This week on the show, Milan sits down with journalist Meenakshi Ahamed to discuss the evolution of U.S.-India relations, from the moment of independence in 1947 to Joe Biden’s inauguration in 2021.
As a new administration takes office in Washington, followers of the U.S.-India relationship are eagerly anticipating what shape ties between these two nations will take under a new president. A new book by the journalist Meenakshi Ahamed, A Matter of Trust: India–US Relations from Truman to Trump, offers a sweeping portrait of this relationship over seven decades.
This week on the show, Milan sits down with Meenakshi to discuss the evolution of U.S.-India relations, from the moment of independence in 1947 to Joe Biden’s inauguration in 2021. The two discuss Nehru’s perennial skepticism of America, Bill Clinton’s lifelong fascination with India, and how China’s recent actions have given the partnership an unprecedented boost.
Episode notes:
Milan 00:12
Welcome to Grand Tamasha, a co-production of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Hindustan Times. I'm your host, Milan Vaishnav. As a new administration takes office in Washington, followers of the U.S.-India relationship are eagerly anticipating what shape ties between these two nations will take under a new president. A new book by the journalist Meenakshi Ahamed, A Matter of Trust: India-U.S. Relations from Truman to Trump, offers a sweeping portrait of this relationship over seven decades, drawing on presidential papers, newly declassified documents, and memoirs and interviews with officials directly involved in events. A Matter of Trust reminds us just how far these two countries have come and perhaps just how much farther they have to travel. Meena joins me on the phone from Washington, D.C. I'm very pleased to welcome her to the show for the very first time. Meena, good to talk to you.
Meenakshi00:56
Thank you, Milan.
Milan 00:57
So, congratulations on the book. I want to start this conversation by asking you a little bit about your motivation. As you and I and I'm sure most of our listeners know, there's no shortage of books on the U.S.-India relationship – I'm thinking of my colleague Rudy Chaudhari's diplomatic history, Forged in Crisis, or my good friend and sometime-podcast regular Tanvi Madan's recent book on U.S.-China-India relations, Fateful Triangle. What gaps did you see in this body of work that was already out there that sort of prompted you to put pen to paper?
Meenakshi01:33
So, Milan, thanks for asking that question, because Forged in Crisis – which is a wonderful book, and I refer to it in my book – was written in 2014, and Tanvi's book, of course, as you know, came up fairly recently. I started writing my book almost eight years ago, and if truth be told, it was actually ten years ago. So, when I started writing this book, there wasn't a lot there. If you look at most of the books that have been written – you look at David Malone, Ray Vickery, even some of the books that Casey Schaefer has written – a lot of them have been written in the 2000s. So, there is this sort of spate of books that have come out in the 2000s – even a lot of Srinath Raghavan books. So, when I started working on this, you'd go to the bookstore, go to [the] South Asia [section], and there'd be like three books. And it really started – this idea began to percolate – in the late 1990s, when there was Dennis Cox's book, which came out in '93. It was a State Department book, very much written in the State Department's style. And then, of course, there was the wonderful book by Ram Guha that came out in 2007. So, to be quite honest, except for those two, there wasn't a lot. And when I worked for NDTV, and we were covering – on a shoestring budget, at the time – things around the globe, people would always say, “Well, why aren't people worried about India? Why aren't people talking about India?” And I would look around to see what I could use as a reference. There just wasn't anything. And so at that point, I started saying, “Gosh, something's got to be done about this.” And there just really isn't much out there. When Ram Guha's book came out in 2007, it was almost like a sense of relief that we finally had a history that we could all look to that was written by an Indian. And so, to answer your question – yes, there are a lot of books now, but there really wasn't back then. And I still think that, even today, if you look at Rudra Chaudhuri’ Forged in Crisis, or a lot of these books, they approach it in a slightly different way than I have approached it. I've really tried to look at it administration by administration, and I’ve tried to focus it very specifically on U.S.-India rather than looking at Indian foreign policy in general.
