Pax Indica: India and the World of the Twenty-first Century (36 page)

India’s biggest asset in its economic relationship with America lies in its national penchant for innovation. Already, multinational giants like GE and Philips are employing more researchers in India than in the United States or Europe, and Indians are doing cutting-edge work designing aircraft parts for Boeing and doing biotech research for US and Indian pharmaceutical companies. The Indian IT revolution, its
huge base of trained scientific manpower, entrepreneurial skill honed in adversity, and Indians’ special talent, amid scarcity, for improvising on a shoestring have helped create new, cheaper and more imaginative versions of products Americans first devised, from cardiograms to automobiles. A Google search for ‘frugal innovation’ returns mainly Indian results; the University of Toronto has established an India Innovation Centre to study the phenomenon; and ‘Indovation’ is becoming the new buzzword. As the high costs of manufacturing make the United States more and more a knowledge economy, India seems a natural partner, one that can complement America’s economy and help meet its needs.

Where are things not quite so amicable? One sometimes fraught area has been cooperation on security issues of vital importance to India. The United States was understood to have been initially helpful in the aftermath of the 26/11 terrorist attacks in Mumbai, both with intelligence sharing and in placing pressure on the Pakistani military establishment to back off from the militants it had sponsored. But subsequent revelations that a US citizen of Pakistani descent, Daud Gilani, calling himself David Coleman Headley, had visited India several times to reconnoitre the terrain for the attacks, and that he may have been a US double agent, led to a great deal of recriminations in the Indian strategic community. Indian commentators alleged that, in effect, the United States had allowed the 26/11 attacks to happen, rather than revealing information in their possession to India, merely in order to protect Headley’s cover. Subsequent disagreements over the level of access to Headley required by Indian investigators of 26/11 became public in India, further poisoning the atmosphere and adding to the mistrust that often finds receptive ground in certain Indian circles.

Indians are chronically suspicious that US dependence on Pakistan over the years—as a staging base for attacks on Soviet troops in Afghanistan earlier, now as an ally and logistical partner of US troops in Afghanistan—always vitiates its broader strategic interests in India. Differences have also emerged between Washington and New Delhi in recent years over a number of issues: the two nations’ different reactions to the Arab Spring, in particular the revolts in Libya and Syria; incompatible views about the implementation of one key follow-
up provision to the nuclear deal, the Nuclear Liability Law, where American companies are seeking exemptions from liability in the event of accidents, which New Delhi judges politically impossible to push through the Indian Parliament (where memories of the Bhopal disaster caused by an American multinational have not faded); and significant disagreements about sanctions on Iran for its nuclear programme, one which India is also concerned about but disinclined to back, given its own dependence on Iranian oil supplies. While these are issues that have played out over months, even years, one specific issue that caused some heartburn between the two countries related to India’s rejection of a US bid to sell the country a large number of combat aircraft.

American officials have been particularly alive to the opportunities afforded by the much-needed (and long-delayed) modernization of India’s ageing military and weapons systems, with estimates of some $35 billion of expenditure likely to be incurred in the next decade. US Assistant Secretary of State Robert Blake told an Indian audience in 2011 that ‘the [Indian] Cabinet Committee on Security’s approval of the purchase of C-17s from the U.S. is just a sample of the sales that we expect will occur over the next several years’.

In this context, India’s decision in 2011 not to purchase American planes for its $10-billion-plus fighter aircraft deal—the largest single defence tender in the country’s history—stirred considerable debate in strategic circles in both countries. The two US contenders, Boeing’s F/A-18 Superhornet and Lockheed’s F-16 Superviper, were deemed by the Indian Ministry of Defence not to fulfil the technical requirements New Delhi was looking for in a medium multirole combat aircraft (MMRCA). With the Russian MiG-30 and the Swedish Gripen also eliminated at the preliminary stage, two European planes, the Eurofighter Typhoon and the French Rafale, were the only aircraft still in the fray for an expected order of 126 planes (the Rafale finally got the nod, though at this writing that decision had been placed in suspense).

