NEW DELHI, Feb. 27 — When President Bush lands in India early Wednesday, he will encounter an ever ambivalent American ally with one important difference from the past: this India has new power to assert its views, some of which align with Mr. Bush's agenda and some of which do not.
A performer removed his mask after an anti-Bush rally in New Delhi last week. Despite the protests, many Indians say they admire America.
Much has changed, in fact, since the last visit here by an American president, in 2000, when President Clinton's address to the Indian Parliament was received so enthusiastically that lawmakers climbed over benches to shake his hand.
Facing prospects of protests, President Bush is not expected to address Parliament at all. But that is not to say that India has morphed into an anti-American redoubt. There is still in most quarters enthusiasm for relations.
But in the past six years, India has also become a more confident partner — in trade and in America's campaigns against terrorism and nuclear proliferation — which touch India both obliquely and directly as it looks abroad in pursuit of its own interests like never before. Meanwhile, India's endemic prickliness shows no signs of remission.
Pratap Bhanu Mehta, president of the nonpartisan Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, sees in his country what he calls "a great admiration for U.S. power," a capacity that many Indians find worthy of emulation. "This is a power that acts independently, acts freely, is not constrained," he said. "It's not so much an anti-American view than wanting to replicate that."
That fine balance is most visible in talks over whether to reward India with access to American nuclear technology, an issue about which both sides would like to announce a deal this week. They are not there yet, as the talks rub up against the one thing that many Indians, particularly in the political elite, hold dear: the idea of India's independence.
Little else may actually unite opinion here. Indeed, the many shades of political opinion found in this feisty country of one billion defy any easy rendering — of an India as either for or against the United States. India has fundamentalists of the Hindu and Muslim persuasion, Maoist guerrillas, free marketers, newly minted millionaires and Marxist lawmakers with posters of Che Guevara on their office walls.
The Pew Global Attitudes Project found Indians last year to be among the most cheerful in their appraisal of both the United States and President Bush. In a survey published this week in the Indian newsweekly Outlook, two-thirds of Indians "strongly" or "somewhat" regarded Mr. Bush as "a friend of India," even as 72 percent called the United States "a bully."
In the same survey, conducted by A. C. Nielsen, nearly two-thirds of respondents said India should go its own way and defy American objections on a natural gas pipeline to Iran. Perhaps most striking, fewer than half the Indians surveyed said they would want to "settle down in the U.S."
The conflicting currents come as relations between the countries have undergone a revolution, and are more entwined than ever before, making commonplace today what would have been unthinkable even a few years ago.
Indians are buying American arms. The two military powers are conducting joint counterinsurgency exercises. Indians are among the fastest growing immigrant groups in the United States, and charity money from America — something that would be held in suspicion in the recent past — is helping to train Indian nurses to care for people with AIDS.
But it is the nuclear deal that is potentially most fraught for both sides. In contradiction to its stand against nuclear proliferation with countries like Iran, the White House has promised India access to civilian nuclear technology, provided that New Delhi comes up with a plan to separate its civilian and military programs.
As beneficial as such a deal would be to this vast, energy-starved nation, it is this demand that has exposed a deep vein of postcolonial pride in the Indian political culture. Why, even pro-American voices are asking, should Washington be allowed to exert leverage over the contours of the nuclear program in India, long a defiant opponent of the global nonproliferation treaty?
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