The fall’s most controversial book is almost certainly The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, in which political scientists John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt warn that Jewish Americans have built a behemoth that has bullied policymakers into putting Israel’s interests in West Asia ahead of America’s.

To Mearsheimer and Walt, AIPAC, the main pro-Israel lobbying group, is insidious. But to more and more Indian Americans, it’s downright inspiring.

With growing numbers, clout and self-confidence, the Indian American community is turning its admiration for the Israel lobby and its respect for high-achieving Jewish Americans into a powerful new force of its own.

Following consciously in AIPAC’s footsteps, the India lobby is getting results in Washington — and having a profound impact on US policy, with important consequences for the future of Asia and the world.

“This is huge,” enthused Ron Somers, the president of the US-India Business Council. “It’s the Berlin Wall coming down. It’s Nixon in China.”

What has Somers so energised is a landmark nuclear cooperation deal between India and the United States, which would give India access to US nuclear technology and deliver fuel supplies to India’s civilian power plants in return for placing them under permanent international safeguards.

Under the deal’s terms, the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty will in effect be waived for India, just nine years after the Clinton administration slapped sanctions on New Delhi for its 1998 nuclear tests. But the Bush administration, eager to check the rise of China by tilting toward its massive neighbour, has sought to forge a new strategic alliance with India, cemented by the civil nuclear deal.

On the US side, the pact awaits nothing more than one final up-or-down vote in Congress. On Capitol Hill, despite deep divisions over Iraq, immigration and the outsourcing of American jobs to India, Democrats and Republicans quickly fell into line on the nuclear deal, voting for it last December by overwhelming bipartisan majorities.

Even lawmakers who had made nuclear nonproliferation a core issue over their long careers, such as Sen Richard Lugar, R-Ind, quickly came around to President Bush’s point of view. Why?

The answer is that the India lobby is now officially a powerful presence on the Hill. The nuclear pact brought together an Indian government that is savvier than ever about playing the Washington game, an Indian American community that is just coming into its own and powerful business interests that see India as perhaps the single biggest money-making opportunity of the 21st century.

The nuclear deal has been pushed aggressively by well-funded groups representing industry in both countries. At the centre of the lobbying effort has been Robert Blackwill, a former US ambassador to India and deputy national security adviser who’s now with a well-connected Republican lobbying firm, Barbour, Griffith & Rogers LLC.

The firm’s website touts Blackwill as a pillar of its “India Practice”, along with a more recent hire, Philip Zelikow, a former top adviser to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice who was also one of the architects of the Bush administration’s tilt toward India. The Confederation of Indian Industry paid Blackwill to lobby various US government entities, according to the Boston Globe. And India is also paying a major Beltway law firm, Venable LLP.

The US-India Business Council has lavished big money on lobbyists, too. With India slated to spend perhaps $60 billion over the next few years to boost its military capabilities, major US corporations are hoping that the nuclear agreement will open the door to some extremely lucrative opportunities, including military contracts and deals to help build nuclear power plants. According to a recent MIT study, Lockheed Martin is pushing to land a $4 billion to $9 billion contract for more than 120 fighter planes that India plans to buy.

Bonner & Associates created an India lobbying group last year to make sure that US companies reap a major chunk of the deal. Dubbed the Indian American Security Leadership Council, the group was underwritten by Ramesh Kapur, a former trustee of the Democratic National Committee, and Krishna Srinivasa, who has been backing the GOP causes since his 1984 stint as co-chair of Asian Americans for Reagan-Bush. The council has, oddly, “recruited groups representing thousands of American veterans” to urge Congress to pass the nuclear deal.

The India lobby is also eager to use Indian Americans to put a human face — not to mention a voter’s face and a campaign contributor’s face — on its agenda.

There are now some 2.2 million Americans of Indian origin — a number that’s growing rapidly. First-generation immigrants keenly recall the humiliating days when India was dismissed as an overpopulated, socialist haven of poverty and disease. They are thrilled by the new respect India is getting. Meanwhile, a second, American-born generation of Indian Americans who feel comfortable with activism and publicity is just beginning to hit its political stride. As a group, Indian Americans have higher levels of education and income than the national average, making them a natural for political mobilisation.

One standout member of the first generation is Sanjay Puri, who founded the US India Political Action Committee in 2002. (Its acronym, USINPAC, even sounds a bit like AIPAC.) He came to the US in 1985 to get an MBA at George Washington University, staying on to found an information-technology company. A man of modest demeanour who wears a lapel pin that joins the Indian and American flags, Puri grew tired of watching successful Indian Americans pony up money just to get their picture taken with a politician. “I thought, ‘What are we getting out of this?’,” he explained.

In just five years, USINPAC has become the most visible face of Indian American lobbying. Its website boasts photos of its leaders with President Bush, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, and presidential candidates from Fred Thompson to Barack Obama. The group pointedly sports a New Hampshire branch. It can also take some credit for ending the Senate career of Virginia Republican George Allen, whose notorious taunt of “macaca” to a young Indian American outraged the community. Less publicly, USINPAC claims to have brought a lot of lawmakers around. “You haven’t heard a lot from Dan Burton lately, right?” Puri asked, referring to a Republican congressman from Indiana who has long been perceived as an India basher.

USINPAC is capable of pouncing; witness the incident last June when Obama’s campaign issued a memo excoriating Hillary Rodham Clinton for her close ties to wealthy Indian Americans and her alleged support for outsourcing, listing the New York senator’s affiliation as “D-Punjab”. Puri personally protested in a widely circulated open letter, and Obama quickly issued an apology. “Did you see? That letter was addressed directly to Sanjay,” Varun Mehta, a senior at Boston University and USINPAC volunteer, told me with evident admiration. “That’s the kind of clout Sanjay has.”

Like many politically engaged Indian Americans, Puri has a deep regard for the Israel lobby — particularly in a country where Jews make up just a small minority of the population. “A lot of Jewish people tell me maybe I was Jewish in my past life,” he joked. The respect runs both ways. The American Jewish Committee, for instance, recently sent letters to members of Congress supporting the US-India nuclear deal.

“We model ourselves on the Jewish people in the US”, explained Mital Gandhi of USINPAC’s new offshoot, the US-India Business Alliance. “We’re not quite there yet. But we’re getting there.”

(The writer is a fellow at the World Policy Institute and the Asia Society)
Washington Post