James Clad is professor of Southeast Asian Studies at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service and is Director, Asia-Pacific Energy, for Cambridge Energy Research Associates.

After decades on the U.S. strategic periphery, India has moved closer to the limelight in recent months. President Clinton's impending visit provides an obvious news hook for rekindling American interest in the world's second most populous country, just as his quick drop-in on Pakistan will focus brief attention on that country's problems and prospects.

In our work, we focus almost entirely on India. Clinton's visit aside, a thorough rethink of India's place in U.S. economic and security perceptions had been long overdue. How exactly does India fit into current U.S. policy in Asia? And how should bilateral ties evolve in the future?

Basic U.S. and Indian interests have been converging for some time. In coming years, the United States will come to see India, not China, as an alternative, even preferred, strategic partner in Asia on many issues, chief among them being American economic and security aims.

The security dimension.

After decades in the amnesia ward of U.S. strategic concern, there is reawakened interest in India's place in the wider Asia power balance. It is no secret why this is happening now: China's emergence as a steadily more assertive Asian power coincides with a slow alteration of India's place on the American horizon.

Hostilities between the two South Asian neighbors have escalated

In considering India, American observers tend to harp on South Asian tension. The fighting last summer in the Kargil area came as the latest iteration of a territorial dispute now older than Palestine and every bit as bitter. In 1998, first India and then Pakistan blew painstakingly crafted non-proliferation and test ban consensus to bits with their nuclear weapons tests in May of that year. The two countries share 1,200 kilometers of contiguous, Cold War frontier and a half-century's bad blood. And recent months have seen planes shot down in Rajasthan deserts and soldiers from both sides bursting their lungs in Himalayan skirmishes at elevations rising to 14,000 feet.

What a sorry spectacle it is. But India's security concerns go much further. It is beginning to dawn on the tribe of Asian Hands in Washington that India has been kept out of the loop in just about every way in the evolution of American policy in Asia. For those skeptical of the Clinton administration's last throw at the China Engagement policy, India beckons as an "asset," a chess piece of uncertain prowess that we might play with ease on the Asian chessboard. Yet this analysis is too simple.

If negative nuclear and regional security issues work as "pull" factors, India's general economic growth, its skills and its competitiveness in information technologies act as a strong "push" factor in broadening American interest. As India's performance begins to reflect its potential, the country's place has been undergoing a major change in American eyes.

Whatever its exact dimensions, the country's middle class is definitely growing; comparatively enormous (perhaps 70 million Indians reasonably aspire to a Western lifestyle), it is thoroughly at home with American consumer habits.

Beyond that lies a profoundly important element -- the rising domestic influence in U.S. politics of hundreds of thousands of professionally trained migrants from India -- doctors, technicians, financial analysts and, most recently, high-tech venture capitalists. This has resulted in a raft of newly rich donors now becoming savvy in the ways of political participation. They aim to inject more texture and understanding into a relationship dominated, until the 1990s, by the State Department. They aim -- and are someway along in getting it -- at the type of variegated relationship with India that the United States now has with China.

Obstacles removed

To understand why this change took so long, one must briefly review the past five decades. For most of the time after Indian independence in 1947, U.S.-India relations oscillated between cordiality and rancor. By the early 1950s, India already had disappointed Secretary of State John Foster Dulles by criticizing his anti-communist alliance system. (Pakistan, by contrast, joined both SEATO and CENTO during 1954, badly unsettling India.)

Then a high point occurred, during 1962, when President Kennedy sent emergency military aid to bolster India after humiliating Chinese victories in disputed Himalayan border regions. A decade later, the relationship nose-dived again, this time when President Nixon sent an aircraft carrier group into the Bay of Bengal as a heavy hint to Delhi to limit the scope of its just-starting hostilities in December 1971 to East Pakistan, soon to become Bangladesh.

Soon afterward, India entered a friendship treaty with the Soviet Union while the United States switched to detente towards China. This left the United States and India on friendly terms with the other's chief foe. Add to this the consistent Indian diplomatic support for Vietnam during the 1970s and 1980s, and Delhi's muted response to the Soviet Afghan invasion after 1979, and the relationship understandably languished. But the Soviet Union's dissolution in 1991, and glaring new realities apparent after the Gulf War, should have changed things swiftly and utterly.

But the post-Cold War 'logic' collided with India's old command-economy elite, its romantic doctrines of self-sufficiency, and an odd mixture of awe and contempt for American hegemony. For 50 years, India's enthusiasm for top-down economic planning, and the sluggish "mixed economy" socialism this delivered, had led to nationalization of foreign firms and to an abiding sense that India had become, to put it mildly, a difficult place for U.S. firms to do business.

So it remains. Yet the emergence -- with no help from Indian bureaucrats -- of migrant Indian skills in information technologies and computer engineering has changed profoundly the impressions that corporate America has of India. Much back-office accounting for U.S. firms now occurs in Bangalore or Bombay. Many of the new patents derive from Indian migrants' research. Much new business beckons Ford Motor Company, IBM, the American International Group (AIG) and General Electric.

