Sixty years after partition, the US has finally separated India and Pakistan in its worldview, with one seen as an emerging strategic partner and other as an indispensable ally in the war on terror.

The culmination of what Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice calls 'de-hyphenation' of the two South Asian neighbors came last month with the finalization of an accord to implement the landmark India-US civil nuclear deal.

"For decades, the US had tried to carefully balance every step with India and determine its impact on Pakistan and vice versa," acknowledged a State Department spokesman. "This agreement with India now is a clear recognition that there is a real difference" between the midnight's twins of August 1947.

That recognition has taken a long time coming as relations between the world's two largest democracies had gone on a roller coaster ride since the dawn of Indian independence.

With India taking the neutral high ground, New Delhi and Washington found themselves slowly drawn on different sides of a Cold War between two World War II allies: capitalist US and communist Soviet Union.

Nevertheless, Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru's first visit to the US in October 1949 made a great impact with his affirmation that if democracy and liberties were under threat India would not stand aloof.

The visit led to the signing of an agreement next year for the supply of economic and technical aid to India.

Washington's balancing act continued in the 1950s even as Pakistan forged a military alliance with the US, obliging non-aligned India embroiled as it was in the dispute over Kashmir to befriend post-Stalin Russia as a strategic counterweight.

As the US started giving Pakistan military assistance in 1954, President Dwight D. Eisenhower pledged to act against any misuse of its aid against India. He even offered military aid to New Delhi but Nehru turned it down.

Yet Eisenhower's visit to India in 1959, the first by an American president, drew tremendous public response, coming as it did months after the US agreed to contribute $517 million towards the $1 billion cost of constructing dams, irrigation works and other projects under the Indus river accord.

The 1960s saw many Indians moving to the US as Washington under President John F. Kennedy came to India's aid after "Mao's India War" in 1962, with 90 percent of the $161 million military assistance to date coming New Delhi's way during 1962-66.

But Kennedy's assassination changed the mood in Washington. President Lyndon Johnson, irritated with India's open sympathy for Vietnamese nationalism, kept New Delhi on what has been described as a "ship-to-mouth presidential short tether" for the supply of food grains.

India-US relations hit their lowest point during the 1971 Bangladesh war when President Richard Nixon and his National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger sent the US Seventh Fleet's nuclear powered carrier "Enterprise" to the Bay of Bengal.

Kissinger sought to repair the damage three years later by acknowledging the validity of non-alignment during an India visit as Secretary of State. But yet another arms aid package to Pakistan did not help matters during the short-lived presidency of Gerald Ford after Nixon departed in disgrace in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal.

India's nuclear explosion in Pokhran in May 1974 further strained India-US relations, with Washington superseding earlier treaty obligations and insisting on full-scope safeguards to continue supply of nuclear fuel for its Tarapur reactor.

The Morarji Desai-led Janata government that came to power in 1977 with the defeat of Indira Gandhi after two years of emergency rule found a friendlier president in Jimmy Carter at the White House. But no headway could be made on the nuclear issue with Desai - as opposed to the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) as Indira Gandhi was - refusing to accept any new conditions.

As Indira Gandhi returning to power in 1980 stood by old friend Soviet Union after its 1979 intervention in Afghanistan, Pakistan turned to Washington for military aid. But Carter offered it only $400 million in military aid which President Zia-ul Haq rejected as "peanuts".

Republican President Ronald Reagan looked at Pakistan as a "frontline state" against the "evil empire" and resumed massive military aid to its ally suspended since the 1965 India-Pakistan conflict. India in turn made commercial purchases to keep the balance.

Talibanisation and terrorism that today threaten both the US and India spawned during this period when Washington pumped in $6-8 billion in support of the mujahideen. Pakistan only diverted the foreign born jehadis to Kashmir as they returned in triumph after the Soviet withdrawal in the 1990s.

With the end of the Cold War in 1991, Pakistan fell victim to the loss of the "Godfather syndrome", but quietly pursued its nuclear ambitions, apparently to get even with India.

Thus when a resurgent India, set on a path of economic reforms, conducted its second set of nuclear explosions at Pokhran in May 1998, Pakistan was quick to respond with a few tests of its own.

All hell broke loose in Washington as the two South Asian neighbours gatecrashed into the nuclear club, triggering sanctions against both. But as danger of a nuclear conflict loomed in the wake of Pakistan's Kargil misadventure, sanctions were withdrawn. India and the US began a marathon dialogue on non-proliferation issues.

Slowly but surely as India's growing clout as a 'nascent major power' dawned in Washington, Bill Clinton embarked on a journey in 2000, the first by a US president in two decades, to mend fences with what was now beginning to be seen as America's 'natural partner'.

It was his successor Republican George W. Bush who realised the full potential of a country of "billion plus and a democracy" and set out to build a "strategic partnership". But it wasn't until the spring of 2005 when Rice de-hyphenated India and Pakistan that it started taking concrete shape.

As a booming economy turned India into "the region's dominant actor" as a US Congressional research report put it, the country that had received $15 billion in US aid in 58 years was eyed by American business as a $100 billion lucrative market and an attractive investment destination.

Soon the two embarked on several economic and security initiatives including a 10-year defence framework agreement. And then on July 18, 2005, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Bush signed a historic joint statement that would set the ball rolling for a pathbreaking civil nuclear deal seen as the symbolic centrepiece of a new relationship between once "estranged democracies".

Just a few months later, two days after signing another joint statement with Manmohan Singh in New Delhi March 2, 2006, to seal the nuclear deal, Bush told his hosts in Islamabad "that Pakistan and India are different countries with different needs and different histories. So, as we proceed forward, our strategy will take in effect those well-known differences".

The message was loud and clear. In the eyes of the world's sole superpower, India had arrived.  

August 12, 2007

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