Why Barack Obama (UPIASIA)

Manipal, India — U.S. policies often affect the globe, and hence the global interest in U.S. politics. Although Australian feminist Germaine Greer may disagree, few in Asia see the possible re-entry of Hillary Clinton into the White House as epochal. Sri Lanka had its two Bandaranaike ladies as prime ministers, India had Indira Gandhi, Pakistan Benazir Bhutto, Turkey Tansu Ciller, Bangladesh the feuding Khaleda-Hasina duo, Indonesia Megawati Sukarnoputri and the Philippines Corazon Aquino and now Gloria Arroyo.

If there has been any significant change in gender dynamics because of these individuals becoming heads of government, it has been too small to notice. While First Lady, Hillary Clinton did not give gender discrimination the priority that she gave issues such as healthcare, and to expect her to change U.S. society, economics and politics -- from a gender standpoint -- in a way that even the formidable British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher could not within her own Conservative Party, may be a trifle optimistic.

In contrast, the election to the U.S. presidency of Barack Obama would signal the true conclusion of the revolution begun by President Abraham Lincoln when he emancipated U.S. slaves in 1863 -- that human beings are one, no matter what their color.

As secretaries of state, neither Colin Powell nor Condoleezza Rice has broken the mould of international opinion, which still regards the United States as being of the same persuasion as Europe, where policies that are racial in substance are the norm. Even in Britain it is far tougher for a nonwhite to reach the higher echelons of the medical and other professions than is the case in the United States. On the continent, Germany has been leading the cry of "Europe for Europeans," aware that ethnicity and not nationality is the core principle at work in fashioning policies related to migration and employment.

Will India-U.S. Ties Get Nuked? (UPIASIA)

M.D. Nalapat

MANIPAL, India — A smiling U.S. President George W. Bush and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh announced on July 18, 2005, that a U.S.-India agreement would be concluded that would regularize nuclear trade between the two countries, and consequently, the rest of the world.

Since the first Indian nuclear test in 1974, India has been the primary target of a comprehensive set of sanctions designed to prevent any external help to the Indian program. Along the way, a large number of hi-tech items -- such as supercomputers -- were made out of bounds to India, which nevertheless persisted with its program, detonating six nuclear devices in 1998 and moving ahead toward development and deployment of a "triad" of nuclear weapons systems that would ensure delivery from the land, air and sea.

Unlike Pakistan, China and Russia, India has not transferred nuclear or missile technology across its frontiers -- hoping to be rewarded for such good behavior by cooption into the major league of nuclear weapons states (NWS). It seemed that on July 18, 2005, the day had finally arrived -- early reports of the U.S.-India understanding were unanimous in stating that the Bush administration had finally given up on containment, and had accepted -- de facto if not yet de jure -- that India was an NWS, and that it therefore made sense for the five "declared" weapons powers to bring it into the fold before New Delhi decided to act the outsider, after being treated as one since 1974.

Influential voices within the country's nuclear and security establishment had been calling for nuclear cooperation with other countries that felt shortchanged by an international architecture that had changed hardly at all since World War II. Among the prospective partners would be Vietnam and Venezuela, who would see little attraction in remaining within the confines of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty were India to offer cooperation in energy.