Obama and India

For the Bush administration, the US-India relationship was solely strategic, aimed at enhancing both countries' military reach. President Obama must embrace a holistic vision of human security that focuses on global warming, the collapse of industrial agriculture, the widening income gap, conventional and nuclear arms in Asia, and ethnic and religious conflict.

NEW DELHI – India has stood out around the world for being one of the few countries indifferent to America’s presidential election. Indeed, an astounding 87% of Indians polled said that they did not think the election mattered to them.

President-elect Barack Obama will have to deal with disasters on many fronts as his administration takes over the reins of government. India, presumably, will not be one of them. If there is one bilateral relationship that the Bush administration is seen to have handled successfully, it is that with India.

This impression is no accident. A powerful lobbying effort included millions of dollars spent to support passage of one of the crowning achievements of Bush’s foreign policy: the United States-India Civil Nuclear Cooperation Agreement. Senator Obama voted for the deal, as did Senator Joe Biden, one of its champions as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

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