Carter and Morarji Desai tango on eggshells

A week before Jimmy Carter's inauguration in January 1977, Indira Gandhi had ended the Emergency and scheduled elections for March 1977.

- V Sudarshan

In February, Indian President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed died, and Jimmy Carter, in a gesture of symbolism of considerable warmth, designated his mother, "Miss Lillian" who had served two years as a Peace Corps volunteer near Bombay during the late sixties, to represent the United States at the funeral.

After the elections, which saw the defeat of Mrs Gandhi, the veteran Janata Party leader Morarji Desai, 81, virtually moved from jail to being the Prime Minister. The peanut farmer from Georgia and the austere Gujarati, both owed their elections to major political trauma -- Carter to Watergate, and Desai to Emergency.

According to Dennis Kux, the author of a seminal work on Indo-US relations (1941-1991), Estranged Democracies, both men shared a "genuine concern on the principles of human rights, democracy, disarmament." The US repealed a law that required it to vote against all World Bank loans to India following the 1974 Pokhran nuclear test.

Jimmy Carter's National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, placed India in a higher strategic position than the presidencies of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. It classified India as a "regional influential", along with Saudi Arabia, Iran, Indonesia, Nigeria, Brazil and Venezuela.

Morarji named Atal Behari Vajpayee as his foreign minister. Carter named a former Princeton University professor, Goheen, who had been born in India of missionary parents, and who retained strong links with India, as ambassador. Before he left for Delhi Carter instructed Goheen to tell Morarji Desai: "If India would restrain from developing nuclear weapons and agree to discuss non-proliferation, he would clear the pending Tarapur shipment."