IT IS the challenge every parent faces. Spoil one child and the other gets annoyed. Signs of affection are interpreted as a slight, neglect or even worse. Diplomacy is no different. And so the warmth of President Barack Obama’s recent visit and enthusiastic embrace of China, with all its talk of the new informal G2 partnership on the global stage, has rather put New Delhi’s nose out of joint. That, combined with the other main preoccupation of the current US administration, Pakistan and Afghanistan, has given a particular significance back home to the Washington visit of Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh beyond the important scheduled discussions on curbing nuclear weapons, climate change and trade.
This is the first formal state visit of the Obama presidency, and Mr Singh was last night getting the full red-carpet treatment with a state dinner in the White House thrown in. Anxious to reassure, the president called the relationship with India, the world’s largest democracy and second-fastest growing large economy, “one of the defining partnerships of the 21st century”.
Although India strongly supports US efforts to defeat the Taliban, it distrusts the closeness of Washington to the nuclear-armed Pakistan military at a time when it fears the Obama administration may be backpedalling on controversial nuclear technology transfer and fuel supplies agreements. The deal agreed by President Bush in 2008 has not been implemented yet. The US, India worries, will now want it to sign up to the Nuclear non-Proliferation Treaty, obliging it to give up its nuclear weapons while Pakistan and China retain theirs. Reflecting continuing mistrust, Mr Singh told CNN in an interview coinciding with his visit that Pakistan’s goals in Afghanistan were not necessarily those of the US.
On global warming, the two are far removed and talks will be difficult. Mr Singh has said India, the world’s fourth-biggest polluter, is not ready to set an emission-reduction target as it has a per-capita output of greenhouse gases far lower than that of developed countries. But Mr Obama needs India on board to have any hope of congressional backing for a climate change deal.
On trade, which grew to nearly $50 billion last year from just $5 billion in 1990, turning the US into India’s largest trading partner, New Delhi is concerned about US protectionism, particularly in services.
Above all, however, both men will want to convey a sense that the warmth of the relationship between India and the US in the Bush years has not been lost with the irresistible rise of China.