On Obama’s India Visit

I want to make two comments on American President Barack Obama’s recently concluded visit to India.
 

What Obama Wanted: During the most of his visit, Obama acted like the CEO of USA, which is good as such. His visit seemed to be focused only on a few issues related to interests of the US. And he got what he wanted – several publicized deals. Though I don’t think the much touted 50,000 jobs is a big deal. Population of US is 31,02,16,000 and with 10% unemployment rate, absolute unemployment becomes 3,10,21,600. 50,000 is only 0.16% of the unemployment figure. Even if he visits 100 countries in a year and win 50,000 jobs in each nation – he would only make up 16.11% of the unemployment figure. The remaining would be a challenge hard to tackle. This is why I see error in his strategy of “winning jobs”. He should be doing something for American economy and a boastful economy would generate far more jobs. (Though controversial, but facilitating the sale of some American companies to Indian or Japanese hands (in deep pockets) would help the US rather than giving American companies some subsidies. And I see even the reverse strategy paying off to the US – allow more Indian and non-US based MNCs enter, expand, and diversify in the US market – that would create far more number of jobs in the US than trying to open up Indian market for the troubled and uncertain American companies.)
 

How Opposition behaved: Following up the press coverage, I noticed a very good trend. The opposition has really been constructive and responsible on the issues related to Obama’s visit. It may be because it was AB Vajpayee of BJP/NDA who had forged Indo-US alliance in real terms. During his visit to the US, Mr. Vajpayee used the term “Natural Partners” for India, which Obama is accepting now. At that time the US President Clinton reciprocated to Vajpayee’s gesture and then on a new era of Indo-US partnership started. May be the BJP is still carrying on with its policy. Also, this time the BJP has not been only goody-goody. The party took a strong line and pushed the govt to be a bit assertive about US response on terrorism and Pakistan. During the last leg of his visit, Obama did make some strong anti-terrorism statements in a way targeted to Pakistan, and with his support for India’s candidature for UN Security Council, the relationship turned towards becoming win-win than being only one sided affair. Credit goes to the BJP in particular and opposition in general too.
 

In any case, I wish only the best for Indo-US friendship. What started from Swami Vivekananda’s visit should culminate in better ties and a close relationship between the two great nations.