Milan 04:48
You know, as I was reading the book, Meena, I was trying to put myself in your shoes, thinking about how to write a book on 75 years of U.S.-India relations, and I think I would have been quite daunted by the task – it's such a broad sweep, I wouldn't really know where to begin. Tell us a little bit about your method. I mean, you said that this was an idea born 10 years ago. It took about eight years to work on the book. How did you break this down into more manageable pieces without kind of losing it?
Meenakshi05:23
It was a daunting task. I mean, I actually wasn't sure if I had the ability to do it. And, you know, when you look at how many books there are written on Israel, the U.S.-Israel [relationship], or U.S.-Russia… And then you look at what was written on U.S.-India, there was nothing. I got inspiration from – there was a book written by David Aaron Miller on U.S.-Israeli relations, and I used that as a little bit of a template. I found that easy to manage and easy to – it's a book that unpacked the relationship in a way that I felt, for people who did not know much about U.S.-Israeli relations, that someone could really get a handle on it. And, as I said in my book, I haven't written this book for academics. I really wanted my book to be accessible for people who really wanted to pick up and learn something about India and who didn't necessarily have a base of knowledge about it, and also for students of history, people who appreciate history who aren't historians or who aren't studying it, just someone who would find it fun in the way that people like to go to India and pick up Freedom at Midnight. They want to learn about India, and they want an enjoyable read. But I also wanted it to contain enough reference points that if a student were studying, [for example,] administration, that they would know what to look for and what to do further research on. So, I wanted to cover both [groups]. But, above all, I wanted it to be fun.
Milan 07:22
It is surely accessible. And one of the things you do so well is you manage to not just take us comprehensively through each administration, but also show us the transitions and the inflection points, of which there are many. I want to begin the substance by going to the early section of the book. At the very outset, you note that America's failure to influence then-British Prime Minister Winston Churchill on the matter of Indian independence left India's first prime minister Nehru and many of his colleagues extremely bitter, and you note that this is really when Nehru first became very disillusioned with America. And you seem to imply – you never quite say it – but seem to imply that he never really recovered from that. Describe for us, if you can, Nehru's skeptical view of the United States,
Meenakshi08:17
One of the reasons I don't always come out with an opinion is that I tried very hard in the book to lay it out for the reader and to let the reader come to their own judgments. I didn't want to be full of opinions because I think the facts speak for themselves. So, I just wanted to sort of show the reader what the situation was in every case – I mean, I think you can see that very clearly in the Nixon years and the Johnson years – and let the reader make their own assessment. There's almost no need for me to give you my opinion. In this particular situation, I think it – look, when Wilson came up with his Fourteen Points and self-determination, there was a great deal of expectation in India about the idealism in America and what it meant for Indian independence, and I think there was a lot of disappointment that [the Points] didn't seem to apply to India. But when the Atlantic Charter happened, I think there was some confusion because – I think there was some misunderstandings because – the U.S. actually, within the State Department, did feel it should apply to India, but they couldn't get it past Roosevelt because Roosevelt on his own felt that he was going to try and pressure Churchill, but Churchill was so obdurate. He was such an imperialist that he just wasn't having it. He liked Roosevelt, but he really thought that the Americans didn't know anything about the rest of the world. He wasn't about to take their opinion and advice, whether it was to do with Iran or India. And so he pushed back, and there were bigger fish to fry. I mean, the U.S., they were dealing with Europe and Stalin, and that was a much bigger consideration for them. So, India got lost, and that's when Nehru was terribly disappointed. The other problem was that I think a lot of people in Nehru's generation were the same way – they were educated in England, and I think that they just imbibed through osmosis, if you will, English attitudes towards Americans, which was very much, “They're Yankees, they're uncultured.” They looked down on them.
