Devesh Kapur                                                                                                  |   Print |
11.05.2007                                                                                                        |   PDF |

With the India-United States nuclear deal facing an uncertain future, there has been a spate of analysis on the domestic opposition to the deal from within India. Security hawks and sections of the Bharatiya Janata Party worry that the deal may constrain India’s strategic options in the future. And for India’s Left the most disturbing implication of the deal is that it will bind India more closely to the US.

Commentators in favor argue that the BJP’s opposition to the deal seems more the result of the narcissism of small differences, payback for the Congress’s carping when the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance government conducted India’s nuclear tests. In both cases each party achieved what the other had been diligently pursuing when in power, and then found the prize snatched away by its rival at the last minute. Not surprisingly, both incidents have led to acute frustration masquerading as principle! And the Left parties could either be acting as the cat’s paw for the Chinese or simply being consistent (or, as some would say, pathological) in their opposition to the US. But where does the Indian public stand? What do Indians think about issues with foreign policy implications – and in particular about the US?

	FIGURE 1 Absolute warmth towards all countries surveyed
	FIGURE 2 Variance in warmth for the US. Variance is calculated as the degree to which the US is preferred by a segment, compared to the average warmth for all countries felt by the segment.
	FIGURE 3 Absolute warmth towards USA and China

Cross-national surveys conducted by the Pew Global Attitudes Project and the Chicago Council on Global Affairs clearly show that the Indian people have favorable feelings towards the US. In both surveys on global public opinion, India consistently ranked near the top of the list in its confidence in and support of the United States. This has not always been the case, however. In 2002, the percentage of the polled Indian population expressing a favorable opinion of the US, at 54 percent, was in the lower half of the countries polled. In 2005, the percentage shot up to 71 percent, the highest of any country polled. And in the Pew Global Attitudes Survey conducted earlier in 2007, India ranked 14th among the 47 nations (most of the others above it were African countries), with 59 percent of the public holding favorable views of the US.

However, the aforementioned cross-national surveys suffer from two problems. First since their sample frame is mainly urban, they can potentially be seriously biased. Second, the sample sizes are too small (less than three thousand in both cases) to understand variation within India, whether across states or among socio-economic groups. This is important because a political party with a concentrated electoral constituency may take a strong position based on the need to shore up its political base even though this might differ from national public opinion. And if it is part of the ruling coalition, the exigencies of coalition politics may still result in a policy being vetoed.

To address this problem we conducted the largest ever random, nationally representative survey of foreign policy attitudes of Indians in 2005-06 covering 212,563 households. The survey instrument was modeled on an annual randomly sampled survey of foreign policy attitudes of Beijing residents from 1998 to 2004. However, in addition, our survey design allowed us to measure the response of nine (six in urban and three in rural India) specific socio-economic (SEC) groups, defined by education and occupation. Data from the Beijing surveys show that wealthier, better educated, better traveled, younger and better informed residents had more positive feelings towards the US. What does the Indian data tell us?

First, there is a clear relationship between socio-economic status and the ability to respond to questions on foreign policy. The more elite (defined both by education and occupation), the more likely Indians will have an opinion on foreign policy issues. For the large number of rural landless, 69.7 percent "don't know" while another 24.3 percent have "no response". At the other extreme - educated urban professionals - the figures are 21 and 6 percent respectively, an almost four-fold difference. High non-response rates among the weaker socio-economic groups indicate that they may be "efficiently" ignorant i.e. they are not interested in putting in the effort on an issue that has low salience for them.

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