By Rajan Menon
Meenakshi Ahamed opens her exquisitely written, thoroughly researched and insightful account of the twists and turns in the 75-year relationship between India and the United States with a telling scene. Houston, September 2019: More than 50,000 Americans of Indian origin — with 10,000 others on the wait list for tickets — excitedly anticipate the arrival of Narendra Modi, India’s Hindu nationalist prime minister, at the big bash that was billed as “Howdy Modi” (apparently no one caught the resemblance to Howdy Doody). The Indian leader, a skilled orator adept at revving up crowds, arrives to deafening cheers, accompanied by his guest of honor, President Donald Trump.
The Houston extravaganza, a celebration of India’s rise as a major power, could not have been staged 20 years earlier. For most of the decades following India’s independence in 1947, Americans had seen it as a land of squalor and famine whose foreign policy seemed defined by an alignment with the Soviet Union. But for at least a decade before the Houston gala, India had been feted by American leaders as a rising power, an ally against an increasingly powerful challenger, China, and an important trade and investment partner.
By then, India’s 1998 nuclear weapons tests — foreshadowed by its 1974 “peaceful” nuclear test — had been forgiven and American economic sanctions lifted. Under President George W. Bush, Washington and New Delhi even signed a landmark agreement on civilian nuclear cooperation, overcoming strong resistance in Congress. Billions of dollars’ worth of American arms — all but shut out of India for decades — started flowing to India. Joint military exercises and meetings between national security delegations became routine. The Indian diaspora, three million strong, had become America’s wealthiest ethnic community — prominent in academia, medicine, Silicon Valley and, increasingly, politics.
Yet as Ahamed, a freelance journalist, recounts in “A Matter of Trust,” this bonhomie is relatively recent. During the Manichaean rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union, India’s commitment to state-led industrialization and a foreign policy of nonalignment was suspect in American eyes. Harry Truman was convinced that Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, was a Communist, and Dwight Eisenhower’s secretary of state, the starchy John Foster Dulles, harbored similar sentiments. Far from being seen as a budding great power as it is today, India back then evoked a mixture of pity and condescension in Washington. In his memoirs, one prominent United States ambassador to India said that the country gave Dean Acheson, Truman’s secretary of state, “the creeps.”
This piece was originally published in The New York Times on July 11, 2022. Read more HERE.