Posted on 07/23/2009 12:30:34 PM PDT by MyTwoCopperCoins
WHEN she landed in Mumbai on July 17th as the first front-rank visitor from Barack Obama’s administration, Hillary Clinton, America’s secretary of state, faced an unfamiliar difficulty. India was uncommonly keen on his predecessor, George Bush. In the words of Manmohan Singh, the prime minister, its people “deeply loved” Mr Bush for his efforts to strengthen bilateral bonds between the world’s biggest democracies.
At the heart of this strengthening was a nuclear co-operation agreement that made India an exception to the global counter-proliferation regime and a more legitimate nuclear power. By contrast, many Indians have looked on Mr Obama nervously. On the campaign trail, he threatened protectionism against their outsourcing industry. In office his team has paid more attention to Pakistan. America has also been paying court to China—against which Mr Bush had wanted India as a counterweight.
Many Indians fear Mr Obama’s administration will judge their country by how far it helps with two issues that Mr Bush was conveniently uninterested in. The first is counter-proliferation, which Mr Obama wants to support by ratifying the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty, considered by India an unacceptable restraint on its nuclear-weapons programme. The other is climate change, on which Mr Obama wants a new global agreement which would ask developing countries such as India to offer some sort of commitment to contain their carbon emissions.
On a three-day visit, Mrs Clinton’s main brief was to soothe Indian nerves. She began well—by putting up at the Taj Mahal Hotel in Mumbai, where 31 people were killed by Pakistani terrorists during an assault last November. Likening that terrorist outrage to the ones in America on September 11th 2001, Mrs Clinton expressed America’s “very strong sense of solidarity and sympathy”. Proceeding to Delhi, Mrs Clinton continued to dribble Ayurvedic oil on Indian tics. She invited Mr Singh to visit Washington in November. She announced an agreement to remove one of the last obstacles to sales of sophisticated American weapons to India.
The one cloud hovered over the issue of climate change after Mrs Clinton hinted that India should accept some cap on its emissions: “There is a way to eradicate poverty and develop sustainably that will lower significantly the carbon footprint of the energy that is produced and consumed to fuel that growth.” However circumlocutory, it was enough for India’s environment minister, Jairam Ramesh, to take umbrage. Given India’s relatively low emissions per head, he said there was “no case” for the “pressure” on India.
This was sadly inevitable. As efforts continue to reach a new agreement on carbon emissions ahead of the climate summit in Copenhagen in December, India seems happy to be among the most cussed obstacles to negotiation. For the time being, no amount of diplomatic balm can change that.
"Hillary, back away from the ashtrays and lamps and assume the position..."
FMCDH(BITS)
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