Different trajectories

Meanwhile, institutional memories in Washington of Pakistan's help during the Cold War containment of the USSR are fading. For well-nigh half a century, Pakistan displayed brilliant skill at leveraging its position to putative or near-parity with India -- in Cold War contests, in the Kashmir dispute, in economic liberalization and in nuclear weapons development. Yet, in all these areas, Pakistan's position has been slipping. Today it offers foreign corporations only payment headaches. Its balance-of-payments crisis seems chronic. As the Pakistanis themselves proclaim, their much-touted liberalization effort of the late 1980s succumbed to cronyism and to evaporating confidence.

Meanwhile, Pakistan's nuclear development is "off the shelf," while India's rests -- with many shortcomings to be sure -- on indigenous capacity. All in all, the leveraged importance Pakistan achieved for the United States has gone, leaving the door open for India.

Lastly -- and we hear a great deal of self-serving noise about this from India -- the political path that each country has taken since independence necessarily has estranged Pakistan from American affections. Despite geographic proximity and the British heritage, electoral democracy in Pakistan has been a tumultuous affair, with the military diving in and out of the dance. Now, since Gen. Pervez Musharraf's seizure of power six months ago, the brass hats are back again.

India, on the other hand, has retained its electoral stability while keeping the Army in the barracks where it belongs. India's one move in the other direction -- former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's so-called "Emergency" of 1975 -- ended in her electoral rout just two years later. To be sure, life can be tough for many Indians, and downright harsh for those within India's borders unlucky enough -- Punjabis, Assamese or Kashmiris -- to take on India's security forces. But the difference between India's and Pakistan's civil society grows more glaring with each passing year.

Unsolicited advice

What will Clinton say when he's in India?

Now the question is what Clinton should say to India when he arrives. One thing is for sure: The United States can never get the nuclear genie back in the South Asian bottle -- the futile game up to the May tests has been lost. Rightly or wrongly, India equates the achievement of great power status with possession of a nuclear capability. Rightly or wrongly, it sees both China and Pakistan as co-conspirators in its immediate neighborhood, adding to security anxieties.

So for starters, Clinton administration officials and their Indian counterparts should start with a lot more honesty. One can hardly chastise Delhi for rejecting a non-proliferation regime that Beijing routinely flaunted. India will not roll back its nuclear capability; the only crucial task is to have India, Pakistan, and China take measures to prevent conflict escalation on the subcontinent.

Beyond the negative security worries, Clinton should add some positive objectives to discuss in Delhi during his visit. We need to learn more from the Indians about how they see Asian power politics evolving. They can offer, and have already offered, valuable help in combating terrorism, enhancing trade, capping the exports of nuclear material and adding to regional stability.

The already existing joint Indo-U.S. Working Group on Terrorism, established several years ago, provides an excellent symbol of common interests. When viewing nuclear material exports, India's record contrasts very favorably to China's. In fact, India's willingness to sign the Missile Technology Control Regime merely formalizes existing policy.

In Prime Minister Vajpayee, India has a leader who, we emphasize, genuinely does not wish to weaken or wound Pakistan. Indeed, the Indian leader worries about Pakistan's slide toward ungovernability; breaking up Pakistan is the last thing Vajpayee wants. He restrained Indian counterattacks during the Kargil episode to retaking previous Indian positions. He refuses to contemplate pre-emptive attacks. His sights rest, instead, on China. And for our own stake in Asia, President Clinton should hear his insights into China's likely future course in Asia.

Rethinking India

Over the longer term, converging economic and security interests may push India and the United States into a carefully calibrated strategic relationship, primarily in Asia but increasingly in areas of mutual but global concern. Taking the lead on that will be the next U.S. administration, whatever the overdue and oddly handled Clinton visit purports to achieve. The end of the Cold War happened 10 years ago; it is time to see India for what it is: a rising, complex, and essentially cooperative Asian power that we need to get to know a lot better.

A final caveat: Let's not take this too far, too fast. No timeless identity of interests between the U.S. and India. The "common democracies equals common ideals" mantra should be retired. India and the United States are very different countries. Keeping one's perspective about the new rash (there have been three since 1991) of excited business reporting about India's "booming economy" is also a must-do. After all, nearly a decade of "liberalization" has enabled India to attract just 1/25 the amount of direct foreign investment going into China during the same time and just 5% of the amount that tiny Thailand has won.

In this presidential visit as in future U.S. administrations, the United States should only seek to give India its due, while guarding against the Indian elite's presumptions. Vajpayee knows the limits but we will probably hear a lot of silly talk from Delhi's chattering classes about a Grand New Strategic Partnership. Much time will have to pass before we get to that, if we ever do. In the meantime, however, a lot of space waits to be filled between the existing relationship, and the needed linkages, and even this lame-duck presidential visit is a good time to start.