Narendra Modi-Barack Obama meet: is the glass half empty or half full?
We take stock of Narendra Modi's visit to the US, his first since being denied a visa to travel to the country almost a decade ago
New Delhi: There are two ways one could look at the just concluded summit between Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and US president Barack Obama—the glass is half empty or it is half full.
For those seeking tangible results, the outcome may have been disappointing. Yet, the talks in Washington between the leaders of the world’s largest and oldest democracies did succeed in breathing new life into strategic ties once described by Obama as one of the defining partnerships of the 21st century.
In the meetings spread over 29-30 September, there was more than enough evidence to show that the two sides not only put their testy past aside, but used the advent of a new government in India to renew pledges made earlier besides charting a road map for future relations.
White House senior director for India Phil Reiner said the talks were “extraordinarily successful" and had helped to “re-energize the relationship". In New Delhi, a senior official described the summit as a “game changer...taking India-US relations to a new level".
According to a joint statement released after the talks, the two sides worked out institutional frameworks for broadening and deepening the relationship, committing to a new mantra: “Chalein Saath Saath: Forward Together We Go."
It wasn’t perhaps a surprise that much of the statement was devoted to economic ties, which have frayed in recent years. Obama came to power in 2008 at a time the US was beset by the financial crisis that peaked with the collapse in September that year of the investment bank, Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. Modi, who took office in May, is trying to revive an economy that grew at decadal lows of less than 5% in each of the previous two years.
Obama and Modi noted that two-way trade had increased fivefold since 2001 to nearly $100 billion and committed themselves to expanding it by five times more, said the statement, without laying down a timeline.
“To raise investment by institutional investors and corporate entities, the leaders pledged to establish an Indo-US Investment Initiative led by the ministry of finance and the department of treasury, with special focus on capital market development and financing of infrastructure," said the statement. “They pledged to establish an infrastructure collaboration platform convened by the ministry of finance and the department of commerce to enhance participation of US companies in infrastructure projects in India."
Modi will receive two US trade missions in 2015, focused on meeting India’s infrastructure needs with US technology and services.
At the level of US businesses, a separate statement from the US-India Business Council (USIBC), whose members Modi addressed in Washington on 30 September, said it had identified upwards of $41 billion slated for investment from members over the next two to three years.
“And that’s based on a survey of only 20% of USIBC’s membership," the USIBC statement said. That compares with Japan’s pledge to invest $35 billion in India over the next five years, and a similar promise from the Chinese to invest $20 billion again over a five-year period.
Analysts in the US agreed Modi’s visit had been able to “successfully reset" relations after a rocky period.
“Do the differences still remain on some challenging questions? Yes—and that will be the core work of diplomacy in the coming months, to try to achieve resolution," said Alyssa Ayres, senior fellow for India, Pakistan and South Asia at the New York based Council on Foreign Relations think tank.
“It was a very forward-looking joint statement..some of the new points that struck me as potentially productive future collaborations were: that the US would serve as a knowledge partner for a new Indian IIT (Indian Institute of Technology), much like the consortium for IIT-Kharagpur in the 1960s; that the US would collaborate with India on a new National Defence University in India, and that India and the US would collaborate on a new Mars joint working group," she said in emailed comments.
At a personal level, too, the visit was a success for Modi, 64, who, almost a decade ago, had been denied a visa by the US over the sectarian rioting that took place in 2002 in Gujarat in which more than 1,000 people, mainly Muslims, were killed. That was when Modi was the state’s chief minister.
He succeeded in establishing a personal rapport with Obama, 53, who, in a rare gesture, joined Modi on a visit to the Martin Luther King Jr memorial and, in fact, ended up giving his guest a tour of it.
At a dinner hosted by Obama, the two leaders swapped stories.
“Probably the most interesting was they found a great deal of common experience when it comes to first coming into government and realizing just how bad government works, and acknowledging that there is so much more that could be done in government with technology, but it’s just so much slower inside," Reiner said.
“So you have to bring in the right people who can help you actually achieve a greater speed with processes, et cetera. There was actually a moment where you had had a succession of back-and-forth between the two leaders where the Prime Minister would say something, and the President would say, ‘Yeah, I identify with that’," Press Trust of India cited Reiner as saying.