The Indian decision was immediately denounced by pro-American commentators as a setback to bilateral relations. India had never previously purchased an American fighter plane, and Washington had hoped its doing so would signal India’s determination to cement an emerging strategic partnership with a hefty cheque. US officials from
President Obama on down had lobbied for the deal, which would have pumped money and jobs into the ailing US economy. The ‘deeply disappointed’ American ambassador in India, Tim Roemer, promptly announced his resignation from his post in New Delhi. In a typical comment, Ashley Tellis observed trenchantly that India had chosen ‘to invest in a plane, not a relationship’. The implication was that India should have sold its technical requirements short out of a desire to reward the US politically for its goodwill.

The notion that a major arms purchase should be based on broader strategic considerations—the importance of the United States in India’s emerging
weltpolitik
—rather than on the merits of the aircraft itself, has struck Indian officials as unfair. Sources in New Delhi are quick to deny that the decision reflects any political bias on the part of India’s taciturn but left-leaning defence minister, A.K. Antony. Instead the choice, they aver, is a purely professional one, made by the Indian Air Force, and only ratified by the ministry. The two European fighters are generally seen as aerodynamically superior, having outperformed both American aircraft in tests under the adverse climatic conditions in which they might have to be used, particularly in the high altitudes and low temperatures of northern Kashmir. Experts suggest the American planes are technologically ten years behind the European ones, and it doesn’t help that Pakistan, India’s likely adversary were the aircraft ever to be pressed into combat, has long been a regular client of the US warplane industry.

In addition, Indian decision-makers could not help but be aware that the United States has not, over the years, proved to be a reliable supplier of military hardware to India or other countries. It has frequently cut off contracted supplies, imposed sanctions on friends and foes alike (including India), and reneged on the delivery of military goods and spare parts, as well as been notoriously unwilling to transfer its military technologies. The current Indian fleet of mainly Russian and French planes has suffered from no such problems, and the existing ground support and maintenance infrastructure, geared to service them, would have needed major changes to handle the US aircraft. (It is likely that the eventual winner of the bid will be required to enter into a joint production arrangement with India, which the US companies would not have done.)

As if all this was not enough to drive the choice away from Boeing and Lockheed, the final clincher might well have been the Government of India’s desire to avoid any further procurement controversy at a time when allegations of corruption have beset it from all sides. A decision made unarguably on technical grounds, many felt, would be easier to defend than one skewed in a particular direction on political grounds. Defence Minister A.K. Antony even postponed a US–India strategic dialogue (scheduled originally for mid-April 2011) for which Secretaries Hillary Clinton and Robert Gates were planning to travel to New Delhi, in order not to come under pressure from his American visitors to weigh political factors in making his technical decision.

Against this are the unarguable advantages of pleasing a major new ally for whom an Indian decision would have meant a great deal, and developing a pattern of mutual cooperation in supply, training and operations which has yet to evolve between the two militaries. At a time when US nuclear reactor purchases—made possible by the historic deal negotiated by the Bush Administration and sold by Washington to the forty-eight other members of the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group—have been held up by US insistence on exemptions from supplier liability in the event of an accident, the rejection of US aircraft is seen by some as New Delhi gratuitously spurning an opportunity to demonstrate that friendship with India is in Americans’ interest too.

Is India being its old prickly non-aligned self again? Is appeasement of India’s notoriously anti-American politicians more important to a beleaguered Indian government than winning Washington over? Is India’s traditional obsession with preserving its own strategic autonomy always going to limit its usefulness as a partner to the United States?

The questions are unfair. Surely India–US relations are greater than any single arms purchase. Why should the financial value of one deal be the barometer of a strategic partnership? It is simply narrow-minded to reduce American policy towards India to the bottom lines of US defence salesmen.

