Obama will focus on jobs during his three-day visit to India.
Obama message in India: Jobs, jobs, jobs
By LAURA ROZEN
Updated 11/05/2010 01:15 AM EDT
When President Barack Obama arrives in Mumbai Saturday on his first presidential trip to India, he'll begin a tightly choreographed three-day visit designed not only to deepen the alliance between the world's two largest democracies but to telegraph a message of U.S. jobs and economic opportunities from expanded U.S.-India trade ties to a struggling American audience back home.
Indeed, when the White House previewed Obama's upcoming India trip last week, "jobs" and "jobs back here" were mentioned 17 times by White House aides.
"Indian companies are the second-fastest-growing investors in the United States and they … now support about 57,000 jobs here in the U.S.," said Michael Froman, deputy national security adviser for international economic affairs. "So it's a great market for U.S. exports," as well as a "good source of investment for the United States. ... And that's the reason why the president will be there."
The "trip is basically economic in focus," White House spokesman Robert Gibbs echoed. "I think when people see the first day of this, they'll understand that … our relationship with this region of the world and with this country is not disconnected in any way from what's important to them in our ability to export our goods, to sell those products and to create and support jobs here in America."
To amplify that point, Obama will speak upon his arrival at a U.S.-India business conference at which several American CEOs plan to announce major deals with India, Washington South Asia experts familiar with the preparations said. Chief among those deals: a $5.4 billion Boeing sale of C-17 transport aircraft to the Indian government as well as an additional sale of commercial aircraft to an Indian domestic airliner. General Electric's CEO is also expected to announce a deal to sell power turbines to the Indian energy company Reliance.
"It will be one of the largest trade missions ever assembled," said a former senior U.S. official who works on Indian issues.
Obama is expected to almost exclusively accentuate the positive in the U.S.-India economic relationship, however, and is not expected to dwell on the touchy issue of the outsourcing of U.S. jobs to the region.
"What they [the Obama team] are really plugging is jobs and exports," said the former U.S. official. "There will be no emphasis [by the White House] at all on the outsourcing of American jobs."
In another sign of the strong economic focus of the trip, Obama will be accompanied in India by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Commerce Secretary Gary Locke, as well as by USAID Chief Rajiv Shah. (He will not be joined by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton or Defense Secretary Robert Gates.)
After Mumbai, Obama will go to Delhi, where he will give a rare address to the Indian Parliament before heading to Indonesia and the G-20 meeting in Seoul, South Korea.
"I don't have any doubt that President Obama is going to wow the Indian masses," former Bush-era U.S. Ambassador to India Robert Blackwill told journalists on a call organized by the Council on Foreign Relations on Wednesday. "He is in Indian eyes an extraordinary example of the diversity and pluralism of American democracy, being the first African-American president. At the most basic level, the Indian people are going to find him extremely attractive and charismatic and so forth."
Blackwill predicted that Obama could wow Indian public and national security elite audiences by saying in his speech to the Parliament that the United States supports India's long-sought aspiration to become a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council in the context of a reformed Security Council. (Currently, the U.S. and China are the only two U.N. Security Council permanent members that have expressed opposition to India's membership, Blackwill said.)
On strategic matters, India remains extremely concerned about a possibly chaotic U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan beginning in July 2011, Blackwill said. India also thinks the U.S. is not putting enough pressure on Pakistan to counter cross-border terrorism such as the Mumbai terrorist attacks in November 2008. Obama will stay in Mumbai at the historic Taj Mahal hotel, one of the two Mumbai hotels that were besieged by terrorists, renting out the entire hotel for security reasons. That has led to criticism by some right-leaning commentators, who have said Obama's trip will cost taxpayers $20 million a day. The White House said Thursday that that number is wildly exaggerated, and former senior State Department official Wendy Sherman told NPR Thursday that the entire Obama Asia trip will cost around $50 million.
India is also looking for Obama to delist all Indian companies and entities save for two that the United States has made ineligible for U.S. technology transfers since India's 1998 nuclear weapons test.
"There won't be a single earth-shattering moment" on the trip, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for South Asia Evan Feigenbaum told POLITICO. "But there are plenty of ideas on the table. I also think what the president says, for instance in Mumbai, will be important and send powerful messages about shared U.S.-Indian concerns about terrorism."
But Feigenbaum cautioned that it would be a mistake for the Obama administration to think about the growing U.S.-India alliance so "transactionally," as he put it — the U.S. gives something in order to get something from India.
"A stronger India is good for U.S. interests, so the various things that are on the table for this visit — from cooperation in Afghanistan to export control reform to defense cooperation via C-17 sales to coordination in third countries, such as in Africa — reflects that underlying strength," he said.