Milan 11:11
So, let me interject here, because this is a two-way street, obviously. I mean, during the Truman years, you have this very nice passage where the President is ranting about Nehru to William Douglas, who was an American lawyer, he was on his way to India, and I just want to read out what Truman says to him. He says, “I'd like to have you spend as much time as you could with Nehru to find out if he's a communist. He sat right in the chair that you're sitting in, and if I ever saw a communist, there's a communist. I can smell these communists a mile away, and this man Nehru sure looked like a communist to me.” Douglas goes to India, comes back, and reports that Nehru is not a communist, but Truman didn't seem to really take that in. So, if you kind of flip the script a little bit, why was there such a deep-seated wariness on this side of the Atlantic about the Prime Minister?
Meenakshi12:00
So, let's just put it [this way]: Truman was a very parochial man. Don't forget that Roosevelt had shut him out of all foreign policy meetings. I mean, Roosevelt ran the show, and even though he was his vice president, he really didn't include him in anything. He had been allowed to come and sit in on just one foreign policy briefing before he became president. So, you know, this was not someone who had had any exposure to the outside world, really. Douglas knew Truman really well, but he was searing when it came to his friend in terms of international affairs. When it comes to India, he was quite critical of him. When it came to Iran, he was even more critical of him. And he was an intellectual. He really enjoyed Nehru's company. They had long walks together, they had dinners together, and Nehru and he got on really well. They talked about, you know, existentialism, they talked about philosophy, and he comes back, and he says, “These two people are like chalk and cheese. There is no way that this man from ‘Missouruh’ is going to ever be able to connect with someone as erudite as Nehru.” And he says, “It's like two ships passing in the night. These two minds are never going to meet.” And, sure enough, Nehru comes, and rather than talking about anything of substance at the state dinner, they're discussing the merits of bourbon whiskey. So, you can imagine what Nehru thought of the state dinner. And Dean Acheson, who really was an intellect and was a really refined man – unfortunately, he and Nehru just didn't get along.
Milan 14:20
So, just to rewind for a second – you contrast Narendra Modi's rousing 2019 reception at the “Howdy, Modi!” rally – we'll come back to Modi in a second – to Nehru's rather lackluster welcome in the United States in 1949. What was his maiden visit like? What was the reception like? Paint us a picture.
Meenakshi14:41
Well, he was very well-received by the press. The literati in the U.S. loved Nehru because he spoke to them in their language. So, if you look at any of the interviews that he did with the press, they're very laudatory. They also talk of his elitism. On the other hand, they had arranged for him a dinner with businesspeople, and again, unfortunately, it was sort of very Gatsby-esque because these business leaders started showing off about how much they were worth. But Nehru also wasn't – let's just sort of say that Nehru wasn't exactly the perfect ambassador here for what India needed at the time. What India needed was someone to come and schmooze with Congress and promote themselves as a democracy. What they needed was someone to come in and say, “Look, we're a democratic state in a landscape that's surrounded by military dictators and communists, and we are going to be the beacon of democracy, so help us.” And instead, you know, he came across as this kind of upper-crust elitist guy who refused to ask and beg for money, who says, you know, “You should help us because it's your moral obligation,” or he refused to even ask. And so Lloyd Henderson had told Deshmukh, the finance minister, “They will just give you the money, you just have to ask the right way,” and Nehru wasn't able to do that. And then you had to get foreign investors to come to India – he had to find a way to convince them to invest, and he wasn't able to do that. He got put off. He found them materialistic, he found them off-putting – he made no effort. And one of the things about Nehru is that when he found people that he didn't like, or that bored him, or that he found beneath him, he would turn off – he would become silent, he would become grouchy, he wasn't interested in them, he turned off the charm, and the way that he could be extremely charming, he could also be incredibly uncharming. And so he didn't make an effort. So, it wasn't just because the Americans were being difficult – Nehru wasn't particularly pleasant, either. And yet, when he went to see Einstein or someone he was interested in, it went really well.
