Conducted by Andrew Beck and Teddy Bunzel

David Mulford, whose background includes extensive experience in both the federal government and the private sector, was sworn in as U.S. ambassador to India on January 23, 2004.

You were an outspoken advocate of the U.S.-India Civilian Nuclear Cooperation Agreement. Why do you think this agreement was so important for both India and the United States?

I have been an outspoken advocate of the Agreement because I believe it’s a very important step forward for the United States, for India, and for the world. I think that it is very important to normalize civil nuclear relations between the United States and India in order to bring India more firmly into the nonproliferation system, instead of leaving India as is stands now, isolated and on the outside of that system.

India has not become a signatory of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, but during the last thirty-plus years they have followed behavior that has been in compliance with the Treaty they have not been a proliferator at all, either inward or outward, and they have a good record in terms of compliance with the standards that are imposed by the Treaty. It is true that during that period they developed their own nuclear weapons, and although the initiative taken by President Bush does not explicitly recognize India as a nuclear weapons country, it implies it through the recognition of India as a country with advanced nuclear technology. But the effect of this agreement will be, over the next four of five years, to bring about seventy percent of India’s reactors under safeguards with the help of the IAEA, which today has none of India’s reactors under safeguards. I think in part it is recognition of India as a major world power, and I think the U.S. will gain enormously from restoring India to full cooperation with the rest of the world.

Some have argued that this agreement rewards India after it developed and tested nuclear weapons outside the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty framework and that it sets a bad precedent for other nations who might be pursuing the bomb or considering withdrawing from the Treaty. How would you respond to this idea?

What the United States did was to look at several criteria for making this change. One of them was that India was a functioning democracy; another was that India is a large country that has a huge energy requirement and needs to be able to develop alternative sources of energy, for otherwise it remains a direct competitor with us for oil and gas; and finally it has to have a record of nonproliferation.

The other countries that might seek such a course do not meet these criteria. Pakistan has been a proliferator. North Korea has been a proliferator. Iran is defying the world and is a signatory of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, which it is violating by its activities. India developed nuclear weapons, but it wasn’t violating the Treaty since it wasn’t a signatory. We have taken the step of recognizing India, accepting that this is a reality that we can’t change, that they aren’t going to put the nuclear genie back in the bottle, and we have decided that it is time to normalize relations with them. After all, they have a track record of thirty to thirty-five years of responsible activity, and they have developed a nuclear weapons program that is of a size they believe is necessary to address the fact that two major countries in their neighborhood China and Pakistan both have nuclear weapons, making, in India’s mind, their own weapons necessary for their defense. But India has not gone beyond that by developing a massive nuclear arsenal, which they were free to do since they are not a signatory of the NPT.

So they have a thirty-year record of responsible behavior, and as a democracy we believe this single-time, one-country exception for India is a sound decision. We think it is appropriate.

India’s economy has been growing at near-double-digit rates for several years now. What can India do to sustain and even increase this phenomenal growth?

India is going to have quite a high growth level just because of the dynamism and demographic structure of the country there are 1.1 billion people, 55% of whom are under the age of 24, and there is a middle-class of 300 million people that is growing at about thirty to forty million new entrants a year. So there is a dynamism in India that I think is going to persist.

I think that whether or not India can achieve these eight- to nine-percent growth rates in the future years depends upon how they manage their monetary system, whether they effectively control their fiscal deficit, and finally whether they solve three major challenges that could become constraints on their growth. First is their dependence on the outside world for energy, because they will have a huge growth in requirements for energy. Second is the need to successfully resolve the question of how to build and implement a world-class infrastructure which they don’t have today in the form of roads, electricity, water, ports, and more. And finally they have to find a way to reform and modernize their agricultural sector, which includes the huge population that lives in the rural areas about 65% of the population, or 650 million people, live on farms and generate only 22% of the GDP, and that sector grows at only 1.7% a year. So as you can see, the agricultural sector doesn’t match the rest of the economy, and India has to find a way to bring those people further into the benefits of globalization, and for them to enjoy the fruits of higher economic growth.

What will it take to reform the agricultural sector and bring these rural farmers into the economic fold?

It’s an extremely complex question. The average farm size in India is about three acres, and very large numbers of people engage in what is basically subsistence farming. In the rural economy there is an enormous lack of infrastructure, job opportunities, agro-related businesses and companies, and investment in agricultural activities, and the systems of irrigation and collection of crops are inefficient.

So I think that India needs to permit developments in its economy, such as the development of large-scale retail businesses in the cities, that build back infrastructure to the rural areas and introduce a lot of the things that need to be done crop collection, processing, cooling, packaging, transportation and so on in order to create other economic opportunities in the rural areas. That’s part of the solution, but it’s an incredibly complex problem.

India is emerging as one of the United States’ closest allies in Asia, and Indians hold a very favorable view the United States especially when compared to the view of other populations around the globe. What do you think accounts for this close relationship?

The relationship that is developing between the United States and India is much more than a government-to-government relationship; it is what I call a “comprehensive relationship” in which we here at the U.S. Mission touch upon virtually every area of human activity, including health care, science, technology, agriculture, economics, politics, military, drug enforcement all sorts of things. This really is reflective of the huge people-to-people relationship that exists between the U.S. and India today and has been building for many years. There are large numbers of Indians who now live in the United States, something like two to 2.5 million Indian-Americans are U.S. citizens, many of whom are very successful, well-educated, family-oriented people who are respected by Americans and are a very favorable part of our community. There is also a large number of Indian citizens who are working in the Untied States who are usually very skilled and technologically-adept. All of this reflects a huge movement of people between the two countries.

