The US media covered the visit cursorily, with no front-page stories. Some papers highlighted human-rights defenders’ demand that Mr Obama raise the 2002 Gujarat carnage and recent attacks on India’s religious minorities. Business-news agency Bloomberg reported on how the President could lose six hours from his lifespan after breathing the world’s most polluted air in Delhi!

The Indian media described the “breakthrough” agreement reached on the thorny nuclear liability issue as the visit’s greatest gain, which would operationalise the US-India civilian nuclear cooperation deal, declared by Prime Minister Narendra Modi as the “cornerstone” of the bilateral “strategic partnership”. In reality, there was no “breakthrough”.

The Obama visit’s true significance lies overwhelmingly in the agreed “Joint Strategic Vision for the Asia-Pacific and Indian Ocean Region”, and secondarily, in military cooperation agreements.

The “Strategic Vision” agreement accords India a prominent place in a huge area stretching “from Africa to East Asia”, and involves it in “safeguarding maritime security and ensuring freedom of navigation and overflight throughout the region, especially in the South China Sea.” It commits India and the US to “promote the shared values that have made our countries great” (read, democracy, which is absent in China).

This is the first time that India has agreed to being drawn into a close long-term military relationship with another nation, in a swathe extending from the Gulf of Aden to the Malacca Straits. The agreement chides China for provoking tensions in the South China Sea by calling on “all parties to avoid the threat or use of force and pursue resolution of … disputes through all peaceful means”.

The document also “welcomes” India’s proposed entry into the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, dominated by the US and Japan. India’s entry would help a strengthened APEC counter the New Silk Road economic partnership being launched by China, which India isn’t joining.

The idea underlying both moves is to recruit India into a partnership with the US to contain China’s military and economic power in what pro-US enthusiasts term the “Indo-Pacific”, as part of the US “pivot” or “rebalance” to Asia. When this idea was first proposed in 2012 in a diluted form, India resisted it under Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

This is not because India then adhered to Non-Alignment. That was abandoned long ago—soon after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. It’s because there was at least a weak consensus among New Delhi’s policymakers that India won’t sign up as a permanent ally of any state even while maintaining friendly relations with a range of countries within a complex foreign policy agenda.

The consensus eroded, especially with the signing of the US-India defence cooperation agreement and the civilian nuclear deal in 2005. To win that deal, India twice voted—under “coercion”, as a US diplomat publicly said—against Iran’s nuclear programme, undermining its own interest in the Iran-Pakistan-India gas pipeline. To please US business lobbies, India has from time to time compromised its own people’s interests—e.g. by loosening price controls on essential medicines before Mr Modi’s US visit last September. But there was no wholesale alignment with the US.

Now, that has come about. Mr Modi has completed what Dr Singh set out to do, but couldn’t: in his first term, because he was constrained by the Left; and in his second term, because he was seen to be far too weak.

Mr Modi faces no such constraints and is naturally inclined towards the US—in keeping with his long-term affiliation to the RSS-Jana Sangh-BJP, America’s Cold War allies; his well-established pro-business bias; and not least, his intimate links with the non-resident Indian community in the US, of which Gujaratis are the largest and most conservative group.

This doesn’t argue that Mr Obama had to press Mr Modi hard to adopt a stand on countering China. Mr Obama brought a long list of issues to discuss, but the bilateral talks were dominated by China for the first 45 minutes, thanks to Mr Modi. To the Americans’ pleasant surprise, he accepted US language on the China issue without negotiation, something uncharacteristic of Indian leaders.

“The New York Times” has quoted a senior US official as saying that Mr Obama's conversation on China with Mr Modi was “really qualitatively different” from past discussions with Indian leaders.

It’s hard to say if Mr Modi’s China position stems from visceral antipathy (which many leaders inherit from 1962), or resentment against China’s reported incursion into Ladakh during President Xi Jin-Ping’s visit in September, or more generally, from recent Chinese moves in the Indian Ocean region, in particular, Sri Lanka, which India considers as its “strategic backyard”.
Yet the fact is, Mr Modi has strategically embraced the US. This close alliance is fraught with three major risks. First, the US isn’t just another country; it’s a superpower that has greatly contributed to making the world a more dangerous place. Wherever the US has recently intervened, it has left a mess worse than earlier dictators did, as in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya or Syria.

This has also served to strengthen the perverse and power-crazed politics fuelling the brutal violence of the Muslim Right, expressed in hatred-spewing jehadi movements like the Taliban and Islamic State, which must be unequivocally and unconditionally condemned. American policies have worsened the turmoil in West Asia, encouraged Israeli belligerence, and set back the prospect for a settlement of the Palestinian question.

The US is the principal author of “Washington Consensus” policies which have visited economic devastation the world over, and are undermining the working people’s greatest social gains.

Strategically allying with the US means courting opprobrium and hatred in many parts of the world, besides accepting an unequal, subordinate relationship. The US does not have symmetrical relationships even with its closest Nato allies.

Second, China has reacted negatively to the Obama-Modi bonhomie, and accused India of being envious of “China’s continuous rise”. It would be counterproductive for India to enter into a hostile relationship with China, which is five times economically bigger, and militarily three times more powerful—when negotiated solutions are eminently viable.

This isn’t an argument for kowtowing to China, but for negotiating mutual disputes. If India can have ambitious trade and economic cooperation agreements with China that deliver, there is no reason why it can’t have a strategic crisis-resolution compact.

More than 50 years after the China war—fought primarily because India refused to negotiate its colonially inherited borders and embarked on a “forward policy”—India is close to discussing the very same “package deal” that China proposed long ago.

Third, by wantonly antagonising Beijing, India would only facilitate a de facto understanding between China, Pakistan and Russia: the last two have recently developed significant military relations, and China is already Pakistan’s “all-weather friend”. This cannot be good for the health of India’s own neighbourhood. Nor can muscle-flexing against regimes in Kathmandu and Colombo which legitimately want improved relations with Beijing.

If the biggest strategic agreement reached during the Obama visit is fraught, the other deals aren’t huge gains either. The defence framework agreement was renewed for 10 years, and a Defence Technology and Trade Initiative launched to help India build an aircraft carrier and other weapons systems. There was an energy-related loan agreement, but none on climate issues. Some “framework” agreements have to be fleshed out.

The much-touted nuclear liability deal reinterprets Sec 17 of the 2010 liability law to indemnify US nuclear vendors from the consequences of accidents caused by reactor design defects. The government has planned an insurance pool with public funds so that potential American liability can be redirected back to Indian taxpayers. This is grossly unfair. And yet, it seems unlikely that US nuclear corporations will sell reactors to India: insurance isn’t enough; they want no liability at all.

Limiting Sec 46 to criminal liability risks violating Parliament’s intent. The US has no attractive reactors to offer: Westinghouse’s AP-1000, and General Electric’s Economic Simplified Boiling Water Reactor are both untested. According to independent estimates, the cost of electricity from them may exceed Rs 15 per unit—three times higher than from competing power sources.

So what is the net result of the Obama visit? Mr Modi hugged Mr Obama and addressed him by his first name (an unreciprocated gesture) as many as 19 times on radio. Whether this closeness is genuine or not, Mr Modi has certainly gained legitimacy from a country that refused him a visa for a decade. US strategic interests have been advanced, but India’s sovereignty stands diminished.

Yet, just before he left Delhi, Mr Obama—probably under pressure of human-rights activists—rightly told a student audience that India cannot succeed without religious freedom, plurality and tolerance. That’s the visit’s only positive outcome. (IPA Service)