On October 2, 1992, I stood before a large gathering of the National Federation of Indian American Associations in Atlanta, Georgia, speaking on behalf of a presidential candidate most of them had never met. Governor Bill Clinton was still months from the White House, the Soviet Union had just dissolved, and India — the world’s largest democracy — was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. Ted Turner had delivered the opening keynote. I had been invited by Subash Razdan, a founding leader of the Indian American community, to speak on the Governor’s behalf. Few people in American political life were paying attention to what India’s crisis might mean for the United States. I was one of them, and I was not alone for long.

What followed over the next two years was one of the most consequential and least remembered diplomatic realignments of the post-Cold War era: the transformation of the United States and India from wary, ideologically estranged nations into strategic and economic partners. That transformation did not begin with a treaty or a summit. It began with a handful of individuals — diplomats, community leaders, and political figures on both sides of the Indo-Pacific — who recognized that history had opened a narrow window, and who refused to let it close. To help ensure that a strong India-United States convergence continues, it behooves us to recall that transformation and safeguard what has been achieved.

An economy in chains

The India I had come to know through several visits during the 1970s was a country of staggering talent shackled by stultifying policy. I rode its rail lines — among the most extensive in the world — and drove its highways by Ambassador automobile. I met engineers managing the country’s nuclear power plant, though functionality posed real problems. I met business leaders strangled by colonial-era regulations and socialist bureaucracy. And I met, repeatedly, taxi drivers in Delhi who turned out to be underemployed engineers — men trained to build a modern economy who had no modern economy to build. Lt. General J. T. Sataravala, former Commandant of the Indian Military Academy and later Director of the India Tourism Development Corporation, proved an invaluable primer on the country’s contradictions. Manufacturing had declined across all sectors. India’s infrastructure, outside of the rail system, lagged decades behind its potential. And yet the country’s commitment to science, medicine, and engineering — championed since independence by Nehru and his generation — had produced a population of extraordinary capability waiting to be unleashed. The gap between what India was and what it could be was breathtaking.

Having studied trade and transportation at Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, I understood early on that India’s potential control over vital sea lanes gave it strategic significance that transcended ideology. The Indian Ocean was not a peripheral waterway; it was one of the most important arteries of global commerce, and India sat squarely at its center. Whoever shaped the security architecture of that ocean would shape the flow of oil, goods, and influence across half the globe. During the early years of the American Republic, tariffs on goods from China, Java, and India comprised a very large share of federal revenue. The trade built mansions in the Salem, Massachusetts neighborhood where I was born, and our local Peabody Essex Museum possessed remarkable Indian art. India’s importance to American interests was not a new idea — it was an old one, waiting to be rediscovered. The question was whether anyone in Washington would see past Cold War categories long enough to rediscover it.

By 1991, the contradiction between India’s talent and its policies had become a full-blown crisis. Although some fledgling attempts at economic reform had been initiated during the previous decades, the country was nearly out of foreign reserves, weeks away from defaulting on its international obligations. It was in this crucible that Prime Minister P. V. Narasimha Rao and his Finance Minister Manmohan Singh launched the historic economic reforms of August 1991 — liberalizing trade, dismantling the License Raj, and opening India to foreign investment. Building on earlier reform attempts, these were more extensive, and the government was unrelenting in seeing them realized. They did so against ferocious opposition. Members of the Sansad were still espousing doctrinaire communism; some even proposed changing the country’s name to permanently reflect that ideology. Singh faced baseless allegations of collusion with Wall Street, temporarily sidelining his career. Rao pressed forward, building domestic consensus for change through sheer political will. The scale of what they attempted should not be underestimated: they were asking a proud, post-colonial nation to abandon a development model it had followed for over four decades, and to do so amid a dire crisis. It was an act of courage that history has not sufficiently honored, one that would not be surpassed until Prime Minister Narendra Modi initiated his far-reaching reforms and programs.

