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Relations between Washington and New Delhi took a marked turn for the better in the second term of Bill Clinton. The spark was a friendship between Strobe Talbott, Clinton's U.S. Deputy Secretary of State, and Jaswant Singh, the then Indian Minister of External Affairs. The pair first met at a time of crisis, after India's 1998 nuclear test. But the men developed a strong bond. They met every two months during Talbott's time in office and swapped ideas for better ties, as Talbott related in his memoir of the period, Engaging India. In particular, they fretted that a U.S. President hadn't stepped on Indian soil since 1978. So on his swan-song foreign tour at the end of 2000, Clinton made a trip to India and did what he does best: charm. For five days, the newspapers were filled with images of the Clintons in Ranthambore Tiger Reserve, the President eating kebabs, and his daughter Chelsea shopping for pashminas in Delhi's markets. To this day, carpet traders, hoteliers and restaurants in New Delhi claim a personal relationship with America's former first family as proof of their standing. "People loved it," says Lalit Mansingh, a former Foreign Secretary. "The Americans were playing ball with the Indian public for the first time. That was the big change."
Over the next few years, relations improved. Blackwill decoupled U.S. ties with India and Pakistan, and strove to end a long period in which Washington felt that if it pleased Islamabad it would only annoy New Delhi, and vice versa. That allowed Washington to engage simultaneously with India and pursue its anti-terrorism goals in Pakistan. Then, in May 2004, the man who opened up India's economy in 1993 as Finance Minister returned as Prime Minister. Singh's first foreign trip was to the U.S. On the eve of his departure, he told TIME that India had been slow to wake up to the post-cold war world, but added it wasn't sleeping any longer: "It has taken us quite some time to realize there is no other option but to align ourselves with the modern global economy."
Blackwill says India has long held a personal fascination for Bush as a living and breathing embodiment of his ideals. "A billion people in a functioning democracy," he recalls then governor Bush saying in 1999. "Isn't that something?" Once Bush was in power, Blackwill and Rice encouraged the President to pursue his instincts and build an alliance of substance. Blackwill's successor in New Delhi, David Mulford, former Under Secretary for International Affairs at the Treasury in George H.W. Bush's administration, soon found himself knee-deep in talks on a range of deals from joint military exercises to AIDS research to space exploration. Top of the list was the nuclear deal.
In neither country is support for the new relationship complete. "This is not an easy decision for India," Bush told the Asia Society, "nor is it an easy decision for the United States, and implementing this agreement will take time, and it will take patience from both our countries." A fundamental change in policy on the control of nuclear materials is a hard sell. Antiproliferation campaigners say the deal means that the U.S. would be helping India to build more bombs. Congress must approve any change to the NPT, and in testimony to the House International Relations Committee, Henry Sokolski, executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center, argued against the new proposals. If the U.S. opposes Iran's atomic program because it suspects civilian nuclear facilities would be used to make bombs, said Sokolski, then surely Washington was now freeing up India's existing capacity to produce plutonium and enriched uranium for weapons, and so "helping India expand its nuclear arsenal." Daryl G. Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, warns of the possibility that the nuclear deal will spark an arms race with Pakistan and China. Last year, the Pakistani Foreign Office, says one of its officials, submitted a paper to President Pervez Musharraf urging him to enhance nuclear cooperation with China, calling it a "must for the country's nuclear deterrent."
In India, nationalists, nuclear scientists and communists oppose the idea that India open its programs to inspections on the say-so of a foreign power. They accuse Singh of pawning national security for ties with the U.S. and allowing an implicit cap on its nuclear deterrent. "India cannot compromise," said India's most senior nuclear scientist, Atomic Energy Commission chief Anil Kakodkar, over the U.S. demand to allow inspectors to view its fast-breeder reactors. So far, India and the U.S. have been unable to agree on what proportion of India's nuclear program should be declared civilian, and opened up, and what kept as military and secret. But even if a deal is not finalized by the time Bush lands in India, the visit "will not be a failure," says Robert Hathaway, an India expert at the Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington. "There's a multiplicity of interests with India at this point and I would not want to judge a trip on the lack of progress on a single issue."