The US president and Democratic Party candidate Barack Obama quashed early prediction of photo-finish against his rival Republican candidate Mitt Romney by sealing a comfortable win for his second term. At the dead of night on November 6 in America, as the poll results gave Obama a clear win, the curtain fell on the long US election year.

As Barack Obama retains the White House, India will not have to read ‘new lips’. But at Foggy Bottom (that is, the secretary of state’s office) there is going to be a certain change. Just before the elections, Hillary Clinton had made her intention clear that she would leave the office by the end of the first tenure of Obama’s presidency. Miles apart at the South Block, India’s external affairs ministry, foreign policy mandarins will have to work with the same administration but a new secretary of state. Indications are that the Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman John Kerry might step in as Clinton’s successor.

If we see history of the last two US presidencies before Obama, the relations between New Delhi and Washington actually fructified towards the second terms.

Bill Clinton visited India towards the end of his second term of his presidency. His charismatic speech in the parliament is still etched in memory. Even during his lame-duck term (which is what the second term is called), Clinton gave a new push for relations with India.

Before Clinton, every US president used to work in Eisenhower style -- Eisenhower had once said that American relationship with India was of the head and that with Pakistan was of the heart. “There was always a comparison between India and Pakistan—rather an equation of both countries—the hyphenation or equation of India and Pakistan. The de-hyphenation changed during the latter half of the second Clinton presidency,” C. Uday Bhaskar, an analyst with Delhi-based South Asia Monitor policy forum, told the Mint newspaper.

George W Bush displayed a poor sense of geography about India during his campaign in 2000. However, it was during Bush’s second term, when New Delhi got real taste of relations. Bush not only came to India but also enabled New Delhi to enter the world of civil nuclear commerce. The two countries signed the civilian nuclear agreement and shed the inhibition of “estranged democracies” of the Cold War time to become “engaged democracies” by 2008.

Obama, analysts say, came to office with a new spirit and a midas touch. He largely went along the expected lines during his first term. There was increased cooperation with India in education, science, technology and cyber security, besides other traditional areas of foreign policy. C Raja Mohan, head of strategic studies at the Observer Research Foundation, a Delhi-based policy think tank, told the Wall Street Journal that “India has no basic complaints against Obama.”

The minor irritants came in the Indo-Iran relations when New Delhi had to decrease oil supply from Tehran as pressure mounted from Washington. The second challenge was the outsourcing which Obama raised in this election campaigns too. One of the Indian chambers of commerce, Ficci, said that Indian companies in the last two years created around 20,000 jobs in the US.

“We hope that the new Obama Administration will take a long-term and practical view on issues such as outsourcing which ultimately are in the US national interest because they help US companies drive down costs paving the way for expansion,” said Ficci president RV Kanoria. The US and European markets account for over 80 percent of revenues of the Indian IT industry.

However, during the three debates between the two presidential candidates, India hardly got any mention. Sumit Ganguly, director of the centre on American and global security at Indiana University, wrote in the Deccan Chronicle, “At one level, it can be seen as a disturbing development as India is hardly immune to the policy choices that are made about those two countries especially as 2014 approaches. On the other hand, it could also be argued that this lack of any explicit attention to India may also reflect a lack of disagreement about policy options.”

Obama does not carry any baggage. As he said in his victory speech at Chicago, “The best is yet to come.” New Delhi will hope for the best from him in the next four years.