Lifting of the sanctions against India has been in the works for more than a year, and the U.S. government quickly moved to include Pakistan in the deal as one of the inducements for president Gen. Pervez Musharraf to back Washington's planned military assault against Afghanistan. The warming of relations provides U.S. imperialism with a strategic relationship with countries located next door to the Chinese workers state.

The sanctions, which bar economic and military assistance to the two countries, could be waived within the next week, a senior administration official told the New York Times. Since developing and dropping two atomic bombs on Japan at the end of World War II, Washington has sought to limit the number of states with nuclear weapons, using the 1994 Nuclear Proliferation Prevention Act and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty to try to prevent governments in semicolonial from developing nuclear arms.

"India is a nuclear power. There are a lot of reasons we ought to engage with India, and we're going to," stated U.S. deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage, summing up Washington's new policy last month. This policy shift has won bipartisan support, with Democrat Joseph Biden, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, backing the move.

Ending the sanctions would open the way for joint U.S.-India military operations and the sale of nonnuclear weapons technology to India. In fact, one of the growing number of leading U.S. officials to visit India over the recent months was Gen. Henry Shelton, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Along with welcoming India to the nuclear club, Washington is quietly dropping its previous demand that the Indian government sign the nuclear test ban treaty.

In a speech to U.S. and Indian businessmen in Bombay September 6, Robert Blackwill, the new U.S. ambassador to India, "extolled the common ground that the two nations have recently found on nuclear issues," commented the New York Times, "and pledged that the United States 'will not be a nagging nanny.'"

In lifting the sanctions Washington will also make U.S. high-technology exports available to more Indian and Pakistani companies. The U.S. government "is also likely to end its policy of blocking any international financial assistance for Pakistan through the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank," noted a September 20 article in the Financial Times. After the Pakistani government agreed to Washington's demands to serve as a military platform for U.S. imperialism's assault on Afghanistan, the IMF approved a sizable new loan for the already heavily indebted country.

In May, Indian prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee publicly embraced President Bush's plan to put in place a land, sea, and space-based antiballistic missile system. Indian officials hailed Bush's plan as a "far-reaching" concept that could "make a clean break with the past."

This sentiment was summed up by columnist C. Raja Mohan in the newspaper The Hindu. "The commitment of the Bush administration to build [this missile system] has opened the door for substantive cooperation between India and the U.S. to build a new global security order," he wrote. "A moment may be at hand now to put behind the wasted decades of the past and begin to [build] an Indo-U.S. security partnership."

Economic ties between Washington and New Delhi have been expanding as well. According to Blackwill, nearly 40 percent of the Fortune 500 U.S. companies now outsource their software operations to Indian companies. Currently the United States accounts for 15 percent of India's international trade.

Blackwill also expressed concern about a dispute stemming from the default by the Maharashtra State Electricity Board on payments for power it receives from a $3 billion power plant largely owned by the U.S. company Enron, representing the country's single largest foreign investment. "I want to be frank," stated Blackwill. "These disputes have darkened India's investment climate."

Relations between the U.S. and Indian rulers have been warming since a March 2000 visit to that country by then-U.S. president William Clinton.

In the coming months a number of cabinet members and other leading U.S. officials are planning to visit India. They include Secretary of State Colin Powell, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, and Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser.
 
 
Related articles:
Protests against U.S. war held in Pakistan, Indonesia
How state of Pakistan came into existence
Imperialists have sought for decades to rule Afghanistan
 
 
 
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