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when Fidel Castro employed it during a meeting of the Nonaligned Movement
(NAM) to describe the relationship between the NAM and the Soviet Union.
Vajpayee, then India's foreign minister, had attended the meeting and
remembered the phrase, although by the time he recycled it to describe the US-
India relationship, he may no longer have recalled its genesis. Most Americans,
nonetheless, would not find its paternity reassuring.
Or take something seemingly as straightforward as Vajpayee's speech before a
joint session of Congress during his September 2000 Washington visit. Many
would see the occasion of this address—an honor not extended more than every
year or two—as another indication of the vibrancy of Indo-American relations.
Unfortunately, the more prosaic reality is that US domestic politics and
calculations of electoral advantage probably played as large a role as affection
for India or belief in the importance of ties with New Delhi in the decision by
House Speaker Dennis Hastert to invite Vajpayee to address the joint session.
Hastert's invitation to the prime minister did, however, reflect a newfound
appreciation among US politicians of the value of courting the Indian-American
community. This community, now nearly 1.7 million strong, is frequently cited as
a reason for optimism about the future of US-India relations. Such faith in the
growing economic and political clout of the community is not misplaced. Indian-
Americans command a respectful attention from US politicians that would have
been unimaginable as recently as a decade ago.
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But here, once more, aspirations tend to outrun realities. For one thing, the
Indian-American community has yet to develop a political maturity
commensurate with its economic and educational attainments. The community is
riven by personality conflicts and competing organizations, each jockeying for
access and influence and rarely working in a coordinated fashion.
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Indian-
Americans need to develop a greater sophistication both in recognizing their
friends and in the way in which they interact with those friends.
For instance, some community activists have berated several of their closest
allies on Capitol Hill for including Pakistan in a South Asian fact-finding trip.
The demand that supporters abandon even a hint of independent judgment is
certain to create resentment among India's congressional friends. Moreover, the
community has yet to learn how to demand accountability from those elected
officials who claim to speak for its interests. Several members of the US
Congress, for example, who at the time of the Gujarat earthquake early in 2001
loudly advertised their support for a generous American response to the disaster,
subsequently voted against a US aid package. Until the community better
understands how to translate its economic muscle into actual and not just
rhetorical political support, it will not exercise the influence on behalf of closer
US-India ties many assume it already has.
Another way to gauge the current state of Indo-American relations, and to
determine where they might be strengthened, is to compare this relationship with
