Time to mend fences with the US

India and the US should engage with each other in defence and other areas. Brinkmanship on IPR issues is best avoided

The astounding mandate secured by Narendra Modi has led scholars and commentators to focus on what more the US can do to win Indias favour. While some argue that the Obama administration ought to modi-fy its advance, others recommend developing a new relationship with India.

In most instances, punditry appears focused on the immediate future, perhaps for good reason. Commentators seem sold on Modis campaign slogan that the good days are coming. Getting on the right side of the new Prime Ministers expected economic and fiscal turn is considered chief priority for most governments, especially the US, which had banned Modi from its shores.

The current state of political transition in India offers an opportunity to ask questions that look past immediate concerns. This is, of course, not to suggest that efforts designed to overcome the touchy issue of a visa ban on Modi are not important.

Personal anguish can make all the difference in state-to-state relations. Conviction on the part of incumbents is sometimes the key to unforeseeable advancements, a point clearly illustrated by the determination shown by President George W Bush and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in negotiating a landmark civil-nuclear agreement between 2005 and 2008.

Yet, the exaggerated focus on how best an Obama White House may reach out to a Modi-led PMO risks losing sight of what this crucial relationship means for world politics in a more general sense.

Indeed, there is little doubt that India-US relations will strengthen. It maybe joyless, as Ashley Tellis, senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, persuasively argues, but it will be productive nonetheless.

There is an urgent need to address differences pertaining to intellectual property standards. India is one of 10 countries listed on the priority watch list of the United States Trade Representatives (USTR) annual report. The key issue, according to it, has to do with Indias weak IPR legal framework and enforcement system which hamper Indias innovation climate. This is most acute, according to the report, in areas such as pharmaceuticals and agro-chemicals, where it is difficult to secure and enforce patents.

In turn, the BJPs retort is unrelenting. During the campaign, Hardeep Puri, the former Indian ambassador to the UN and now a party member, made it clear that the report is extra-constitutional.

Even special provisions such as settling matters prior to an out-of-cycle review were put down by Puri as nonsense. The answer, according to him, lay in taking the matter to the World Trade Organisations dispute settlement body. Rather than resort to brinkmanship, simply because this is a determined US-led initiative, it would be prudent to engage the US bilaterally to arrest such divergence.

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Time to mend fences with the US