When the Prime Minister Goes to Washington

Trump is yet to fill some key posts that have a bearing on India-US relations. For now, the two sides are talking at higher levels to reset the course

- K P NAYAR

What do Indian prime ministers and US presidents talk about when they have summit meetings, which have become regular only in the last 25 of the 77 years since independence? Quite often, they lean on each other's shoulders to share experiences because it is quite lonely at the top for those holding high offices.

Barack Obama and Narendra Modi easily broke ice at their first meeting in the residential East Wing of the White House in September 2014, contrary to expectations among aides on both sides. They did this by effortlessly finding common ground as leaders of their respective countries who had stepped into high offices as rank outsiders in their capitals.

Modi had never held any elected public office in New Delhi until he became prime minister. Obama was only a first-time senator who had not even completed his term when he was elected president.

There was a time when American presidents were condescending and talked down to Indian prime ministers. When Indira Gandhi and Ronald Reagan met for the first time in Cancun in 1981, the president spent most of their 45-minute meeting lecturing the prime minister with a memorable closing line: "India must pull itself up by its bootstraps to survive." Janki Ganju, a family friend and the Indian embassy's one-man lobbyist in Washington for some 30 years, who was with Indira Gandhi, was surprised that she listened to Reagan in silence. When the president finished, her reply was just one crushing sentence: "Mr President, in order for us to pull ourselves up by bootstraps, first we must have boots." End of meeting.

A quarter century later, the roles had been completely reversed. When Manmohan Singh went to Washington on a farewell visit for George W Bush, the president was a deeply troubled man.