Reviving the Indo-American Relationship

...Years ago Moscow enabled India to build mig fighters and channeled aid to its Navy...

...The government' s nonideological approach toward domestic economic policy...

...In continuing to distance themselves from Great Britain, the former colonial power, Indians are turning to the United States for inspiration—in technological matters, academic and professional areas, and even culture itself...

...National Aeronautics and Space Administration launched India's first multipurpose satellite...

...In retrospect, one could reasonably say the U. S. did not understand that the situation in India required special handling...

...At one point New Delhi actually threatened to ban Hollywood feature films, but it has just renewed its import agreement with the Motion Picture Export Association of America...

...relations, Frankel shows that successive American Presidents sought to make postcolo-nial India, the Subcontinent's major power, into an ally...

...India's importance and diversity also should have made its unwillingness to be drawn into the Cold War more acceptable to Washington...

...She then observes: "Rajiv Gandhi came to his responsibilities with a more open mind than his mother...

...Perhaps significantly it was written by a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, Francine R. Frankel, who has spent the '84-'85 academic year here...

...Furthermore, eight out of every 10 Indians doing advanced work in stateside schools choose not to return home—the celebrated "brain drain...

...CULTURAL CONNECTIONS Reviving the Indo-American Relationship wqwwldmonte Bombay In the wake of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi's mid-June visit to the United States, where he launched the 18-month Festival of India, commentators of both countries are taking a close second look at what has been an on-again, off-again affair between the world's biggest democracies...

...Moreover, while U.S.-Indian diplomatic relations deteriorated during the first Reagan Administration, numerous informal connections linking the two nations have grown stronger...

...She is also the author of two highly regarded books: India's Political Economy, 1947-1977: The Gradual Revolution (1978), and India 's Green Revolution: Political Costs of Economic Growth (1971...

...The new atmosphere, heightened by the flexibility of 40-year-old Rajiv Gandhi and the warm reception he received from President Reagan, raises the hope that the United Slates and India will shed their remaining false and harmful notions about each other in this Festival year and explore ways of drawing closer on a wide ranee of issues...

...A recent study by Delhi University's Mahendra Pal reveals how deeply the Bank has penetrated into the daily life of India—very much the heaviest borrower...

...My personal view of our material progress is rather less optimistic...

...Possibly being exposed over the next year and a half to India's culture, and to different facets of its modern nationhood, will coax Americans to re-examine whatever preconceptions they may still have about this country's political and economic course since the achievement of independence in 1947...

...Some 13,700 Indian students arecur-rently enrolled in American universities, with the vast majority paying their own way...

...Instead, to the consternation of Indian policy makers, the aggrieved Americans chose Pakistan as their ally in the region, above all during the 1971 Bangladesh War, when the aircraft carrier Enterprise steamed into the Bay of Bengal...

...And the very same infrastructure the Soviets contributed to is at present helping India keep its economic and political freedom of action...

...This new generation had inherited a self-reliant industrial economy in which the commanding heights were already controlled by the public sector...

...They think it is a propitious time to recognize that despite the domestic strains created by widespread grinding poverty and periodic food shortages, not to mention three wars against neighbors in the years from 1962-1971, the country has not abanDarryl D'Monte frequently writes on Indian affairs for The New Leader...

...It is estimated that by now roughly 500,000 Indians have become American citizens, and it has been claimed that they are among the most affluent of today's immigrants...

...The financial institution has succeeded in getting planners here to invest resources in such services as transport (particularly railroads), electricity and communications...

...Most years of late the U.S...

...has replaced the Soviet Union as India's maj or trading partner...

...Thus, once again, thecountry should not be seen as a monolithic allyofthe Soviets...

...Frankel rightly calls attention to the fact that the personal and cultural ties have been buttressed by a wide range of economic contacts...

...Tracing the entire history of Indo-U.S...

...The Soviet Union is thought to have a mere 500 Indian students—practically all subsidized by Soviet fellowships...

...Certainly the opportunity for mutual reassessment now exists, because Rajiv seems less committed to past policies than was his mother and predecessor, the late Indira Gandhi, victim of a brutal assassination last November...

...Similarly, at an earlier stage, not until the United States refused India the assistance it wanted to modernize its petrochemical and steel industries did New Delhi turn to Moscow...

...it should be judged, rather, by its desire to be in a position to balance arms acquisitions— to say nothing of technology purchases in general...

...This open partisanship—opposed, incidentally, by the U.S...

...sparked speculation about a more flexible path in foreign relations as well.' The end of the Indira era, Frankel argues, should likewise move the U.S...

...These men and women and their families constitute a tremendous fund of good will for the United States in India, and vice versa...

...doned its democratic framework...

...Happily, all that has changed...

...Entrenched political views," say the two economists, have tended to "obscure recognition of India's achievements," yet its economy has finally gathered enough momentum to boost living standards at home and change the nation's image in the world at large...

