President Obama heads for India today on his first trip to the world’s largest democracy since taking office. In a video Q&A, Ashley Tellis previews the trip and analyzes bilateral relations. Tellis says that Obama’s tour of India is an opportunity for both sides to reaffirm the importance of the partnership and argues that the United States should demonstrate that it sees India as a critical component in maintaining a favorable balance of power in Asia.
- What is the significance of President Obama's trip to India?
- What is on the agenda for the visit?
- How will President Obama communicate the importance of the trip?
- How strong are bilateral relations?
- How important is India for Washington's foreign policy priorities?
- Should India be viewed as a counterweight to China?
- Are the two countries working together to improve security in South Asia?
- How successful has the civil nuclear cooperation agreement been for both countries?
What is the significance of President Obama's trip to India?
This is an important visit for President Obama for several reasons. There has been a general belief in India that the U.S.-India relationship has been losing its order and intensity and this visit provides the Obama administration with the opportunity to set this impression straight. This is the first important objective of the visit.
Second, the president has ambitious goals for what he wants from India—he wants a global partnership. That concept, however, hasn't been clearly defined and the visit is going to provide him with the chance to define what a global partnership actually means.
The third element is that the president believes India has an important role to play in the area of trade—the area of economics—and this has particular resonance given the economic crisis that currently engulfs the United States. And so you can look to the visit to see a variety of commercial deals close. The Indians want to close on those deals to show that they actually support the United States in tangible ways and the president will want to close on those deals because he wants to show his U.S. constituency that the relationship with India is paying off in very tangible ways.
So there’s a broad range of topics on the table—everything from geopolitics at the highest level to the bilateral relationship to issues relating to money.
What is on the agenda for the visit?
There is a wide-ranging agenda for the visit. In fact, I fear that the agenda is so wide ranging that the visit could actually lose focus, but let me identify some key areas that matter to both sides.
The first is diplomatic consultation. This is critical because the United States is deeply involved in Afghanistan and Pakistan and these are areas that matter to India. There is a complication in U.S.-China relations at the moment having to do with currency and the nature of the global economic system and this is an issue that is also important to India. Depending on how the currency question is resolved, India could see a major inflow of foreign investment which the economy may be unable to handle. So, these are two areas that are important for the Indians and therefore diplomatic consultation is going to be high on the agenda.
The second is the area of trade and this involves increasing market access to both sides. The United States wants greater access to the Indian market in retail and dairy products, and the Indians want greater access to the United States with respect to portfolio investments for the specter branch banking. So, there’s a whole range of economic issues that are on the agenda.
The third area is closing all the uncertainties related to India’s nuclear liability legislation and satisfying the United States that there is in fact a level playing field for American companies.
The fourth is defense and space cooperation as there is a wide agenda here that involves both sides. There is an agreement that has been pending called the Commercial Space Launch Agreement which has been pending since 2004 and both sides are hoping to close on. There is a great deal of things that need to done in the area of defense cooperation beyond just weapon sales, including joint exercises. It is a very ambitious agenda of how both countries can work together and there are foundational agreements that the United States hopes India will sign.
There are also areas that are going to be on the table relating to energy, science and technology, education, and public health. And so when one looks at it, there really is a soup to nuts agenda that will occupy both sides. The challenge will be actually drilling down on two or three key areas that will help define the visit as opposed to dealing with all these and then being lost in a morass of multiple issues.
How will President Obama communicate the importance of the trip?
There is a theme that already seems to be surfacing and that is that India is part of the vibrant Asia-Pacific region and the United States sees India as an important component in maintaining a favorable balance of power in Asia.
Now the Obama administration is shy about using the term “balance of power,” but everyone understands what it means and what they will do is use the fact that the president is going to India first (before heading to Indonesia, South Korea, and Japan) to showcase the argument that India is in fact an American partner in a larger Asia-Pacific region and not just simply in the South Asian region. This is clearly a very important talking point for the trip.
How strong are bilateral relations?
This is a very curious moment in the bilateral relationship at this point. At the private sector level, I think U.S.-India relations are thriving. If you look at the intensity with which the two societies are engaged—whether that be in education, science and technology, business, or in the arts—there is a profound transformation that is taking place compared to where we were say twenty years ago or even ten years ago.
But at the official level, the transformation has flagged. While it has by no means come to a stop—that’s definitely not true—it has certainly flagged and the reasons for that are quite complex and exist on both sides. There are many in the United States who blame the Obama administration for dropping the ball, but I think that this is a tad uncharitable. The Obama administration is deeply distracted by the challenges of managing the crises that surround it, whether those be economic or geopolitical.
And to the degree the administration has not paid the attention to the extent the Bush administration did, that much is obvious. But the Obama administration has not dropped the ball. The president personally is very keen to sustain this relationship because, as he has said both privately and publicly, the relationship is one of the great things he inherited from his predecessor—and he is not likely to lose on his term.
But there are difficulties in India as well, and this is something people have not focused on. The Indian government, particularly the second term of the Singh administration, is very inward looking, partly because they are suffering from indigestion after all the big initiatives they launched in the bilateral relationship in the first term. They are still trying to digest those and deal with the aftermath of those big decisions—so that's part of it.
