Before he became Indian prime minister in 2014, Narendra Modi could not get a visa to visit the US over claims about communal violence in his home state of Gujarat.
US lawmakers this week gave Modi multiple standing ovations when he joined the small pantheon of leaders, alongside Nelson Mandela and Winston Churchill, who have addressed Congress more than once.
The reception, one of the high points in a three-day state visit by Modi, reflected the seismic shift in US-India relations that has occurred over the past 25 years — and which has accelerated under President Joe Biden.
“In the past few years, there have been many advances in AI — artificial intelligence,” Modi joked to members of Congress. “At the same time, there have been even more momentous developments in another AI — America and India.”
For a country that co-founded the Non-Aligned Movement at the height of the cold war in 1961, and whose diplomats today take every opportunity to voice New Delhi’s policy of neutrality, both the optics and substance of Modi’s visit were extraordinary.
The two sides signed defence and technology agreements, including deals to sell US drones to New Delhi and to co-produce fighter jet engines in India. They also did deals to help jump-start India’s nascent semiconductor industry, train Indian astronauts at Nasa, and open US consulates in Bengaluru, India’s IT capital, and Ahmedabad.
But one of the most telling lines in Modi’s speech was an oblique reference to what experts say is the main reason India is diluting its traditional non-aligned status and moving slowly but surely into the US orbit: China.
“The dark clouds of coercion and confrontation are casting a shadow in the Indo-Pacific,” Modi declared. “The stability of the region has become one of the central concerns of our partnership.”
Tanvi Madan, an India expert at the Brookings Institution in Washington, describes that part of the speech as the “Voldemort section”, a reference to Harry Potter’s arch-enemy whose name is rarely said aloud.
“In the cold war, India could walk a middle path because it had no major disputes with either the US or the Soviet Union, and play each other off against each other,” she says. “Today it can’t do that with the US and China.”
Officials and analysts say the nascent US-India strategic alignment is being driven by commercial and defence imperatives related to Beijing.
Washington and New Delhi are striving to compete with China in emerging areas of high tech, including chips, quantum computing and AI. They also want to deter Chinese military aggression, particularly near the India-China border in the Himalayas in the case of New Delhi.
Indian officials insist the country’s neutrality on defence is sacrosanct, but they are more forthright about the need to co-operate with the US to catch up in critical technologies where China has an edge. India this year surpassed China as the most populous country, but it is little match in most areas of manufacturing and high tech.
In his speech Modi noted that when he first addressed Congress as US prime minister in 2016, India was the 10th largest economy in the world, is today the fifth-largest and would “be the third-largest economy soon”.
Underscoring the efforts on technology, the guests at the state banquet that Biden hosted for Modi included Sundar Pichai, the Indian-born chief executive of Google, which has a large presence in India, and Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, which is diversifying its supply chain by moving parts from China to India.
“This is primarily about India’s transformation,” says Shivshankar Menon, a former Indian foreign secretary. “I don’t see how we can build a modern, developed economy without working with the US.”
Strenuously neutral
In its official declarations, India takes pains to stress its neutrality, which is also part of its appeal to other developing countries who share a long-standing scepticism of the US.
Non-alignment has been a cornerstone of India’s policy and national ethos since independence. The historian Ramachandra Guha has written that Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first post-independence leader, embraced it in the hopes that “a third bloc might come to act as a salutary moderating effect on the hubris of the superpowers”.
In January, Modi hosted a “Voice of the Global South” summit, which included attendees from Algeria, Azerbaijan, and Venezuela, and was meant to provide a platform for the concerns of developing countries whose economies and people have been hit badly by the Covid-19 pandemic and inflation that followed Russia’s attack on Ukraine.
Next month he will preside over an online leaders’ summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, a Eurasian multilateral grouping that includes China, Russia, and central Asian countries, but to which the US and other western countries do not belong.
India has also been a leading buyer of Russian oil since Russia invaded Ukraine, and has not joined the US in condemning the invasion.
But India has for years been steadily moving closer to the US and other western countries on arms purchases and defence ties, and officials say the momentum is growing.
“We were strangers in defence co-operation at the turn of the century,” Modi said in Thursday’s address. “Now, the United States has become one of our most important defence partners.”
