Ours is a love-hate relationship with America: its democracy, culture, universities hold us in thrall; its bullying repels us.
Whenever an American president wings his way to India, we always seem to get entangled in a bewildering variety of contradictory, confusing emotions. There’s jubilation at the chance to host the most powerful man of the world, to show him the wonder that’s India. Every word of his is decoded, every movement dissected. Underlying this excitement, though, persist the fears we have harboured over decades. Can’t we fathom the surreptitious American agenda, some ask. No matter how liberal a president of the United States may be, his principal goal is to dominate the world, conquer markets, and enrich his own citizens, they claim. Such warnings emanate from, and stoke, a vague anxiety about the future.
This emotional confusion about America, though, has become less acute over the years, largely because of the psychotherapeutic impact of cataclysmic changes around the globe. For instance, the end of the cold war and the disintegration of the Soviet Union into fragments have treated our paranoid propensity to see the spectre of cia behind developments not to our liking. And the ensuing withering of the non-aligned movement has removed the immobilising effect of having to constantly walk the tightrope between Moscow and Washington. This also seems to have resolved the contradiction in the hearts of those Indians who subscribed to a broad leftism but found the pull of the ‘elitist’ lifestyle of India, neither capitalist nor socialist, simply irresistible.
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