The Left front is no longer a force to reckon within the Indian Parliament for the next five years at the least. After supporting the previous UPA government for four and a half years, the Left and Congress fell out over relations with the US – and India started the process of getting closer to the USA.
I have argued elsewhere that aligning with the US was a mistake that India was making. That India should either have done it sixty years ago, or failing that, stayed in the shadows for another decade, when a declining economic clout of the USA and a rising graph for India would enable India to negotiate from a position of strength. Some early signs of the differences that exist in the world views of the USA and India are now visible.
While the PM was expressing his love for George Bush, or requesting the autograph of the new president, the USA was, rhetoric to the contrary notwithstanding, busy downgrading its relations with India. One of the best articulation of this is in the speech that Robert Blackwill, the former US ambassador to India delivered on May 5, 2009 at the CII conference at New Delhi
The Indian viewpoint is well articulated by Brahma Chellany
In International relationships, what matters is not what is said, but what is done. And what has been done by the US is to relegate India to the third hyphen in the troika of Afghanistan-Pakistan-India. That the government of the day seems to have managed to sell this to the Indian public as a winner of a relationship is itself an acknowledgement of the Congress’s ability at Spin – the opposition has a lot to learn in this regard
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