Milan 17:38
But if you fast forward again a few years – 1956, Nehru comes back to United States. It was a stark contrast to his first visit, right? And Nehru and Eisenhower struck up a good equation. Why do you think this was? Was it really a sort of personality thing? Do you think that ideological views had evolved on both sides? What led to this kind of black and white contrast in a period of six or seven years?
Meenakshi18:05
So, one of the things that you'll notice about my book is that I've put people on center stage. I talk a lot about people's personalities. And one of the reasons I've done that is because – I think a lot of people talk about policy, and I think that's really important, and of course policies are the bottom of everything, and you have to discuss that. But I think people sometimes tend to neglect people's personalities and how important they were, and I wanted to shine a light on how important they were. Nehru dominated Indian politics for, you know, 20 years. I mean, he was prime minister for a long time, and even when he wasn't, even before that, he had dominated politics, and he ran foreign policy in a way that I don't think anyone else did, because he was totally trusted by everyone. If you talk to any of the ambassadors – he hand-picked the ambassadors in the beginning, and I had long interviews with Jagat Mehta, who had worked with him when he was young, who was foreign secretary, and who I was fortunate to interview before he passed away. Everyone trusted Nehru with foreign policy, with foreign affairs. They left foreign policy to him. So, if you don't understand Nehru's personality, you're not going to totally understand foreign policy. And there are some things that are a total mystery, like his relationship with Krishna Menon and why he allowed Krishna Menon to so damage relations with the U.S., etc., which is of course discussed in the book. But with Eisenhower – Nehru really had great respect for people who were able to bring peace to the world, and he really had great respect for how World War Two was concluded. Eisenhower was associated with the successful conclusion of World War Two, and I think, despite the fact that Eisenhower was in the military, he saw him as a man of peace, because I think Eisenhower promoted that. And he had been the sort of post-war commander, and, I think, even as President, even though the Korean War was raging – which, of course, as you saw from the book, India was very much a part of – he did have a driving ambition to end the Korean War, which he did do, he sort of saw it to a successful conclusion. And when he met Eisenhower, I think Nehru, who was older – I think they were the same generation – and Eisenhower was not dogmatic, he was sort of an intellectual, not intellectual in the way that Kennedy was, but he appreciated Nehru, he was a worldly man, he wasn't like Truman. I mean, Eisenhower had great exposure to Europe, world affairs, he had a sense of the world, so Nehru enjoyed him. And the other thing was, the simplicity of Eisenhower was very appealing to Nehru. He was humble. He was not pushy in any way. And by bringing him to Gettysburg, in a very sort of humble environment, to his home, I think he set up a very conducive place for them to actually speak. And the other thing was, there was no John Foster Dulles, and there was no Krishna Menon, and by removing these two very antagonistic people, keeping them out of the picture, I think they just were able to arrive at mutual understanding, and they had very good conversations. And even though they didn't agree on everything, I think they were able to come to an accommodation about their general view on world affairs. And after that, I think, Nehru muted his criticisms, Eisenhower determined that he was going to really go out of his way to help India, and they both, I think, held to their promises.
Milan 22:46
We've heard a lot about Jackie Kennedy's famous goodwill tour of India, but before that tour, Nehru visited Kennedy in 1961, and it was, frankly, another disastrous visit. You intimate that Nehru may have suffered a minor stroke in that trip. What went on behind the scenes?
