privacy rights of Americans or on any other ground like dislike for globalisation — has to generate disproportionate anxiety levels in India. Any economy as big and as robust as the American economy (which adds between a hundred and two hundred thousand jobs every month!) has nothing to fear from free trade; in fact US prosperity is based on their openness to the rest of the world. But historically there have always been constituencies in America which have had reservations about free trade; and these constituencies, like organised labour, while sometimes muted, never go away completely. It would be interesting to pay attention to the early funding and support of different presidential candidates. Those who garner support from opponents of free trade can lock themselves into positions that may be counter to the interests of all developing countries for whom the US is a critical market.

The US presidency with its personality-oriented campaign highlighted by the thoughtless electronic media gets disproportionate attention. We need to be careful not to get overly influenced by this hype. We should always remember that the US has a diverse federal polity much like India’s. We need to pay attention to broader public opinion in the US.

The Congress’s ability to delay and alter the decisions of the imperial presidency surfaced recently during the debate on the Indo-US nuclear accord. The US Constitution gives the Senate a great deal of power in the area of foreign policy. The two senators from thinly-populated Montana have as much influence as the two from populous California regarding issues like treaty ratification.

It is interesting that despite officially being a communist country, China has managed its interface with the US in a really smart way. Rich and noisy Hollywood stars are supporters of Tibetan independence. But they have not been able to influence American foreign policy in any substantive way in this regard. China has entered the WTO with US support and has maintained a low value of the Yuan despite official US pressure (strongly countered by various constituencies within the US who believe that a weak Yuan is not such a bad thing). While we should not go for improper influence-peddling, we need to constantly get the message across to the broadest possible spectrum of American public opinion that India and the US are on a strong win-win collaboration path. This does not mean that we need ever compromise on our self-interest or our basic positions on sovereignty.

As we follow the candidacies of Edwards, Obama and Clinton and McCain and Giuliani, it is important not to indulge in lazy and wishful thinking guided by poorly-researched media positions. We want to deal with any elected American president on the basis that free trade, easy movement of professionals and principled opposition to terrorism everywhere (everywhere is a code word that includes Pakistan!) are in the interests of both countries. We understand the domestic compulsions of responding to the needs of multiple constituencies in a sensitive way. Presidents, like prime ministers, come and go… the historic and hopefully constructive encounters between mature republics are of greater consequence to our peoples and hopefully for a more stable world amidst the current cacophony.

The writer is chairman of Mphasis