India Will Try To Push Bush Around

An Assertive India Girds for Negotiations With Bush

NEW DELHI, Feb. 27 — When President Bush lands in India early Wednesday, he will encounter an ever ambivalent American ally with one important difference from the past: this India has new power to assert its views, some of which align with Mr. Bush's agenda and some of which do not.

Much has changed, in fact, since the last visit here by an American president, in 2000, when President Clinton's address to the Indian Parliament was received so enthusiastically that lawmakers climbed over benches to shake his hand.

What's not to like... An America that is shipping more jobs overseas--especially to India--than any other industrialized country in the world.

But in the past six years, India has also become a more confident partner — in trade and in America's campaigns against terrorism and nuclear proliferation — which touch India both obliquely and directly as it looks abroad in pursuit of its own interests like never before. Meanwhile, India's endemic prickliness shows no signs of remission.

Pratap Bhanu Mehta, president of the nonpartisan Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, sees in his country what he calls "a great admiration for U.S. power," a capacity that many Indians find worthy of emulation. "This is a power that acts independently, acts freely, is not constrained," he said. "It's not so much an anti-American view than wanting to replicate that."

That fine balance is most visible in talks over whether to reward India with access to American nuclear technology, an issue about which both sides would like to announce a deal this week. They are not there yet, as the talks rub up against the one thing that many Indians, particularly in the political elite, hold dear: the idea of India's independence.

This is a mistake in the process... And just exactly how is China, Pakistan and Iran going to feel about the idea that India is grwoing nuclear capabilities and allying itself with the US?

Little else may actually unite opinion here. Indeed, the many shades of political opinion found in this feisty country of one billion defy any easy rendering — of an India as either for or against the United States. India has fundamentalists of the Hindu and Muslim persuasion, Maoist guerrillas, free marketers, newly minted millionaires and Marxist lawmakers with posters of Che Guevara on their office walls.

The Pew Global Attitudes Project found Indians last year to be among the most cheerful in their appraisal of both the United States and President Bush. In a survey published this week in the Indian newsweekly Outlook, two-thirds of Indians "strongly" or "somewhat" regarded Mr. Bush as "a friend of India," even as 72 percent called the United States "a bully."

It's okay to be an international bully as long as you give us your technology and jobs.