'Republicans are always better for India, they have much better strategic sense than Democrats,' says Indian professor and strategist

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2/27/13, "Chuck Hagel stirs up India-US storm over Afghanistan," BBC

"New US Defence Secretary Chuck Hagel has stirred up a sudden storm in a chai glass here, with past suggestions that India has been using Afghanistan as a "second front" against its old rival Pakistan.

"India has over the years financed problems for Pakistan" in Afghanistan, said Mr Hagel in a 2011 speech at the previously little-known foreign policy seed-bed of Oklahoma University.

If nothing else, it showed what a liability the internet can be for politicians who would wish for their past thoughts to be forgotten.

For Mr Hagel's Republican opponents, it was just a few clicks' work to ferret out the speech, get it online via a sympathetic outlet, then picked up 10.5 time zones away....

There's another reason, though, why this little episode may be more significant - because it highlights a bigger question over where relations between Delhi and Washington are going.

The high hopes for a new era of relations after a nuclear deal have "simply not panned out", says Professor Bharat Karnad at the Centre for Policy Research....

It was former President George W Bush who got things going, ending decades of often frosty relations between the world's two largest democracies. And many see the end of his time in the White House as the high water mark.

"Republicans are always better for India," says Mr Karnad. "They have a much better strategic sense than the Democrats."

In fact, Mr Obama seemed interested in moving things on in his first term, but he seems to have other priorities in his second. And India fears it has lost its best supporters, with Hillary Clinton leaving the state department and Leon Panetta the Pentagon.

An Indian official admits "the jury is still out on Kerry and Hagel"."


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