India Uncut
This blog has moved to its own domain. Please visit IndiaUncut.com for the all-new India
Uncut and bookmark it. The new site has much more content and some new sections, and you can read about them here and here. You can subscribe to full RSS feeds of all the sections from here.
This blogspot site will no longer be updated, except in case of emergencies, if the main site suffers a prolonged outage. Thanks - Amit.
Wednesday, July 20, 2005
A good time for diplomacy
The Telegraph, the Indian Express and Gaurav Sabnis believe that Indo-US relations have reached a new high, more or less backing up Nicholas Burns's assertion that this was "the high-water mark of US-India relations since 1947." Pratap Bhanu Mehta strikes a note of caution, though.
Meanwhile, here's the text of Manmohan Singh's speech to the joint session of the US Congress.
Singh has been enormously smart during the last few days. Just as Pervez Musharraf cites domestic pressures as the reason to not do everything the US wants him to, Singh must have used the excuse of the Left to not toe the line on many of the US's requests, such as putting troops in Iraq. But wherever a win-win situation arose, he grabbed it. It's great that India's hyphenation with Pakistan in international relations finally seems to be ending, but it is important, as Mehta warns, that we don't align ourselves too strongly against China in the US-China game of poker, but pursue good relations with both, positioning ourselves as a strong and confident regional leader that looks other superpowers proudly in the eye. India has much to gain from both America and China, and the gains from one do not need to come at the cost of the gains from another.
Update: Here's Nitin Pai's analysis of Mehta's article.
Meanwhile, here's the text of Manmohan Singh's speech to the joint session of the US Congress.
Singh has been enormously smart during the last few days. Just as Pervez Musharraf cites domestic pressures as the reason to not do everything the US wants him to, Singh must have used the excuse of the Left to not toe the line on many of the US's requests, such as putting troops in Iraq. But wherever a win-win situation arose, he grabbed it. It's great that India's hyphenation with Pakistan in international relations finally seems to be ending, but it is important, as Mehta warns, that we don't align ourselves too strongly against China in the US-China game of poker, but pursue good relations with both, positioning ourselves as a strong and confident regional leader that looks other superpowers proudly in the eye. India has much to gain from both America and China, and the gains from one do not need to come at the cost of the gains from another.
Update: Here's Nitin Pai's analysis of Mehta's article.