So I think that when Indians show support for the United States what they really are saying is that they are supportive of the idea of America as opposed to supportive of its policies, many of which they may criticize. They are supportive of the idea of hard work, education, mobility, meritocracy, free enterprise, and so on. They are also admirers of democracy and the transparency that exists in American governance. So this is really the basis for the extremely-high 70% approval rating of the U.S. that we see today among the Indian population.

We also share many common values: We are both major democracies, we are both secular states, we both believe in freedom of religion we are multi-religious, multi-cultural societies. Both countries are strong supporters of the rule of law, of a free press, and both have large private sectors that are sophisticated and accomplished. So we share an ethos that in many ways tends to bring us together.

Some have cited India as a model of a democracy in a very culturally, religiously, and even linguistically diverse country. To what extent can the U.S. use the example of India as it attempts to pursue democratization in the Middle East and across the globe? What would you say are the shortcomings, if any, of India’s democracy?

I think that India’s democracy is a very important model for countries around the world that aspire to be democracies because of the enormous diversity of India as well as its clearly established parliamentary form of government, its federal structure with very significant powers residing in the states, its commitment to the rule of law and effective, but slow, court system, and its very active media and political process. So it has all the attributes of the true democracy. When they have a general election in India something like 450 million people go to the polls, and all the voting is done electronically.

The diversity of India is important. There are something like twenty different official languages, many different cultural groups and tribal areas, but overall something like eighty percent of Indians are Hindus. India has the second largest Muslim population in the world at about 150 million, and this is a population that is not radicalized. Because Muslims feel involved in India’s democracy, it is a population that is Indian first, Muslim second. They have a diverse set of views some even have militant views but they are not a radicalized population. We have not found, for example, Indian international terrorist organizations; we have not found Indian citizens in Al-Qaeda or organizations like that because here they are participating in their own democracy. I think the lesson there is that democratization tends to produce a more peaceful and engaged society at home. It may be a hard thing to produce, but India has done it successfully since 1947.

India recently became the country with the highest number of AIDS cases in the world. What is India doing to address the AIDS epidemic, and how the U.S. helping?

There’s a very large commitment on the part of the United States to combat AIDS here in India. The U.S. gives something like $75 million a year to address this issue, and USAID has been very involved for many years now working with NGOs and leveraging resources to accomplish progress on the campaign against AIDS.

We have also seen significant U.S. private participation. The Gates Foundation has committed around $200 million and is involved in many different aspects of the campaign. The embassy here has sponsored corporate education in India and has helped promote the idea of corporations’ putting up funds to fight AIDS.
The government of India has also shown a large commitment to fighting AIDS and is increasingly recognizing it as a major threat. The government still doesn’t do enough it needs to put more of its budget toward this cause but it’s building up rather quickly, and the campaign goes on. The thing about AIDS in India is that it is spread around in rather localized areas, and people are working to understand its prevalence in certain areas and prevent its spread.

Although there has been a thawing in India-Pakistan relations over the past few years, recent train bombings have underscored the many obstacles that still face the two countries in the quest for peace. Where do you see the peace process going in the next few years? Do you see any breakthroughs on the fundamental issue of Kashmir?

There has been a major peace initiative that was launched by Prime Minister Vajpayee when the Bharatiya Janata Party was in power and has been maintained by Prime Minister Singh, and it has been a question of a steady effort to improve relations and to address, in an incremental way, peripheral issues that surround the Kashmir issue in the hope that as they advance this relationship, they can ultimately address and resolve the underlying problems.

The position of the United States is that we support both these countries in their efforts, and we encourage the two countries to continue their efforts. But we are very careful not to place ourselves in the middle of this process as either the manager or the referee, but rather we continue to encourage them to make progress. It looks to us as if they will continue to make progress, but it will be slow as they feel their way along and attempt to build confidence. It will be important to continue the effort despite terrorist outrages that are designed to set the peace effort back, such as the recent firebombing of a train from Delhi to Pakistan or the Mumbai train bombings last year.

So I think the outlook is very favorable, but I think one has to be very patient as they try to come to terms with solving the inherent issues involved in Kashmir, because that’s a very complex problem with a very sensitive history that goes back to 1947. But I hope they will be able to make progress there as both countries move forward.

India and Iran have historically had cultural and political ties, and although India has voted against Iran at the IAEA on the issue of the Iranian nuclear program, plans have also gone ahead for a massive gas pipeline between the two countries. What complications does the Iran-India relationship create for U.S.-India relations?

India has cooperated in the IAEA on two occasions to vote to move Iran in the direction of the UN Security Council. They have made it very clear, both to us and to Iran, that they do not want Iran to develop a nuclear weapon and that they oppose any other nation’s having nuclear weapons in their neighborhood. They believe that Iran is not complying with its obligations under the NPT.

Their attitude is that this is an issue best advanced by negotiations and consultation, as opposed to confrontation. India has a large Shia population within its Muslim population, so this is an active political issue in domestic politics, and as a democracy they have to be responsive to those influences.
It is true that they have been talking about a pipeline with Iran, and they already depend to some extent on energy resources from Iran. We have advised them of our Iran-Libyan Sanctions Act that enables us to take action against entities that engage in substantial investment in Iran to develop energy resources. We have never employed the Act before, but it has been regarded as important; for example, it is cited as significant in isolating Libya and influencing them to renounce their weapons programs.

So that is our position. India is an independent country, and it will make its own decisions, as it has in the past, on the question of Iran. We have similar interests there but maybe not exactly the same approach, and we will have to continue to work with India and watch what they do. We are sure that they are going to support the sanctions they have already demonstrated that so far as their national interests are concerned; they have not been favorable toward what Iran has been doing.
 

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