Candidate Clinton, a cautious friend of India
NEW DELHI: Recent polls in which US voters were asked to choose between her and a roster of Republican president’s possible, have Hillary Clinton winning in 95% of them. New Delhi, like most capitals, is probably wondering what a second Clinton presidency this will mean for the country.
On the plus side, there is no doubt that Clinton has long taken an avid and personal interest in India. Her two visits to India as First Lady led her to become the strongest White House advocate for a full state visit by her husband and then US president, Bill Clinton.
It helped that she was among the first US politicians to recognise the financial clout of the Indian-American community.
She was also the strongest consistent advocate for India in the first Barack Obama term, say both Indian and US officials. Clinton had a broad agenda that encompassed gender issues, climate change, trade and investment policy, and democracy promotion and continued to woo India.
By the time she resigned as secretary of state, however, even she had wearied of the Manmohan Singh government’s inability to carry out anything. Privately, say US officials, she described India as among her greatest foreign policy “disappointments”.
As secretary of state Clinton never took any steps to reverse the visa ban on Narendra Modi that she inherited, but she and Bill Clinton met Modi when he went to the United Nations General Assembly last year. She has also praised his sanitation and Swaach Bharat programme. Which is a reminder that Clinton is a pragmatist, much less ideological and more centrist than Obama.
A President Clinton can be expected to continue where a second-term Obama administration has left off. And like him, her interest in India will be rekindled because of a Modi government that can put its legislation where its mouth is. New Delhi will also be helped by the fact, say Washington sources, that two of the front-runners to run her foreign policy — Nick Burns and Kurt Campbell — have been longstanding cheerleaders for the Indo-US relationship.