The atmospherics on display during the week of the recent inaugural US-India Strategic Dialogue (1-4 June) suggest that the bilateral relationship is on a solid footing. U.S. Under Secretary for Public Affairs William Burns called the relationship “one of the defining partnerships of the 21st century”, while U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke of a joint responsibility to “determine the course of the world”. U.S. President Barack Obama even made a surprise visit at the dialogue’s reception, and announced that he would visit New Delhi in November. On the Indian side, Foreign Minister S.M. Krishna called US-India ties “a relationship of limitless opportunities for mutual benefit”.

Complex Realities

Yet this flowery rhetoric masks the complex realities of what has been and continues to be a testy relationship between Washington and New Delhi. Even today, Indians worry that the United States is cozying up to Pakistan and China at their expense, while some in Washington charge that India is too fraught with bureaucratic hurdles to speed up its development and too caught up with its ‘neighborhood’ concerns to assert its influence on the world stage. If the two countries hope to forge a truly strategic partnership in the 21st century, they will have to navigate past sharp disagreements over important issues and bridge wide perception gaps.

Divergent interests kept India and the United States estranged during the Cold War. India’s policy of ‘moral nonalignment’ in the 1950s between the two superpower blocs was viewed in Washington as immoral, while the U.S. neutrality on Kashmir and arming of Pakistan after 1954 as part of a global containment policy engendered much mistrust in New Delhi. Estrangement continued in the 1970s and 1980s as India drifted toward the Soviet camp while the U.S. pursued rapprochement with China and armed Pakistan in order to undermine the USSR. And while the end of the Cold War did lead to some bilateral cooperation – including joint military exercises in the 1990s – India’s nuclear test in 1998 (which it viewed as retaliation for Pakistan’s nuclear tests) drew Washington’s ire. It was only with the signing of the civilian nuclear deal under the Bush administration in 2008 that relationship began to really take off.

New Realisation

Both sides now realize that there are manifold areas in which to pursue functional cooperation. Economically, India’s blistering growth rates and role in the G20 means that it is unquestionably a global economic power, and that there is room for expanding trade, investment, as well as educational linkages. Strategically, Washington views India as a counterbalance to Chinese hegemony in Asia, even if New Delhi is itself at time reluctant to play this role. Both the United States and India are among the world’s top five greenhouse gas emitters and have been victims of extremism, and are thus vital to solutions on climate change and terrorism. India’s geographic proximity to the Indian Ocean and status as the world’s fifth-largest navy also means that opportunities exist for further cooperation in the maritime domain, from disaster relief to anti-piracy operations and joint patrols. Beyond these interests, both are also large, vibrant democracies.

Yet discord continues to persist. India and the United States often lock horns on trade and climate issues, and there is still bad blood surrounding both the collapse of the multilateral Doha Round of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2008 and the Copenhagen Climate Conference of 2009, where New Delhi is said to have colluded with China to obstruct any meaningful outcome. More recently, Indians have hissed at the Obama administration for interfering in the ‘internal’ Kashmir issue, carelessly signing off on a joint US-China role in South Asia (which India considers its neighborhood), and closing an eye on Pakistan-sponsored terrorism and nuclear activities in exchange for Islamabad’s cooperation in Afghanistan without adequately consulting or involving New Delhi. India would also like the United States to unequivocally endorse its claim to a permanent seat on the Security Council, as opposed to just being “very committed to considering the idea,” as well as relax stringent export controls on technology.

The United States, for its part, laments India’s softer position on Iran and is frustrated by its inability to even pass the requisite legislation for civil nuclear cooperation to begin after Washington brought it into the nonproliferation fold. As Jasmeet Ahuja, a staff member for the House Committee on Foreign Affairs told a conference at the American Enterprise Institute recently, “India needs to think strategically about how to engage...if India does not want to, there isn’t much more that the U.S. can do”.

Give and Take

Pursuing a truly strategic partnership will mean both sides finding compromise on these issues and addressing their respective concerns. Even if differences over Afghanistan and Pakistan persist, pushing a new “big idea” to succeed the US-India nuclear deal over the next few months could provide sufficient “ballast” to drive the relationship forward for Mr. Obama’s visit to India in November, as former Bush administration official Evan Feigenbaum has noted. This could be movement on a bilateral investment treaty, export controls, defense procurements and agreements, or even a package of other smaller deals in agriculture or education.

Beyond specific policies, forging a strategic partnership will also require managing what former Indian ambassador Lalit Mansingh referred to as “perception deficits”. While India sees the world from the prism of ‘strategic autonomy’ and views itself as a great power and civilization, the United States is used to relationships where it has the dominant voice. Despite the vast asymmetry in terms of material capabilities, both nations engage in preachy moralism, and neither is used to deference. Learning to deal with each other amidst vibrant media communities and noisy democracies is a challenge in and of itself. The United States must understand and at times accommodate India’s perception of its “inherent greatness”, as the India scholar Stephen Cohen once put it. But India similarly needs to comprehend that it is only one of many priorities on the U.S. agenda, and that some other interests may at times take precedence.

Both sides also often trade barbs on India’s global role. Washington is fond of complaining about New Delhi’s unwillingness or ambivalence to assume a global role or think strategically beyond its immediate neighborhood. There is some truth to this. At the Track II version of the US-India Strategic Dialogue at the Brookings Institution on 28 May, prominent Indian journalist Gautham Adhikari plainly admitted that “India does not have a strategic view of the world”, and urged New Delhi to formulate a comprehensive vision for its foreign policy.

India’s Challenges

At the same time, Washington must grasp the fact that India is still grappling with a complex set of domestic challenges – from poverty that affects a third of its population to its growing Maoist insurgent threat – and that it lives in a dangerous neighborhood with a terrorism threat from Pakistan and unresolved border issues with China. Such a full plate of domestic and regional issues understandably weighs New Delhi down and restricts its ability to assert a global presence.

A strong basis for cooperation exists between the United States and India, both in principle and on specific issues. But solidifying a strategic partnership in the 21st century will require compromise, vision and deftness from both sides. For, as Mr. Burns has himself noted, “progress in US-Indian partnership is not automatic” as the atmospherics may suggest.