By Ranjit Devraj
NEW DELHI, Nov 4 2004 (IPS)

While many Asians might have been shocked by George W Bush’s re-election as U.S. president, what mattered most to ordinary Indians was the fact that one of their kind, the 33-year-old Republican candidate Bobby Jindal, made it to Congress in the just concluded elections.

Two other candidates of Indian origin emerged victorious – Republican Nikki Randhawa Haley, 32 who will be the first Indian to hold office in North Carolina and Swati Dandekar, a Democrat who has been re-elected to the Iowa state assembly.

”Jindal’s victory proves that America is a land of opportunity for young and ambitious people from anywhere in the world,” said Sunita Arora, a young software engineer who is marking time working at a call centre ”to make a little pocket money and pick up ambience before I can finally emigrate.”

It was easy to guess why Arora was rooting strongly for the Republicans and Bush. ”(John) Kerry (Bush’s challenger) must be really daft if he cannot see that outsourcing will create more jobs in the U.S. rather than take them away,” she told IPS.

India currently earns 12..5 billion U.S. dollars annually from companies in the United States that outsource jobs ranging from low-end call centers and transcribing doctors’ dictation for prescriptions to engineering design and software, legal support, accounting and other jobs higher up the value chain.

News of Bush’s victory resulted in a surge in the stocks of Indian software giants like Infosys, Satyam and Wipro. There was an overall rally in the country’s stock exchanges with the ‘sensex’ (sensitive index) recording a seven-month high.

Kerry’s election rally tirades against the outsourcing of jobs to India and other developing countries would only have affected less than one percent of the business because it solely concerned U.S. government positions. Nonetheless, the presidential challenger succeeded in sending shock waves through a rapidly expanding business.

For India, the world’s largest democracy and an emerging power in Asia, there was much more at stake than a handful of outsourced jobs, although Kerry did his best to make it a major election issue.

Christopher Raj, Professor of American Studies at the Jawharalal Nehru University (JNU), told IPS in an interview on Thursday that this time around the Republicans were more clued into India than the Democrats. ”A look at their manifestos alone would reveal this,” he said.

”The Bush administration seemed keen to dispel the long-held belief that Republicans were more hostile to India than the Democrats while being friendlier to Pakistan,” said Raj.

In his assessment, under the second Bush administration India-U.S. ties could see a complete upgrading – which during the Cold War years was less than cordial because of New Delhi’s military and strategic alliance with the former Soviet Union.

”We may expect a new assessment of the Kashmir issue since Bush already has an inclination of what India calls cross-border terrorism (over the border with Pakistan) thanks to what is happening across the Syria-Iraq border,” said Raj.

India has already experienced an easing of pressure on its independent nuclear policy in recent months and Washington is currently engaged in holding a dialogue with New Delhi on what is officially referred to as Next Steps in Strategic Partnership (NSSP) that covers cooperation in the sensitive areas of nuclear and space research.

”This is as good as Washington indirectly recognizing India as a responsible nuclear power and contrasts with the insistence by the Democrat government under former president Bill Clinton that India sign the unequal Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT),” Raj said.

In spite of the overall cheer at the Republican win there were unmistakable signs that many ordinary but better informed Indians are still deeply opposed to Bush’s war in Iraq.

A mock presidential poll organized on Wednesday at the American Center in the heart of the national capital and open only to Indian citizens resulted in a big win for John Kerry who got 192 of the 300-odd votes cast.

”Bush went to war in Iraq only to gain control over its oil resources,” said 14-year-old schoolgirl Priya who voted firmly for John Kerry.

Officially, India’s Parliament under the right-wing, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government, which was voted out of office in May, passed a resolution condemning the war against Iraq, although it was accused by its opponents of trying to cosy up to Washington.

The communist-backed Congress government that took over has continued with the view that the war in Iraq is illegal. But Prime Minister Manmohan Singh seems to be ready to do business with Bush and is gearing up for a White House visit soon.

In a congratulatory message to Bush on his re-election, Singh showed signs of new Indian flexibility by saying that India was ”ready to contribute to the electoral process (in Iraq) early next year.”

India’s ‘calculated aloofness’ from the war in Iraq seemed to find resonance in August when three Indians captured by Iraqi rebels were released unharmed while workers from neighbouring countries like Nepal and Pakistan were slaughtered.

Also in his message to Bush, Singh said ”the global war against terrorism and efforts to combat weapons of mass destruction (WMD) proliferation will benefit enormously from your steadfast resolve and leadership.”

The reference to WMD, said Raj, was intended to indicate India’s keenness to project itself as a responsible nuclear power and one that maintained a tight lid on its weapons programme.

This image, he said, was necessary to indicate that the country was different from neighbouring Pakistan, which has seen a leading nuclear scientist confessing publicly to having passed on nuclear technology to third countries.

Abdul Qadeer Khan, considered the father of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb, has admitted selling the nation’s nuclear secrets to other countries. He was pardoned earlier this year by the Pakistani President, Pervez Musharraf.

According to Raj the lingering unhappiness with Washington’s foreign policy was not enough to discourage New Delhi’s quest to mend relations between the world’s two biggest democracies.

”It will certainly not deter young people from increasingly looking to the U.S. for inspiration and for opportunities – just look at the long queues of visa seekers outside the American Embassy,” he pointed out.

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