In 2018 the US gave India so-called Strategic Trade Authorization-1, easing US export controls for high-tech sales, the third Asian country to obtain the status after Japan and South Korea.
One factor focusing Indian policymakers’ minds is friction along their country’s nearly 3,500km long border with China.
In 2020 India suffered casualties during clashes in and around the Galwan valley in eastern Ladakh, when at least 24 troops, mostly Indians, were killed. Chinese forces have now pushed India out of at least two areas where they formerly patrolled.
Another clash between Indian and Chinese troops in India’s far north-eastern state of Arunachal Pradesh in December resulted in injuries on both sides. In talks with China aimed at defusing the stand-off, India has made it clear it will not resume normal relations until the status quo at the border is restored.
India has also pushed back against Chinese tech, banning dozens of Chinese apps in India, including TikTok, for security reasons. This came as the Modi government undertook a broader industrial policy push which offers investors generous government subsidies if they help build homegrown tech industries, including mobile phone production, semiconductors, and advanced batteries.
Today India does more joint military exercises with the US than with any other country. In 2022 it undertook a high-altitude exercise with US troops in its northern Uttarakhand state near the border, which China protested. In 2021 the two sides did a similar joint exercise in Alaska.
“The US and India have a very good relationship, and it’s deepening by the day,” says Sujan Chinoy, director-general of Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses in New Delhi. “The Chinese think that is not normal, but our logic is that this is none of China’s business.”
“The US and India,” he adds, “can engage on mutually beneficial subjects — training, joint exercises, weapons training, our shared values — just as China engages with other countries, including Russia and Pakistan.”
The war in Ukraine, analysts say, has further nudged India in the direction of the US because it disrupted Russia’s supply of arms and servicing of existing weapons systems. In January of this year the US and India unveiled an Initiative on Critical and Emerging Technology covering co-operation in defence, tech, and space.
The defence deals agreed during Modi’s state visit include an agreement that will see General Electric co-produce fighter jet engines in India with state-owned Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd, an Indian state-owned company. This will give HAL a core technology it needs in its Mk2 light combat aircraft programme. India has also committed to buy armed MQ-9B SeaGuardian drones, produced by US contractor General Atomics.
“A stronger India preserves the balance of power in the Indo-Pacific, which has been upset by China’s tremendous rise,” says Dhruva Jaishankar, head of the Observer Research Foundation America think-tank. “Having India be a net security provider is of benefit to the US.”
The right bet?
Jaishankar was responding to the view held by some in Washington who are asking if Biden is making a smart investment in a partner that is unlikely to join the US if there is a conflict with China over Taiwan.
In a widely discussed article published last month in Foreign Affairs, Ashley Tellis, an India expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said Washington was making a “bad bet” on New Delhi.
He said the US and India had “divergent ambitions for their security partnership”, and that New Delhi would “never involve itself in any US confrontation with Beijing that does not directly threaten its own security”.
US national security adviser Jake Sullivan says he spoke to Tellis about the article and stresses that the Biden team was not using that as a kind of metric for success. “We’re not making a bet on some future war, and whether we’re fighting alongside each other,” Sullivan says.
The long-term trajectory of the two countries’ relationship, he adds, “is built on the notion that two democracies with shared value systems ought to be able to work together, both to nurture their own democracies internally and to fight for shared values globally”.
Several Democratic lawmakers rebuked Biden, who has made democracy promotion a central part of his foreign policy, for not criticising the Modi government’s human rights record, especially on religious minorities, arguing that the US should not “sacrifice human rights at the altar of political expediency”.
Another question is the extent to which India is willing to pull away from Russia, where there is little alignment between US and Indian geostrategic interests. In his speech, Modi said the world “must do what we can to stop the bloodshed and human suffering” in Ukraine, echoing India’s policy since the invasion, which calls for peace without assigning blame.
“While US-India interests may intersect when it comes to China, when it comes to Russia there is still tremendous dissonance,” says Lisa Curtis, an Indo-Pacific expert at the Center for a New American Security think-tank in Washington. “There is no indication that Modi is moving towards the US orbit when comes to Russia.”
At the same time that they are welcoming the US embrace, many Indians have more modest expectations for what the countries can and will do together.
“We are allies in all but name,” says Menon, the former Indian official. “The US is not going to come and fight for every inch of Indian territory, but we can do everything allies do short of defending each other.”
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