Modi’s no stranger to Capitol Hill

What type of man is India’s new Prime Minister, Narendra Modi? Arriving on his first official visit as India’s leader, he comes to an America consumed by worries very similar to his own – especially, terrorism, extremism, a sounder footing for economic growth, Chinese assertiveness and Afghanistan’s future.

He is someone we can, and should, work with.

Back in 1990, and then resident in Delhi, I wrote a long cover feature for what was then Asia’s pre-eminent news magazine, The Far Eastern Economic Review. The feature identified a party – the BJP – about which the outside world, and much of India itself, knew very little.

Live long enough, and things change: five then-young BJP politicians now sit in the cabinet. Modi himself knows our country better than we might think: He played a little known role in American efforts to restrain Pakistani adventurism in what became known as the ”Kargil Affair” of 1999 – a wretched, high altitude fight between Pakistani and Indian army units fighting in 16,000 foot Himalayan passes.

To try to dissuade Islamabad from pressing the fight (by this time, both South Asian countries were nuclear weapons states), the House of Representatives passed a non-binding ‘Sense of Congress’ resolution. It did something novel — linking the threat of reduced American support in the IMF for Pakistan’s economy (then, as now, chronically faltering) to an ending of fighting at Kargil.  This was something new.

What’s not known is that Modi was on a private visit to Washington at the time. He met Democrat Rep. Gary Ackerman (N.Y.) and, in that meeting, seeded the idea of tying U.S. economic support to a cessation of hostilities.  This found its way into the lower house’s resolution.

The upshot: Former President Bill Clinton met then (as now) Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, and the U.S. tilted decisively in a way which Pakistan recognized would force it to stand down. Modi never took credit for this – indeed, the story is confined to a few Hill staffers. Republican Rep. Ben Gillman (N.Y.) fell into line as well. The story shows a seasoned politician – then only a party official, not yet even a state chief minister – comfortable in English, and already focused on the business side of international politics.

And that’s where he stands today, determined to make the often inert, bureaucratically heavy Indian polity more flexible, and give across the board chances to its sorely underused human capital. The best way for a successful visit by him in a few weeks’ time is to tone down expectations, and avoid staged moments full of portentous hot air.

While I served in the previous administration, admired rather more in India than the current one, we were also prone to over talk the relationship, especially in missives from chatterbox State Department officials. In truth, both foreign service bureaucracies in India and the US have used their interdepartmental powers to throttle trends and play tit-for-tat games.

Modi arrives at a moment when, to put it mildly, America’s ‘strategic sense’ seems either absent or incapable of being articulated by the political class. With India, by contrast, we’ve a common working agenda already in place, not just 30,000-foot commonalities. India’s preferred outcome in central, south and southwest Asia looks a lot like ours; less Chinese pushiness, more constrained Pakistani adventurism, a neutral stabilized Afghanistan, Iran brought back into normal discourse, and a Southeast Asia in which India (and other) powers help balance China.