That position does not seem to bother India too much. Maybe, because for over 50 years India had survived, if not thrived, without forging any kind of special relationship with the US. All those years, the US had never hesitated to act against the interest of India, pumping massive military and other aid in cash and kind to Pakistan most of which was used to attack India repeatedly.

It is a different matter that the Pakistanis never got the better of India: their dream of wresting Kashmir remains a dream and in the process they have lost the eastern half of the Muslim heaven that Mohammed Ali Jinnah had had the British rulers carved out of British India. A resurgent India should be able to face threats to its existence from the US, China and Pakistan triumvirate in a much better manner than it did from the Chinese aggression of 1962.

In today’s world, a war that is fought intensely is not necessarily always on the battlefields but on the diplomatic front and in the halls of seminar rooms and think tanks staffed by all kinds of ‘experts’ whose voices travel loudly. It is a more effective tool than the old style crude propaganda war of the days of the Nazi Germany.

Many decisions taken at the highest levels of administration are often based on the inputs from the sophisticated, cleverly prepared mixture of truths and half-truths that pass for ‘erudite doctrines’ that come from the stables of think tank experts. The voice that reaches the farthest corners has a better chance of being heard—it is as simple as that. It does appear the Indian voice does not travel far enough; nor does it have the decibel strength. It might not be wrong to assume that the US has the largest cluster of these think tanks with perhaps UK coming a close second. India must be near the bottom of the table in this regard. The post-Soviet world of one superpower is influenced a great deal by the views of the US--and perhaps also its ‘closest’ ally, the UK. Their views are the loudest, articulated across the global media, the academia and the various international forums.

Indians continue to tear their hair and blame Manmohan Singh or his foreign ministry mandarins for the Balochistan fiasco at Sharm El-Shaikh. But some of the Pakistani ‘experts’ in the US have been raising for quite some time now their voices against Indian ‘presence’ in Afghanistan and ‘meddling’ in Balochistan. One American lady, who ironically was in India when her remarks had raised a storm here, was quoted by the Pakistani media as saying that the Indian consulate in Zahedan, in the eastern ‘Balochistan’ part of Iran, was not confining itself to issuing visas—implying it was dabbling in subversive activities.

Her ‘expert’ comments obviously did not take into consideration the vital fact that had the Indian consulate been actually indulging in ‘un-diplomatic’ activities the Iranians would have shut it down long ago—if not done something worse. But ‘experts’ presenting patently biased view is part of the new high decibel diplomacy where India has a lot of catching up to do.

The problem in India is that not only does it lack sufficient number of quality think tanks and a fuller army of scholars and experts but it also seems to be working most of the time in isolation from their counterparts in the two countries. This is not to say that there is no communication or exchange of visits between the Indian and American think tank members, or that the Indian view is totally blacked out in the US and other important capitals.

What is, however, clear is that the Indian point comes out feebly from Washington and the Indian presence looks inadequate and less weighty. The area where it is quite prominent is in the area of studies on India’s troubled relations with its western neighbours. It could well be by design or by accident; one doesn’t know.

In looking at and reviewing events in the sub-continent, the university dons, experts and think tanks in the US have shown some understanding of the Indian point of view. But there has been a far more stress on presenting the Pakistani point on issues that have a direct or indirect relation with India. There is always a Pakistani who presents the case of his country or a Pakistani ‘expert,’ but rarely an Indian who would counter those views. There appear to be far more Pakistanis on the American academia circuit at the moment than probably ever before, which is something of a surprise. The American think tank and academia have a preponderance of Pakistanis drawn from different fields -- university, journalism, politics, military, intelligence, politics and diplomacy. They are provided all the important and prestigious forums to air their views, which invariably have an anti-India sting in them. A former journalist-cum-diplomat of Pakistan lost no time in launching regular verbal aggressions against India moments after she gave up her diplomatic job and landed in a Washington tank. .

Another Pakistani, a former journalist-cum-politician and now a diplomat who had once presented himself as a critic of the military rule in his country and had exposed the nexus between the military and the terrorists now likes to distinguish between the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ terrorists—the former being the ones who spread terror in India.

The greater amount of exposure being given to the anti-Indian lobbies in the US must have been inspired by the increasing hiatus between India and the Obama administration. It might be futile to ‘demand’ that the Pakistani views must be ‘hyphenated’ with India’s. A better way might be for Indian think tanks and experts to take a harder look at the US polices that affect India adversely and determine where exactly does Obama’s America place its relations with India.

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