During her last visit to India in July, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton urged India to play a bigger role in Asia. While this predates Clinton's more recent suggestion that India, China and the US should work more closely together, it is still widely believed that heightened India-US cooperation is aimed at encircling China. And it appears the symbolic element of official India-US interactions is often mistaken for a sustainable strategic relationship. But in both countries there are domestic obstacles to a closer relationship which are unlikely to disappear in the foreseeable future and which warrant closer scrutiny.