India-US Relations: Connecting the Dots

God knows I haven’t been paying enough attention to this blog…my blog dashboard informs me that the last time I updated it was 51 days ago. To use the cliche, time certainly flies. Many reasons for the inattention, chief of which was that I was busy organising 30 lectures for future foreign service professionals.

But the title of this post is not related to that, but, rather to a thought that crossed my mind sometime over the past 50 days when it seemed to me that India-US Relations were about to go into hibernation, if not deep freeze. The trouble as usual is that there are many conflicting signals coming out of Washington which lend themselves to all kinds of interpretation in a region on the boil. Coupled with that is the fact that there are all kinds of proxy warriors on the Hill, and in the thinktanks and the media in Washington and you have a situation where it often becomes difficult to separate fact from fiction.
Two examples that come to mind are the reactions following the release of the Af-Pak Policy Review and the reported nomination of Timothy Roemer as next Ambassador to India.
An initial reading of the Af-Pak review made it seem as if the Obama Administration was still intent of bringing in internationalisation of the Kashmir issue through the back-door after beating a hasty retreat the first time around after vigorous Indian protestations. Continued consultations with India by Richard Holbrooke as well as the most recent statement by Secretary of State Clinton in Congress have shown the opposite to be the case. Of course, part of the reason for that could be that events in the region are outpacing policies, and complicating issues would be the last thing on the mind of US policymakers.

So also the reported appointment of Timoth Roemer as next US Ambassador to India. I say reported because AFAIK, there’s been no official confirmation ever since the news broke on the Cable blog of Foreign Policy magazine. After going into Roemer’s background, I am not sure whether he’s been made Ambassador t India bcause of his Pakistan credentials or his non-proliferation credentials. Either way, it doesn’t bode that well for India other than the fact that he apparently has the President’s ear.

We generally tend to have a love-hate relationship with US Ambassadors to India, partly because they are invariably tasked with passing on bad news and admonishments by their bosses which they also tend to do with gusto. Just do search on Google News Labs Timeline feature and you will see what I mean. The headlines range from Manmohan snubs Mulford to US (read Mulford) attacks ‘closed’ India economy. The last link is to a BBC report of Mulford’s first statement after being appointed US Ambassador to India! Let’s hope history doesn’t repeat itself.

Ambassador Karl Inderfurth, widely tipped to be the next US Ambassador to India, was in Congress on the 26th of February to testify before the House Subcommittee on the Middle East and South Asia at a Hearing on Building a Strategic Partnership:U.S.-India Relations in the Wake of Mumbai. His views were pretty much gung ho [...]

I just came across this lecture by FBI Director Robert F. Mueller III which he delivered at the Council on Foreign Relations. Probably because this was just a few days before he was to wing his way to Delhi, he began his remarks with reference to the Mumbai attacks and the involvement of the FBI.
The [...]

With temperatures and tempers flaring on the sub-continent, the respective Indian and Pakistani lobby groups in the United States have not been far behind in adding their voices to the fracas.
Indian American lobby groups came up with the Washington Chalo (Let’s March on Washington) program, echoing the Delhi Chalo war cry of Subhas Chandra Bose [...]

This is slightly off-topic but I just couldn’t resist:-) I was googling for Foreign Secretary Shivshankar Menon’s speech at Delhi University on January 19 when Google turned up another speech of his in December 2007 out of which 2 paragraphs(547 words) on International Terrorism and Energy Security had been copied in their entirety and pasted [...]

First, it was the month long vacation that was combined with a medical check-up. And, then picking up the threads after such a long break also proved to be a tedious task. It took Barack Obama’s Inaugural Address to remind me of my responsibilities in cyber space, and I shall resume posting before the week [...]

One doesn’t quite know what to post after an attack like the one on Bombay. The terror attacks have been termed as India’s 9/11 and I find the analogy quite apt as it exposed the utter unpreparedness of the authorities. As a leading columnist put it, India is disgraced by Mumbai Failure. Though it seemed [...]

Looks like it’s the Indian Navy that’s coming down with a headache. Media reports quote a Thai national as saying that what the Indian Navy sank was no pirate mother ship but his fishing vessel which had been captured by the pirates. The Navy’s denied this and there are insinuations that the Thai national is [...]

As the Navy basks in the glow of its successful actions in Somalia leading to congratulations pouring in from across the world, the civilian bureaucracy and the political leadership at the helm of affairs in Delhi have been running helter-skelter trying to figure out how to prevent existing power equations changing as a result of [...]

The story of Clinton being appointed special envoy on Kashmir swept across the front pages of the newspapers here on November 5, just a day after the elections. The gist was that President Clinton had been sounded out on becoming special envoy on Kashmir, and the timing of the reports was such that it almost [...]