The bad news starts with atmospherics. On the eve of Bush’s arrival, American Ambassador David Mulford has been trashed by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in parliament. Mulford, according to Singh, violated protocol by countering the chief minister of West Bengal who characterized Bush as a leader of the “most organized pack of killers”. It followed another Communist leader calling Bush “the biggest terrorist of the world".

The issues are snarled in what British novelist E.M. Foster defined as the Indian “muddle”.

Mulford, not given to obfuscation, has been delivering some not very welcome advice to the Indian Communists: they cannot expect foreign investment to pour in if New Delhi opposes U.S. policy on such crucial issues as Iran’s attempt to acquire nuclear weapons. The Communists, on whom Singh’s coalition depends for his parliamentary majority, have sabotaged efforts to continue economic liberalization. Singh, as finance minister a decade ago began the process, sees it as his top priority. At the same time, the Communists controlling Calcutta, that template for urban despair, are courting foreign investment.

More basic is the issue of American transfer of nuclear technology to India’s starving power sector. It all started last summer in a sudden bureaucratic initiative – apparently instigated by a former U.S. ambassador to India, cashiered only to turn up as action man in the National Security Council for Iraq [!], and now a paid lobbyist for the Indians, and a sidekick at the Carnegie Endowment, well-known for its soft approaches.

There is a long history of American difficulties with India over nuclear issues. In fact, Washington cut off the Mumbai [Bombay] power reactor’s fuel in one of the bitterest feuds of New Delhi’s Cold War alliance with the Soviets. The new policy winks at India’s refusal to sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty, its secret development of nuclear weapons, as a sign of growing mutuality of interests. Adding access to American nuclear and other technologies was supposed to give fillip to snowballing exports to the U.S., now India’s number one trading partner.

But the deal was not cleared with Congress. And Washington’s caveat India must separate power from weapons and put it under the UN International Atomic Energy Agency policing has made it a domestic political football, particularly kicked by the Communists.

There are all sorts of implications, not excluding the U.S.’ tortured – but highly critical – relations with Pakistan President Gen. Pervez Musharraf. Pakistan, having developed its own nuclear weapons with North Korean help and a network of black market technology, looks askance at U.S. offers of a nuclear leg-up for India.

Bush was supposed to have found all these problems solved and ready for signature. And he was to cut the Gordian knot with Musharraf, get the Pakistanis to once and for all close down terrorist training camps helping to pin down a half million Indian Kashmir security forces. That whole issue makes nuclear war in the Subcontinent more likely than any other place in the world.

None of this, of course, even touches basic issues whether the Indians would, could, and will enter into the kind of alliance Washington dreamers have hypothecated. Significantly India’s always Americaphobic foreign office has played down the visit. So far Singh has leaned toward referral of the Iranian issue to the UN Security Council, a touchstone Washington had pushed its European allies on for months. But he has also argued for continued good relations with Tehran [it’s on Pakistan’s flank] and pushed a mammoth Iran-Pakistan-India gas project.

But it would take far more than nuclear technology transfers and U.S. weapons sales to make India the kind of help on China some Washington strategists conceive. China’s Tibet hold which dominates India’s northern – and still contested border -- is strengthening. The situation in Nepal, nestled in the Himalayas, worsens by the day – with Beijing fishing there. Pakistan is as much as ever a major Chinese ally. British India’s old satrapy, Myamar [Burma], has become all but an out and out Chinese ally. New Delhi’s relations with Bangla Desh where Chinese influence is growing are abominable. Maoist insurgencies exist in a dozen Indian states; there are half a dozen armed separatist movements in its northeast bordering China and Myamar. India [like China] is still heavily dependent on Russian arms [a multi-billion-dollar purchase appears in the offing].

That’s why Bush will come home with a headache, not a foreign policy triumph.

Sol W. Sanders, (solsanders@cox.net), is an Asian specialist with more than 25 years in the region, and a former correspondent for Business Week, U.S. News & World Report and United Press International. He writes weekly for World Tribune.com and East-Asia-Intel.com.