West's Discovery of India

SINCE INDEPENDENCE IN 1947, the West has had a transactional relationship with India. The old colonial power, Britain, both covertly and overtly backed Pakistan for decades. The United States, locked in a Cold War with the Soviet Union, regarded India as a geopolitical aggravation.

- Minhaz Merchant

US President Richard Nixon, later disgraced by the Watergate scandal, reflected influential views of the day in Washington when he made disparaging remarks about Prime Minister Indira Gandhi (many of them unprintable). He sent the US Seventh Fleet to the Bay of Bengal in December 1971 to intimidate India during the Bangladesh war.

India was a tiny economy. Food shortages had plagued it through the 1960s. But transactional relationships can change abruptly. As India's economy grew, the West reassessed its geopolitical priorities. President Bill Clinton had imposed harsh sanctions on India following the Pokhran II nuclear test in May 1998. Within two years, on a visit to India, Clinton changed his tune. He saw first-hand how India, then a nascent software power, had used the Y2K dot com crisis to emerge as a potential global technology leader.

The West's discovery of India had begun. The India-US civil nuclear deal in 2008 followed. China was meanwhile quietly stealing US technology and intellectual property rights to propel itself into the world's second-largest economy. In 2000, China's GDP was a mere $1.21 trillion. In 2006, it was $2.76 trillion, less than India's GDP today. But within another eight years, by 2014, Chinese GDP had quadrupled to $10.48 trillion.

Washington, following the Nixon-Kissinger visit to China in 1972, facilitated by Pakistan, had moved decisively against India. It has taken half a century for the US to reverse and rewrite its Indo-Pacific doctrine. While the India-US nuclear deal set the direction of future ties, China's toxic threat dawned only gradually on Washington. It realized belatedly that during former leader Deng Xiaoping's hide-and-bide strategy, China had converted itself into an economic powerhouse by reverse engineering patented US technology.