India and the US - Implosion: India's Tryst with Reality - page 328

consciously leftward-leaning Congress party where it has never been politically correct to
display pro-US tendencies.
The US Turns
The change in US attitudes began with India's 1998 nuclear tests. Within a month, Bill
Clinton, the US president who till then had tilted towards Pakistan rather than India, sent
Strobe Talbott, a senior state department official, to Delhi to start a dialogue with Jaswant
Singh 7 . In Washington, there was a surge of interest and access for Indian diplomats that
had not been seen before. 8 Clinton then supported India during its potentially dangerous
conflict with Pakistan in 1999, when he told Nawaz Sharif to withdraw troops from the
mountain peaks above Kargil. He had a triumphant visit to India in 2000, saying he wel-
comed 'India's leadership in the region and the world', adding that he knew it must be dif-
ficult to be 'bordered by nations whose governments reject democracy'. 9 But Clinton did
little more. In particular, he did nothing to lift a multitude of nuclear-linked sanctions on
India. This was partly because his Democratic Party took a strong line on nuclear non-pro-
liferation after the 1998 tests, and partly because the state department did not want to upset
Pakistan which it saw as its more important ally.
The next moves came after two major terrorist attacks in 2001 - 9/11 on the New York
twin towers in September that year and on the Indian parliament in December. By this time,
George W. Bush had become US president and he decided to launch an initiative to build a
new relationship. officials from both sides, including Mishra and Robert Blackwill, the then
US ambassador in Delhi, began to look for a policy idea that would be a game-changer in
the bilateral relationship and enable India gradually to become a counterweight to China 10 .
They chose the nuclear deal which was, as Geoffrey Pyatt, a senior US official, said later,
'a single big issue which captured everybody's attention and made clear that we were chan-
ging the rules of engagement'. 11 Without China as a potential common adversary, these
moves might never have happened.
Tensions remained, however, especially over America's closeness with Pakistan, and
also because Washington viewed its relations with India through what was known as the In-
dia-Pakistan prism and did not see India as an individual subject. The tensions were under-
lined in July 2002 when Kanwal Sibal, who had just become India's foreign secretary and
describes himself as a 'hard-nosed foreign policy realist', accused America of intentionally
giving Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf 'a lot of room to play with ambiguities on
terrorism'. Sibal said that this gave Musharraf 'an alibi' when terrorist attacks originating
from Pakistan took place in Jammu and Kashmir. American priorities on the fight against
terrorism, he added, were 'not quite in phase' with India's because the US was less con-
cerned about stopping terrorism in Kashmir than elsewhere in the world. 12