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India Has a Soft Spot for Bush (ANAND GIRIDHARADAS, 1/11/09, NY Times)

Manmohan Singh leads the largest democracy on earth. But India’s prime minister is gentle of manner and speaks in whispers. One struggles to imagine him professing love without shyness to his own wife. And so it meant something when he recently laid the L-word on a little-loved man: George W. Bush.

“This may be my last visit to you during your presidency,” Mr. Singh told Mr. Bush in Washington in September, “and let me say, Thank you very much. The people of India deeply love you.” [...]

George W. Bush’s critics often link his idiosyncratic temperament to his administration’s diplomatic misadventures. But among Indians, who in the main have no love for his ideology, even his critics say the traits for which Mr. Bush is so often condemned were, in India’s case, benignly applied: his penchant for unilateral deeds, and his moral conviction that democracies are simply better than non-democracies.

“Mr. Bush is driven by ideology and instincts, not by nuanced thinking,” said Ashutosh Varshney, a political scientist and South Asia expert at Brown University. “Bush’s ideology convinced him that, of the two rising stars on the world stage, India was preferable.” (The other is, of course, China.)

The Academy rehabilitated post-presidency Richard Nixon largely on the basis of his inituiating a failed relationship with the evil alternative.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 11, 2009 9:09 AM