America From Abroad : U.S.-India Relations Turn Sour : Both are democracies with values in common. U.S. investment pours in. On one level, ties have never been stronger. So what’s wrong?

One country is the world’s most populous democracy, the other its wealthiest. Both cast off the yoke of the same colonial power but kept its language. One has the biggest free-market economy, the other is moving in the same direction.

Why, then, have relations between India and the United States seemed so sour lately?

The top U.S. official for India, Assistant Secretary of State Robin Raphel, is due in New Delhi next week. “It’s unlikely that the inventory of the protocol division of the Ministry of External Affairs includes a black carpet,” snapped the Hindustan Times newspaper. “But there is still time to acquire one.”

Vice President K. R. Narayanan, who was his country’s envoy to Washington in the early 1980s, is said to have observed that India and the United States are nations divided by the same political system. And Dennis Kux, a career Foreign Service officer, pointedly titled his new history of Indo-U.S. relations “Estranged Democracies.”

Superficially, events over the past six months seem to bear them out.

In October, Raphel--a former diplomat in New Delhi, a friend of President Clinton’s and the first head of the State Department’s new Bureau for South Asian Affairs--made some remarks on the sensitive issue of separatism in the northern Indian state of Kashmir.

Kashmir joined India 47 years ago because of a maharaja’s wish. When Raphel suggested that might not be enough to grant India perpetual title, Indian correspondents treated her off-the-record comment as tantamount to a U.S. statement putting India’s territorial wholeness in doubt.

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Two months later, the White House added fuel to an anti-American blaze already raging in Indian dailies. A form letter to a pro-secessionist Kashmiri group, bearing Clinton’s signature, said, “I look forward to working with you and others to help bring peace to Kashmir.” In another missive to a congressman about conflict in the Indian state of Punjab--cradle of the Sikh minority and also home to a secession drive--Clinton wrote of the need to safeguard “Sikh rights.”

A gleeful band of Sikhs who accuse India’s Hindu majority of genocide of their people bestowed on Clinton the honorary title of nawab. But much of the Indian Establishment fumed at what they interpreted as Washington’s trafficking with its enemies. The Press Trust of India said that a “virulent group of anti-Indian officials” had grabbed control of U.S. policy. The Pakistani high commissioner, Riaz Khokhar, noted with amused satisfaction that he was no longer the most unpopular person in Delhi.

But the outrage of journalists, politicians and participants in orchestrated protests on the broad streets near the U.S. Embassy is just one theme in the schizophrenic story of U.S.-Indian relations these days.

Dig deeper, and it becomes clear that ties between this former Soviet proxy and Moscow’s chief Cold War adversary have never been sounder or broader-based.

In a more open India, more than $1 billion in new U.S. investment was approved by the Indian government last year--more than in all the other years since Indian independence combined. Two-way trade was around $7 billion, with India the net leader by about half a billion dollars.

In January, India’s president, Shankar Dayal Sharma, used the tried-and-true language of anti-colonialism to reject foreign “interference” but was chauffeured to an official function in a Chevrolet. And a leftist-proposed boycott of Coke and Pepsi this month fizzled before it began.

U.S. and Indian diplomats are co-sponsoring U.N. resolutions on controlling weapons proliferation; last year the two navies held their first joint exercise.

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Much of the sound and fury may be a last gasp of the anti-Americanism that was once rife in the Indian political and foreign policy Establishment. To many, the United States was the architect of Union Carbide’s deadly plant in Bhopal and, most worrisome of all, an ally of archfoe Pakistan.

In larger terms, the collapse of the Soviet Union left India without its most influential friend on the diplomatic scene and tore the rudder off its foreign policy. It is still seeking a new course in the post-Cold War world.

Some Indian journalists blame their colleagues assigned to Washington or the foreign affairs beat for blowing largely harmless remarks out of proportion.

“They don’t understand what they’re writing about,” said Subhash Chakravarti, diplomatic editor of the prestigious Times of India. India’s leaders are said to be unfazed.

“The government at the top is more inclined to look at the opportunities rather than the problems,” a high-ranking U.S. diplomat said. On the most important issue for Prime Minister P. V. Narasimha Rao’s government, economic reform, U.S. support has been steadfast and tangible.

There is no single Indian viewpoint, of course, but many Indians feel Americans don’t pay enough heed to their sensibilities.

“Our country is a young one, really,” one former ambassador said. “We feel it is still fragile. How would you feel if we said that California was a ‘disputed territory’ of the U.S.?”

Former Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, the father of modern India, found Americans “immature” in their political thinking. He drew the conclusion after his first visit to the United States in the fall of 1949.

As author Kux recounts, the Cambridge-educated premier found talk at the White House less than stimulating--a main topic of one dinner discussion between then-President Harry S. Truman and Vice President Alben Barkley concerned the merits of Kentucky bourbon.

Nehru’s supercilious judgment is being heard in updated form today. “One explanation for what is happening is that the Clinton Administration is naive and commits blunders all over: Somalia, Bosnia, etc.,” said Satish Kumar, a professor of diplomacy at the New Delhi university named for Nehru.

But Kumar doesn’t feel that explains everything. “While we know that Clinton has made no adverse change as far as economic policy, on political and strategic issues there is a distinct feeling . . . that the Clinton Administration has taken a turn against India,” he said.

Differences also abide on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and alleged brutalities by Indian forces fighting insurgents in Kashmir. Raphel’s remarks, Kumar said, could be “kite-flying” to test New Delhi’s reaction.

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In their most charitable interpretation, Indians say Clinton Administration officials such as Raphel are proving inept at getting their message across. The image they are casting, intentionally or not, from across the ocean ends up affecting the real stuff of relations as Indians get irked and demand that their government do something.

“You’d be ill advised to underestimate the depth of public sentiment on this issue,” Foreign Secretary Krishnan Srinivasan cautioned an American journalist. India’s government can’t afford to underestimate that sentiment.

Two weeks ago, Home Affairs Minister S.B. Chavan told Parliament that the United States is looking out for its own interests in Kashmir and implied that all the talk about human rights from Washington is a smoke screen. His blistering remarks drew an expression of displeasure the next day from the top U.S. diplomat in Delhi, Charge d’Affaires Kenneth C. Brill.

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Brill is highly regarded by Indians, but the fact that since March, 1993, he and not a full-fledged ambassador has represented the United States in New Delhi also gives pause to some. The nomination of former U.S. Rep. Stephen J. Solarz (D-N.Y.), known here as a “friend of India,” was held up for months as the FBI conducted a background check.

As of Monday, the embassy in New Delhi had not been asked to seek approval from the Indian government, as protocol requires, before Solarz’s nomination can be made public, an embassy official said.

For those seeking evidence that the two democracies are still estranged, the lack of a U.S. ambassador is simply more proof.

“The fact that we don’t mean an insult doesn’t mean that the Indians don’t perceive it as an insult,” said Sen. Hank Brown (R-Colo.), who visited in December. “They do.”