Tunku Varadarajan suggests that the poor state of U.S.-Indian relations isn’t all that important:

Should America care? India has little or nothing to contribute to American efforts to tackle the crises in Gaza, Ukraine, Syria, and Iraq. It is a reluctant partner, at best, in Washington’s efforts to rein in Iran and will have no truck with the West in any showdown with Vladimir Putin and Russia. Its incessant push for permanent membership of the United Nations Security Council, while understandable for a country that is the world’s second-most populous, isn’t exactly in America’s interests: New Delhi and Washington frequently find themselves on different sides of votes on U.N. resolutions.

This is a remarkably short-sighted view of the potential value of the U.S.-Indian relationship. What Varadarajan says here is more or less accurate with respect to India’s role in the world, but these aren’t particularly good reasons to “shrug” at the poor state of the relationship and wait until “Indians have made up their muddled minds about the kind of country theirs is.” If we judged other major powers and even some allies by the standard used here, we would conclude that the U.S. shouldn’t be bothered trying to cultivate good relations with a large number of important states. That should tell us that the standard is seriously flawed. After all, one could fairly say many of the same things about Germany, but I don’t think many would seriously suggest that the extremely poor state of U.S.-German relations right now is a matter of indifference.

The short version of Varadarajan’s criticism is a familiar one: India doesn’t reliably defer to the U.S. and follow its lead on numerous international issues, and therefore the relationship is largely useless and not worth the trouble. Because Indian elites still hold to the ideal of non-alignment, the argument goes, the U.S. can’t expect much from India and therefore shouldn’t put in much effort. This gets things almost entirely backwards: because India is a major and rising power that can’t regularly be counted on to fall in line behind the U.S. on many issues, it is that much more important that the U.S. make a sustained effort to cultivate good relations with India. The goal should be to minimize disagreements, limit tensions as much as possible, and make the most of the interests that both states have in common. The U.S. and China almost never agree on major international issues, but both recognize that the bilateral relationship still has to be managed and worked on because neither government can afford to ignore the other. India is large and important enough that the U.S. can’t simply dismiss it or its concerns, and that means that the U.S. ought to be making the effort to strengthen ties in spite of disagreements and frictions that have troubled the relationship to date.

Then there is the question of whether the U.S. should be trying to do many of the things that India doesn’t want to support. So what if India doesn’t want to lock itself into an anti-Chinese alliance? The U.S. shouldn’t be trying to encircle China with a hostile coalition in any case. India doesn’t support military interventions in other states’ internal conflicts, but the U.S. shouldn’t be intervening in them in the first place. If there is reluctance on India’s part to impose severe sanctions on Iran, that should come as no surprise, since India is like most other nations in that it doesn’t share our peculiar obsession with Iran’s nuclear program. Instead of emphasizing its reluctant cooperation on Iran, it should impress us that India has agreed to cooperate on Iran sanctions at all when it is clearly not in Indian economic interests to do so.

Americans, especially American hawks, have a bad habit of expecting a degree of cooperation and compliance from other governments that we wouldn’t provide if the positions were reversed, and then we hold this against them as if they were obliged to do as we wish. If India isn’t providing the U.S. with as much cooperation as Washington desires, perhaps at least part of the fault lies in what Washington wants done. Along the same lines, perhaps there would be more support in India for a stronger relationship with America if Americans made the case for closer ties that doesn’t amount to a list of demands of what India should do to demonstrate its fealty.