US President George W. Bush leaves this region having declared India and Pakistan strategic partners. But his declarations spoke just as loudly of the shifting balance of power in the region, and the world.
It was India that appeared to come out the biggest winner last week. Pakistan walked away with little more than a mild pat on the back after Bush's visit on Saturday. While buttressing the US' alliances in the region, Bush also took home a formidable political challenge to sell his nuclear deal with India to a skeptical Congress.
India could hardly be more pleased. "IND-US Civilization" screamed a front-page headline in the Times of India on Saturday, in joyous praise for what Bush had bestowed on the nation.
Those gifts included a nuclear deal celebrated by Indian officials, elevation as a global leader and nary a recriminatory word on the troubles in the disputed province of Kashmir. Indian backers of a US-India partnership were elated.
"I think we have managed to get a rather good deal," a senior Indian official said, unwilling to disclose his name because the full details of the nuclear agreement had yet to be shared with the Indian parliament. "This is from our point of view, a hard bargain."
In Pakistan, the difference was discerned.
"One thing is very clear: The US is keeping India and Pakistan at two different levels," said Hasan Askari Rizvi, an independent political analyst in Lahore. "The kind of multifaceted interaction that exists between India and the United States is not to be seen with reference to Pakistan. For Pakistan, it's a limited and cautious support."
Some US Congress members and analysts have already taken the Bush administration to task for making too many concessions to India, the bete noire of outsourcing in some US circles and a stubborn opponent of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Bush's test is to persuade Americans that India is worth the bargain.
The balance of costs and benefits has everything to do with India's new place in the world and its rise in the US imagination.
It is the world's largest democracy, seen in some quarters as a potential check on China. It has the world's second-largest Muslim population. Its engineers and call center workers are embedded in the largest US firms. Its immigrants in the US have grown swiftly in number, wealth and influence.
Perhaps most important, India's economy has galloped forward for the last several years: It is poised to post more than 8 percent growth this year and double-digit growth in the years ahead. Its potential market is vast.
Bush exhorted India to open that market further, and in his joint statement with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, he listed "economic prosperity and trade" as the first among several agreements made between the countries.
But it is the nuclear deal, which commits the US to supporting India's civilian nuclear program, that will stand as the measure of what was achieved last week.
Despite Pakistani demands for equal nuclear status with India, the White House maintained that the scandal surrounding the Pakistani nuclear scientist A.Q. Khan and his illegal nuclear peddling made no such deal possible anytime soon.
There was only a passing public reference to Kashmir -- and that too only to urge the leaders of both India and Pakistan to work it out between themselves.
What Pakistan got instead was affirmation of its standing as a vital ally in the war on terrorism and what many in India will interpret as modest blessing of President Pervez Musharraf's brand of democracy, despite Bush's nudge to conduct transparent elections next year.
Likewise, Indian officials point out that strategic ties with Washington can help India achieve its aspirations on the world stage -- chief among them, ending the country's nuclear isolation in the world and yielding the legitimacy it has long sought as a nuclear weapons state.
Mushahid Hussain, a member of the Pakistani parliament and close to Musharraf, said at least the new strategic partnership between Pakistan and the US should yield a "a peace dividend" for South Asia.
To please two lovers is by nature an impossible task, and in this instance, Bush did not leave South Asia without leaving a trail of ambivalence -- and even outright anger -- in both countries.
And while both India and Pakistan may be grateful in receiving what support Washington has to offer, it was not clear that either nation could embrace all that Bush expected of his new friends. In India, for starters, Bush's message of crusading for democracy worldwide raised eyebrows.
"As a global power, India has an historic duty to support democracy around the world," is what he told the audience at Purana Qila, a fort on Friday. He used the word "democracy" 16 times in his speech.
Ashok Mehta, a retired general who writes about foreign policy, pointed out that India was not in the habit of spreading democracy, not even in its own neighborhood.
"We would like countries to uphold democratic values, but we will not thrust that down their throats," is how Mehta put it, on his way out of the Bush address.
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