We're both democrats

A significant proportion of India's intelligentsia looks upon George W. Bush with derision. To them, he represents the image of a cowboy who shoots from the hip and a man who is least aware of the complexities of the world beyond the shores of the US.

A significant proportion of India's intelligentsia looks upon George W. Bush with derision. To them, he represents the image of a cowboy who shoots from the hip and a man who is least aware of the complexities of the world beyond the shores of the US. These people recall that when he took office, he couldn't remember the names of India's prime minister or that of Pakistan's president.

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Yet, it is the same Bush who took the strongest ever position in favour of India in his very first speech in the presidential campaign. And now, he has broken all norms of the US nuclear doctrine to make India an exception for supplying nuclear fuel. He brushed aside the 'ayatollahs of non-proliferation' in Washington and took the decision against the views of many Congressmen and senators of his own party, leave aside the Democrats. What explains Bush's unwavering and substantive bond with India?

Is there an inner logic and a deeper philosophical foundation, yet unrecognised by India's intelligentsia? In the process of resenting the man George, could they have blinded themselves to the revolutionary shift in US foreign policy towards India, under this President?

The Bush strategy is founded on pushing democracy across the world. He and his team see democracy as the 'soft power' that will define and script the 21st century. Manmohan Singh was quick in recognising these dynamics of change, and boldly inked the Singh-Bush accord six months ago.

What is the underpinning of Bush's India policy? Bush-Wolfowitz-Rice are Wilsonians in American foreign policy parlance. They do not believe in the passive

Jeffersonian perspective that democracy is like a shining city on the hill, which will automatically attract all nations to emulate.

Yet, within the Bush cabinet there were discordant voices. Colin Powell was a 'realist'. 'Don't go beyond pursuing national interest and commerce' would be Powell's advice. If such interests required one to support royal families and dictators, so be it. Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfield have been classified as 'populist' by Joseph Nye, Jr. They focus on self-reliance and frequent use of coercion. To extrapolate, they would perhaps say 'knock Saddam off surgically, but do not get embroiled in the task of rebuilding Iraq or engineering its democracy'.

The Wilsonians, Bush-Rice, are in search of substantive partners in this global endeavour of pushing democratic values. The partners themselves must be deeply wedded to free electoral process and pluralism. Thus the fateful words on the Bush-Singh accord of July 18, 2005 : "create (together) an international environment conducive to promotion of democratic values, and to strengthen democratic practices in societies which wished to become more open and pluralistic".

These are activistic words indeed. Of course, the balance of power in Asia in the 21st century between a dictatorship of the proletariat, China, and a thriving democracy, India, is of major significance in the Bush-Rice decision matrix.

How does the clash-of-civilisations debate play out in the Bush thesis? In 1995, Samuel Huntington predicted a clash between Islam and the West, where China would ultimately join the Islamic world, and interestingly, India and Russia would join the western world. What Huntington did not factor in is the possibility that Islamic nations could themselves begin to embrace democratic values, under internal or external influences.

It is instructive that the world's largest Muslim nation Indonesia has developed a massive moderate majority, marginalising the extremists. Similarly, democracy has produced a significant moderate majority in Malaysia, with extremists only in the fringes.

Despite having almost 150 million Muslims, India had not a single prisoner in Guantanamo Bay and not a single global terrorist of any importance. Our robust and inclusive democratic values can obviously explain this envious reality.

This is why the fight against the Taliban and the struggle to create a democracy in Afghanistan is so significant. So is the current struggle in Iraq where, no doubt, the Bush administration made serious mistakes, peppered by lapses and deep insensitivities. But there is no denying that the wheels of democracy have started churning in Iraq with the elections that were free and fair.

Massive coalition building and dispute settlement processes are underway within a democratic idiom. Will the Shia-Sunni conflict, along with Kurdish claims, be resolved over time through dialogue or will it ultimately turn into a conflagration? I am hopeful that, within an appropriate space and time, solutions will surface from the democratic process.

Following on the heels of Iraq came the free elections in Lebanon, and then the free elections in Palestine with the Hamas coming to power. I believe that Hamas too will be forced to reorient its priorities by focusing more on jobs and economic development for Palestinian youth.

Also, starting with the local elections, there's been a beginning of the electoral process in Saudi Arabia. When Condoleezza Rice spoke at the American University in Cairo in June 2005, she said, "for 60 years, my country, the US, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region, here in the Middle East, and we achieved neither. Now we are taking a different course. We are supporting the democratic aspirations of all people."

She added that "Egypt's elections must meet objective standards that define every free election, including freedom of assembly, speech and press." With emotion she said, "brave citizens are demanding accountability from their government".

After much soul searching on this subject, the Economist wrote a cover story on February 4: "The one thing Bush got right — democracy". This is the solid underpinning of our future relations with the US, nuclear fuel or no nuclear fuel. India's intelligentsia will perhaps ask whether the 'freedom agenda' is a 'veil for something else' — an American policy of stomping about the world deposing unfriendly regimes at will.

A dispassionate analysis suggests that India-US synergy in the Bush-Singh era is not a veil but founded on a bedrock of common values. The US is finally giving India the long awaited 'democracy dividend'. Let us give it a shot.

The writer is Secretary General, Ficci