Houston, we don’t have a problem: The bipartisan era of Indo-US diplomatic ties | ORF

For too long the ‘Indian Dream’ was the ‘American Dream’. That is, for the aspirational classes from as early as the 1960s, the overarching belief was that a STEM degree would unlock great career opportunities stateside. This was during the days of a moribund Soviet-style, centrally planned socialist economy, long before the Indian growth story started.

The Indian diaspora in the United States reflects the educational intelligentsia of India, the new coastal elites, some of the new 1%. To an extent, seeing Donald Trump, a Republican too right for moderate Republicans, address one of the largest congregations of the Indian-American diaspora, may have had its own sense of incongruity.

Texas is a good place to address the changing tide of India-US relations. Perhaps, one would obviously gravitate to a connection between the respective space agencies, given the recent news pertaining to ISRO’s Chandrayaan 2 and NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, which recently celebrated fifty years of the moon landing. But the connection to Texas is unique.

The diminutive but astute Prime Minister Narasimha Rao arrived in the US in June 1994 and was scheduled to meet President Bill Clinton, also addressing a joint session of the Congress. In the 1990s, Kashmir and…