wonderful fiction, said Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh about the India Today report on the American proposal for elaborate military cooperation with India (November 19). No, no proposal, said the prime minister. Wonderful denials, in the time-honoured tradition of governments' response to truth as unravelled by the media-and in this case, the report has documentary support. Singh's instantaneous denial, delivered from Washington, reveals only the minister's mind, which aspires, in matters diplomatic, to be more American than Uncle Sam. Though a nationalist in rhetoric, when it comes to America the foreign minister exhibits a kind of naive, proprietorial position, as if he has discovered America for the Indian policy establishment. Things American without Singh's seal are not facts, they are fiction!

Singh apart, why is India defensive about the proposed military relationship with America? It is not that India has asked for it. It is America's rather belated discovery of India, made possible by immediate geopolitical exigencies. If the war in Afghanistan and the national characteristics of some of America's partners in the campaign provided a context to the proposal, the text of a new Indo-US engagement has been there since the day the BJP became a ruling party. India was a decade late in coming to terms with the post-Soviet world order. Even as the world was busy getting out of ideological bipolarity, India continued to see the world through the cataract of the Cold War. The BJP Government's most audacious achievement in foreign policy was the repudiation of the institutionalised sense of anti-Americanism. That way, the proposed military alliance was a logical culmination of the new-found Hindi-Yankee bhai bhai.

So, no wonderful fiction here, Mr Foreign Minister. It is a wonderful opportunity and, at the moment, both India and the US are on the right side of history. They are, to use the prime minister's assertion last year, "natural allies" against the acknowledged enemy-radical Islamism. In Asia, ideally, America can't get a better friend than India-China is market-friendly but it is a communist dictatorship; Pakistan is an unevolved nation at war with itself. An Indo-American entente is in tune with the geopolitical times, and the BJP Government has made it viable. What a great pity it lacks the courage and vision to take it to its logical end.