...In contrast, two Indians have taken Soviet citizenship—so much for the bear hug Moscow has supposedly flung around the country and its people...

...That is why his first trip abroad as prime minister, taken a month before he visited America, brought him to the Soviet Union...

...The influence of American pop music and movies on the domestic cultural scene cannot be overestimated...

...Still, for every deal involving the Soviet bloc several more are concluded with the World Bank, notwithstanding its strong and well-known ties to U.S...

...Meanwhile, it has overcome its fear of India's Five-Year Plans, which Nehru envisaged on the Soviet pattern, minus the coercion...

...In addition, as an editorial page writer in the Times of India has noted, upper-class Indians who previously looked to London for artistic sustenance have come to regard New York as their Mecca...

...The nation that was quickest to sense the winds of commercial change sweeping across the corridors of New Delhi's labyrinthine secretariats, however, was Japan...

...The significance of this ability is underscored in an article by Catherine Gwin and Lawrence Veit, "The Indian Miracle," published in last spring's issue of Foreign Affairs...

...These captains of local industry neatly stepped into the shoes of the departing British industrialists and constituted a formidable obstacle to the imposition of a fully socialist structure...

...For its part, the globe's most populous democracy expected Washington to grant it favored treatment, especially in providing development assistance...

...to reformulate its" India policy...

...it has come around to financ-inganumber of undertakings in the public sector, including offshore oil exploration...

...Those limitations, concludes Frankel, had the effect of "alienating influential conservative lobbies"in America...

...It promises to transform the communications system of this big and diverse land by making television almost as widely available as radio...

...If Indians—and others—become more aware of the country's recent forward motion, a virtuous circle of development that has been building in India over the past decade may be reinforced, possibilities for further development realized, and opportunities for more fruitful ties with the West increased...

...Rajiv Gandhi himself, by the way, had to swear that he aims to build a socialist-style society, a promise that neither he nor his supporters take at all seriously...

...State Department—paved the way for the Treaty of Peace and Friendship that India signed with the Soviet Union in 1971, at the conflict's end...

...The need for a continuing supply of spares and replacements means that Rajiv Gandhi will have substantial difficulty reducing the country's dependence on Communist military hardware...

...Such cooperation is a far cry from the tension of the late 1970s, the brief period of Janata rule, when IBM and Coca-Cola were told to get out and stay out...

...Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger...

...But Pandit Jawa-harlal Nehru, the nation's first prime minister, assumed the leadership of the nonaligned movement, a step the United States—incorrectly in the eyes of Indian analysts—interpreted as a rebuff to it and to the whole Western world...

...As for its ostensibly strong links to the Soviet Union, Indian officials pay them lip service but are thoroughly prepared to be pragmatic should the occasion demand it...

...What' s more, American corporations are making significant inroads into once protected industries, particularly high-tech ones like electronics...

...It has moved into the automobile and motorscooter markets with its customary amazing rapidity...

...Indeed, one of India's accomplishments is that to a considerable extent it can now pick what it wants to buy and from whom...

...Far and away the most perceptive account of the tangled Indo-American relationship appeared recently as an eight-part series of articles in the Times of India...

...policy interests...

...But India had already begun broadening its sources of military equipment, having bought British Jaguar tanks and French Mirage aircraft...

...In Nehru's day the Bank declined to make loans to state-owned heavy industry projects, thereby hindering a key component of India's effort to gain self-sufficiency...

...TheyoungPrime Minister, and many of his colleagues, had grown up in free India...

...Indians, for example, would like to see Washington abandon the pro-Pakistani tilt that has been evident in American behavior, particularly since the days of President RichardM...

...Unlike the other newly emergent states of recent decades, India had a highly developed capitalist class—not only in textiles but in steel and engineering—at independence...

...Acknowledging the " dynastic democracy" that brought the present regime to office after Indira's sudden slaying, Frankel notes that it nonetheless was accorded legitimacy when it scored an overwhelming victory in the December elections...

...Over the last several years, too, an increasing number of Indians have gone to the United States and made their presence felt in it...

...It looked as if they could afford to be relaxed about the role of government in regulating private enterprise, both Indian and foreign...

...nevertheless, Rajiv's unmistakable drift toward liberalization should surely receive the hearty approval of any believer in free enterprise, in the Reagan Cabinet or elsewhere...

...In 1983, for instance, Ford Aerospace built and the U.S...

...American political pundits seldom understand the underlying, essentially conservativ e reality beneath India'son-going profusion of Leftist rhetoric...

...A simultaneous cause of friction was India's determination "to build up basic and heavy industry in the public sector as the foundation of self-reliant development, while imposing a comprehensive system of licensing and controls on industries open to private enterprise, and foreign private investment...

...Although the Soviet Union and the rest of Eastern Europe trade a good deal with India, they have their greatest impact in the field of defense...