Why Bush Is Courting India

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Bush, of course, is not the only person to spot India's potential. In the last 18 months, New Delhi has hosted the leaders of Russia, Japan, China and Britain. Bush's visit comes a week after the departure of French President Jacques Chirac, who signed France's own civilian nuclear-cooperation deal with India before he left, and a few days before the arrival of Australian Prime Minister John Howard. But the U.S. has an edge. Outside official links—in the diplomacy of the heart—ties between the two nations are growing every day. There are 2 million ethnic Indians in the U.S., and India has become the largest source of foreign students there. The U.S. is India's biggest business partner, with bilateral trade worth $20 billion in 2004, three times the 1992 figure; the largest foreign investor in the Indian stock market, accounting for 40% of equity inflows between 1993-2005; and the biggest foreign backer of Indian business. In 1991, U.S. direct investments in India were worth just $11 million; in 2004, $620 million flowed in. And then there's Silicon Valley. "You can't underestimate the impact of the technological revolution that took place in the U.S. in the late 1990s and the huge number of Indian entrepreneurs who contributed to that," says Narayana Murthy, chairman of Infosys, one of India's leading technology firms. "Politics is driven to a large extent by economics." Bush regularly scores higher approval ratings in India than in the U.S.

The biggest hurdles to a bright future are the habits of the past. Sensitivity to foreign interference in its internal affairs is high in India, where a history of opposing imperialism has produced one of the proudest nations on earth. No Indian government could accept a relationship with the U.S. in which it was obviously the junior partner. Some in the U.S. are wise to the dangers of being overbearing. Last year, Rice warned India not to pursue a plan to build a gas pipeline from Iran. When she was ignored in New Delhi, the U.S. quietly dropped the subject. "We're not trying to strong-arm them in any way," says the deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi, Robert O. Blake. "It's counterproductive." Some U.S. Congressmen insist, however, that in return for accepting Washington's help for its nuclear program, India must back the U.S. in its efforts to shut down Iran's. Last summer, Tom Lantos, a Democrat from California, called then Indian Minister for External Affairs Natwar Singh "dense" for not grasping the quid pro quo on Iran.

Old attitudes live on in India too. The nation's communists scored their best vote ever at the 2004 general election, and Singh relies on them for his parliamentary majority. Though the economy is opening fast, on matters like privatization India still lags—this month New Delhi, Bombay and Calcutta airports were buried in garbage and sewage as 23,000 workers went on strike over sell-off plans. However much the Indian public may love the U.S., Indian intellectuals are overwhelmingly left-of-center and anti-American. "Nobody's supposed to be nice about Bush," laughs New Delhi-based nuclear expert C. Raja Mohan. "My friends get terribly upset when I say he's offering us a good deal."

Prakash Karat, leader of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), says his party does not oppose America on principle. But he is outraged that Singh is sitting down with the man he considers Imperialist Nemesis No. 1, and grumbles about a sinister-sounding "pro-American lobby in the Indian establishment." The timing of Bush's trip, which is expected to wrap up March 3—just before a vote at the International Atomic Energy Agency at which India must decide whether to support referral of Iran's nuclear program to the U.N. Security Council—have redoubled Karat's anti-Bush instincts. Tens of thousands of communist supporters, he says, will dog Bush's visit with mass protests.

But Karat's world is being changed for him. India's revolutionaries are a ragtag bunch who have no real shot at derailing its economic boom. Karat himself admits the old Soviet Union was never the aspirational focus the U.S. is today. And whatever the size of the protests Bush meets, bitter hostility towards the U.S. is now only found in demonstrations, not in government. Karat runs his campaign from a sparsely furnished office in a dusty side-street on the edge of the central government sprawl in New Delhi. The walls are hung with a small portrait of Lenin and a faded Soviet propaganda poster from the 1920s, exhorting workers to build better steam railways. Asked about the welcome Bush will receive, he says: "When [Soviet leader Nikita] Khrushchev came here in 1955, the hugest crowds turned out to meet him." The message is unmistakable, if unintended. That was then. But this is now.