John McCain vs. Barack Obama – An Indian Perspective

Come November 2008, we will witness yet another US Presidential Election, an election to decide who will sit on unarguably the “most-powerful” seat in the World today. Though there are a few contenders, the final showdown will apparently be between Barack Obama (Democrats’ candidate) and John McCain (Republican candidate). The result of this event would affect a lot of countries and India will be one of the nations, which will have a phenomenal influence of this change.

So, where do they stand on issues that are crucial for India?
Apparently while McCain is conservative in his outlook, Obama seems to be more of a liberal.

On one end we have Barack Obama, who is has had fundamental foreign exposure from the ground up, going back a long way into his youth, unlike his Republican John McCain. He even mentioned in one of his interviews that he had been in Karachi and Sind, Pakistan for about 3 weeks and has been closely associated with the sub-continent. He has a lot of Pakistani and Indian friends and so, unlike most of his predecessors, he is pretty aware of the culture and situation in these countries. The facts that he carries with him a small idol of Hanuman (after he came to know about Ramayana) and that he has a lot of Indian-American supporters in his campaign are good signs for India. His pronouncing Pakistan and Gandhi correctly also show that he because of his eclectic and unusual upbringing may be different from the other leaders. But this apart, Obama is against the military war against terrorism and has already shown his desire to bring back the troops from Afghanistan and Iraq, yet he also looks at military-dominated Pakistan and the fundamentalist monarchy in Saudi Arabia with deep distrust. The only thing we can be sure of is that most of the policies setup by the Bush administration will get rolled back.

On the other hand, McCain’s winning the elections would ensure that a lot of the Bush policies will be continued. The war on Terror, which has helped check terrorism and pressurized Pakistan to take action to fight terrorists, will be a good thing for India. Apart from this, McCain has gone on record saying the policies that he would likely keep, which do interest India. Over and above that, he seems to be favouring the entry of India and Brazil into the G-8, making it a larger G-8. All this said-and done, McCain is a war-hero and hence he seems to be a tight-fisted leader. Popularly believed to be a maverick in his own Republican party, what he would have in store for India is a question most cannot answer.

But, the debate does swing a little towards Republicans, when we consider the topic of outsourcing. While Obama has shown signs that he is against it, McCain has gone on-record saying he is ok with outsourcing and this is a positive stand for India. Then again, most experts say that the operational and financial linkages between the large US corporations and the Indian IT sector are very convoluted, and any efforts at untangling these ties will cause major economic disruptions in both countries. Thus an Obama-effort to reduce these would probably be futile and even suicidal to an extent. But the fact holds that Indian IT/ITES depend a lot on the US for revenues and so any effort at reducing outsourcing is bound to hurt.

Beyond that, US-India ties, at least from Washington's perspective, would continue to be largely security driven, subject to conservative impulses arising from fears of an extremist Islamist agenda to India's west and an expanding Chinese influence everywhere. Any administration would not be very different, with perhaps a little more emphasis on non-proliferation objectives, especially the Nuclear Deal. But it is very difficult to comment on Obama’s exact stand, because he is still putting the pieces and players together. But with the influence and importance that the ties these two countries have, "One thing we know for certain is that whoever becomes the President, he will not be hostile to India."

In the end of the whole analysis, the fact that still holds is that, any quest to judge the more favourable candidate for India is a futile exercise. Any Leader of a country will look only to promote that country’s interests. If India is not aligned in the same direction as The Unites States, as was the case with the Nuclear Deal, and if the priorities of both the countries do not converge, “Who becomes the Next President of United States is immaterial...!”