WASHINGTON AND NEW DELHI

WHY THE US NEEDS INDIA

Raghu Krishnan

The Economic Times, November 7, 2010

That President Obama and both his immediate predecessors have visited New Delhi indicates the growing importance which the USA attaches to relations with India.

A USA, which has almost a trillion dollars-worth of its Treasury bonds being held by China, is reinforcing ties with strategic partners at a time American policy-makers have a sense of growing disquiet vis-a-vis Beijing.

Being heavily indebted to a China which is not averse to throwing its weight around would make anyone nervous, especially Americans who, for five of the last six decades, have got used to regarding their country as the dominant superpower in the world.

Time was when leaders from India and elsewhere would call on the President of the USA. If India had a problem in looking after millions of refugees pouring in from East Pakistan following the military crackdown and genocide in 1971, Indira Gandhi would call on Nixon in the hope that the USA would resolve the crisis.

If some 14 years later, Rajiv Gandhi called on Reagan, it was in the belief that American technological investment would catalyse development. And if Union Carbide CEO Warren Anderson was allowed to get away scot-free in the wake of the world’s worst industrial accident in the MNC’s subsidiary’s plant in Bhopal, it was partly because of the clout American industry wielded throughout the world.

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