US election 2020: What India thinks of the US election (opinion)

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Indian diplomats say privately that handling the Trump administration has been complicated. At one level, India and the US have continued to move their nascent strategic relationship forward with mutual concerns about China’s territorial and political assertiveness in the Indo-Pacific serving as the backdrop. The US president and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi have gone out of their respective ways to rub shoulders and share podiums with each other over the past four years. New Delhi and Washington have never been closer in military and economic terms. The Trump administration is credited for giving India far greater access to defense technology, for example, than any previous US government.
At the highest level, India has had to work hard to cater to Trump’s personal liking for the theatrical and his determination to win small but symbolically important battles in trade and immigration for his domestic constituents. The then-Indian foreign secretary and now Foreign Minister, S. Jaishankar, told India’s commentariat in 2017, “Don’t demonize Trump, analyze Trump. He represents a thought process.”

He could have been describing the Indian government’s entire approach to the US president.

Modi has courted the US administration by inviting Ivanka Trump to India, inviting Trump himself to an Indian-American “Howdy Modi” rally in Houston and, most spectacularly, ensuring the US president received the largest possible audience during his visit to India with events that included a 100,000-strong rally in Gujarat.
All of this allowed Indian and US officials to soften the hard edges of Trump’s trade and immigration policies and facilitate White House approval of other bilateral agreements.

But does this mean that Modi would be worried if Trump is not reelected? Almost certainly not.

Overall, Delhi is confident the Indo-US relationship is strong enough that it doesn’t matter who wins the presidency. Senior Indian officials say relations between the leaders of major countries are driven overwhelmingly by national interests and only marginally by personalities. They point to Modi’s excellent working relationship with Obama, whom Modi invited to be chief guest at India’s Republic Day parade. Obama was the first US president to receive this honor. Their political views were miles apart, but they bonded strongly on issues like climate change and other issues.
And while they worry that Joe Biden would waste time trying to embrace China in the way of the first few years of the Obama administration, they are familiar with many of the Biden foreign policy team and with Biden himself, who as a senator backed the US-India nuclear deal in 2008.
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While it is common to claim Modi and Trump are part of a larger global right-wing populist wave, the comparison is facile. The right-wing ideology of the BJP diverges significantly from that of Trump. Modi is best known for his religion-infused nationalism, but he is also a fervent proponent of climate action andr has massively expanded his country’s welfare programs. At the Gujarat rally, with Trump sitting beside him, Modi used his closing remarks to list his policy accomplishments — specifically mentioning his promotion of solar power, introducing a national healthcare system and passing India’s first transgender rights law.

If Biden wins, the Indian government can be expected to re-engage on climate issues, an easing of immigration restrictions and a resumption of less rancorous trade talks. New Delhi would also like to shore up sagging multilateralism and expects a President Biden to be less eager to pull all US troops out of Afghanistan, a major point of difference with the Trump administration.

Biden, for his part, has promised to work with India on issues like fighting terrorism and curbing China.
However, a Biden administration would also have its differences with Modi’s nationalist agenda. One area of disagreement is the Modi government’s changes to Kashmir’s constitutional status and its refugee policies. Democrats have criticized these policies as human rights abuses that are biased against Muslims; Indian officials argue that these are a misunderstanding of what the legislation sought to accomplish.
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The real geopolitical glue, as was the case with the Trump administration, will be how much convergence Biden and Modi have on tackling China. New Delhi gave President Trump high scores for standing up to Beijing. Even though Trump was often erratic, Indian diplomats believe his administration recognized the threat posed by China and articulated a robust US Indo-Pacific policy. While Biden has also spoken out against China, New Delhi is unclear how willing a President Biden will be take steps against Beijing when his administration clearly would want to focus on domestic issues like health care and the Covid-19 pandemic.

Indians, great admirers of the US and its technological capabilities, have been bewildered at how the nation has blundered its way through the pandemic. While both countries have struggled to contain the virus, Modi’s approach could not have been more different to Trump’s.

When it became clear India’s rickety healthcare system and unruly federal structure were failing to contain the virus, Modi agreed to impose one of the severest economic lockdowns in the world. On most points, Trump took a different track: undermining the medical experts and advocating against lockdown as much as possible. India has fared better as a consequence, with India’s active cases falling since late September and a mortality rate that is now about 1.5%, compared to the US’s 2.6%.
More importantly for Modi is that his handling of the pandemic improved his already sky-high approval ratings.
Indian politicians meanwhile have taken to buffing their own pandemic records by comparing them to the US. Delhi chief minister and opposition leader, Arvind Kejriwal, bragged that when it came to Covid-19 policies, “What Delhi did yesterday, America does today.” Trump, in turn, has compared the US’s record on testing favorably to that of India’s and claimed India and other countries are not giving proper counts of their Covid fatality numbers. While there is a kernel of truth in both statements, Indians find it almost a matter of pride to be treated as a benchmark by a country with a per capita income over 30 times their own.
There is also considerable vicarious pride in the choice of an Indian-American, Sen. Kamala Harris, as Biden’s running mate. One noticeable characteristic of the present campaign is the degree to which both candidates have gone to woo the Indian-American community. That the US is home to what is perceived by Indians as their most successful diaspora is just one more — and arguably the most lasting — reason that India and the US will remain close, irrespective of election results in either country.



Source : Nbcnewyork