The diaspora as proof of concept

But domestic reform alone was not enough. India needed a new foreign policy to match its new economics, and that meant a fundamentally different relationship with the United States. For nearly two generations, the diplomatic channel between Washington and New Delhi had been choked by Cold War suspicion and ideological posturing. Indian envoys, with rare exception beginning in the 1980s, espoused the Soviet model to their American counterparts, while American policymakers regarded India as a lost cause — too large to ignore, too stubborn to engage. The non-aligned movement, which India helped to found, was treated in Washington less as a principled stance than as a thinly veiled tilt toward Moscow. The result was decades of mutual indifference punctuated by occasional friction. Before that calculus could change in the corridors of power, something needed to happen on the ground — and it did, initially, in good measure, precipitated through the example of the Indian American community itself.

Subash Razdan personified what that community had achieved. He had fully embraced America while never losing sight of his birth country’s potential. He knew, intuitively, that the two nations could be aligned both strategically and economically. When I laid out my vision for what a Clinton presidency could mean for that alignment, he recognized it was not a Potemkin village. He agreed, and with countless other Indian Americans I approached during the campaign, supported Clinton at the polls. Years later, having introduced him to the wider Clinton orbit, Subash would accompany President Clinton on his historic March 2000 visit to India.

During my remarks in Atlanta and in conversations at every table that evening, I made a case that would become central to everything that followed: unfettered by India’s stultifying economic policies, the Indian American community had thrived in the United States. Their doctors staffed hospitals across the country. Their entrepreneurs were building businesses from Silicon Valley to the suburbs of New Jersey. Their civic engagement was exemplary. They were, in the most concrete possible terms, a living demonstration of what India itself could become if freed from failed ideology. That was not merely a talking point — it was the core of the argument I presented. If you wanted to know what Indian talent could accomplish in a market economy, you did not need to theorize. You could look around the room.

Not everyone in the Clinton campaign saw it that way. Concerned at the resistance from campaign leadership to including Indian Americans and other communities on key committees and at events, I organized a Flag Day Dinner for Governor Clinton on June 22, 1992, at the New York Sheraton for 930 community leaders, hundreds originally from India and Southeast Asia. The campaign’s New York finance chair, who had led the push against inclusion, arrived at the event stunned by the turnout. The community would not be sidelined. It was during the first Clinton Presidential Campaign that Indian Americans, though present before, became an extensive, integral part of presidential politics, their actions reverberating on both sides of the Indo-Pacific pond.

Sibal, Ray, and the path to realignment

To build the diplomatic bridge, two remarkable envoys were sent to Washington in the early 1990s: Ambassador Kanwal Sibal, a career diplomat, as Deputy Chief of Mission, and Ambassador Siddhartha Shankar Ray, appointed by Rao, as Chief of Mission. Their assignment was nothing less than to reverse nearly two generations of diplomatic inertia.

I first encountered this effort through Sibal, who introduced himself after my Atlanta speech. Over a lengthy private conversation, I made the case directly. The Indo-Russian alliance, I told him, had become a diplomatic fiction — deep in Russian armament and oil sales to India, but devoid of real economic substance. India’s future lay with the market economy its own diaspora had already mastered. I pointed to the technology corridors outside Boston, to visionaries like Bob Seamans at NASA who had helped send America to the moon, and suggested that India, with all its unemployed engineers, wanted to be part of that vortex. I stressed that the United States and India had common interests. Sibal listened intently, revealing nothing of his own position. But subsequent events would confirm that the message had landed. He later visited Little Rock, Arkansas, where I was headquartered during the campaign.

Ray’s call to me came after the Clinton Transition, reaching me in New York where I had returned to my textile business. His voice carried the weight of purpose. He was not a career diplomat; he was a lawyer who had provided legal justification for Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s Emergency, served as Governor of separatist-inclined Punjab, and helped manage the Maoist Naxalite movement in Bengal. Washington would prove tough terrain, not least because of Communist China’s rapidly emerging influence. But, with Rao’s full authority to act decisively and quickly, Ray brought to the assignment an urgency and directness that the moment demanded.

Over a four-hour lunch at the Cosmos Club — far longer than either of us had planned — Ray asked me, point-blank, how the U.S.-India relationship could be completely realigned. He was not being rhetorical or diplomatic. He was genuinely seeking an immediate path forward, much frustrated by the U.S. State Department, whose positions on Kashmir threatened India’s territorial integrity, that seemed to lean toward Pakistan, and whose attention was increasingly consumed by China.