Meenakshi23:02
Kennedy is very interesting. Kennedy, from when he was a young congressman, really admired Nehru. He thought Asia was the future – he was very prescient – and he thought Nehru was its leader. But Nehru, for some reason, never really – he thought he was a rich man's son, I think, and he just never really paid much attention to him. Now, once he becomes president, he has to pay attention to him, but I think when he went on this trip, he just wasn't well. Now, when you have historians writing, academics writing, they focus on policy, they focus on historical details. Not everyone focuses on things like health, and maybe this is what happens when you're an amateur historian like me – it struck me – this is what happens when you read people's memoirs: details like this come out. And I was fascinated, because B.K. Nehru, who was the ambassador at the time in Washington, he was his cousin, so of course he'd be concerned about Nehru, and he wrote about this quite extensively. And then I started reading letters that Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit had written, and I found all kinds of documents where she had referred to his illnesses, about how he had this kind of recurring problem with urinary tract infections. I know this is kind of a – maybe this shouldn't be on a podcast – but he had these, and these are things that people in India would never mention. So, I started making lists of this. And she kept saying, “Oh, well, he's suffering from that unusual thing that he always suffers from.” And so when I started putting it all together, then I discussed it with a friend of mine who's a doctor, and it turns out Nehru, when he arrived in the U.S. during the Kennedy visit, was actually quite sick, and he probably suffered a mini-stroke while he was here. He was not a well man. So, he was just not himself. He arrived, and [B.K.] Nehru's cracking these jokes, [but Jawaharlal Nehru is] unresponsive; he's talking about Vietnam, there's silence through the whole thing; this is not Nehru. B.K. Nehru even says that he had a whole gaggle of reporters to meet him, and normally, Nehru would come on time, he'd be very enthusiastic about riffing with them – Nehru is someone who, like, jumps two steps at a time, and he's very enthusiastic about meeting with intellectuals – but Nehru, his mind wandered, and he basically couldn't engage. And then [B.K. Nehru] noticed this white foam coming out of his mouth, and he was stumbling, he was late. I mean, these are all very unusual things, and what I think was so criminal was that no one took him to Walter Reed Hospital for a checkup. The guy probably had a mini stroke. And so this was a disastrous trip for many reasons. But I think Kennedy looks at him and says, you know, “He's washed up, this guy's too old to lead the nation.” His whole response was so disappointed, and he was so disappointed in Nehru. Naturally, Nehru just wasn't a well man. Had they figured that out by a simple thing like a checkup, maybe everything would have been different. And it wasn't just him – you have him coming with Mrs. Gandhi, and she's going through her own mental crisis – you just have to read all the necessary writing. She wrote to Dorothy Norman, where she talks about how she's almost on the verge of a nervous breakdown. She's going through this terrible crisis mentally, and she's in the middle of a great depression, and she's talking about how the trip was so difficult for her. So, she's obviously so caught up with her own internal anxiety that she's probably not focused on her father. And Jackie Kennedy talks about how she looked like she was sucking on lemons and stuff like that. But if you read her really painful letters to Dorothy Norman, she talks about all her internal anxiety. So, you have these two people who've arrived in the US, and both of them are sort of compromised in some way.
Milan 27:33
So, I want to fast-forward here to try to get at some of the bigger themes of the book, and I want to take us to the 1990s. You describe a 1990 mission to India undertaken by Robert Gates, then- and future Secretary of Defense. I mean, one of the things you realize as well: Bob Gates, 25 years later, would still be the central figure. But at that time, in 1990, he was dispatched to defuse a potentially very volatile situation between nuclear-armed India and Pakistan. On that trip, he tells the Pakistanis that, “Look, we've war-gamed the conflict between your two countries, and Pakistan was a loser in each and every scenario.” And if war broke out, Gates warned, America would not rush to the Pakistan side. This was really the first time the U.S. administration took so openly the Indian side in a conflict between these two neighbors. Would you go so far as to point to this moment as a kind of inflection point or a pivot point for what would then become known as the kind of U.S.-India embrace?
Meenakshi28:43
No, I do not see this as the pivot point. And the reason is, this was more about sort of dropping the ball on Pakistan rather than an embrace of India. I think that they – the Cold War was over, and I think they saw that Afghanistan was no longer a problem, at least for now, and so they didn't need Pakistan anymore. And I think that they decided, why continue to lie and protect them when they didn't need to? So, I think that it was a nod to India, but it wasn't an embrace of India. I think it was just more a sort of acknowledgement of the reality of – maybe an acceptance of truth, more than anything else. So, when I spoke to Richard Haass, because I interviewed him for the book, he was on that trip, and he admitted it, he said, “Look, India still wasn't that important.” But it was an acknowledgement that, you know, the Indians were easier to deal with, and they were accommodating, they made sense. And we just didn't need Pakistan anymore, and he said that we weren't going to go out of our way [to support them]. Bob Einhorn, now, was interesting. He said to me something very interesting, he said, “On the nuclear issue...” – and as far as the Indians are concerned, they call him the Ayatollah, but -
Milan 30:45
For our listeners, Bob Einhorn has been one of the best-known policy practitioners in the nuclear policy world over the past several decades.
Meenakshi30:55
It's actually kind of almost a little unfair. He's an Ayatollah in terms of proliferation in general, but not necessarily towards India. He actually likes India very much. So, I've had extensive conversations with him about this, and he said, you know, “The Pakistanis were just lying all the time, and we disagreed with covering things up for them.” And he said it finally got to a point where it was ridiculous. He said, “You couldn't turn a blind eye to what they were up to. It got to the point where, how could you not acknowledge what they were up to? And finally Afghanistan got cleared up, and we were finally able to say, ‘They got the bomb. We're not certifying them anymore.’” He said, “It got to the point where it was so out there that we were able to just say, ‘We're not certifying.’”
Milan 32:07
One of the things I hadn't realized until I read your book was how much Bill Clinton wanted to visit India, and how it took him eight years and multiple false starts to finally make it.
Meenakshi32:23
He was fascinated by India when he was a student. He had read A Passage to India. So, this is so funny – so, he and Strobe Talbott were roommates at Oxford, right, and Strobe was a Russia expert, he spoke Russian, and he was there as a student – if you remember, they had managed to smuggle out Khrushchev's memoirs, and Strobe was busy transcribing Khrushchev's memoirs, [while] Bill Clinton was reading A Passage to India, cooking breakfast for everyone. And it was pretty amusing. Anyway, he had a sort of fascination for India, and so I was told that when he went to Little Rock as governor, he and Hillary, they would sit around, and they were really interested in the whole microfinance project, they were interested in the whole Gandhi model of self-sustaining villages and NGOs and how that whole how the whole village model worked. So, they were interested in Seva. So, I think when he became president and he brought this up, everyone was, like, looking at him and thinking, “What's his thing with India? Like, what's his obsession with India?” They were talking about, you know, Russia falling apart, Yeltsin, and all the nukes all over the place and having to collect them, and Clinton's talking about India, and they're saying, “Okay, that's not, like, high on our priority list, so can we worry about that later?” And unfortunately, there were so many other things that kept getting in the way, and when he was ready, if you remember, India went through this terrible crisis, Rao was out, and it was, like, musical chairs for the prime minister. Vajpayee was there for 13 days, and then Deve Gowda was there for 11 months, and then back and forth. So, when he was ready, there wasn't a prime minister that he could visit! It takes a lot of time for a U.S. president to organize a trip. You've got to have massive security, and you've got to have the beast and helicopters, and -
Milan 34:49
And the development of an agenda, right? You want to go there to have something to wave around.
Meenakshi34:54
And you have to have a team of people working on what you want to say, and whether there would be a policy at the end of it and everything. So, yeah, and then before they could come to any kind of grip on this, there would be a new government. And so it wasn't really until Vajpayee came in right at the end [that they were able to do much]. What he did do was, he did start this whole process with Strobe, and under the Vajpayee government with Jaswant Singh, they started laying this foundation on the nuclear deal, which laid the basis for what the Bush people would do – this conversation that began to come to terms with something that was actually very near and dear to the Indians because the Indians wanted this sorted out.
Milan 35:55
So, you note in the very first chapter of the book that George W. Bush was the unlikely hero of the U.S.-India story, the one who really transformed this bilateral relationship. And I think most scholars and analysts agree that this was a pivotal moment. Why, in your view, was he such an unlikely protagonists? Because you do point out in the book that he, like Clinton, had an interest in India that predated his time in office.
Meenakshi36:22
Well, two reasons. I think Clinton's interest in India was somewhat romantic, intellectual, and not necessarily the same as George Bush's, which was more grounded in reality and in the diaspora. Bush had been exposed to a lot of entrepreneurs in Texas – as you know, the three states which have the greatest number of American Indians are New Jersey, Texas, and California, so he was exposed to a lot of members of the Indian diaspora, many of them who are doctors and entrepreneurs, and he was very impressed with them. But because of Rao's reforms, he also saw that India was now an emerging power, and those two things had left an impression on him. So, Bush was fairly practical, and he realized that with a rising China, India was going to play an increasingly important role. Now, how do you go about changing the relationship? What Bush did – why it was so remarkable is that he didn't try the old route of renegotiating the relationship. He just said, “What will it take? What does India want? What is India looking for? And what do we need to do to make things happen?” So, India was very clear, India said, “We want to be recognized as a responsible nuclear power. We have not proliferated; China has proliferated and Pakistan has proliferated. We have been totally responsible, and we want recognition, and we also want cooperation. So, that is the one thing that that we would like.” And so he just said, “Let's make that happen. How do we do this?” And he put Condi Rice on the job, and he channeled everything through her, and so she got a team together. And, you know, if you don't put the weight of the White House behind a policy, generally things languish, they don't actually happen. And so that is the big difference. He put the weight of the White House behind it. So, when I talk to people like Steve Hadley or Ashley Tellis, all the people that were involved in this, and Shyam Saran, this nuclear deal was something that almost died several times – if you read the book, you'll see – and it had to be literally resurrected from the ashes. And the reason it got resurrected was because both Manmohan Singh and Bush were committed to not just this, but also making the relationship happen. This wasn't just about the nuclear deal. There was something bigger: it was about changing the relationship between the U.S. and India. And they both grasped that, and they both worked on it, and all the negotiators worked really hard. And there were several instances – some of them I've given in the book – where people walked out of meetings, where people got angry with each other, people were fuming. But in the end, they got the deal done. I mean, look, it almost brought down Manmohan Singh's government. We all can thank Shyam Saran, and he was a formidable negotiator for the Indians; we can thank Steve Hadley, who really smoothed over a lot of things. But everyone really bent down and bent over backwards, worked long hours over several months, over several years to make this happen. But it happened. And in the end, it is what changed the relationship, because I don't think the Indians actually believed that the U.S. would go through a 180-degree change and change their existing laws to make and to give India this exception that they needed. But they did, and they got bipartisan approval in Congress to make this happen, which was very unusual at a time when Congress was very divided over the Iraq war. And so this was quite a feat. And they got the Indian diaspora involved... It was a mammoth undertaking. And the engine that drove it was President George Bush on the U.S. side.
Milan 41:27
One of the arresting conclusions or statements you make toward the end of the book, Meena, is that you write that neither President Obama nor Indian Prime Minister Singh could have predicted how many of their policies and established conventions their successors would undo. Now, that was interesting to me, because that kind of flies in the face of what a lot of commentators say, which is that if you look, there's been more continuity than change. So, explain to us your belief that the U.S.-India relationship broadly stayed the same, it was more of their domestic concerns that were upended.
Meenakshi42:05
Yeah. Well, I mean, there were some areas in foreign policy, for example – no one could have predicted that Trump would shoot through the whole alliance-based structure that the U.S. had in place since World War Two. I mean, this was a very carefully crafted system, an architecture that was in place since World War Two that had kept the world at peace both in the Pacific and in Europe, and Trump just basically took an arrow and shot right through it. All the European allies – it's just been a nightmare, frankly, for them, they've got to rebuild that whole setup. You know, he insulted everyone in NATO, and the Pacific was turned upside down. So, yeah, I mean, that part of foreign policy. Not the Indo-U.S. [part]. But domestically, they've seen massive changes in India, where it was very much a secular state, and you've seen how that's changed. Things in Kashmir have changed.
Milan 43:22
Let me ask you about Kashmir, actually, because you note that every U.S. administration you cover in the book at some point had this hope that it could resolve the Kashmir dispute between India and Pakistan. In the end, you know, every administration came to the same conclusion, which is that they couldn't – they ended up giving up. Do you think that [future] U.S. presidents, and let's just say a President Biden, would still be afflicted by this kind of delusion of being able to solve this intractable problem?
Meenakshi43:49
I think it's been accepted since probably Kennedy's time that this is going to be a bilateral issue for India to sort out. So, no one treads on that anymore. So, I think that anyone who offers a similar agreement, it's been pretty accepted that – the whole world pretty much accepts the Line of Control as an international boundary. I don't think anyone would dispute that. I think if Pakistan tried to change that, I think there'd be a lot of backlash. And I think that after the Simla agreement, I think that the U.S. has backed off from trying to resolve any disputes. So, that is why when Trump started to offer his services without – shooting from the hip without even understanding the history of it, I think everyone in Delhi sort of started flipping out, and I think there were some people that were saying that everything that [Modi] did in Kashmir was done – he abrogated 370 because he wanted to preempt any kind of rash Trumpian actions. I don't know if that is true, but there was some sort of theory put forward, anyway.
Milan 45:26
But also, the change in Afghan policy, the idea that there might be a settlement that would allow the Pakistanis then to shift attention from Afghanistan to Kashmir. But I want to sort of end this conversation by asking you to reflect on what I think is one of the key takeaways of the book, and it struck me as a pretty pessimistic one: you write, “70 years of U.S.-India relations has shown that despite the two countries being democracies, not only are they far apart culturally, but the intersection of their critical interests is relatively modest.” So, with that as the kind of context, what might be in store for U.S.-India relations in this brand-new Biden administration?
Meenakshi46:15
So, I think the intersection of their interests was relatively modest until very recently. Literally, actually, after the book went to print, almost – it seems to have shifted 180 degrees after this whole China change. The U.S. attitude on China seems to have shifted dramatically. Trump started to shift it, but I don't think the Biden administration is going to shift it back anytime soon, where the relationship has become much more adversarial – it's not just competitive, it's adversarial. And given what they have done in India recently, in Ladakh, etc., I think that they're just so much more willing to be aggressive. I think that there now is a greater degree of intersection of interests with China. So, there may be now more reason for them to cooperate. And Tanvi and people who are experts on China – there are so many of them now, and Nirupama Rao is about to come out with a book on China – they will be better placed to give you very erudite opinions on this. But, so, I think there will be room for cooperation there, because India has a role to play. I do believe that. Going forward, though, you can see that from all the announcements that Biden has made so far, the domestic issues are going to use up a lot of his first couple of years. It's just going to be that way. On the foreign policy front, he has a lot of repairing to do with Europe with his allies, because – think about it this way. China's going to be his big concern, right, to contain China, and if the U.S. GDP is 25% [of the world total], the allies along with the U.S., their GDP is 50%. So, if they joined together, which is basically what Jake [Sullivan] and everybody else has said they would like to do – they'd like to approach China with strength, from a position of strength – it's the Dean Acheson approach, and if they want to do that, 50% of the world's GDP confronting China is a lot stronger than 25%. So, that is their approach, and to do that they have to rebuild all their alliances. And my guess is that rather than working on a bilateral approach, they're probably going to first concentrate on an alliance approach, a cooperative alliance approach. But, you know, that remains to be seen.
Milan 49:49
My guest on the show today is the author and journalist Meenakshi Ahamed. Her new book is called A Matter of Trust: India-U.S. relations from Truman to Trump. It is a remarkable work of history that covers the entirety of the U.S.-India relationship from 1947 to the present. Meena, thanks so much for joining us. Congrats on the book, and I look forward to much coverage of it as we start a new administration here. Thanks again.
Meenakshi50:16
It's been such a pleasure, Milan.