The story of India and the US is one of a thousand heartbreaks and a hundred reunions. It is a story of inching closer, drifting apart, trying again, getting disappointed, developing new stakes in each other, losing interest, recharging batteries, giving it another shot, succeeding partly, celebrating with high rhetoric, hiding disappointment but strategically leaking true feelings while continuously rebranding the relationship as larger, deeper and wider, and strengthening the foundation. It's remarkable how much the process-initially halting but increasingly steady has achieved over the past thirty years, roughly the period that I have been privileged to report and analyse the India-US relationship.
Also remarkable is how both countries have learnt from each other, even changed their style of diplomacy a little over time to better suit the partner's requirements. Broadly speaking, US diplomats have become kinder and gentler, and Indian diplomats less starchy and rule-bound as a result of their long institutional association. This is especially true for the past twenty years, when the relationship really got going. Indians have made the Americans more sensitive to a different worldview, in which a country can stand alone for decades and, for instance, not sign a patently unfair and unequal treaty on nuclear weapons but maintain a clean record as if it were a signatory. The Americans have helped Indians break out of a few sacred ideological straitjackets by relentlessly pounding the table and projecting their views.
The Landscape: A Broad Picture
In the late 1980s, when I began reporting for the Telegraph from Washington, India-US relations were surprisingly sparse. Not much had changed since the early 1970s. The Pentagon was a votary of Pakistan because of a long history, close relations with the Pakistan Army and the ongoing CIA-financed war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, which Islamabad was directing and helping to execute.
