Canada India Foundation (CIF).

India's emergence as a major player next to Japan and China is beginning to alter the global balance of power for the 21st century. 

The March 2006 visit to New Delhi by President George Bush was an acknowledgement of India's place in the post-Cold War world. 

In accepting its status as a nuclear weapon state, the Bush administration put in place the making for U.S.-India strategic partnership in the region and beyond. India's experience as the most populous democracy is the counter-point to that of its neighbour, communist China.

Despite immense odds of poverty and vast diversity of people, India has succeeded in building a democratic polity that is vibrant, open and intensely argumentative.

According to Amartya Sen, one of India's most widely respected intellectuals and Nobel laureate in economics, Winston Churchill thought the idea of India being a democracy was funny.

But democracy, Sen observes, "is, ultimately, the practice of public reasoning in the broadest sense." This practice is found in the long and rich history of India, and its tradition was incorporated into the institutions left behind by Britain.

Churchill once remarked about Russia being "a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma." Of India it could be said in reverse that it remains an enigma despite being unwrapped and open to global scrutiny.

The enigma is India's remarkable economic performance over the past decade with an average annual growth of 7%. This growth has occurred in a democratic setting, and it has been relatively people-friendly by relying on an expanding domestic market and a growing middle class.

India's success with democracy bears a lesson for Africa and the greater Middle East. It has proven that democracy can take roots outside of European society, and can be shaped to the requirements of non-European culture.

Canada has more in common with India -- a parliamentary democracy with a federal system and membership in the British Commonwealth -- than with any other Asian country.

The recent trends in Indo-Canadian partnership are encouraging. Provincial trade missions from Canada have visited India to develop business opportunities at both ends.

Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty returned recently from India with a trade delegation, and Ottawa is sending International Trade Minister David Emerson with a team in March to build business contacts aimed at supporting India's investments in repairing and building its infrastructure.

But beyond trade missions and seeking business opportunities it is now necessary that Ottawa rethink its strategic interests in a part of the world -- Asia -- where future growth and economic demands have overtaken Europe and the Atlantic region.

It should be natural for Canada to draw closer to India based on shared values than for Ottawa to strive for some sort of equitable distance from Beijing and New Delhi.

The temptation in Ottawa, however, to treat China and India equally is driven by mercantile interests. The irony in any such policy of neutrality is rewarding an authoritarian power while holding back from a democracy. The price of trading with authoritarian powers is paid in shading concerns over human rights.

Trade and other bilateral relations with democracies, on the contrary, contribute to enhancing human rights across the political spectrum and to expanding the zone of peace in a world that remains treacherous and threatening.

There was a moment in Canada's role in world politics a half-century ago when Ottawa pursued a special relationship with New Delhi.

A renewal of that relationship under new conditions will strengthen the forces of democracy in the region where peace remains precarious for now and the future.

Salim Mansur is Senior Fellow at the Canadian Coalition for Democracies

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