The shape of U.S. policy decisions, however, remains uni-dimensional and flat and, much in the same way that that the recent obsession with normalizing trade relations with China has marginalized concerns over the justness of the Chinese government, the enduring drive to box India into nuclear submission has marginalized U.S. interests in the justness and equality of the Indian state. Gleefully referring to India as "the largest democracy in the world," the U.S. demonstrates a profound lack of interest in or a desire to rectify the ways in which India is decidedly non-democratic. What ensues is a foreign policy that is at best impoverished and at worst adverse to the universalism that undergirds the ethics of the United States.

However, not only does boxing India foster ill-informed government policy decision, it also fosters ill-informed electoral decisions as well. According to a recent ABC News/Washington Post poll, 54 percent of Americans claim that foreign affairs will be very important to them in the November presidential elections. Yet, 37 percent of Americans admit that they haven't heard enough to accurately evaluate the true status of Indo-American relations. Consequently when Americans hit the polls in 41 days, they will be doing so without the knowledge necessary to make an informed decision about U.S. policy with what will, in less than 50 years, be the largest nation in the world. And they will be electing a President whom they cannot hold accountable to a detailed policy of Indo-American relations.

But the oversimplification of India also engenders deeper and more morally pressing issues.

To conceive of India as a nation of warheads and missiles as opposed to a nation of people, is to foster the kind of moral ambivalence for which the United States has consistently garnered a disreputable image abroad. It is to allow Americans to sit in an ivory tower, wrapped in a tightly woven cloak of arrogance and ignorance, that prevents and excuses them from showing any genuine interest in lives of those individuals living outside the hallowed border of our state. And it is to give breath to the hypocritical philosophy that American interests in equality and rightness end at the fault line between the domestic and foreign realm.

Pigeon holed and oversimplified for far too long, Indo-American relations must be deepened and broadened in the years ahead. It is time to start thinking about India, in more ways than one.

Lauren E. Baer '02 is a social studies concentrator in Dunster House. Her column appears on alternate Wednesdays.