The great unspoken dilemma in the India-US relationship is that the US wishes to simultaneously cheer, and contain, India.
This is not often spoken about in stark terms, but perhaps it is time. The US-India relationship is, and perhaps for many years, in some form or the other, has been stuck on one fundamental question—how does the United States wish to approach India?
The early years of jostling, disillusionment, suspicion, accusations of betrayal, but also, later, more recently, deep, critical cooperation, and vital change of mood with the civil nuclear deal etc., is well-known, as is the difficult dynamics between the US, India, Pakistan, and Russia.
India’s rise was always inevitable on paper, but intermittent in practice. There was a certain ennui until even a few years ago and phraseology about “the elephant learning to dance, or even move”. Therefore, it was easier to perhaps manage India.
But things have changed as India’s per capita income doubled in the last decade, and it started to show serious ambition in, as Prime Minister Narendra Modi had defined, becoming a leading power, not just a balancing one.
Now this would work easily for the US, and the rest of the West which takes cues from the US, if India agreed to be a classic ally. Its size and strength, and market scale, would make it invaluable especially as a bulwark against China in Asia. But India has, and does, insist on strategic autonomy. This makes the relationship, from time-to-time, tetchy and turbulent, even though as the two largest democracies in the world, India and the US are in, many ways, natural partners.
That the US now faces a real challenge with China as a compelling competitor which is looking to outdo the US in everything from warship building to electric vehicle manufacturing has added complexity to the India-US relationship. The US, and the West, assisted China’s rise hoping economic success would pivot it towards democratic politics. As it turned out, this was a strikingly false assumption.
But this also means that the US, and the West, are reluctant to unquestioningly assist India’s rise as they once did China’s. No matter that India has a longstanding democratic track record. What if it turned intransigent once it became a high-income country? What if—this is rarely spelt out—a high-income, or even upper-middle-income India chooses to strike a deal with China (as its biggest immediate threat on its very border) rather than remain a camp-mate of the West? India’s economic and military rise has also pushed up long-suppressed commonly articulated desire for national greatness, something the West, always wary of nationalism which are not Western, views with great circumspection.
Having assisted India in many ways including in joining nuclear communities usually barred for non-signatories of non-proliferation agreements, the US desires more acquiescence, more demonstrable “groupiness”, especially in times of conflict like the war in Ukraine.
But from India’s vantage point, its size and strategic importance need recognition that is long overdue. It has started to wonder aloud why, for instance, the UK, having been surpassed in economic size by India, sits in the UN Security Council and not India? It is more vocal about “being on its own side”, as External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar once put it, than ever.
All this means that the US and the West now grapple with applying a strategy which partners with, and participates in, India’s growth, but at the same time, using levers to “contain” the rise of India, and keep it “in line”. This is difficult and fraught with awkward moments for all concerned.
Some of the tools of cooperation are, to give an example, the latest defence agreements signed between the US and India, the Security of Supplies Agreement (SOSA) and the Reciprocal Defence Procurement Agreement (RDP).
These will integrate US and Indian defence mechanisms, and supply chains, even further. The US is already one of India’s biggest purchasers. But this progress goes hand-in-hand with consistent pressure on all kinds of political issues that debilitate the relationship. Continuing friction on the Khalistan issue is a classic example where alleged Indian action against militants making open threats to India, and Indian diplomats, including attacks on consulates was seen extremely poorly by Canada, the US, with repercussions being felt also in the UK and Australia. Considering that the revival of the Khalistan issue (that caused a wave of terror in India in the 1980s) was so intertwined with the so-called farmer agitation in the country a couple of years ago that led to the scrapping of pivotal agricultural reforms that could have given a historic boost to Indian agriculture, this issue is even more fraught with anxiety and ill-will. India watches with aggrieved bemusement as the same organisations, of state and media, in the West that cheered the farmer agitation, today blame India for failing to reform its vast and inefficient agricultural sector.
