Not yet a senator or the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nationals but already a notable figure in American politics, in February 1973
Daniel Patrick Moynihan
took up his post as U.S. ambassador to India. A little over a year later,
Bernard Weinraub
of The New York Times did a write-up – a portrait, an assessment – of Ambassador Moynihan’s first year in India. That article was the source for today’s featured quote, but, of course, there were several others, some wry and acerbic, and all classic Moynihan.
In our view, today’s featured quote is as valid today as it was then. Still, that was 45 years ago, and the circumstances were different. America was feeling unappreciated for the food aid the United States had provided to India in the 1960s and frustrated at the lack of accounting for other assistance. For its part, India resented America’s perceived tilt toward Pakistan during the 1971 Bangladesh War of Independence. India supported Bangladesh – previously East Pakistan – and near the end of the longer war, there was a short 13-day war between India and Pakistan. Add to all that more than a dash of Indian anti-Americanism, and the Ambassador from Hell’s Kitchen had his work cut out from him. At one point in the piece, Weinraub shares
this Moynihan lament:
I somehow wish I could have more of an exchange with Indian academics. But they’re so lost in a kind of ritual anti-Americanism, you’ve got to be a masochist to try. You could only injure the American case by intruding into their isolation.
Again, forty-five years is a long time. India has changed a lot since 1974 and so has America. Perhaps most importantly, India today is reaching out to countries around the world, including to the United States and the European Union, both of which are negotiating trade agreements with the jewel in the crown of South Asia. As for the broader U.S.-India bilateral relationship, it is, if anything, more important today than when Daniel Patrick Moynihan sat with Bernard Weinraub in New Delhi 45 years ago. Here is the more extended version of today’s featured quote from Ambassador Moynihan:
India is the biggest democracy in the world, and the Untied States is the second largest. Our mutual concern and interest that each other’s institutions should prosper and prevail and endure is fundamental. This is not simply rhetoric. It’s a hard-headed assessment of mutual self-interest. There are not many practicing democracies today. There is little pleasure, and less prospect, in being the last of a disappearing species.
In every important sense, we need each other.