My central recommendation was simple and, I believed, decisive: do not seek a state visit and do not ask for aid. Instead, request immediately a no-nonsense, working business meeting: Prime Minister Rao, his commerce team, and India’s most visionary innovators sitting across the table from President Clinton, Commerce Secretary Ron Brown, Trade Representative Mickey Kantor, White House Chief of Staff Mack McClarty, and Assistant to the President Bruce Lindsay. Come as equals, not supplicants. Talk about technology, investment, and strategic partnership — not grievances, not colonial history, not Cold War baggage. Focus relentlessly on commonality, on the future.

Ray asked me to travel to New Delhi to convey these suggestions personally to Prime Minister Rao and to carry a message back to President Clinton from the PM. I declined, explaining that I was not a registered agent and did not feel it appropriate. He assured me that my recommendations would be conveyed to Rao by him, word for word, and implemented at once. They were.

Rao’s Washington moment

The result was Rao’s landmark working visit to Washington in May 1994. The format itself was a statement of intent. This was not a ceremonial state visit built around toasts and photo opportunities. It was a substantive working session — ministers and officials on both sides, seated across a table, talking trade, technology, and investment. Those meetings did not produce the headlines a state dinner might have, but they accomplished something far more durable. For the first time, the conversation between the world’s two largest democracies centered not on how much aid India would receive, but on how the two nations would build lasting economic ties and strategic alignment. At the joint press conference, Clinton declared his full support for India’s reform program, calling it the engine of growth in the bilateral relationship. Rao responded that the two nations had an unprecedented opportunity to free their relations from the distortions of the Cold War and to work together for mutual benefit.

Those words were not diplomatic pleasantries. They were the articulation of a new reality, one made possible by the vision of Rao and Singh and those who supported them in New Delhi; the tenacity of Ray and Sibal in Washington, who deserve far more recognition than they have received; the grassroots political energy of the Indian American community, as exemplified by Subash Razdan; the full participation of President Clinton and his team; and the quiet conviction shared by a small number of people that the moment demanded action. No single actor could have achieved it alone. What made the realignment possible was the convergence: a reforming prime minister; shrewd envoys; a receptive administration; and a diaspora community that had already proven the thesis in their own lives.

Forward

I think often of what my Georgetown professor, Father Richard McSorley, told me: there would be moments to act for the good, that they are fleeting, and that failing to seize them is to leave history in the lurch. The early 1990s were such a moment, my meeting with Ray such a moment. A country of nearly a billion people was turning away from decades of economic paralysis. A community of Indian Americans was coming into its own as a constructive force in American civic life. And a handful of individuals — some in positions of great power, others acting from the margins — recognized that these currents could be joined to reshape the world for the better. It was incumbent upon all parties, each at their station, to act.

The relationship between the United States and India has grown enormously in more than three decades since. Defense cooperation, technology partnerships, educational exchanges, and commercial ties that were unimaginable in 1992 are now routine. There have been setbacks — India’s 1998 nuclear tests, periodic trade disputes, the gravitational pull of great-power competition. Some stress may be visible today. President Trump seeks what is best for the United States; Prime Minister Modi, what is best for India. Military operations aimed at managing extremist threats impact everything from energy flow to food production.

But the foundational alignment forged in the early 1990s endures. President Trump recognizes, and come what may, respects the global importance of India. The President has placed one of his closest collaborators, Sergio Gor, as U.S. Ambassador to India, an appointment Prime Minister Modi has written will further strengthen the India-U.S. Comprehensive Global Strategic Partnership — terms unthinkable prior to 1992. Indian Americans hold prominent roles in the Trump Administration, among them Kash Patel as FBI Director. I believe that alignment will prove more durable than any momentary divergence. The strategic logic is too strong, the economic complementarity too deep, the human connections — beginning with those Indian American community leaders in Atlanta — far too solid.

Narasimha Rao deserves to be remembered as the chief architect of modern India’s emergence onto the world stage, as much as Narendra Modi deserves to be credited with realizing India’s full potential as a powerhouse: they are sentinels in history. Manmohan Singh, Kanwal Sibal, Siddhartha Ray, and the Indian American community — by the simple, powerful act of thriving — proved that the soul of change was already alive, waiting only to be claimed.

The United States and India have already experienced that soul of change. There is only going forward.

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