The Daily Fix: India needs good relations with the US but it should be wary of its bear hug

The Big Story: American pie

If there’s one area in which the Modi government has broken new ground, it’s in its conduct of foreign policy. Narendra Modi has taken diplomacy out from the confines of closed rooms and successfully created a public relations machine around it. Much of this has benefitted not only him politically but also India.

In his current visit to the United States, Modi was able to wrest a number of important wins from the world’s only superpower. As per the joint statement released at the end of the visit, India is now a “major defence partner” of the Unites States in technology transfer and a “priority partner in the Asia-Pacific region. The US will also back India’s entry into the Missile Technology Control Regime and the Nuclear Supplier’s Group. It has also agreed to treat January's Pathankot attacks seriously as an act of terror equivalent to the 26/11 Mumbai attacks. Westinghouse, an American firm, will also set up six nuclear reactors in India.

It is often forgotten that close India-US ties aren’t without precedent. In 1962, for example, the US helped India as China bore down through the Himalayas. So close were US-India ties at the time that a former CIA officer Bruce Riedel writes that if China had continued to wage war, “we can be reasonably certain that America, India and probably Great Britain would have been at war together with China”.

After 1962, India balanced its US relationship with Soviet help. In retrospect, it has become fashionable to criticise this strategy but to see what a completely one-sided US alliance looks like, one only needs to look west to Pakistan. Pakistan’s elites have openly sold their country militarily to the US, allowing the world’s largest military to use their country for military activities. This has devastated Pakistan. The nation has been torn apart from the consequences of the decades-long engagement with Afghanistan. Alarmingly, India has already agreed in principle to the terms of an agreement with the US in April that would let US soldiers use Indian military bases.

Ultimately India needs to consider its own long-term self interest on this matter rather than get starry-eyed about a US partnership. US allies in the third world have rarely benefitted from an American bear hug.

The Big Scroll
Is America using Narendra Modi and India against China, asks Rohan Venkataramakrishnan. And it’s not only in the defence sector: India and the Unites States have taken steps to save the environment too.

Political Picks
1. The New York Times calls Modi’s speech in the US Congress a “new moment” in India-US relations even as some US Congressmen slam the Modi government for violence against minorities.
2. An idol of the god Swaminarayan dressed up in the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh uniform in Gujarat has kicked up a controversy.
3. Arnab Goswami interviews Anurag Kashyap over the controversy surrounding the censoring of the film Udta Punjab.

Punditry
1. In the Telegraph, Mukul Kesavan argues that the Akhlaq case is being used by the BJP for its own ends.
2. In the Hindustan Times, Shishir Gupta explains how the South China Sea could be a flashpoint for the entire region.
3. In the Indian Express, TM Krishna says that art and culture are going through a right-wing phase, though Hindu art forms have never been targeted in India.

Don’t Miss

Meet the ordinary Muslim women fighting an extraordinary case against triple talaq in India.

For the first time, Bano discovered that instantaneous triple talaq was an un-Quranic custom outlawed in 22 Muslim countries. She had to decide whether she wanted to go beyond her own divorce and pursue a legal fight for the rights of all Muslim women by challenging the very power vested in all-male Muslim law-making bodies in India.

“I had not seen or spoken to my children for almost a year,” said Bano. “It was a moment when I had lost all hope in life, and going ahead with the case felt like the only option.”

She added: “I have now met a lot of other women who have been through a similar ordeal, but they are not able to come forward and fight. I don’t really know where I got the strength from.”