The growth of the relationship between India and the United States is often traced from its nadir 25 years ago, when the U.S. imposed sanctions against India (and Pakistan) after they tested their nuclear weapons in May 1998. Since then the arc of the relationship between India and America has grown year-on-year, some years more than others, built by five American Presidents (Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Joe Biden) and three Indian Prime Ministers (Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Manmohan Singh, Narendra Modi) over the first two decades of the 21st century. While the Clinton-Vajpayee-era gave impetus to summit-level diplomacy in the relationship, the Manmohan-Bush and Manmohan-Obama relationship highlighted nuclear diplomacy and Modi-Obama and Modi-Trump worked on trade and military diplomacy.
After his visit to Washington in earlier this June, Mr. Modi’s meetings with Mr. Biden during his state visit to Washington have led to the two nations forging ahead with technology diplomacy, including the unprecedented new promise of Transfer of Technology (ToT) from the U.S. as a result of the Memorandum of Understanding between General Electric (GE) Aerospace and Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) “to produce fighter jet engines for the Indian Air Force”.
For India, the rapidly rising arc of ties has been seen in terms of shrugging off what Mr. Modi in 2016 called the “hesitations of history” and of renouncing the government’s Cold War muscle-memory in Indian foreign policy towards the U.S. The more important arc, however, is the shift in the U.S.’s belief in “American exceptionalism”, to a more pragmatic era of “American exception-ism for India”. In other words, it is the U.S.’s decision to make a series of exceptions specifically for India in the first quarter of this century that has been responsible for the big surges in a relationship billed as the most “defining partnership of the century” by Mr. Obama (2009), and Mr. Biden (2023).
