The presence of US President Barack Obama at the Republic Day celebrations next year is likely to mark the long awaited moment of transformation in India’s relations with America and an extraordinary shift in Delhi’s world view.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s decision to invite Obama, and the American president’s acceptance reveal the scale and scope of the mutual understanding that appears to have emerged out of the meeting between the two leaders in September.
Over the next two months, Delhi and Washington will have the opportunity to clinch a broad set of ambitious agreements — ranging from defence and counter-terrorism at one end to economic agreements at the other — that will lay the foundation for a genuine strategic partnership between India and the United States.
The reluctance of the world’s largest democracy to share the most important day in its national life with the world’s most powerful democracy underlined how estranged the two republics had become over the decades. It was indeed commonplace to suggest that anti-Americanism was deeply embedded within the DNA of the Indian political and bureaucratic classes. This jinx has now been broken by an Indian Prime Minister who has had the greatest reason to turn his back on America; for Washington had denied him entry into the United States for more than a decade.
Unlike many in Delhi, who were advising the PM to ignore America, Modi has understood the centrality of the United States in accelerating India’s economic growth and elevating its position in the international system. Whatever might have been his personal grievance, Modi said, it has no bearing on on his government’s pursuit of India’s national interests with the United States.
Atal Bihari Vajpayee, India’s first prime minister from the BJP, saw far enough to declare in 1998 that India and America were ‘natural allies’ despite the then prevailing tensions over the nuclear issue. Modi now appears determined to translate Vajpayee’s sentiment into a durable partnership. Obama, too, moved quickly to seize the moment when Modi won the elections in May.
Recognizing the mistakes made on the visa issue, Obama chose to call Modi even before he was sworn in as the PM and invite him to Washington. When he shows up in Delhi in January, Obama will be the only American president to visit India twice. Obama had visited India in November 2010.