Modi, who was on the annual Navratra fast during the visit, sipped warm water during the dinner while the other guests at the dining table in the Blue Room of White House ate compressed avocados, crisped halibut, saffron Basmati rice and salmon.
“They joked about the fact that the rest were eating and the Prime Minister (Modi) was fasting. The President expressed admiration for the energy and the vigour with which the PM was able to maintain this rigorous schedule on a diet of only warm water," assistant secretary of state for south and central Asia Nisha Desai Biswal was quoted by PTI as saying.
Modi interacted with several thousand Americans of Indian origin at New York’s famed Madison Square Garden on 28 September, announcing plans to simplify immigration rules for expatriates and calling on them to “serve mother India." The US is home to 2.8 million people of Indian origin.
Once on opposite sides during the days of the Cold War and, thus, described as “estranged democracies", India-US relations underwent a remarkable transformation after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the US emerging as the world’s only pre-eminent power.
Prior to that, India was seen on the side of the former Soviet Union, despite its espousal of non-alignment, and the US, with its military and other support to India’s arch-rival Pakistan, was seen as unsympathetic to India. The Soviet collapse coincided with India undertaking market reforms and opening up its economy.
“It was in this new environment of global geo-strategic change and economic reorganization that the first seeds of Indo-US cooperation were sown" said Sumit Ganguly and Brian Shoup in their book, US-Indian Strategic Cooperation into the 21st Century: More than Words.
India’s potential as a market was slowly becoming clear to US firms, prompting the US administration of the day to give more attention to India, previously viewed through the prism of subcontinental tensions with Pakistan over the disputed region of Kashmir.
Exploring the possibilities of engagement was the dominant theme of the 1990s, with India and the US setting up, among other channels of communication, the defence policy group for an institutionalized dialogue between the US defence department and India’s defence ministry.
However, it was India’s nuclear tests in 1998 (that prompted reciprocal tests by Pakistan) which really kick-started a strategic dialogue. The landmark visit to India in 2000 by then US president Bill Clinton cleared all doubts that ties had turned a corner. US president George W. Bush visited India in 2006 and Obama in 2010.
In recent years though, ties had become stressed over many issues. One of the early irritants was the Indian civil nuclear liability law passed in 2010 which put high penalities on suppliers of power plants in case of an accident—virtually blocking US firms from bagging contracts to build atomic power plants in India.
This after Washington played a key role in reversing three decades-old embargoes against India sourcing nuclear power generation equipment and technology from the global market. Another issue was the seemingly slow pace of India’s economic reforms.
The Manmohan Singh government that returned to power in 2009 with a stronger mandate, became mired in a series of corruption scandals that pushed policymaking onto the backburner. Obama’s own preoccupations with re-election and domestic problems did not help the relationship either.
The alleged mistreatment of Indian diplomat Devyani Khobragade who was detained over alleged visa fraud in New York in December and complaints of trade protectionism by both sides played their parts in ensuring that the India-US relationship went into the deep freeze.
Since Modi led the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) back to power in the April-May general election, both sides have moved to reset ties. The reboot began with a congratulatory telephone call from Obama to Modi on 16 May that was also accompanied by an invitation to visit Washington.
It was on the same day that White House announced the lifting of the visa ban on Modi. US secretary of state John Kerry called up foreign minister Sushma Swaraj on 29 May, three days after the Modi government’s inauguration, and followed it up with a visit to New Delhi on 31 July for the fifth India-US strategic dialogue. Another high profile visitor from the administration was defence secretary Chuck Hagel, who was in India in August.
That Modi was willing to let bygones be bygones also helped. “One of the first things that the new (Modi) government did after taking office was to indicate that we want to move the relationship forward," said an Indian government official who did not want to be named. That Modi had come to power with a majority in the lower house of Parliament—for the first time in 30 years—was not lost on the US administration or US businesses that had seemingly begun to lose interest in India.
“Today there is a positive sentiment in the US industry vis a vis India," said one of the people close to the development cited previously. With Modi, as chief minister of Gujarat, being seen as the chief architect of transforming the state into an economic powerhouse, “there are expectations in the US industry he will play out the Gujarat model at national level using the (political) mandate," said the person cited above.
