India is a Good Horse to Bet Upon

lookieloo

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Long piece, much more at the jump.
Mr. Singh Comes To Washington: India, China & The Pacific « Breaking Defense - Defense industry news, analysis and commentary

WASHINGTON: When Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh meets with President Obama at the White House this Friday, the rise of China may not be on the official agenda, but it will be on everybody's mind – and Beijing will be watching warily...

...As much as hawks in both the US and India would like their countries to jointly contain China, there are reasons India will be cautious. The issue is not so much on the US side, despite the Pentagon's repeated protests that, as Carter said in New Delhi last week, "the rebalance is not aimed at China." In fact, under Carter's leadership, the Pentagon has overridden the State Department's reluctance to sell advanced weaponry to India, just as Bush overturned the sanctions put in place to punish India for its 1998 nuclear tests. But on the Indian side there are still deep-rooted obstacles: a six-decade commitment to "non-alignment," an arsenal largely built with Russian weapons ("We don't have the history that Russia does here," Carter acknowledged), and sheer institutional inertia have slowed New Delhi's response to US offerings. Indeed, arms sales to India can take decades to finalize, when the seller is lucky.)...

...while India is hardly an equal counterweight to China today, in twenty years India will have more people and quite possibly more wealth available for its armed forces. For all the short-term frustrations, Washington's bet on the world's biggest democracy makes a lot of long-term sense.
 

pmaitra

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I don't want to come across as pessimistic, but this is interesting (from the article):

Tellingly, the two countries can't even agree on what the "T" stands for in a partnership called "DTI": Washington says "Defense Trade Initiative," to emphasize the US selling arms to India, while New Delhi calls it the "Defense Technology Initiative," to emphasize the US transferring new technology to India.
 

lookieloo

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I don't want to come across as pessimistic...
Nothing wrong with a healthy dose of pessimism. This is going to be a very long process, but great alliances are, at their heart, based upon shared cultural values; and in the long term, India and the US have more in common with each other than either has with cold-war partners.
 

pmaitra

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Nothing wrong with a healthy dose of pessimism. This is going to be a very long process, but great alliances are, at their heart, based upon shared cultural values; and in the long term, India and the US have more in common with each other than either has with cold-war partners.
I agree. I also believe, a slow but steady progress will lead to long lasting friendship.

It's like a hare and tortoise race. :)
 

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