Nobody, but nobody, pushes India around. On this, there's a consensus amongst citizens of this country, be they conservative or liberal or any admixture of the two. Thank goodness. That's a source of comfort, as India begins addressing a need that has been obvious for quite some time: the need for a strategy to handle America.

Strategy is the appropriate word. Even India's first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru would have agreed, convinced as he was that foreign policy must be derived from economic strategy (and is not some wishy-washy matter of whim). If he was a practical man of his times, so is current Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, a key player in one of India's biggest policy shifts. With values and goals held constant, India has altered the means to reach those goals by granting the market a lead role in the allocation of resources. This, let's be clear, had to do with a fresh evaluation of the merit in market forces, as evidence emerged, as opposed to central planning. India, mind you, did not scamper in panic to the winning side of the Cold War, as American triumphalists often assume. It was a sovereign decision based on a rethink, not fear. India, remember, was non-aligned. And open to diverse schools of thought.

Some 15 years on, India has grown in confidence. The country's economic growth is within striking range of the desired rate, despite low levels of foreign investment, and is being watched as closely as China-even as the stakes soar for leadership of the 21st century. What's more, India is newly armed with nukes, and America has started giving shape to a new strategic partnership with a country it once had little time for. The chief watchdog's chief diplomat, Condoleezza Rice, has been on a visit too. Instead of tactless GDP comparisons with Spain, or subjecting officials to an inquisition, she has taken care to hold India's progress in appropriate esteem, and has even held out the possibility of enhanced technology transfers. So far, so sweet of her. Mutual ties have never been better.

But America also seems intent on pushing India to another decision fork of sorts. Framed one way or another, Rice appears to be offering a binary choice, and the deal comes down to this: 'either Iran's piped-in gas or America's fighter jets'. Choose.

In its choice of principle, India needn't bat an eyelid. It's easily the principle of economic sovereignty; the one that says India's future shall be determined by its own citizens. So if the energy security of a pipeline, given the acute need for cheap gas, is worth more than the additional defence security of those jet fighters, given the existence of a nuclear deterrent, it makes more sense to go for the pipeline.

That decision is indeed a matter of Indian sovereignty, and one of bigger consequence than the fracas over who America keeps off its territory, where it spots "severe violations of religious freedom", or-heck-what its intelligentsia makes of a speech made in Goa. Not to say it doesn't grate. It does, as should any barbed hint of state hypocrisy (that's why the howls of protest).

Talking tough is all very good. But it is still no replacement for an external strategy to secure India's well-being in the long-term. Rice's either-or offer, to return to the issue, cannot be viewed in isolation of global geopolitics and America's own fears of possible threats-the known, mapped ones-to its power. And power it is. So the risk of American ire must also enter the calculations. This is not a watchdog that keeps its growls and snarls to itself.

What would be an optimal way out?

If India makes its market too big for investors to resist, the country could operate with even more degrees of freedom. So that's important as far as the long-term aims of domestic policies go.

For now, the best course might be to go ahead with the original energy plans, shrug off the possibility of lost fighter jets, and then make up for such bad behaviour by offering America a sweetened deal of its own. It's fuzzy, but one it may still want to consider.

What would America rather have: a slick series of shot-from-the-hip ventures hoping to gush forth quickie dividends? Or a stable stake in the emergence of a market that insists on thriving on liberty-and could talk the rest into it too? Choose. Difficult, is it not?