A Grass-Roots Rapprochement Between India and U.S.

A Grass-Roots Rapprochement Between India and U.S.

Letter from India, The International Herald Tribune

 

BANGALORE, INDIA — Over the years this city, the epicenter of India’s booming technology industry, has increasingly been inflected with traces of America.

Streets that were once bordered by colonial bungalows are now lined with glass-paneled towers bearing the logos of U.S. technology companies. On Mahatma Gandhi Road, young tech workers shop for bagels and Philadelphia cream cheese. In the city’s pubs, the talk is about venture capital, stock options and Silicon Valley-inspired compensation packages.

The Americanization of Bangalore is a reflection of a more general rapprochement that has taken place in recent years between India and the United States. For much of India’s post-independence history, the two countries were political and cultural antagonists. India was effectively a Soviet ally during the Cold War, and in its economic and public policy it espoused a straitened austerity that was sharply at odds with U.S. materialism.

It wasn’t until the early 1990s, when India adopted something approximating a capitalist economy, that ties improved. In 2000, President Bill Clinton visited India — the first U.S. president to do so since Jimmy Carter, in 1978 — and, in a speech to Parliament, declared the two countries “natural allies.”

Eight years later, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh visited Washington and, thanking President George W. Bush for pushing a landmark civilian nuclear deal between the two countries, told him that the “people of India deeply love you.”

Recent months have witnessed something of a cooling in that ardor. A series of events have contributed to the impression that the relationship is going through tough times.

In August, the civilian nuclear deal, a symbol of the two countries’ new closeness, came under strain when the Indian Parliament passed a bill that would increase the potential liability of nuclear plant operators. The United States expressed its concern and asked India to change aspects of the bill.

Also in August, the U.S. Senate passed a bill that hiked fees for the H1-B and L visa categories used by skilled Indian technology workers. Indians were incensed by Senator Charles Schumer’s characterization, during debate over the bill, of Indian businesses as “chop shops.” (He later clarified that he meant to say “body shops.”)

Then, earlier this month, Ohio’s state government announced a ban on the outsourcing of state technology projects to offshore centers.

The reaction in India has been swift, and unhappy. The National Association of Software and Service Companies, an industry trade body, labeled U.S. actions “protectionist” and part of a “disturbing trend.”

Media reports have accused the United States of “inventing a villain” and setting India up as a “whipping boy” to distract from domestic woes.

But how threatened, really, are ties between the two countries?

Even as they protest, Indian businessmen concede that they are unlikely to suffer much. Devendra Saharia, an entrepreneur who runs a medical outsourcing company in the city of Chennai, told me that while people were paying attention to what was being said in the United States, the future of the outsourcing sector still looked bright. Business continues to grow, he said, “due primarily to a shortage of skills in the United States.”

In addition to the limited impact on companies’ bottom lines, though, there is another, more structural and perhaps more significant, reason why the political and public jousting is unlikely to result in real damage.

Unlike many bilateral relationships, ties between India and the United States are not, primarily, driven by politicians or the political process. The growing closeness of the last couple decades has had, rather, a distinctly grass-roots character. It has been forged in thousands of interactions between individual citizens, many of them in the context of flourishing commercial and business transactions.

Between 1991, the year India began its economic reforms, and 2009, trade in goods between India and the United States grew from $5 billion a year to nearly $38 billion. The United States is now India’s second leading source of foreign investment.

It is this thriving commercial relationship, more than the official government-driven bilateral relationship, that has defined Indian-U.S. ties in recent years. As Manjeet Kripalani, the co-founder of Gateway House, a Mumbai-based research organization, said: “Business has been leading diplomacy in India for 15 years.”

Many of India’s technology entrepreneurs were educated or worked in the United States. The companies they founded upon returning to India are imbued with a U.S.-style work ethic and office culture. They have served as crucibles not only for a new India, but also for a new attitude to the United States.

When I was a child growing up in India, the son of an Indian father and American mother, it was common to hear Indians rail against U.S. imperialism and decry the evils of U.S. capitalism. Now, it is far more common to hear Indians — and especially Indian entrepreneurs — talk about a “common mind-set,” and a shared commitment to democracy and capitalism.

In 2005, the Pew Research Center conducted a survey to measure global feelings about the United States. The survey, conducted in the midst of the U.S.-led war in Iraq, found significant hostility around the world. But in India, 71 percent of respondents — the highest number outside the United States itself — had a favorable view of the country. Eighty-one percent of Indians considered Americans hard-working, and 86 percent admired Americans for being inventive. Such positive attitudes provide a deep font of good will between the countries.

At the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, the French philosopher Montesquieu summarized his views on the potential of trade, writing that “the natural effect of commerce is to lead to peace.”

That maxim holds as true today, in an age of offshoring and e-commerce. Good relations between the United States and India are built on foundations of shared commercial interests. Those foundations are by no means unshakable — but they are likely to prove solid enough to withstand short-term political positioning or economic saber-rattling.

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Comments (3)

  • Harvey

    That's right, while the US trained Pakistani terrorists kill Indians, Indian and US businessmen are happy to carry on as if nothing is happening around them. And don't forget, while Indians were cheerfully greeting Clinton and Bush, the US were secretly helping Pakistan acquire its nuclear bomb. And again, while Obama will be greeted with warmth and splendor in Delhi, his eye will be on Kashmir and how to get it away from Indians. You see, I doubt many Indians are as nationalistic as Americans are towards their country. More's the pity.

  • Brij Singh

    Akash, Very good assessment. Thanks

  • Brajanarayan

    Believe me the net Indian wisdom is far more superior to that of USA. We do thinks wisely and unbiasedly; so that the long term outcome is bound to be favourable. USA is biased, looks at short term solutions; so their short term aclievement if at all do not guarrente a good long term outcome. Let us be happy at what our collective, century old rich wisdom and be confident that others will appreciate it one day.

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