Abhijit Bhattacharyya | India-US ties plagued by irritants, friction points

While it is true that Prime Minister Narendra Modi had a successful bilateral meeting just recently with US President Joe Biden, nearing the end of his term in the White House, followed by a multilateral Quad summit along with the leaders of Australia and Japan, some niggling issues invariably crop up, creating avoidable confusion. One such is the summons issued by a US district judge to some senior Indian officials over the alleged attempt to kill an American citizen on US soil. These pinpricks, unless nipped in the bud, could spoil the efforts made at high levels for peace, prosperity and collective security.

One of the chronic problems is that the United States is constantly playing on multiple fronts, and in face of escalating violence in the Middle East and elsewhere it has exhibited negligence, over-confidence, rank intelligence failures or mis-judgment, leading to wanton killings and violent eruptions from Libya to Afghanistan, Baghdad to Maghreb, Sahel to the Levant; and now in the Danube-Volga basin. It is possible that US intentions were born out of altruism, but what resulted on the ground has been only death, destruction and despair.

The US, in the process, is losing more goodwill than it is gaining. Even in Europe, and among its closest military allies, there are definite murmurs about its role in the Russia-Ukraine conflict, which shows no sign of ending anytime soon. There is an acute lack of trust in Washington’s intentions, and matters are not helped by the intense political bickering going on in America on these matters, as a landmark election looms. The Europeans, and others across the world, appear keen to have a day without “help” from Washington on polity.

The US, outside its borders, continues to exhibit the same arrogance as before, but the takers are shrinking, given the clear signs of panic, nervousness, and vacillating but vitriolic use of avoidable toxic and jingoistic jargon. That is not the way a superpower should behave.

Regarding India, the US continues to have a problem accepting the close, decades-old bond between New Delhi and Moscow and India’s insistence on asserting its “strategic autonomy”, despite the close relationship it has built up with Washington on both economic and military fronts. The neo-conservative successors of late warrior-diplomat Donald Rumsfeld, former US defence secretary, now transcend US bipartisan space and play a seminal role in today’s wars.

They find it hard to accept that any nation which they have embraced so closely, and to which they have even offered a military alliance, might actually choose to do some independent thinking of its own and not just sign on the dotted line. Since the US has wooed India as a “strategic partner”, how can India choose to be anything other than a whole-hearted member of the American camp. What is sought is an alliance of “un-equals” rather than equals.

That might be what lies behind the US judge’s summons to high-ranking Indian officials on a matter which is officially under investigation in both nations. The alleged incident, in which a “Khalistani” activist who holds American citizenship was targeted in an assassination attempt, needs to be resolved by both countries at the diplomatic level to ensure that the overall relationship does not get impacted or face further unforeseen hurdles. If the judicial system in either nation gets dragged into the matter, a diplomatic resolution would only get that much harder.

The era of imperialism has been long over, but the American political and judicial system needs to get used to its passing. It is certainly over so far as individual enterprises of the West are concerned; but the inherent psyche thereof lingers. The goals and targets remain constant, only the means have undergone a transformation. Instead of the individual British, French, Dutch, Danish, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Belgian rulers’ sprawling empires across Asia, Africa and Latin America, things kicked off through collective teams comprising judges and prosecutors which delivered verdicts on the so-called “war crimes” and put to the sword the “war criminals” of the non-West.

Two classic examples stand out: the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (1946-1948) to punish the Japanese ruling class at the Tokyo trials and the Nuremberg trials (1945-1946) to suitably stamp out the German “war criminals”. It’s the march of collective wisdom of the Western justice system which suitably punished the non-West through the gallows and rewarded the West by exonerating its crimes despite its use of atomic bombs, which killed the most numbers of people in one go in the entire history of mankind. The imperialism of the US-led West re-merged through the verdict of the "world judiciary". The same mission is being carried out by the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court at The Hague -- despite the small hiccup that the United States itself does not accept the jurisdiction of these tribunals. (What if one day someone were to accuse the US President of “war crimes”?)

It is high time for the sole superpower to try influence the entire United Nations to stop the ongoing conflicts in Europe and the Middle East, and in Sudan and Sahel, where human beings are dying like mosquitoes as the UN continues to cut a sorry figure. Both India and the US should jointly work for basic reforms at this white elephant headquartered in New York, which is currently holding its annual jamboree of Presidents, Kings and Prime Ministers, as well as a battery of diplomats, wasting millions and billions of the resources of poor countries.

The United States must take the lead to save the world just as it claims to have done at the end of the Second World War. The bigger power has a bigger responsibility than others. The “strategic partnership” of India and the US must concentrate on the existential threat facing the human race and to de-escalate the mindless mayhem. The US must control the greed of its corporations, and particularly the arms manufacturers, out to exploit the entire world, or else it will face a self-destructive phase. Washington will do better if it keeps its focus on the major strategic issues of our times.