Sam bharose

Nevertheless, India is not going to become a power simply because the US anoints it so. Nations become great powers courtesy a mix of military prowess, economic strength, risk-taking, sense of direction. Above all, great power aspirations necessitate cold-blooded realism.

For India, as a first step, a realistic calculation of the post-9/11 world is warranted. The US offer — whatever India’s final decision on it — would only make sense after such an assessment.

Four years after the Twin Towers were brought down, how has life treated India? Crude as this may sound, it has emerged as among the biggest beneficiaries of 9/11. Pakistan is now America’s headache, virtually its protectorate. Indeed, this week, American embassy anxiety over a safe passage for the cross-LoC bus matched South Block’s.

Afghanistan is no longer a problem. The jihadi threat, while still there, has been severely defanged. India is more secure now than it was on September 10, 2001.

Two, India is a spectator state in the War against Terror. Great convulsions are taking place in the Middle East. Iraq is the most salient case; Lebanon is an emergent one. Iran may see tension shortly, Syria and Egypt are unpredictable. While still a theoretical construct, Saudi Arabia’s implosion could be the story of the decade.

This is a moment of cataclysmic change. Two major countries — India and China — are, essentially, sitting it out. The US complains they’re “bringing nothing to the table”, committing no troops. The Asian giants have another view. While the neocons try to reorder the world, India and China build their economies.

America realises this. It figures that in, say, 10 years it may win the larger battle for the Arab mind, but come out of it quite bruised. China will by then be a formidable challenger, if not a downright threat.

What of India? As Thomas Donnelly of the American Enterprise Institute wrote on March 31: “A US-India strategic partnership, if fully developed, would the single most important step toward an alliance capable of meeting the 21st century’s principal challenges: radical Islam and rising China…In sum, the United States could hardly dream up a more ideal strategic partner.’’

Three, the US is scarcely equating India with Pakistan. Forget the F-word (F-16, as it happens) that has Indians with Cold War hang-ups frothing. Washington has offered New Delhi nuclear energy technology, in effect, legitimising Pokhran I and II, nuclear weapons status. These are not on offer to Islamabad.

Rather, giving Pervez Musharraf his F-16s may be only a cover. Rice is said to have had a tough chat with Musharraf in March. She sought “more access” to A.Q. Khan and indicated the last had not been heard on his rogue nuclear network.

In March, too, Robert Blackwill, foreign policy mentor to Rice, friend of George W. Bush, urged India and the US to begin “secret talks” on Pakistan’s future. India couldn’t be asked to discuss contingency plans if it were being equated with Pakistan.

Four, the new world order may not follow an old world template. The Cold War was a time of certitudes, absolute positions—all enemy or all friend. Today, there is more room for ad hoc partnerships. That’s why Rice’s repeated reference to the post-tsunami “core group” — the US, India, Japan and Australia — suggests a model.

See it in basic terms: on North Korea, Japan and the US could form an ad hoc partnership, but not India. On Bangladesh, the US and India could work together, but not Japan. There is no one thread of logic; there are many sub-threads of, to coin a neologism, sub-logics. This gives India more ability to forge a regional alliance with the US than was possible, say, 20 years ago.

Five — and this has a domestic political dimension — post-9/11 the whole notion of security has cha-nged: local and international security concerns now flow seamlessly into each other. Shorn of jargon, this means the US will be more interventionist, less willing to tolerate what it considers deviant behaviour.

The Narendra Modi visa episode is an example. As even senior RSS members admit, the sustained — if exaggerated — campaign by leftwing NRI groups after Gujarat, the fact that, post-/911, any juxtaposition of “religious” and “violence” is a hot button, has been problematic. The global political cost of a communal riot is becoming too high.

This cuts both ways. The Congress won the Andhra Pradesh election of 2004 with informal Naxalite help. There are murmurs it wants to extend this experiment to the 76 Naxal-active districts across India, and call an early Lok Sabha election. If so, expect American pressure. Going soft on Naxalism will not be indulged as India’s “internal business”, not after 9/11. Threat perceptions of an Indo-Nepalese Maoist swathe are higher in Beltway Washington than in Lutyens’ Delhi.

What does all this add up to? Simply, America is already a factor in Indian discourse and decision-making. The strategic partnership only attempts to institutionalise this relationship. If India doesn’t want a wedding, it’ll still have to live in.