India-US relations: cooling and warming up (merged thread)

[Madhu]

Lots of articles in this vein. It doesn't mean the US is correct but it bears on the opinion about this case in various constituencies.

Most of the Western commentary has been about high flyers and the upper middle class. The larger opinion is hard to gauge, so many reporters are in a bubble that includes other reporters and the officials they cover. Myra McDonald at War on the Rocks seems to be a bit in this category, which is surprising. Generally a good commenter on these issues. At any rate, an article about Adarsh:

That's not all when it comes to Devyani's real estate holdings in Mumbai. When she got the Adarsh flat, she already owned a flat in another government housing society in Oshiwara, which too was allotted under the state government's 10 per cent quota where recipients get flats at extremely cheap rates as compared to Mumbai's stratospheric market prices, and which is another fount of corruption in Mumbai, with most flats cornered by politicians and their relatives, and of course bureaucrats and their relatives, and those connected to their powers that be, making a mockery of the 10 percent quota supposedly for helping citizens who need it most. As the Economic Times reports, a massive 42 percent of such flats allocated in the past 10 years were resold by allottees at much higher prices, making a killing in the bargain at the expense of the taxpayer and the common Indian. Things have become so bad with the 10 percent quota that the Bombay High Court recently warned the Maharashtra government of contempt if it continued to stonewall requests to name double and multiple allottees of such flats.

OTOH, Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said that the Indians so much as told us that they were going to go nuclear, so to speak, in the late 90's, and we just didn't listen. The case of the Indian fisherman and the Italians pretty much told us how the Indian elite class would react to this case.

And the Indians should have posted someone else after getting certain signals.

I doubt long term relations are seriously soured but both embassies seem to be a bit of a disaster.

Read more at: http://www.firstpost.com/india/how-a...ce=ref_article