US President Barack Obama’s successful visit to India and his historic speech to a joint session of Parliament capped a milestone week in Indo-US relations. This was his sixth encounter with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in various forums in the last 18 months, but his first in New Delhi, and it set the seal on the consolidation of a relationship that has changed dramatically over the last decade.

Throughout the Cold War, the world’s oldest democracy and its largest were essentially estranged. The American preference for making anti-communist allies, however unsavoury, had tied Washington to a series of increasingly Islamist dictatorships in Pakistan, while the non-aligned democracy had drifted towards the secular Soviet embrace. With the end of the Cold War and India’s increasing integration into the global economy, a thaw set in, but India’s explosion of a nuclear device in 1998 triggered a fresh round of US sanctions. President Bill Clinton began to turn things around with a hugely successful India visit during his last year in office. The Bush administration took matters much further, with a landmark accord on civil nuclear cooperation that remains the centrepiece of the transformed relationship.
The nuclear accord simultaneously accomplished two things. It admitted India into the global nuclear club despite our principled refusal to sign the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty. More important, it acknowledged that US exceptionalism had found a sibling. Thanks to the US, which strong-armed the 45 countries of the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group into swallowing their concerns that special treatment for India could constitute a precedent for rogue nuclear aspirants such as Pakistan, North Korea and Iran, there is now an “Indian exception”. Few things could have been more gratifying to a deeply proud nation that was tired of being constantly hyphenated by Washington with its smaller, dysfunctional neighbour, Pakistan.
Under Mr Obama, nothing quite so dramatic was possible. But the President hit all the right notes in his speech to Parliament. The references to Mahatma Gandhi, Swami Vivekananda, and even B.R. Ambedkar; the quotes from Tagore, the Panchatantra and the Upanishads (though he wisely didn’t attempt to pronounce “vasudhaiva kutumbakam”, contenting himself with saying it in English) and the game utterances of “bahut dhanyavad” and “Jai Hind” won over many a sceptical Indian heart. And his speech conveyed two substantive assurances: support for India’s aspirations to a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, and an unambiguous declaration that safe havens for terrorists in Pakistan were “unacceptable”.
The latter was particularly welcome. The Obama administration’s understandable concerns in Afghanistan have made Pakistan loom much larger in its consciousness than India. Mr Obama understands that there is no successful outcome in Afghanistan possible without Pakistan, and his administration has therefore been attentive to Islamabad’s priorities in ways that New Delhi finds occasionally irritating. This statement will go a long way towards reassuring us that Washington is conscious of the fundamental danger to Indian security emanating from that side of the border, and is committed to addressing it with its friends in Pakistan.
Over the last year, there has also been progress on other fronts — the small but significant steps that add up to strengthening the sinews of a relationship. Agreements on seemingly mundane subjects like agriculture, education, health, and even space exploration and energy security testify to enhanced cooperation, and the two governments have also proclaimed “initiatives” on clean energy and climate change as well as educational linkages between American and Indian universities. The Obama visit consolidated all these gains, and the announcements in Mumbai of significant trade and investment deals confirmed that each nation is developing a more significant stake in the other than ever before. The US is India’s largest trading partner, if you take goods and services together. American exports to India have, in the last five years, grown faster than to any other country. The Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) estimates that services trade between the two countries is likely to grow, despite the recent global financial crisis and the US recession that sparked it, from the present $60 billion to over $150 billion in the next six years.
There are strong reasons for congruence and powerful arguments for continued closeness. India is clearly going to join the US amongst the top five world powers of the 21st century. Both nations are anchored in democratic systems, and are committed to the rule of law, diversity and pluralism, and the encouragement of innovation and enterprise. The engagement of the two countries with each other is reinforced by the growing Indian presence in America — the 100,000 Indian students (who form the largest foreign student community there) supplementing the flourishing and influential Indo-American community, who enjoy the highest median income of any American ethnic group and who are playing an increasingly prominent role in politics and government.
Mr Obama spoke of a “global partnership”. What could this mean in practice? Both countries share a responsibility for preserving a rule-based, open and democratic world order and for the management of the global economy. Both are active in the G-20 as the world’s premier institution for dealing with international economic questions. India and the US could also act together to preserve the global commons — the environment, the high seas, human trafficking, outer space and cyberspace — all areas in which the two democracies, one the world’s richest, the other still emerging from poverty, have different but not irreconcilable approaches. Cooperation on the innovative development of green energy technologies, for instance, and on space exploration or combating cyber-crime, are obvious examples of issues that did not exist before the 21st century dawned.
The possibilities are vast. As they say in America, Mr Obama stepped up to the plate this week, and in his speech to Parliament, he hit a home run. Let us make sure that after his departure, we keep the ball in play.

Shashi Tharoor is a member of Parliament from Kerala’s Thiruvananthapuram constituency