The other aspect is that domestic politics are dominating their attention today because they are thinking of the next election, where they are coming face to face with the challenge of bringing the 400 or 500 million Indians who have not profited from economic growth thus far into the national economic success story. Because this will be the focus, the government has been looking more at this issue, more so than the issue of growth.
By focusing on domestic politics rather than foreign policy, India has become inward looking and so the attention that it might have otherwise been paid to the bilateral relationship has diminished.
So, there is enough at both ends to suggest that there has been a certain flagging in the relationship. The visit provides a great opportunity to jump start it and I think both sides are really looking forward to that.
How important is India for Washington's foreign policy priorities?
At one level, India is very important, but at another level it is less so. It is very important when Washington thinks about the world in coming years and when the president is thinking about what kind of environment he wants to leave the United States in after he exits office. From that perspective India is very important.
And the president has said this publicly because he thinks of India as a key partner for the larger objectives that the United States seeks to achieve. India is now in this league, along with the European community, along with Asia’s principal alliance partners, Japan, and South Korea, along with probably America’s principal competitor, China. So he sees India as being very important.
But at another level, India has in a sense dropped in salience, and that is because the president is so focused on fighting fires. He is focused on trying to resuscitate the American economy and India plays a very marginal role in that struggle. He is focused very much on trying to extricate the United States from the conflict in Afghanistan. India is important on this aspect but our policy has moved in a direction that does not make India critical.
But the United States cannot afford to lose India because India could be an important part of the problem if not handled correctly. And so the challenge for the Obama administration is trying to figure out how to raise India’s salience in the challenges that it confronts in the here and now—namely on Afghanistan, Pakistan, and China—because everyone agrees that India becomes very important when you look ahead, and when you look at the larger challenges in the Asia Pacific.
Should India be viewed as a counterweight to China?
India is a counterweight to China whether we play it as a counterweight or not. And it is a counterweight simply because it is located next to China, it is one of two countries in the Asian continent growing at very dynamic rates, and it will be the third or fourth largest economy in the world in another twenty years. And so whether we want it to or not, India sees its own interests as requiring it maintain a certain set of capabilities vis-à-vis China. So there is going to be a certain rivalry that exists between India and China irrespective of what the United States does.
Now the challenge for the United States is how to position itself given that the Sino-Indian relationship is going to be one of the pivotal relationships in Asia. Because the United States is going to face a challenge from China independent of what ever happens in the Sino-Indian relationship, it is in the United States' best interest to develop a tacit coordination with India—because we do have a common challenge.
This does not mean a containment strategy because the realities of economic interdependence do not allow for containment. But it does mean developing a stable balance of power where the United States ends up having enough friends and allies on China’s periphery to restrain China’s propensity to exploit its power.
And to the degree that America thinks of the U.S.-India relationship in that context—that it provides a set of objective constraints on China’s willingness to abuse its power—it should satisfy the interests of all concerned.
Are the two countries working together to improve security in South Asia?
The United States and India have done less well than in cooperating on security than they should, and the reason for that is because U.S. policies, particularly in Afghanistan and Pakistan, have hinged on Pakistan as the fulcrum. And because of this, the United States has gone out of its way to avoid excessive Indian entanglements because it doesn't want to unnerve its Pakistani partners with too deep of a relationship with India that could put Pakistan at a disadvantage.
Unfortunately this strategy is reaching its limits of its success because the United States is realizing, after eight years in Afghanistan, that Pakistan is a very ambivalent partner of the United States—that while it cooperates with the United States in certain counterterrorism objectives, it also opposes it on other counterterrorism objectives.
The United States is now at a point where it is looking to integrate Indian interests more actively in its management of the challenges in Afghanistan and Pakistan. And this is both beneficial and necessary because India has substantial geopolitical weight. If India is left out of the solution, it will automatically become part of the problem.
To avoid this then, the United States should start engaging India now, particularly when thinking actively about how to exit Afghanistan. At this juncture India becomes all the more important because U.S. goals and Indian goals are actually identical on Afghanistan, and really, they are also identical on Pakistan.
How successful has the civil nuclear cooperation agreement been for both countries?
While we have done better than many people think, the United States and India have not crossed the finish line yet.
If India had liability legislation that met all the requirements of the Convention on Supplementary Compensation for Nuclear Damage (CSC), then I would have said without any hesitation that we had won the race. But unfortunately, because of the complexities of Indian politics, and because the Singh government does not have enough of a majority in parliament, the liability legislation has become very complicated.
The legislation as it stands today, in my judgment, is not CSC compliant. And because it is not CSC compliant, it imposes very significant penalties on private sector participation in India’s nuclear energy program. And this is not simply the American private sector that could be penalized, but the Indian public sector as well.
The big challenge that both countries have now is to find a work-around that allows the private sectors in both countries, and internationally, to play the role that the prime minister would like. So this is unfortunately still unfinished business.
I’m optimistic that in the next few months we will find a solution to this problem. Unfortunately it will not take the form of legislation because the government simply does not have the requisite majority in parliament to amend the law. But I think we may be able to find solutions either through bureaucratic means or through regulation.
Both sides are having a very active conversation on this issue right now, so I believe that we will finally be have a positive conclusion. Then the governments can get out of the way and leave the private sector in both countries to go about doing their business.
