Who is good for India: A Republican President or a Democrat President?

India has come a long way when it comes to both the US Presidents and US presidential elections.

For the first 50 years since India’s independence (till 1997), there were just three US presidential visits to India. The first two visits were by Republican Presidents, Dwight D Eisenhower (in 1959) and Richard Nixon (in 1969), and third one was by a Democrat, Jimmy Carter (in 1978).

However, the 23 years since then saw five US presidential visits to India: three of them by two Democrats, Bill Clinton (in 2000) and Barack Obama (in 2014 and 2015), and two by the Republicans, George W Bush (in 2006) and Donald Trump (in February).

Since the Clinton visit, both India and the US have travelled quite some distance. It has been a remarkable journey that got rid of the delusions of the past. Steadily, the relationship started being driven by realism, changes the world had seen since the USSR’s fall, the economic rise and political and military behaviour of China, and the growing clout of Indian American diaspora.

The two democracies eventually shed the hesitations of the past, which was also shaped by distrust over nuclear issues, and Washington currying strategic favour with Pakistan on crucial issues of national security importance to India.

In the process, old concerns of political ideologies defining bilateral ties have vanished, and the relationship found its bearing in bipartisan support in the US, and New Delhi has learnt to live with the dominantly transactional nature of US foreign policy.

On its part, the US stopped behaving like the eternal conscious keeper on issues such as Kashmir, human rights and religious freedom. It is more than a coincidence that as the political ties started to transform itself, the Indian market became bigger for US products, and the ticket size of the defence purchase from the US grew substantially. Since 2008, India has procured around $18 billion-worth of defence items from the US. Indian students numbering 227,000 currently contribute $6.5 billion to the American academic sector.

The US is India's largest trading partner, and India is among the top 10 trading partners in terms of sheer volume of business. In short, there are enough bucks in the ties to keep it going and growing.

Republican or Democrat, the US Presidents are guided by their national interests. US’ national interests shift on their own, and permanence is hardly a virtue. Obama spoke unflatteringly about jobs being shifted from "Buffalo to Bangalore" and wooed China like no other. He also became the first US President to visit India in both terms in office and contributed considerably to the growth of bilateral ties. Bush was exceptionally nice to India, and offered India a nuclear deal which ended the country's nuclear pariah status without signing the Non Proliferation Treaty.

Trump has also been exceptional for India. He proclaimed Washington’s consensus was bad for Washington and made the relationship even more transactional and unconventional. Of late, the Republicans in general, and Trump in particular, don't harp on shared values between the two countries, instead, the emphasis is on shared interest. The focus on shared values can be irksome as they often bring out sermons in the form of Congressional resolutions or public statements, for which the Democrats have taken a shining. This also does not matter beyond a point. There are enough convergences in the relationship that make such irritants inconsequential.

The Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden has already reminded Indian Americans — the third-largest group in the larger Asian American population after the Chinese and Filipino — how he had stood for bettering ties with India and asserting that he would continue to do the same. If elected to power, the Biden administration would possibly have some of the influential Indian Americans, such as former US envoy to India Rich Verma, Biden Unity Task Force Economic Policy adviser Sonal Shah, and former US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, and Centre for American Progress Action Fund CEO Neera Tanden.

Though optics play its part in foreign relations, what drives the relationship is the shared interests and mutual benefit. This makes the age-old question of ‘Who is good for India: a Democrat President or a Republican President?’ a bit irrelevant. Republican or Democrat, the approach towards India will depend on what would come to define American national interest in the next four years that would translate into shared interests and mutual benefit between the two countries. 

Jayanth Jacob is a foreign policy commentator who covered the ministry of external affairs for more than two decades. Twitter: @jayanthjacob. Views are personal.