In the American scheme of things, an assistant secretary of state is just a cog in the giant wheel of foreign policy making. But few cogs invite more scrutiny than Robin Raphel, the first point person for South Asia, who last week wound up her tour of duty in the state department with warm goodbye letters to her friends in India and Pakistan. Engaging and offensive in turns, she was vilified in India and venerated by the Pakistani establishment, perhaps to a needless degree at both ends. As she packed her bags for an ambassadorial assignment -- most likely in Tunisia it was a chastened Raphel looking back at what US policymakers now say is one of the most difficult regions in the world to engage.

Despite her controversy-ridden tenure, the bottom line is that Indo-US relationship is now in much better shape and more mature than it has been for years. Sure, there is the occasional run-in on nuclear issues. And an odd dust-up about putting Indian companies on a watchlist.

Plus a few wrinkles relating to trade matters. But by and large, the United States has begun viewing India with a new respect, based partly on its accelerating economic growth and recognition of its resilient democracy and civil society. Indian suspicion of American design too is tempered by its own growing aplomb and self-confidence.

On her part, Raphel overcame early prejudices to recognise that India is a regional power, which cussed and intractable at times, needs to be heard and respected. On its part, New Delhi weathered her inexperience and impetuosity to forge a sounder partnership with Washington resting mainly on trade and economic cooperation.

It did not look like that four years ago when a young foreign service career officer posted as a trifling political counselor at the US embassy in Delhi was transported to Foggy Bottom as the first ever assistant secretary of state for South Asia.

Robin Raphel started with several firsts: advantages that in the long run weighed in as disadvantages. To begin with she was a friend of Bill Clinton (they studied together at Oxford), and jumping three levels in the foreign service to land the plum job superseding several senior aspirants ensured her lasting frostiness in the corridors of foreign policy.

Her own relative inexperience was amplified by the fact that the South Asia bureau itself was newly created, carved out of the old East Asia and Pacific section in the State Department.

Still, as a minnow in the league of self-professed big boys, Raphel had a chance to carve out her space and glory. She supposedly had direct access to the White House. It was a new Democratic administration's first term. An exuberant Clinton, himself a tyro in foreign affairs, was in office.

The Cold War was just over and there was expectation in the air. There was truce in the Middle-East, geography had been relaid in Central Asia and history was being made in South Africa. Perhaps South Asia could be posted on the board too?

Unfortunately, she made a horrible beginning. Her first trip to South Asia did not include India. This did not endear her to New Delhi, which as it is viewed her with distrust.

Not only were they forced to deal with an assistant secretary who had been a minor functionary in the US embassy in New Delhi only months before, but she had begun her tenure with disdain towards the region's most powerful country. Besides, in the eyes of many paranoid New Delhi babus, her previous tenure in Islamabad and her stint with American intelligence agencies, made her very, very suspect.

Raphel aggravated this already dim view almost immediately during her first pow-wow with the Indian media in Washington. Asked to state US' position vis-a-vis the accession of Jammu and Kashmir to the Indian Union, she made her now infamous remarks that caused a furore in New Delhi that took weeks, if not months, to subside.

This was worse than the dreaded `tilt'. It questioned the very basis of the Indian Union. Suddenly, all the vision of a post-Cold War golden honeymoon between India and the US evaporated. It was attrition once again.Robin Raphel never recovered from that episode.

To this day, she claims the question was set up (no one had ever asked before a specific question about the accession) and that she was merely reiterating the known US position that the entire state of pre-Independence Jammu and Kashmir was disputed territory. But New Delhi saw her questioning of the instrument of accession as a low blow. They proceeded to give her the works. Every proposal she came up with was handed the cold treatment. When she came to India, she was repeatedly snubbed, denied basic access required by minimum protocol.

Back in Washington, she was not faring too well either. Within the State Department, she did not seem to command the confidence of the seventh floor. And heading a fledgling bureau did not help either.

Neither Secretary of State Warren Christopher nor Deputy Secretary Strobe Talbott showed any great interest in South Asia, obsessed as they were in the Middle East and the former Soviet Union respectively. Her access to the White House meant little. National Security Council mandarins there were in a ``treaty mode.''

If there was no treaty to be signed in the region, then it merited little attention or effort. Meantime, New Delhi preferred to deal with Frank Wisner, an able career diplomat and one of the seniormost heads in the State Department who was a power in his own right and who functioned quite independently of his Assistant Secretary of State.

If despite all these problems, Indo-US relations prospered, it had much to do with the shared common values of the two countries. Reforms in India led the US to engage New Delhi on the commercial level. International terrorism brought the two countries together on a little-known track of cooperation climaxing in an extradition treaty last month.

Raphel herself put behind the sour experiences to forge a more professional exchange with Indian diplomats in her final months. And most of all, much to New Delhi's delight, her remarks on Kashmir became more measured and even.

Although she did not at any time signal a change in the US policy, her suggestion to the two sides not to go back in history and look forward to a new, creative solution while moving ahead on the trade and commercial track, is more palatable to India,. It is a kind of footnote that her successor Rick Inderfurth could carry on from.

Copyright © 1997 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.