Nor is there any military estrangement between the two countries. Even if this deal didn’t work out for the United States, it is still a leading arms supplier to India, having won bids to provide ships, reconnaissance aircraft and advanced transport planes. The Indian Army, Navy and Air
Force still conduct more exercises with US defence forces than with those of any other power. The two countries’ worldviews on the big issues confronting the planet are not incompatible.

In any case, the strategic traffic is not merely one-way. Washington too has a national interest in Indian strategic autonomy, which would be buttressed by a wider range of external partnerships, including with the European states that will be the beneficiaries of the aircraft tender. Though India is rightly allergic to being seen as a US-supported counterweight to a rising China, in practice it is avidly courted by Southeast Asian countries anxious to balance Beijing, a development which suits Washington’s interests. President Obama’s 2010 visit cemented a perception that the two countries shared an increasingly convergent worldview, common democratic values and a thriving trade. None of this will cease to be relevant if India buys a European fighter plane.

In fact the potential for India–US collaboration in a variety of areas—military and non-military—would probably be enhanced by this decision. Turning the United States down this time actually frees the hands of the Indian government to pursue other aspects of the partnership, immune from the charge that it is too responsive to US pressures. So New Delhi hasn’t foreclosed its options; it has in fact enlarged them.

The MMRCA deal was, however, only one of several issues that arose between the two states that created the impression of a downturn in India–US relations after the heady days of the Bush Administration, when Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had even publicly declared to the American leader, ‘Mr President, the people of India love you.’ India’s positions on the MMRCA order and its rejection of the nuclear liability legislation advocated by Washington remain what Americans like to call the ‘poster children’ for the argument that the relationship with India is not yielding the rewards its advocates had predicted, or at least implied. But those who make this point in Washington fail to see that neither is specifically anti-US in conception—both involve India taking positions based on its own understanding of its own national and security interests within a specific domestic political context, exactly what democracies tend to do. The same is true of the more general disappointments that are being voiced in Washington, notably over India’s timidity in pursuing economic reforms that would open its
market further to US firms—something that affects all potential foreign investors and not just Americans. (And yet it is US companies, more than others, that could conclude that the Indian market is less attractive than they had imagined, since Americans are quickest to complain that the lure of the potential of the Indian market needs to be matched by its performance.)

Meanwhile, the reality of extensive defence cooperation is masked by the rejection of one American combat aircraft. In fact India relies significantly on American platforms for its long-range maritime patrol aircraft, very heavy lift transport aircraft, advanced special operations tactical transport aircraft and heavy attack helicopter requirements—all implying a degree of Indian dependence on American defence technology, and American willingness to supply it, that would both have been inconceivable just two decades ago. And India’s attitude to the American troop presence in its own neighbourhood—which has gone from outright rejection during the Cold War to publicly welcoming American troops in Afghanistan as a source of security and stability and seeking their prolongation—is proof of an astonishing metamorphosis in Indian perceptions of America.

At the same time, if American analysts can point to the aircraft deal and the nuclear liability legislation as evidence of India not trying hard enough, there is just as much cause for disappointment on the other side of the equation. Many Indians had expected more from the new strategic partnership with the United States than has been forthcoming. Major irritants from an Indian point of view include America’s excessive generosity to the Pakistani military—some $11 billion since 2001, ostensibly for security against terrorism but much of it spent on weapons aimed at India—its continuing sale of conventional arms to Pakistan, US inattention to Indian interests in Afghanistan, the Obama Administration’s assiduous cultivation of China and the continuing reluctance in Washington to transfer cutting-edge defence technology to India. On China, Indians saw a clear contrast from the start with the Bush view of Beijing as a power to be contained; on Obama’s inaugural visit to Asia as President in November 2009, he spent four days in China and left after signing a joint statement that declared Beijing to be the key to ‘peace, stability, and development in South Asia’, a distinction that
surely ought to have been accorded to India. The visit was accompanied by some suggestions that this was a far more important relationship to Washington than the one with India, and even loose talk of a ‘G2’ condominium between the United States and China to manage the world. India was kept waiting another year for a visit.