Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s declaration of “deep love” among Indians for the president of the United States of America, George W. Bush, needs to be defended. Or at least put into context. As one of the two score or so men and women — including officials from India and the US — present in the White House Oval Office last week when Singh opened his heart to Bush, this columnist is qualified to rationalize Singh’s very public affection for Bush which has understandably caused an uproar across India. At the risk of repeating an idea that is somewhat frayed by its overuse in the US, it must be acknowledged in all fairness that no other American president has gone as far as Bush in changing his country’s relations with New Delhi and in doing whatever he can for India.

This columnist was at the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis when the issue of India’s exemption from the global rules for nuclear commerce was slated to come up before a meeting of the Nuclear Suppliers Group in Vienna on September 4 and 5. Bush skipped the convention, which had nominated him for the US presidency in 2000 and in 2004, and would have given him a long and effusive farewell tribute that he could treasure for the rest of his life had he gone for the party meeting this year. The US president chose to stay away from Minneapolis because he was preoccupied with a potentially devastating hurricane in America’s south and was determined to avoid a repeat of the disastrous handling of Hurricane Katrina by his inept aides in 2005.

This time, Bush was directly in charge of dealing with Hurricane Gustav and made sure that the Katrina experience was not repeated. Yet, in the middle of all that, Bush ensured that he was kept abreast of developments in the run-up to the NSG meeting in Vienna, and he decisively intervened repeatedly to make sure that India’s case for an exemption went through within the nuclear cartel. A number of elements combined to facilitate the change in the NSG rules for India, but it would not have come about without the US president’s direct intervention with several world leaders on more than one occasion in the last days of August and in the first week of September, according to those privy to what precisely Bush did by way of arm-twisting, cajoling and sweet-talking the nuclear cartel’s members in New Delhi’s favour.

No other foreign leader since the Soviet Union’s Leonid Brezhnev in the 1970s has done as much as Bush has done to improve and stabilize his country’s relations with India. No diplomat other than Ronen Sen, India’s ambassador to the US, knows this better. Sen, who was in Moscow in the 1960s, ’70s, ’80s and ’90s, is uniquely placed in India’s foreign service to compare what the Soviets did for India during those decades to what Bush and key members of his administration, such as the secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, have done to change the complexion of Indo-US relations.

But it is unlikely that Sen would have had any reason or occasion to tell the prime minister, a relative newcomer to diplomacy, the epic tales of how Indo-Soviet strategic partnership was forged during the Cold-War years and refashioned as a vital relationship for India in the post-Cold-War era. It is a sad story of the decline of a great power into American tutelage — thankfully brief — during the years of Boris Yeltsin’s now discredited rule that American “advisers” actually sat in the office of the then Russian foreign minister, Andrei Kozyrev, limiting access to Kozyrev and having a final say on his decisions. Sen — who was ambassador in Moscow during those years — and other envoys like him had to get past these US “advisers” to gain access to the Russian foreign minister of that time.

It is the unwritten story of the understated endurance of ties between New Delhi and Moscow that even in those difficult years for post-communist Russia, the Russians never gave up on India. It is one of Indian history’s great tragedies that P.V. Narasimha Rao has taken to his grave much of what was done during his prime ministership, with Sen as his trusted man in Moscow, to resurrect Indo-Russian strategic relationship against heavy odds and stiff opposition from the US, a country for which the present prime minister clearly feels a deep love.

But then Singh, in all likelihood, is unaware of all this because details of these are not in the archives of South Block and not even in the archives of the Indian embassy in Moscow. These things were done very differently between Rao and Sen and, earlier, between Indira Gandhi and a succession of trusted men whom she appointed as ambassadors to Russia. So, to a very large extent, Singh can be excused for assuming that Bush is the most India-friendly leader to have walked the earth since the beginning of mankind.

All that Singh has seen during his just-concluded visit to the US is how heavily Bush has been personally involved in pushing the nuclear deal on Capitol Hill even during a bleak week when the US president is trying to get his country out of the quagmire of what is emerging as the worst economic crisis in American history. Bush found time in the middle of this crisis not only to meet Singh in the White House, but also to host him for a dinner in the Old Family Dining Room of the presidential abode.

It is very clear that Bush likes Singh and has great regard for him. Bush certainly likes Singh much more than L.K. Advani or Sitaram Yechury likes the prime minister. And Bush certainly doesn’t say snide things behind the prime minister’s back, as Amar Singh does, that are contrary to what he says in public. It is a human weakness to want to be liked: for the prime minister, Bush fulfils that need, which Singh reciprocated in the Oval Office.

Besides, Bush doesn’t harangue Singh — unlike the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, or José Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission, in the latest instance — on issues such as violence against Christians. It is not that Bush is not under pressure: the statutory US commission on international religious freedom is angry with Bush for not putting pressure on India on freedom of religion. His own deputy secretary of state, the second-ranking diplomat in the Bush administration, John Negroponte, wants to punish India for not doing enough to curb trafficking in human beings. But Bush is clearly unfazed by all that, and he loves Singh. Shouldn’t Singh love him back and claim that the people of India “deeply love” Bush as well, even if that claim is questionable?

Singh’s predicament is somewhat — but not exactly — similar to that of Tony Blair when he became the British prime minister. Until he moved into 10 Downing Street, Blair had no experience in government. Most of Blair’s predecessors handled key ministerial portfolios that prepared them to be prime ministers, and they had access to top-secret British documents, intelligence briefings and other materials that made them immune to shocks over the years.

Blair is brilliant, articulate and had immense charisma when he was elected prime minister. And yet, he ruined his legacy and made a wreck of his prime ministership by going along with Bush on Iraq. It is said that Blair decided for regime change in Baghdad after he read secret intelligence reports about Saddam Hussein’s excesses, which convinced him that Britain must fight for the Iraqi people against Hussein’s tyranny. All because Blair had no prior access to such secret briefings until he entered 10 Downing Street, unlike Margaret Thatcher and John Major. By the time Thatcher and Major grew into prime ministerial shoes, they knew that dictators worse than Hussein already broke the backs of their people, and previous British leaders chose other priorities. But because Blair did not know better, he chose to go with Bush on Iraq.

It has been the same with Singh. The only foreign-policy decision that Singh influenced before he became prime minister was Narasimha Rao’s decision towards the end of his prime ministerial tenure not to test a nuclear weapon. Singh feared that a nuclear test then would undermine his economic reforms. It is Singh’s innocence in foreign policy that makes Bush appear lovable to him. History will probably absolve the prime minister for confusing his love for Bush with whatever feelings that Indians may have for a man who will go down as the worst-ever US president.