The Hindu Business Line : Indo-US see-saw

INDIA and the US have been in a peculiar kind of a bind or a bond, if you will, for over 60 years. Franklin D. Roosevelt, the US President during the Second World War, was the first prominent American leader to take personal interest in India's struggle for freedom.

Apart from his own libertarian convictions, he felt that in order to effectively concentrate on the conduct of the war, the UK should get the Indian problem out of the way by applying the Wilsonian principle of self-determination or granting dominion status or even independence to India.

Early in their special relationship as Allies, he raised it with the British Prime Minister Winston Churchil,l who bristled to the extent of warning that any more mention of the subject by Roosevelt "would break my heart"! That put an end to all further initiatives by the US. India and the US have been described as "estranged democracies" by Dr Dennis Kux in a book of the same title providing comprehensive coverage of Indo-US relations in the period 1941-91. Jawaharlal Nehru was never at ease with the US, and US Presidents from Dwight Eisenhower to John Kennedy found it off-putting to deal with him at all.

Only the trauma of the Chinese invasion made a reluctant Nehru ask for American military help. The US Ambassador John Galbraith at the time has himself admitted that the meeting arranged by him between Kennedy and Nehru "was a disaster". Meanwhile, V K Krishna Menon, was aggravating the estrangement by his abrasiveness and antipathy towards the US.

There was a sort of a thaw when Mr Jimmy Carter became the US President, but it could not be sustained, and Indo-US relations went into a prolonged freeze until the National Democratic Alliance came to power in 1998.

The initial bumpiness following Pokhran II was soon got over and the two countries proclaimed themselves as "natural allies", notwithstanding the US effort to build up Pakistan, overlooking its duplicity, as the lynchpin in the war on terrorism.

It should not be surprising if the change of Government in Delhi brings back memories of the estranged years to the US official establishment. The Foreign Minister, Mr Natwar Singh's declaration, at the joint media meet with the US Secretary of State, Gen Colin Powell, that "we intend to continue the policies that we have followed for 57 years" must have set his host thinking as to whether this portends an atavistic throwback to bad old days. Anyway, the playing of the see-saw with the US will doubtless continue!

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