Quotes of the Day

If you want a snapshot of a changing world, look at pictures of last May's ceremony in Moscow to mark the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II. At what was one of the largest gatherings of world leaders for years, Germans shook hands with French, Japanese with British, and an American President allowed his Russian counterpart to treat him to a display of martial power, topped with hammer-and-sickle flags, while they sat and chatted amiably in front of Lenin's tomb. As well as burying old feuds, the summit was a chance to forge new friendships. At a banquet that night at the Kremlin, George W. Bush made a beeline for Manmohan Singh. According to Singh's press adviser, Sanjaya Baru, Bush told his wife Laura, "This is the Indian Prime Minister." Singh later told Baru that the President then launched into a mini-presentation to the First Lady. India was growing fast; India had an energy crunch; India had the world's second-largest Muslim population and not one belonged to al-Qaeda. Baru says that Bush then turned to Singh and said: "You and I need to talk civilian nukes." The Indians were impressed. Says Baru: "We realized this was coming from the top."

"This" is one of the more dramatic geopolitical realignments of recent times. Back in the days of the cold war, India was a Soviet ally. New Delhi and Washington supported different sides in the 1971 Bangladeshi war of independence; during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, when the U.S. and Pakistan armed the mujahedin resistance, India backed the Moscow-imposed Afghan government. And the U.S. was furious over India's 1998 nuclear test, when New Delhi detonated three bombs under the Rajasthani desert. That test was followed by a similar one in Pakistan, and the U.S. slapped a raft of sanctions on both nations. As former U.S. ambassador to India Robert Blackwill noted in his farewell speech in New Delhi in 2003: "India was not seen in Washington as an essential and cooperative part of solutions to major international problems. India was one of the problems—a nuclear renegade whose policies threatened the entire nonproliferation regime and which had to be brought to its senses." Visits by American officials, said Blackwill, "were about as rare as white Bengal tiger sightings."

No longer. This week Bush lands in India for a three-day stay—a top-level follow-up to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's visit last March, when she told Singh that Washington's broad aim was "to help India become a major world power in the 21st century." Besides creating goodwill, Bush also hopes to deliver something concrete to the Indians: a deal that promises Delhi access to the highly restricted trade in nuclear fuel. The agreement would lift the remaining sanctions and offer access to the world's nuclear expertise to help build India's atomic-energy program. In return, India would pledge to use the imported nuclear fuel only to generate power. It would also have to split its existing 23 reactors into military and civilian stations. Washington wants most of the reactors—including a fast-breeder program that's under construction and which produces more fuel than it consumes—to be placed in the latter category and opened to U.N. inspection.

The U.S. offer takes place against the backdrop of a shift in the world's nuclear landscape. Many developing countries such as China, Brazil and Iran are launching or stepping up their nuclear-power programs, either to diversify their sources of energy or as a matter of national pride. But such an expansion of nuclear power could encourage the illicit trade in plutonium and uranium, the essential ingredients for nuclear weapons. In the 1980s and '90s, Pakistan's chief nuclear scientist A.Q. Khan built a thriving trade selling nuclear secrets to Iran, Libya and North Korea. To better police the flow of nuclear materials, the White House has unveiled a proposal for a Global Nuclear Energy Partnership, in which a core of approved supplier nations would provide nuclear fuel to users. The trade would be done under international monitoring and on condition of non-military use, and the suppliers would recycle the waste rather than let it be diverted to weapons programs. The proposal would supplement, and require changes to, the two key instruments of arms control: the 28-year-old Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), banning the supply of nuclear fuel to states with atomic weapons, and the Nuclear Suppliers Group, a 44-nation nonproliferation body set up in 1974 in reaction to India's first nuclear test. At a speech to the Asia Society last week in Washington, Bush said that the U.S.-India deal was the vanguard of this wider restructuring. "We are starting with India," he told reporters. "We'll bring India's nuclear program into the international mainstream and strengthen the bonds of trust between our two nations."

Beyond the nuclear initiative, the U.S. and India are beginning to see each other as kindred spirits. Both are democracies. Both have thriving—and increasingly integrated—technology sectors. Both speak English, and enjoy the same yoga gurus, the same escapism in movies and even the same food. "Young Indians are acquiring a taste for pizzas from Domino's and Pizza Hut," Bush told the Asia Society. Washington and Delhi also both fight Islamic militancy and share concerns over China's rising power. Indian Foreign Secretary Shyam Saran tells Time his U.S. counterparts are explicit about a desire for a strong and lasting alliance to act as a "bulwark against the arc of Islamic instability" running from the Middle East to Asia, and to create "much greater balance in Asia"—in other words, for India to act as a counterweight to China.

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."

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.

• Alex Perry
• When George W. Bush lands in New Delhi this week, India and the U.S. hope to seal a transformation from cold war antagonists to strategic partners