A stable paradigm

It's safer not to expect as much from Bush's visit in March as Clinton's 2000 visit had achieved

Pranay Sharma Delhi
Bill Clinton's visit to Delhi in early 2000 played a key role in not only bringing about a "paradigm shift" in Indo-US relations but also in opening the floodgates for the Atal Behari Vajpayee government's intense engagement with the outside world. It was the beginning of the acknowledgement by the big powers of India's potential as an emerging key player on the international stage. Exactly five years later yet another US President is scheduled to visit Delhi. But questions are already being asked whether Manmohan Singh will be able to gain as much from George W Bush's visit in March as his predecessor Vajpayee did from Clinton's.

The skepticism about the success of the Bush visit stems from some important changes that have taken place in India and the region in the past few years. Clinton was the first US president to come to India in 18 years. Attempts to re-work any relationship after such a long hiatus is bound to enthuse the two countries involved in the process. As a result, Clinton's visit to India succeeded in putting Indo-US relations to a newer and higher plane – one that had never been achieved by the two countries. The fact that it came within one and half years of India's decision to explode its nuclear veil by conducting five tests in Pokhran only added to the Indian enigma that many in the US were keen to grasp.  Coupled with India's supremacy in the field of information technology, the significant contribution that Indian-Americans were making in the US led Clinton and his key aides to re-discover India in a big way.
Bush's visit to India, on the other hand, takes place only five years after Clinton's and less than a year after the US president had a summit meeting with prime minister Manmohan Singh in Washington in July last year. Moreover, in the past five years there have been a number of visits between the two countries at different levels leading to a better understanding of each other's position on key bilateral as well as regional and international issues. The relation between the two sides is less tentative and much steadier than what it used to be some years back.

But the difference in the two visits also has much to do with the personalities of the two American presidents. Bush and Clinton are as far apart and different from each other as chalk and cheese. Clinton is perhaps one of the most charismatic leaders that the US has produced since John F Kennedy. The difference between him and Bush is not only because they headed two separate parties, the Democrats and the Republicans respectively, but also in their approach towards life in general. Clinton visited here in the wake of the Monica Lewinsky scandal. But most Indians dismissed it as an "internal affair" of the Americans and if some were at all interested, they started looking at the US president as more human than other political leaders.

Bush, on the other hand, is reputed to be strait-laced. The jokes about his lack of wit might have stopped circulating in the past few years but that has not made him any more interesting. He is said to be in bed by 8 in the evening and seldom finds things outside running his government interesting. During a visit to The Hermitage museum in St Petersburg two years ago, it was rumoured that Bush forced his delegation to follow him out after a whirlwind tour of the collections that lasted all of 15 minutes.