America's Strategic Opportunity With India

The New U.S.-India Partnership

R. Nicholas Burns

From Foreign Affairs, November/December 2007

Summary:  The rise of a democratic and increasingly powerful India is a positive development for U.S. interests. Rarely has the United States shared so many interests and values with a growing power as we do today with India. By reaching out to India, we have made the bet that the future lies in pluralism, democracy, and market economics.

R. NICHOLAS BURNS is U.S. Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs.

NATURAL ALLIES

As the United States and India look ahead to a new kind of partnership, we in the U.S. government should not forget that the big breakthrough in U.S.-India relations was achieved originally by the private sector. The strength of that private-sector engagement ensures that the change now under way is real -- and will last. In many respects, both governments are playing catch-up with the extraordinary business-led trade and investment growth of the last two decades. Since 1991 -- the year of the launch of the economic reforms in India -- trade between the United States and India has grown more than sixfold, reaching $32 billion in 2006. Boeing alone sold $11 billion worth of aircraft last year to India, one of the world's fastest-growing aviation markets. General Electric houses its second-largest research center in Bangalore. A number of India's blue-chip companies -- in banking, pharmaceuticals, and information technology -- are listed on U.S. stock exchanges.

I saw this phenomenal growth firsthand on a visit to Hyderabad last autumn. Standing in the lobby of the city's state-of-the-art business school, I caught a glimpse of a vast and sparkling office complex in the distance -- Microsoft's largest such enterprise outside of Redmond, Washington. On the same trip, I visited a high-tech Indian firm founded by Indian Americans who got their start in California. The virtual bridge between U.S. high-tech centers and the Hyderabad-Bangalore corridor in India is the most obvious example of the high-tech future. According to a recent Duke University study, more than one in seven start-ups in Silicon Valley is founded by an immigrant from India.

As businesses multiply, our societies are increasingly being woven together, thanks in part to the 2.5 million Indian Americans in the United States, the wealthiest and best-educated immigrant community in the country. People-to-people contacts -- for work, education, and tourism -- have reached new heights. The U.S. embassy and consulates in India are on track to process a staggering 720,000 Indian U.S. visa applications this year; the U.S. consulate in Chennai issues more U.S. visas for skilled workers (43,000 last year) than any other U.S. diplomatic post in the world. Each year, the United States accepts more students from India -- 76,000 this year -- than from any other country. Many of them have gone on to make substantial contributions in both countries and across diverse fields. The Stanford graduates Sabeer Bhatia and Vinod Khosla founded Hotmail and Sun Microsystems, respectively; the Yale graduate Indra Nooyi became the CEO of PepsiCo last year; the Harvard Business School graduate Rajat Gupta went on to head McKinsey worldwide. The late heroic astronaut Kalpana Chawla left Punjab for the University of Texas, parlaying her aeronautical engineering degree into a distinguished career with NASA.

The rise of a new U.S.-India strategic partnership over the last two decades is one of the most significant and positive developments in international politics. If the old U.S.-India relationship could barely lift anchor, the new one has clearly set sail. Today there is more of a strategic upside to our relationship with India than there is with any other major power. Our great opportunity and challenge is what we do with it and how we put it to work to serve our hopes for global security and peace. Indians and Americans have a unique opportunity over the next generation to rewrite history as it ought to have been written in the first place: the world's oldest democracy will finally count the world's largest as one of its closest partners. By reaching out to India, we have made the bet that the planet's future lies in pluralism, democracy, and market economics rather than in intolerance, despotism, and state planning. Sixty years ago, our countries failed to chart a common course. Sixty years from now, no one will be able to accuse us of making the same mistake twice.