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U.S. Ready to End Sanctions on India to Build an Alliance
By Jane Perlez, NY TIMES

WASHINGTON, Aug. 24 — The Bush administration is moving on a broad front to strengthen relations with India, a nation it views as a neglected and potentially important strategic ally and trading partner in Asia.

The most dramatic step the administration will take, officials say, is the almost certain lifting of American economic and military sanctions imposed on India in 1998 for its test of a nuclear weapon.

Senior administration officials say Congress will be asked to lift the sanctions when it returns next month. Some of the most senior legislators, including the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Joseph R. Biden Jr., Democrat of Delaware, favor the move.

Senator Biden said in an interview that he had sent a letter to President Bush last week expressing his support and indicating that the sanctions could be removed in time for a possible meeting between Mr. Bush and Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, in New York in late September. Mr. Bush is also planning a visit to India early next year.

The sanctions were symbolic as much as practical, the officials said. Lifting them now would remove a significant irritant to closer ties. But it would also signal that the United States — after being surprised and chagrined by India's nuclear test three years ago — had little choice but to accept that India, the second most populous nation, had elbowed its way into the nuclear club.

The reversal is not as awkward as it might once have been, given the administration's own opposition to a nuclear-test-ban treaty and its desire to build a missile shield against what it increasingly seems to regard as the inevitable spread of missile technology and weapons of mass destruction.

In short, as one official said, the United States had to face the fact that India was a nuclear power and that "the genie could not be put back in the bottle."

One senior official said the administration was also likely to ask Congress to lift some sanctions against India's neighbor and rival, Pakistan, which detonated its own nuclear weapon in a tit-for-tat test just weeks after India did. But Senator Biden said he was not prepared to go along with the request for Pakistan, which has since come under military rule.

In the most direct explanation of the administration's position, Robert B. Zoellick, the United States trade representative, told an audience in New Delhi earlier this month, "The United States wants to treat India realistically for what it is — a major country and an emerging power.

"We want to engage India in a strategic dialogue that encompasses the full range of global issues," he added. "The United States appreciates that India's influence clearly extends far beyond South Asia."

Mr. Zoellick, the first member of President Bush's cabinet to visit India, said Washington wanted to work with India on fighting terrorism and the spread of nuclear weapons, promoting human rights and protecting the environment.

He also urged India to drop its resistance to the start of a new round of trade talks by the World Trade Organization, in Doha, Qatar, in October. India's strong voice on behalf of developing countries contributed to the breakdown of the last round, in Seattle in 1999.

Another high-ranking Bush official, Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage, said this month in Sydney, Australia: "India is a nuclear power. There are a lot of reasons we ought to engage with India, and we're going to."

Mr. Armitage noted that the Indian-American population in the United States was "very high-tech oriented, very organized, very politically astute, a very helpful" factor in American politics.

In urging the lifting of sanctions, senior Bush officials said, they are not seeking a quid pro quo. They say the end of sanctions will itself produce a closer dialogue and, for example, possibly lead India to tighten its controls on the manufacture of material for nuclear w

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