When George W. Bush was taking foreign policy lessons from the so-called "vulcans" (a group of advisers led by Condoleezza Rice) in the 2000 US presidential campaign, the subject of India arose: "A billion people and it's a democracy. Ain't that something?" said the then-governor of Texas.
What to some might have been a throwaway line about a faraway country was to Mr Bush an instinctive statement of support for a nation that Washington now routinely describes as a "natural ally". In spite of its continuing prickliness over sovereignty and a residual sense of anti-Americanism, India has returned Mr Bush's overtures with interest.
The burgeoning US-India relationship reached a high point early this year when Mr Bush visited New Delhi for the first time and concluded an unprecedented deal that permits India to derive all the advantages of being a signatory to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty without actually joining it. In other words, Mr Bush signalled that the US attached greater importance to India's emergence as a civil and weapons nuclear power – and thus implicitly endorses New Delhi's view of the NPT as a form of "nuclear apartheid" – than it did to the principal mechanism for containing the spread of the world's chief weapon of mass destruction.
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