Former WSJ-er Tunku Varadarajan is an academic and a columnist at Forbes now, and this week he's urging President Obama to maintain the "exhilarating degree of cooperation" that existed between India and US during the Bush administration. He also points to an early mis-step in the new administration's dealings with India. From "Obama should visit India--soon":
What President Obama must be careful to do is deal with India on its own terms. He must not return to the old, pre-Bush binary in which India was twinned always with Pakistan and in which American diplomacy with India was always calibrated for the effect it might have on American relations with Pakistan.
India has outgrown Pakistan economically, militarily, strategically and civilizationally--and the U.S. must treat it, on a par with Japan and Germany, as an always-consequential state whose interests can never be disregarded. The Obama administration started off on the wrong foot with India by giving its special envoy to Pakistan and Afghanistan--Richard Holbrooke--the additional task of seeking resolution on Kashmir, an affair on which India has never encouraged foreign intervention. In the end, hard-nosed Indian diplomacy led to a dropping of Kashmir from the Holbrooke "portfolio," but the Obama administration's intervene-in-Kashmir instinct sowed alarm in New Delhi.
In an item that was widely picked up in the Indian media (DNA, ET, Hindu, NDTV), PTI points to an article in Foreign Policy. It notes that India was originally on Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's Asia tour:
