ABSTRACT
Given the partial successes of engaging India through the war on terror narrative, how are we to understand the recent India-Anglosphere nuclear deals? The India–US nuclear deal was hailed as a breakthrough in the relationship, and led to similar deals with the UK, Canada and Australia. As we have already seen, the hierarchy within the global nuclear order has long divided India from the Anglosphere. Importantly, the various India-Anglosphere nuclear deals were accompanied and underpinned by a distinct change in the Western-Anglosphere states’ discourse on India. Commentators and policy-makers alike started to cite various forms of shared colonial heritage and shared liberal values as underpinning these relationships, including a shared language. 1 Aside from the Anglosphere’s perception of India, India under the INC and Manmohan Singh began to argue that India and the US had much in common with one another, and that they needed to ally with a ‘common lexicon’. 2 This is an attempt at constructing a shared identity, but does so in a way which reshapes the ideational hierarchy of the English-speaking world. It is in this context that the US and its Anglosphere allies have continued to manage the India problem by narrating India as knowable, understandable and ‘just like us’.
