Anxiety continues to grow in India over the Obama presidency, says John Elliott on The Daily Beast.

Pakistan has firmly believed that India had a special place in George W. Bush’s heart from turning a blind eye to the activities in Kashmir to the nuclear deal that allowed India to buy nuclear hardware from the international community without signing the Non Proliferation Treaty. But the undertones coming out of New Delhi shows an increasing anxiety about what Obama can and will do for India.

John Elliott lays out some of India’s arguments on The Daily Beast:

India is not against Obama. It recognizes that the world should be a better and safer place with him as president, but it has lost its best foreign friend. Bush brought it out of the cold and helped to make it an international player by instigating-with Condoleezza Rice-the U.S.-India nuclear pact that scraped through just before Bush took his fingers off the levers of power. The deal enables the U.S. and other countries such as France and Russia to sell nuclear plants and allied technology to India, which had been banned for many years since India developed nuclear weapons.

A particular concern has been India’s hope that Obama will not link two distinct issues: the urgent international issue of the Taliban and al Qaeda on the Afghan-Pakistan border with far less critical India-Pakistan differences over Kashmir. For its part, Pakistan has been arguing that a settlement of the Kashmir question would allow it to move troops from the Indian border to tackle the insurgents and terrorists on the Afghan side.

After a strenuous lobbying campaign in Washington, India has successfully persuaded Obama not to include India in the Pakistan-Afghanistan brief given to Richard Holbrooke, his new special envoy to the region. The lobbying was blunt. At one meeting, India’s emissaries told Madeleine Albright, the former secretary of state and a leading Obama adviser, that Holbrooke would not be welcome in Delhi if India was included in his brief. Albright apparently asked, presumably mischievously, if he would be given an Indian visa. Yes, came the reply, but not much else.

Also of concern is India’s sensitive mountainous border with China, where Beijing has become more belligerent about disputed boundaries since India became a close ally of Bush’s America. Less urgent, but equally important, is how vigorously the Obama administration is willing to promote the new nuclear deal, especially on fuel reprocessing.

These issues were discussed this morning at a seminar in Delhi organized by the San Francisco-based Asia Foundation and the Confederation of Indian Industry which focused on what Karl Inderfurth, former Clinton Assistant Secretary of State, more regional focus of the Afghan-Pakistan border.

Curiously, India’s successful lobbying of Obama seems not to have reached the ears of Britain’s foreign secretary, David Miliband, who upset senior Indian ministers with both the content and style of his behavior while he was in Delhi on an official visit two weeks ago.

Miliband picked up the Pakistan line linking Kashmir and Afghanistan and urged that the Kashmir border problem should be solved so as to reduce the incidence of terrorism internationally. He first wrote this in an article in The Guardian newspaper just before he arrived in Delhi, saying that “resolution of the dispute over Kashmir would help deny extremists in the region one of their main calls to arms, and allow Pakistani authorities to focus more effectively on tackling the threat on their western borders”.

That angered Indian ministers because it seemed to suggest that the world’s terrorist attacks were significantly the result of Islamic anger over the unsolved Kashmir border issue-which was clearly ridiculous.

I have been told that a very senior Indian government official was so outraged by Miliband’s lecturing on how India should handle Kashmir that he said, in a very quiet but stern voice, “We did not tell you how to handle Ulster and I do not expect you to tell me how to handle Kashmir.”

Again, it looks like the Obama administration could be in trouble when the Indian lobbyists enter the West Wing. With the strong ties to the Clintons, India seems to have the bargaining chips right for themselves.

But are they right for the region and the world?