India-US Relations: Next Steps in Strategic Partnership

Historically, the relations between India and US have alternative trends of warmth and thaw in bilateral relations. Several factors that undermined the relation of India US were as follows:

• India-Pakistan Relations was one of the important barometers of relations of either country with United States.
• Successive American administrations concerned only with need to contain communism and viewed India’s NAM rhetoric as veiled alignment to USSR.
• The US alliance and military support to Pakistan was a cause of friction.
• The dominance of state in Indian economy was not look with much favour in US.

In the first 50 years since India’s freedom, only four US presidents visited India. This entire period was filled with misconceptions. The end of the cold war in 1990s coincided with liberalization of Indian economy and gradually there was an improvement in the relations of the two countries.  The air was first cleared when Bill Clinton visited India in 2000 for five days. America realized the gravity of terrorism only during tenure of his successor George W Bush, when growth of the militant Islamic fundamentalism culminated in the 9/11 attacks. The counter terrorism operations of United States also brought it somewhat closer to India. During those times, a bilateral link was developed to set up a joint commission to counter terrorism. Gradually, the cooperation areas were increased from counter terrorism to defense cooperation, high technology cooperation. For the later, a “High Technology Cooperation Group” (HTCG) was established in 2002 as a forum to discuss ways to promote High-Technology Trade.

In January 2004, the United States and India agreed to expand cooperation in three specific areas viz. Civilian nuclear activities, Civilian space programs and High-technology trade. The above three were called ‘trinity’. In September 2004, India and US announced a major progress in the form of “Next Steps in Strategic Partnership” (NSSP) initiative. The core philosophy was that, implementation of the NSSP would lead to significant economic benefits for both countries and improve regional and global security.

The biggest outcome of establishing the NSSP initiative was that it enabled the United States to make modifications to U.S. export licensing policies that would foster cooperation in commercial space programs and permit certain exports to power plants at safeguarded nuclear facilities.