On the eve of his visit, in an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal, Modi signalled his intentions to forge a strong partnership with the US when he described the US as India’s “natural global partner", with both having a “fundamental stake in each other’s success—for the sake of our values and our many shared interests".
That the Obama administration was more than willing to meet him halfway was clear with the itinerary drawn up for the visit—two separate meetings with Obama, one a private dinner and the second formal delegation level talks, lunch hosted by vice-president Joe Biden and Kerry, a meeting with Hagel and talks with John Boehner, Speaker of the US House of Representatives.
Further proof that the two sides intended to set aside past differences and look to the future came in the form of a rare opinion piece co-authored by Modi and Obama in The Washington Post. In the piece titled A renewed US-India partnership for the 21st century, Modi and Obama described the India-US partnership as “robust, reliable and enduring"—as well as “expanding".
“Through our joint efforts, our natural and unique partnership can help shape international security and peace for years to come," they wrote. “It is time to set a new agenda" to expand ties in diverse areas like trade, investment and technology and the “advent of a new government in India is a natural opportunity to broaden and deepen our relationship. With a reinvigorated level of ambition and greater confidence, we can go beyond modest and conventional goals," the two leaders said.
“I think the two leaders made the best of a difficult situation. For the greater part of a decade, the US had no relationship with Modi as a matter of stated government policy," said Milan Vaishnav, associate at the South Asia Programme in the Washington-based Carnegie Endowment for Internal Peace think-tank.
“To complicate matters, government-to-government relations stagnated and US private sector interest in India had tapered off with India’s slowing growth. This visit was a “clean up" operation—the two countries now have a new basis upon which to get to work. Whether the US and India will take advantage of this opportunity depends on whether the two countries can sustain high-level attention to the relationship and, in large measure, on whether Modi is successful in delivering on his mandate to get India’s economy back on track," he said in emailed comments.
The exhaustive joint statement released later laid out a plan of action for cooperation in the coming years, even decades. It “emphasized the priority India accords to its partnership with the US, a principal partner in the realization of India’s rise as a responsible, influential world power", while Obama “recognized that India’s rise as a friend and partner is in the US’s interest".
American firms would be “lead partner" in developing smart cities in Ajmer, Vishakhapatnam and Allahabad, the statement said.
On civil nuclear cooperation, both sides “reaffirmed their commitment to implement fully the US-India civil nuclear cooperation agreement", the statement said adding “they established a contact group on advancing the implementation of civil nuclear energy cooperation in order to realize early their shared goal of delivering electricity from US-built nuclear power plants in India".
In defence, the note said “The two leaders reaffirmed that India and the US would build an enduring partnership in which both sides treat each other at the same level as their closest partners, including defence technology transfers, trade, research, co-production, and co-development."
The two countries also agreed to renew a defence relationship framework agreement first signed in 2005.
“The PM and the President reaffirmed their shared interest in preserving regional peace and stability, which are critical to the Asia-Pacific region’s continued prosperity," the statement said. Without naming China—which the US considers a strategic rival and India has an unsettled boundary dispute with—the statement said Modi and Obama “expressed concern about rising tensions over maritime territorial disputes, and affirmed the importance of safeguarding maritime security and ensuring freedom of navigation and over flight throughout the region, especially in the South China Sea.."
The reference was to China imposing curbs on air and shipping links through waters it considers disputed with its neighbours Vietnam and the Philippines.
Whatever the critics may say about his US visit, Modi appeared to be pleased with what he had achieved, having got to know Obama personally and rekindled a relationship that’s key to his goal of reviving India’s economic growth and restoring its place at the global high table.
“Thank you America," Modi said on his last public engagement of the visit he described as “very successful."
From the look of things, “Modi seems to developed a working chemistry with Obama" and “both sides seem to have worked out a way to get the India-US relations out of stagnation," said Uma Purushothaman, a fellow at the New Delhi-based Observer Foundation think-tank. “The US seems clearly willing to assist India in its development goals," she added.
Unlock a world of Benefits! From insightful newsletters to real-time stock tracking, breaking news and a personalized newsfeed – it's all here, just a click away! Login Now!