**OT** Indo-US Relations summed up in one word, "Panga"
Yankee Go Home But Take Me With You
Yet Another Perspective on Indo-American Relations
Jairam Ramesh
Secretary, Economic Affairs Department
All-India Congress Committee
(Presented in a personal capacity at the Roundtable on Indo-American Relations organized by the Council on Foreign Relations and the Asia Society, New York, November 1, 1999. Dedicated to the memory of Professor Myron Weiner.)
Introduction
I am grateful to my good friends Frank Wisner and Marshall Bouton for inviting me to address such a distinguished audience. Sherpas normally write speeches for summiteers. And so it has been with me for the past few years. Now to actually sit down and actually compose one for oneself is an altogether different experience. I hasten to add that whatever I say this evening is purely in my personal capacity as someone deeply interested in bringing our two countries closer together.
India may not be terribly important to the United States, as a recent survey of the Chicago Council of Foreign Relations revealed?only 36 percent of those surveyed in 1998 said that the United States has a vital interest in India, (although this proportion was up from 31 percent in 1994) and India?s "thermometer" rating was 46 degrees C in 1998, with anything more than 50 degrees being defined as a country towards whom "warm" feelings were expressed. But the United States is tremendously important for us. Porfirio Diaz bemoaned that Mexico?s tragedy was that it was so far away from God and so close to the United States. Well, India?s tragedy has been that it has been too close to God and far away from the United States!
I got to know Frank Wisner when he was Ambassador in New Delhi and was very often at the receiving end of his aggressive salesmanship. He was tough but transparent. He was unyielding but sensitive. He was fearless but friendly. He was certainly the right man at the right time to bring the two estranged democracies together.
Marshall is virtually half-Indian and has indefatigably worked to include India as part of Asia in the American consciousness, something that we take for granted in my country but that is not always apparent to Americans. It also turns out that he had known my father-in-law thirty years ago when he was doing his doctoral work in Tamil Nadu.
Mutual Perspectives
Frank wrote to me saying that he could think of no one better to articulate what India seeks in its relationship with the United States. What we desire is very simple and is captured in the title of this paper?Yankee Go Home But Take Me with You! This is more than a mere one-liner that sherpas are prone to, but captures the ambivalence of our attitudes. We want you to be out but we want to be in with you. We do not want to be a Tony Blair, who we see as your poodle, but we do want to have a special relationship with you, on our terms.....<continued>
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