Indian Courtship

From The Economist:

In the 13-hour flight next week from Washington to Delhi, George Bush could curl up with E.M. Forster's best-known novel. “A Passage to India” is a tale, of misunderstanding: of wrong signals, exaggerated expectations, offense unwittingly caused and taken. It is a parable of the complications that arise when eager Anglo-Saxons go travelling on the Indian subcontinent.

A degree of wide-eyed enthusiasm on Mr Bush's part is forgivable. India is a rich and exotic prize...(it) is the world's largest democracy, and the arguments for forging a much closer partnership between India and America seem unassailable.

Despite all this, there are reasons to urge both sides to tread as carefully as angels before they rush in to an over-enthusiastic partnership. Mr Bush needs to avoid two kinds of mistake. The first, and most serious, would be to shower America's new friend with gifts that the United States can ill afford. Unfortunately, this has already happened. In July, when India's prime minister, Manmohan Singh, visited Washington, he came home with a remarkable present: a promise from Mr Bush that he would aim to share American civilian nuclear technology with India.

That was too generous. Under American and international law, such technology can be given only to countries that have renounced nuclear weapons and joined the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. India has never joined the treaty, and it tested nuclear weapons in 1998. Mr Bush, in effect, was driving a coach and horses through the treaty in order to suit his own strategic ends, a move that invites the accusation of hypocrisy from other nuclear states and wannabes not so favored....

Posted on The Human Stain