Even when India was threatened by the USS Enterprise in 1971, India did not grant the Soviets basing rights despite signing a mutual defense pact (which really meant Soviet protection for India, as India could do little to defend the USSR).
It's pure fantasy to think that any Indian government, led by any party, would grant basing rights to a third country, whether the US or anyone else. If Indian foreign policy objectives included becoming a client state of some other country, India would have never developed nukes or built up an indigenous space program despite global opposition and ostracism for 4 decades.
What's more interesting here is that the USAF officer actually discussed this in public. By the time most Western (and, increasingly, Russian and Chinese) military officers hit the O-7 and O-8 (brigadier and major general) ranks, they start to learn PR skills - basically, what to say and what not to say in front of a journalist or microphone. Hence, I'm inclined to take his laundry list as a public signal that:
1) The US just included a bunch of countries to smokescreen the Chinese
2) The US is bluffing, and this is meant to provide leverage in the upcoming resumption of Sino-US mil-mil talks currently being mulled after the Xi-Obama summit in California
3) The US is seriously engaged with India on talks for basing rights
Of the three, #3 is the least likely, because that officer
has to know that Indians have a preference for (public) non-alignment, even if they'd privately concede to a de facto mil-mil relationship. Consequently, if the US were actually trying to get something done on Indian soil, publicizing that fact would make it more difficult, not less. Ergo, if I was China, I would read this statement as an implicit
denial that the US will be basing anything on Indian soil against China in the near future.
Another reason that explanation makes sense: Iran. Due to proximity, the lack of theater-range US assets in Pakistan, and the need for theater-range assets in India in order to credibly threaten China, any US assets based in India (especially radars) would have a better than even chance of participating in any US strike on Iran - which would instantly kill the Indo-Iranian relationship, from which India imports a sizeable amount of its oil. Even passively hosting those assets without letting the US 'use' them would severely piss off the Iranians. India knows better than to do that, and ergo, the US knows better than to put India in that situation.
It's not #2, either. The facilities necessary to threaten China, again, would have to be capable of supporting theater-range assets. What are these assets? Long-range radars, B-52s loaded with Tomahawks and glide bombs, B-2s, F-22s, KC-135 tankers, E-3s, etc. China has spent decades studying those weapons systems, and knows they require certain sets of infrastructure to be combat-effective: 7-10,000 foot runways constructed to certain ISO specifications, million-liter underground fuel tanks filled with certain grades of jet fuel and hooked to specialized pumping equipment, control towers installed with a certain class of (easily hackable) electronics gear, weapons bunkers constructed with certain layouts and security systems, etc. - and that's not counting the KFCs and beer delivery contracts the USAF likes to bring with it wherever it lands, be it Greenland or Kuwait.
Point is, the USAF can't credibly bluff those actions because those actions are horrendously expensive, time-consuming and/or self-limiting. Because most of the IAF operates relatively rugged Russian equipment, there are only a handful of Indian airbases that can be upgraded to support those big, heavy, delicate USAF prima donnas, and even fewer (only two or three, if my memory serves me right) that already meet all USAF standards.
Ergo, by process of elimination, this is #1 - the USAF officer is simply putting out a smokescreen, and given #2 and #3, a pretty bad one at best - or maybe it's just directed to the gullible public rather than the people who actually know their stuff.
