For two democracies that do not tire of touting their status as natural kindred souls, the history of Indo-US ties has been less than pristine white. India’s long dabbling in non-alignment set it up in a space that, if not exactly antithetical to the US, was remote from its axis. Its formal equidistance from the Soviet and American blocs was often perceived as genteel euphemism for a partiality towards the Soviet Union. The 1974 nuclear test at Pokhran cleared by Indira Gandhi plunged the trust graph to its nadir—the entire Nuclear Suppliers Group architecture was created explicitly as a response to that, to deny India nuclear fuel and technology.
