The Foreign Service Journal, October 2016

36 OCTOBER 2016 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL of the Cold War. Then it began to wobble, and finally fell apart completely with the Bill Clinton administration. Today the perceived relationship between India and the United States is far more complex and only marginally, if at all, tied to the party of the U.S. presidential victor. A Reliable Formula In India, the “Democrats=Good, Republicans=Bad” equation began to be formed when Dwight D. Eisenhower’s United States tilted toward Pakistan in the 1950s, while giving short shrift to Jawaharlal Nehru’s nonaligned stance. It coalesced further when John F. Kennedy and Nehru formed a warm relationship, and Washington was supportive of New Delhi after the Chinese inva- sion of 1962. Democrat or not, Lyndon Johnson was viewed as a mixed bag. The PL-480 Food for Peace program received a huge fillip under Kennedy, with Johnson carrying it forward, and the aid received by India in the 1960s was acknowledged with gratitude. At the same time, it was U.S.-donated Patton tanks and Sabre fighter jets that our military faced in the 1965 war with Pakistan. Any ambiguity disappeared, however, with Richard Nixon. At his inauguration, the former vice president of the Eisenhower administration was already seen here as being anti-India. And things got rapidly worse. In 1971, when the Pakistan army cracked down on its own East Pakistani population and hun- dreds of thousands of refugees began to pour across the Indian borders, Nixon and Henry Kissinger, with their unstinting sup- port of the Yahya Khan regime in Islamabad, quickly moved up the marquee to become Public Enemies 2 and 3, right behind the Pakistani military dictator. During the prolonged crisis that led to war and the eventual formation of Bangladesh, the threat of the U.S. Navy’s Seventh Fleet prowling around in the Bay of Bengal, ready to intervene on behalf of Pakistan against India’s army, was very palpable. A couple of years later there was much celebration among India’s intelligentsia when “Tricky Dick” was forced to resign in disgrace. Continuing down the timeline, Jimmy Carter would still vie for the title of “POTUS most friendly to India.” On his official visit here, President Carter was frank enough to praise the revival of democracy in India following Indira Gandhi’s 1975-1977 Emergency, the 21-month period during which Prime Minister Gandhi ruled by decree after the president declared a state of emergency across the county. However, the benign Carter’s one term overlapped with the even shorter term of the frac- tious Janata government that came to power in India after the Emergency, and by 1981 both Carter and the Janata government were history. The supposedly socialist Mrs. Gandhi returned to power in 1980, just before Ronald Reagan was inaugurated. By that time most of urban India had television, and people could actually see the actors playing out the primary roles in world politics. The conventions with their banners, the election debates, the confetti, the pomp of the inaugurations, all became part of the visual consciousness of most Indians, especially those with any pretension to being citizens of the world. But meanwhile, a phenomenon that had begun to develop in the late 1960s continued through the 1980s, and would argu- ably have the deepest impact on Indo-U.S. relations from the early 1990s onward. As the Indian Institutes of Technology and other colleges began to produce students who could aspire to hold their own in an international environment, as the new urban middle class—especially in Gujarat, Mumbai and south India—began to aspire to live and work beyond the borders of the nation, group after group of young, educated Indian men traveled to America for further studies. Many of these students stayed on and became U.S. citizens, starting families and careers in America while retaining close ties with their home towns in India. This exodus of professionals knew no parallel in the previous waves of immigration into the “melting pot.” Today’s ethnically Indian U.S. corporate leaders, state governors, mid-ranking politicians and potential Supreme Court judges are all second- or third-generation offspring from this relatively quiet migration, and they are influencing the way America and India relate to each other. Things Get More Complicated From the time of Bill Clinton, the perception of the relation- ship between India and the U.S. presidency has become more The “Democrats=Good, Republicans=Bad” equation began to be formed when Dwight D. Eisenhower’s United States tilted toward Pakistan in the 1950s.