Why Bush Is Courting India

If

you want a snapshot of a changing world, look at pictures of last May's ceremony in Moscow to mark the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II. At what was one of the largest gatherings of world leaders for years, Germans shook hands with French, Japanese with British, and an American President allowed his Russian counterpart to treat him to a display of martial power, topped with hammer-and-sickle flags, while they sat and chatted amiably in front of Lenin's tomb. As well as burying old feuds, the summit was a chance to forge new friendships. At a banquet that night at the Kremlin, George W. Bush made a beeline for Manmohan Singh. According to Singh's press adviser, Sanjaya Baru, Bush told his wife, Laura, "This is the Indian Prime Minister." Singh later told Baru that the President then launched into a mini-presentation to the First Lady. India was growing fast; India had an energy crunch; India had the world's second-largest Muslim population and not one belonged to al-Qaeda. Baru says that Bush then turned to Singh and said: "You and I need to talk civilian nukes." The Indians were impressed. Says Baru: "We realized this was coming from the top."

"This" is one of the more dramatic geopolitical realignments of recent times. Back in the days of the cold war, India was a Soviet ally. New Delhi and Washington supported different sides in the 1971 Bangladeshi war of independence; during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, when the U.S. and Pakistan armed the mujahedin resistance, India backed the Moscow-imposed Afghan government. And the U.S. was furious over India's 1998 nuclear test, when New Delhi detonated three bombs under the Rajasthani desert. That test was followed by a similar one in Pakistan, and the U.S. slapped a raft of sanctions on both nations. As former U.S. ambassador to India Robert Blackwill noted in his farewell speech in New Delhi in 2003, "India was not seen in Washington as an essential and cooperative part of solutions to major international problems. India was one of the problems—a nuclear renegade whose policies threatened the entire nonproliferation regime and which had to be brought to its senses." Visits by American officials, said Blackwill, "were about as rare as white Bengal tiger sightings."

No longer. This week Bush lands in India for a three-day stay—a top-level follow-up to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's visit last March, when she told Singh that Washington's broad aim was "to help India become a major world power in the 21st century." Besides creating goodwill, Bush also hopes to deliver something concrete to the Indians: a deal that promises Delhi access to the highly restricted trade in nuclear fuel. The agreement would lift the remaining sanctions and offer access to the world's nuclear expertise to help build India's atomic-energy program. In return, India would pledge to use the imported nuclear fuel only to generate power. It would also have to split its existing 23 reactors into military and civilian stations. Washington wants most of the reactors—including a fast-breeder program that's under construction and which produces more fuel than it consumes—to be placed in the latter category and opened to U.N. inspection.

The U.S. offer takes place against the backdrop of a shift in the world's nuclear landscape. Many developing countries such as China, Brazil and Iran are launching or stepping up their nuclear-power programs, either to diversify their sources of energy or as a matter of national pride. But such an expansion of nuclear power could encourage the illicit trade in plutonium and uranium, the essential ingredients for nuclear weapons. In the 1980s and '90s, Pakistan's chief nuclear scientist A. Q. Khan built a thriving trade selling nuclear secrets to Iran, Libya and North Korea. To better police the flow of nuclear materials, the White House has unveiled a proposal for a Global Nuclear Energy Partnership, in which a core of approved supplier nations would provide nuclear fuel to users. The trade would be done under international monitoring and on condition of non-military use, and the suppliers would recycle the waste rather than let it be diverted to weapons programs. The proposal would supplement, and require changes to, the two key instruments of arms control: the 28-year-old Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), banning the supply of nuclear fuel to states with atomic weapons, and the Nuclear Suppliers Group, a 44-nation nonproliferation body set up in 1974 in reaction to India's first nuclear test. At a speech to the Asia Society last week in Washington, Bush said that the U.S.-India deal was the vanguard of this wider restructuring. "We are starting with India," he told reporters. "We'll bring India's nuclear program into the international mainstream and strengthen the bonds of trust between our two nations."

Beyond the nuclear initiative, the U.S. and India are beginning to see each other as kindred spirits. Both are democracies. Both have thriving—and increasingly integrated—technology sectors. Both speak English, and enjoy the same yoga gurus, the same escapism in movies and even the same food. "Young Indians are acquiring a taste for pizzas from Domino's and Pizza Hut," Bush told the Asia Society. Washington and Delhi also both fight Islamic militancy and share concerns over China's rising power. Indian Foreign Secretary Shyam Saran tells TIME his U.S. counterparts are explicit about a desire for a strong and lasting alliance to act as a "bulwark against the arc of Islamic instability" running from the Middle East to Asia, and to create "much greater balance in Asia"—in other words, for India to act as a counterweight to China.