| It is a curious and troublesome paradox that the relations of the largest democracy in the world, India, and the strongest democracy in the world, the United States, have been so broadly characterized as "fragile and thin," as "fractured" and most recently as exhibiting a relationship between "estranged democracies." Given the premise that American foreign policy is driven in major part by the need to defend democracies, and the desire to encourage states that are not democracies to become more democratic, it is perplexing why the relations between these two democratic nations have been characterized as such. Hence, some analysts have questioned the claim that the defense and support of democracy is a primary driving force of American foreign policy. In order to explain this puzzling relationship several scholarly attempts were made based on the geopolitical realities and these attempts were inadequate and inconsistent. Even though the role of perceptions was recognized as an important element in Indo-US relations and in spite of the acknowledged importance of the perceptual dimension of the relationship between these two countries, there are hardly any studies which look at this aspect of bilateral relations in depth.; This study is an attempt to explore the perceptual aspects of the Indo-US relations by using image theory, which has been widely employed in analyzing the relationship between cognition and national policy. The image model assumes that policy-makers tend to categorize different countries, and this categorization, in turn, significantly affect information processing and decision-making. In this study, an attempt has been made to show how much perceptions rather than geopolitical realities play a role in foreign policy decision-making. By accessing hitherto unused archival data this research is designed to explore what kind of images US policy-makers had towards India during the Cold War and how these images translated into policy choices, especially around the Indo-Pakistan War of 1965. |
