The visit of Prime Minister Narendra Modi to the United States witnessed substantive outcomes that will take the India-US partnership to newer heights, especially with deals such as the potential co-production of the GE-414 engine in India, with 80% technology transfer. This is something unprecedented as the US does not share such technology even with all of its treaty allies. However, this success is proving to be a bugbear for a range of analysts, think-tankers, politicians and now even a US President. Many people who were thought to be India’s friend, are showing their true colours. There is too much animus floating around. The intensity of the animosity for India in general and Prime Minister Modi in particular seems inexplicable. During his visit to India in 2015 on PM Modi’s invitation, then President Obama appeared to be India’s best friend. So it may seem a mystery why he made the most outrageous claim that India would break up into a Hindu India and a Muslim India unless it took care of its Muslim minorities. That he said this when the Indian Prime Minister was on his State Visit to the US and President Biden was going out of his way to make the visit a success, makes it all the more baffling. It was almost as if he was trying to throw a spanner in the works for his one-time Vice President Joe Biden, who is currently President. But what is troubling is the implicit threat in Obama’s virtue-signalling—that of India’s Balkanization, unless it falls in line. It’s almost as if he was sending out a coded message to forces that have the capacity to spread unrest in India. Surely, thoughts about the Muslim community would not have made Obama’s heart bleed. As Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman pointed out, when President, Obama bombed six Muslim countries to smithereens, leading to destabilization and migration and deaths. Or did the statements come from frustration that too much was being given to an undeserving India, until recently a Soviet ally and now unwilling to condemn Russia in the Ukraine War? It could be the West’s Cold War mentality on display, where Russia is the enemy and not China. Given Obama’s close association with India—he visited this country twice and hosted and met Mr Modi multiple times—he knows the Indian reality quite well, as well as India’s history. India has already been partitioned once on the basis of religion. A Muslim Pakistan was born out of it, which marginalised its minorities. It has reached a stage where its minorities as a whole are a minuscule percentage of the total population—less than 4%. In contrast, the fact that the Muslim population in India is burgeoning at over 200 million, should prove that India is a pluralist democracy, which too Mr Obama knows. So is his—and the others’—discomfort is because of the belief that all that rhetoric about India being a valuable US partner, was supposed to stay at the stage of rhetoric, and was never supposed to be acted upon the way Biden has done?
In fact, there is a growing belief that the dislike for India is particularly rampant among those analysts who have always seen Pakistan as the US’ most valuable ally in the Indian subcontinent and India as a Russian lackey. These are the people who are having a tough time readjusting to the changed realities. But that cannot be the case with “India’s friend” Barack Obama…or can it be? If former Pakistani diplomat Hussain Haqqani is to be believed, Obama had promised Pakistan that he would nudge India to the discussion table on Kashmir, if Pakistan stopped supporting terrorism. This was rejected by Pakistan. In his book “Magnificent Delusions”, Haqqani claims that Obama felt that the Kashmir issue needed to be settled and that in November 2009 he had sent his envoy to Pakistan, offering to make that country the US’ “long-term strategic partner” if it was ready to follow his direction on Kashmir and terrorism. In other words, in the eyes of a US President in the first decade of the 21st century, India was still seen as hyphenated with Pakistan. India was a minor power with not much strategic relevance, with even its GDP a “puny” $1.3 trillion and its ranking 11th in the world. It seems India’s growth story has passed Obama by, who is now finding it difficult to adjust his lenses to the fifth largest economy of the world, which is on its way to become the third largest economy and a world power.
People like him need to realise that the more they try to create a gulf between India and the US, the more they help China. Without the India-US partnership, there is no free and open Indo-Pacific. But then in Mr Obama’s mind, China is not the enemy. Lest we forget, it was Obama who had turned a blind eye when China gobbled up the Scarborough Shoals in 2012. It was again Obama who was advocating the mainstreaming of China in the hope that it will make that opaque Communist country more transparent. But then nothing worked and now China is aggressively trying to lord over the world. Hence, it is hoped that Mr Obama and Company will wake up from their reverie and come out in support of the India-US partnership. The world’s future depends on it.