The Hindu : Transforming Indo-U.S. ties

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, Apr 28, 2003

Opinion

Opinion - News Analysis

Transforming Indo-U.S. ties

By C. Raja Mohan

NEW DELHI April 27. It is not often that governments pay public compliments to departing ambassadors. In praising the U.S. envoy, Robert D. Blackwill, who has announced his departure last week, the Foreign Office was underlining the fact that more movement has occurred in the last two years between India and America than in the many preceding decades.

Mr. Blackwill's principal contribution to Indo-U.S. relations lies in radically altering the discourse on three big issues — Kashmir, terrorism and nuclear proliferation — that bedevilled the bilateral relationship in the past.

That the Hurriyat leaders in Srinagar welcomed the departure of Mr. Blackwill tells us the story of Kashmir and Indo-U.S. relations. For decades now, the unstated assumption in New Delhi, Islamabad and Srinagar has been that shorn of all rhetoric, the U.S. position was tilted against India. Although the positive evolution of the U.S. line on Kashmir began in the final year of the Clinton Administration, it was Mr. Blackwill who forced a decisive shift in India's favour last year.

In pressing the Hurriyat to join the elections, in quickly endorsing the polls as "free and fair" after the first round and by refusing to see the Hurriyat leaders during his visit to Srinagar after the elections, Mr. Blackwill was signalling that the U.S. was no longer interested in playing games against India in Kashmir.

By cutting out the ambiguities in the U.S. position on Kashmir, which the State Department in Washington might have wanted to maintain for several reasons, Mr. Blackwill was building confidence between the two nations on an issue that was at the heart of the deep Indian distrust of America. Equally important was Mr. Blackwill's support to India in its war against terrorism. Mr. Blackwill showed up at Parliament after the gruesome attack at the end of 2001 and declared that December 13 and September 11 meant the one and the same thing.

Mr. Blackwill's insistence that there can be no fudging the question of terrorism in India forced an end to the "finer points" Washington used to make about the "complexity" of the Kashmir situation and Pakistan's sponsorship of terrorism.

For the first time in years, Washington acknowledged the sources of terrorism in Pakistan, held the Pakistani state responsible for its complicity and insisted that Islamabad end cross-border terrorism on a permanent basis.

Through the 1990s all that India and Washington discussed between the two governments, and in the unending seminars at the Track-II level, was proliferation and its consequences for regional stability and global order. Mr. Blackwill's tenure saw an end to this dreary exercise. Over the last two years the focus of the nuclear dialogue between India and the U.S. has shifted to what was considered for long an absolute taboo in bilateral relations — how the two sides could cooperate in civilian nuclear and space programmes and promote high technology trade.

Underlying it was the dramatic change in the political perception promoted by Mr. Blackwill that India's nuclear arsenal need not be a problem for the U.S. but a long-term asset in building a stable balance of power in Asia.

* * *

Mr. Blackwill's tenure at Roosevelt House in New Delhi was not limited to changing the parameters of the old and difficult problems in bilateral relations. The U.S. envoy also sought to actively develop and sell in Washington and New Delhi a larger framework for strategic partnership. For decades India and the U.S. talked endlessly about their desire to build a partnership. For Mr. Blackwill the question was no longer whether India and America should build a new relationship but how to go about laying the building blocks of such a political partnership.

India has long demanded a greater role for itself in world affairs and nursed the grouse that Washington was never interested. As Mr. Blackwill argued the case for larger Indian responsibilities in Asia, he faced resistance not only from Washington but also in New Delhi. If old thinking about India was the problem in Washington, the obsession with Pakistan often clouded the Indian approach.

Despite the many difficulties he encountered, Mr. Blackwill has succeeded in setting a new direction for Indo-U.S. relations. But there is some distance to go before the two sides can consolidate the gains under the Bush Administration. One can only hope that the U.S. President, George W. Bush, will send a new envoy who can continue to do the heavy-lifting that Mr. Blackwill has initiated.

* * *

Much has been written about the wrangling between Mr. Blackwill and the State Department on the core issues of Indo-U.S. relations. But good envoys are not merely managers of post offices for the governments. Even in the age of instant communications and jet-setting Presidents and Prime Ministers, a good ambassador can make a huge difference.

As the 16th century French essayist Michel de Montaigne wrote, "unswerving obedience fits only with precise and peremptory commands. Ambassadors have somewhat freer duties, the filling of which, in several respects, entirely depends on their own dispositions. They do not simply execute, but form and direct by their own advice, the will of their masters".

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