ABSTRACT
America had a reason for avoiding an overt embrace of India. In its initial engagements with India, America was guided by its experience of ‘loss of China’. When Nehru visited America in 1949, the US media hailed him as their best bet against advancing communism in Asia. However, the American establishment was careful not to weaken the nationalist forces in India by making Nehru look like Chiang Kai-shek, a leader under American control.
In the triumphalist American era, postcolonial India did not command full agency in the conduct of its foreign policy. Archival evidence indicates that even during the so-called estrangement in the early 1950s, India-US engagement maintained a steady intensity, and the power asymmetry between the two largely determined the scope of their interactions. They cooperated in the realms of nuclear know-how, economics and science; however, the general outlook on the strength of the relationship remained negative, because the US supported Pakistan on the Kashmir issue and supplied Islamabad sophisticated military hardware.
The chapter has relied on the Indian embassy reports from Washington, especially the analysis of American media’s comments on Indian policy. The stated facts and official records are analysed along with the underlying strategies and asymmetries to understand bilateral relations between an empire and a ‘third world’ country. It challenges the prevalent orthodoxy that uses the framework of discord to define the Indo-US ties in the Nehru era.
