This visit ought to be about making clear to Trump that the larger promise of India outweighs the irritants associated with trade disagreements
‘What the leaders of India want and are determined to have is a democracy that is indigenous to their own country – not English or American or French or Russian,’ wrote Eleanor Roosevelt. Diplomat, activist, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s wife, according to Mrs. Roosevelt, who travelled across India in the spring of 1952, ‘the democracy India is building probably will never be exactly like ours.’ After all, she continued, ‘there is no reason it should be.’
Few American leaders understood this at the time. President Harry S. Truman had in fact dissuaded American envoys from accepting postings to post-independent India. India was, according to Truman, a country associated with ‘people sitting on hot coals and bathing in the Ganges.’ It was not ‘important.’ That the US-India relationship has transformed is an understatement.
From cloudy musings about hot coals to nuclear deals, strategic partnerships in the Indo-Pacific, disagreements about data localisation and motorcycles, and $142 billion in trade (as of 2018), India and the United States share as unique a relationship as is possible. These are two outsized democracies whose leaders seek to evangelise (in the case of the United States) and guard (in the case of India) their own distinctive democratic advances…Keep reading
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