Growing Links for US and India

THIS WEEK is the two-year anniversary of the US-India summit at which President George Bush and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh declared "their resolve to transform the relationship between their countries and establish a global partnership." How have they done?

In the civil nuclear space, the issue that was in the forefront then and has subsequently been, in the words of State Department Undersecretary Nicholas Burns, "the symbolic centerpiece" of the relationship, the going is pretty iffy. A high-level Indian delegation is meeting with US representatives today to try to give a life-saving jolt to the negotiations.

As the centerpiece of the transformed relationship, there is enormous political will to complete the deal, but the devil is in the details. The Indians have dug their heels in on a couple of integral points, including the enrichment and reprocessing in India of spent fuel and the removal of a clause from US legislation that mandates US sanctions if India tests nuclear weapons. The United States has little room to maneuver. Any concessions made now would likely be brought down when the deal goes before Congress. However, despite the focus on this one element of the original July 2005 joint statement, the relationship that the two leaders proposed is much more wide-ranging.

Defense cooperation is booming, with many potential acquisitions on the line. India is modernizing its military, putting out large bids for aircraft, with US companies as some of the front-runners. This past year, the US Navy transferred its decommissioned ship the USS Trenton to the Indian Navy. We are close to deals on large transport aircraft. Also, joint military exercises are expanding, to include the participation of Japan alongside the United States and India.

In science and technology, cooperation continues, whether through a new "green revolution" that is being jump-started with large financial commitments from both nations, or space cooperation recently promoted by the announcement of US instruments being placed on an Indian lunar shuttle. People-to-people links have multiplied: For the last three years, India has sent more students to the United States than any other country including China. At the same time, the number of American students in India has doubled over the past year. More and more Indian entrepreneurs are returning to India after some years in America in a "reverse brain-drain."

Notwithstanding lack of progress on the Doha negotiations, trade and investment between the two countries have also multiplied. While it has not achieved the intended "doubling of bilateral trade in three years" that was announced in March 2006, trade is growing by over 20 percent per year with steady advances as Indian markets open up and tariffs are removed in both countries. Niche market it might be, but after 18 years of disputes, Americans can now buy Indian mangos.

The links keep expanding, whether in counterterrorism where the two countries are working ever more intimately, to disaster relief, pandemics, health, energy, and the environment. And what of the "global partnership" that was promised? Here, too, there have been strides, whether regionally in responding to the significant events in Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh, or more globally with discussions regarding the East Asia Summit or in the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Hopefully, these advances will be lasting and will strengthen the US-India relationship. And hopefully, neither nation will hold the broader relationship hostage to the symbolic civil nuclear deal.

Xenia Dormandy,former director for South Asia at the National Security Council, is executive director for research at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.