Old and new disagreements between India and the United States
During its first four decades of independence, India approached the United States apprehensively. Indians disapproved of the Americans’ robust alliance with Pakistan and questioned the United States for consistently aiding an illiberal dictatorship despite all its talk of spreading global democracy. Simultaneously, American leaders despised India’s Cold War nonalignment doctrine and its cushy relationship with the Soviet Union. Additionally, domestic politics kept the two countries apart. India’s most prominent Cold War leaders, Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi, were sceptical of capitalism and chose to nationalize large industries instead of courting foreign investment, a decision that depressed Indo-American trade through the end of the 1980s.
By the time Bill Clinton was elected President in 1992, conditions were ripe for the US–India relationship to change from one of benign neglect to one of true partnership. As Indian security expert C. Raja Mohan explains, Indian leaders saw the end of the Cold War as an opportunity for a new Indian geopolitical doctrine, allowing India to “reinvent its foreign policy” and refocus its attention on collaboration with the United States.3 The fall of the Soviet Union also made Indian leaders rethink their domestic economic policy. One of newly elected Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao’s major initiatives was to liberalize India’s economy and promote trade with the United States. The Clinton Administration reciprocated, as it believed that India would play an integral role in America’s post-Cold War grand strategy. As Clinton’s National Security Advisor Anthony Lake put it, “The successor to a doctrine of containment must be a strategy of enlargement, [the] enlargement of the world’s free community of market democracies.”4
But American attempts to play both sides of the India–Pakistan rivalry during the early years of the Clinton presidency repressed the growth of Indo-American relations. In 1985, the US Congress passed the Pressler Amendment, which banned American military assistance to Pakistan unless the President could definitively say that Pakistan did not have, and was not developing, nuclear weapons. Congress was suspicious of Pakistan’s military dictator Zia ul-Haq and was committed to limiting the spread of nuclear weapons technology. By 1995, however, Pakistan was in the hands of the more charming and liberal Benazir Bhutto, who visited Clinton in Washington and presented a new image of Pakistan. This helped sway Congress to pass the Brown Amendment, which permitted the United States to deliver Pakistan USD 368 million worth of military equipment.5 The Brown Amendment left many Indians feeling betrayed.
Indian objections to President’s Clinton condemnation of counterinsurgency practices in Kashmir also stalled relations. In the early 1990s, Pakistani-backed militants maintained a fierce insurgency in the disputed territories of Jammu and Kashmir. The Indian government cracked down hard against the insurgency, killing around 5,000 militants between 1990 and 1994.6 The Clinton administration condemned the Indian Army for “significant human rights abuses” in Kashmir, although it did not act on the issue. This left both Pakistanis and Indians dissatisfied. Pakistanis wanted a more substantive intervention against India, while Indians wanted the United States to stop meddling in their affairs, arguing that their counterinsurgency efforts were necessary to quell a domestic uprising. Although Clinton was right not to sacrifice his values and beliefs to appease India, this disagreement drove a wedge between him and the Rao government.
The Indian government’s continued nuclear proliferation efforts deepened the wedge between Washington and Delhi. By the time Clinton came to office, India hadn’t conducted a nuclear test in nearly two decades, but it also hadn’t signed the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), and was suspected of adding to its nuclear arsenal. As Clinton’s Press Secretary Dee De...
