Andrew J Potter's Comrades At Arms

Andrew J Potter looks at the emerging relationship between the newly independent Republic of Indian and superpower that was the United States during the Cold War era in his book, Comrades at Arms: The United States and India, 1947-1964. It is, however, the angle from which he decides to look at this relationship that is most interesting. Rotter decides to look at this budding complicated relationship from a culture angle as, in his own words, “Like the rest of us, policymakers and diplomats do not shed their values, biases, and assumptions at their office doors. They are creatures of culture, and their attitudes cannot help but shape the policy they make.”

Today, relations between the United States and India are quite good, and this has been the case since at least the Bush era during which the Nuclear Treaty was signed (citation); however, the period that Rotter examines was one filled with distrust and a lack of mutual corporation. In trying to answer why this was the case, and see whether it would have
In this way, both countries were highly hypocritical in criticizing the other for practicing discrimination – or at least, as Rotter pointed out, that’s how the two nations viewed it.

Rotters emphasis on the matter of caste being a major obstacle in Indian-American relations seems rather far-fetched. “Rotter says that the “westerners with whom Nehru found he could work kept themselves humbly removed from the Indian caste system.’ He continues that “as outsiders – non-Hindus and foreigners – Westerners were not to presume that they had a place anywhere inside the social hierarchy. They had to behave as if there were no social expectation of them, as indeed there were