Hillary Clinton, America's Secretary of State in the Obama administration, made her pilgrimage to India (July 17-21) for the purpose of determining the nature of the relationship which the world's two largest democracies will pursue with each other now that the George W. Bush administration has run its course.

There is a touch of almost romantic irony in the fact that for the first time in US history the country's foreign policy has been conducted in sequence and across successive administrations by women secretaries of state.

This is an especially poignant fact with respect to US-India relations because Clinton's predecessor, Condoleezza Rice, during her tenure as secretary of state (June 26, 2005, to Jan 20, 2009) is credited with being a leading proponent of the Bush administration's late-blooming determination to forge a strategic relationship between the US and India, while Hillary Clinton, during her tenure as first lady during the Clinton administration in the 1990s, helped create the favourable atmosphere that paved the way for her husband's epoch-making 'de-linking' of US policy towards India and Pakistan.

The Bush policy towards South Asia was a striking manifestation of a growing diminution of the influence of the neo-conservative faction which had dominated American foreign policy throughout the president's first term, and had wrought the disastrous Iraq war, burgeoning budget deficits in order to fund it, diminished American international prestige, and mounting controversy over the propagation of state-sponsored torture such as water-boarding and so-called 'rendition' (transporting prisoners to countries that condone torture).

One of the first symptoms of the political disarray which heralded this diminution in neo-con influence on president Bush was the resignation of General Colin Powell that created the vacancy in the State Department which Condoleezza Rice could then occupy. Rice had been head of the National Security Council, enjoyed a special insider relationship with the president, and was known to be an advocate of a more flexible, less ideologically strident approach to foreign policy, including rapprochement with India.

Rice, in fact, regarded democratic India as an especially fertile venue for demonstrating her determination to significantly alter the tone and objectives of American diplomacy throughout the world.

Her status as secretary of state with the power, prestige and flexibility to uninhibitedly shape the Bush administration's foreign policy was materially enhanced by the departure of then defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and then deputy defence secretary Paul Wolfowitz, from the Pentagon, and perhaps even more crucially, by a gradual estrangement between Bush and the supreme proponent of neo-con doctrine, then vice president Dick Cheney.

Originally designated by the neo-con establishment as 'keeper' of a politically inexperienced George W. Bush, Cheney had originally been the undisputed power behind the throne who called the political shots. But with the passage of time, Bush gained confidence, 'grew into the job', as it were, and with new, more stable advisers, like Ms Rice, and Robert Gates as secretary of defence, in the face of mounting failure of key neo-con policies, both at home and abroad, grew more independent. As a recent Washington Post article stated: 'In the second term, (Cheney) felt Bush was moving away from him.' And this was true.

It will be the task of history to determine whether this trend was the inevitable result of Bush's 'on-the job maturation', or the by-product of increased intercession by the father, former president George Herbert Walker Bush, and his more senior, politically mature associates like General Brent Scowcroft and James A. Baker.

Cheney's emerging successor, as far as influencing foreign policy is concerned, was Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Her goal was to bring American foreign policy back into the mainstream of international diplomacy, and within the ambit of this altered conception of the use of American power, latitude for a formalised strategic relationship with India.

Thanks to her initiative and the diplomatic skills of her principal assistant, then under secretary of state for political affairs Nicholas J. Burns, the Non-Proliferation Enhancement Act was signed Oct 10, 2008.

One of the least appreciated aspects of the process which led to this momentously important rapprochement between the world's two largest democracies was the outcome of the remarkable two-and-a-half-year dialogue between Strobe Talbott, the Clinton administration's deputy secretary of state, and Jaswant Singh, then India's external affairs minister in the Bharatiya Janata Party-led government of Atal Bihari Vajpayee.