While the US continues to fund Pakistan, which continues a policy of attacks via terrorism on India, focus on so-called Indian high-handedness in Kashmir in Western political and media commentary has continued to muddy waters. In an age before social media all of this could be confined to newspaper commentary or even news TV debates, but all this now plays out near real-time among tens of millions of social media users in all countries creating colliding narratives that only heighten misgivings.
In recent days, interventions made in the West against Sheikh Hasina (including the fact that the former Bangladeshi Prime Minister could not get a visa to a Western country including the UK where her sister is a citizen, and her niece is a sitting legislator for the ruling party) have been firmly read in India as red flags. Hasina still remains in India, with newspaper reports suggesting that the Bangladesh interim government by banker-Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus is likely to demand her extradition, which will cause further bad blood. Many Indian experts were under the impression that a sudden change of guard in Bangladesh will only strengthen the Islamists, and actions by the Yunus government, including releasing members of an Al Qaeda-inspired group, and removing the ban on the Jamaat-e-Islami, is being watched warily by India, which does not want another Pakistan on its eastern borders, and that too with a country with which its shares a long, relatively porous border. With Bangladesh becoming relatively unstable, India faces conflict on all its borders, therefore, tying it to its neighbourhood more than ever. This, of course, is an old strategy to rein in rising powers—if they get mired in their neighbourhood, their global aspiration wings are clipped.
There is also concern in India that some elements in the West are trying to inflame the issue of Article 370 in Kashmir once again—even though it has been settled through a judgement of the Indian Supreme Court. Covert support, including in the Western media, seeking to delegitimize the integration of Kashmir with the rest of India could cause further unease in the future.
On one hand, the Modi government, and the Prime Minister himself, has been feted across the Western world, including successful visits to the US, there has been a constant stream of attacks on his government, and him personally, on issues of religious strife or governance issues, which for many in India seems like interference in the country’s domestic matters. Truth be told, a US and the West grappling with all kinds of crisis—from immigration to ideological divide, riots, violence against women, attacks on minorities, and issues such as homelessness or even gun control, and a history of devastatingly haphazard regime change attempts in the non-West—no longer seem like places which could, in all honesty, give gratuitous advice to a country of 1.4 billion growing at around 7% and dealing with unique complexities.
Such advice, or criticism, especially when frequent and prolonged, are read these days as evidence of a desire for regime-change, or at the very least a push towards uniformization of extreme diverse cultures, and lived experiences. Once Fareed Zakaria talking about the future of democracy and liberalism was considered with attention by Indians; now often his analysis sounds inept at best, and insidious, at worst. India no longer thinks of the West or America as exemplifying high liberal values. Often it sees societies is greater peril than anything India faces.
This does not mean the room for real engagement, even at a people-to-people basis has shrunk. It only means that some of the aspirational blinkers are off.
In fact, many in India would argue that perhaps there has never been a better time for real, equitable engagement and partnership.
But for the US and the West such pinpricks are low-cost methods to try and contain India and ensure that it does not lean-in towards China, and remain in the sort of socio-cultural ambit of the West. The rise of a particular type of hard Left rhetoric in the US and other parts of the West is leading to tremendous strife in those societies. Therefore, to project those on Indian complexities with an air of judgement is probably not going to be beneficial. Indians want to make sense of the world in Indian terms, embracing or rejecting using localized filters.
The path forward involves deeper engagement and understanding that India, as it grows, will not become identical to the West. Nevertheless, it can be an invaluable partner, and the pivot around which the future of the Indo-Pacific resolves. There is no effective manner of countering China without India, but that is not the only reason a country the size of a continent should be engaged. Culturally, perhaps, India will always remain out of comprehension for the West, and that might just be all right.
India must be allowed to evolve through its complex challenges at its own pace and finding its own solutions. Attempts to cut and paste solutions will only cause friction.
This, of course, is easier said than done, and therefore, come November with a new President in the US, the strategy of containing and cheering India is likely to continue, even heighten. How the US, the West, and India navigate through this will determine the next decade.
Hindol Sengupta is professor of international relations at O. P. Jindal Global University, and co-founder of the foreign policy platform Global Order.