ABSTRACT

In 2000 US President William (Bill) Clinton stood up in the Indian parliament and extolled the ideational values, in this case ‘democracy’, that united India and the USA. 1 India was the world’s biggest democracy in population terms, and the USA was the world’s biggest democracy in power terms. In their subsequent Joint Statement, India-US Relations: A Vision for the 21st Century (2000), both countries stressed these values shared in common, and looked forward to ‘a day of new beginnings’ in relations between the two countries. 2 The irony is that from the 1950s through to the 1990s India and the USA were rather estranged, yet a decade later India was indeed ‘crossing the Rubicon’ in establishing close defence-military-strategic links with the USA, with the People’s Republic of China as a third-party (unstated) consideration. 3 The Indian-US relationship now looks set to be a central one for the emerging international system of the 21st century. This chapter looks at their estrangement and then their convergence.