The US presidential elections are round the corner. President Barack Obama has already begun his campaign and outsourcing is one of the issues on the agenda. Only recently, Obama accused presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney of favouring outsourcing jobs to India.

It was against this background that secretary of state Hillary Clinton arrived in India on a three-day visit. On a question of outsourcing Clinton said in Kolkata, “Well, you know, it's an election campaign and there is an obligation in any election campaign. Well, I'll not go that far to say overstate but to talk about what’s on people’s minds… there are advantages with it that have certainly benefitted many parts of our country and there are disadvantages that go to the need to improve the job fields of our own people and create a better economic environment. So, it’s like anything, like the pluses and minuses.”

But just as she was sensitive on this issue, she remained insensitive on another – India’s energy ties with Iran. This has been a hallmark of America’s diplomacy for last several years. India has not only a historic partnership with Iran; it has also been the number two oil supplier after Saudi Arabia for the last several years.

For the Indian diplomatic establishment, it has been a quite tightrope balancing act between growing relationship with America and at the same time not snapping ties with Tehran. However, India has already pushed state-run refiners to diversify their imports from Iran to win a waiver from sanctions against Tehran.

But this time New Delhi made it position crystal clear to the US, as Krishna was direct in reply to Clinton. He later said, “I conveyed our vital stakes in peace and stability in the Persian Gulf and wider West Asian region, given the six million Indians who live there and the region’s importance to our economy.”

This must have been a rude shock to the visitor, who might have expected a less confident reply given the political chaos here. Recently an American think tank, US India Business Council, in a secret memo to Obama said there was a “vacuum at the centre” in India. For officials back home at Foggy Bottom (that is the name often used to refer to the department of state because its headquarters is in the neighborhood), this would have been an opportunity, as the US has been working for some time to gain consensus for tougher sanctions against Iran.

Many foreign policy watchers accuse India of only reacting to far-reaching changes taking place around us. But being assertive on the Tehran issue, New Delhi brought back memories of the first PM, Jawaharlal Nehru, who minced no words when dealing with the superpower.