As the Biden administration warmly welcomes Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Washington, some experts warn that the United States shouldn’t succumb to irrational exuberance about the two countries’ relations. My colleague Barkha Dutt writes that India will never be America’s ally, no matter how warm Washington’s embrace. India is intensely focused on its own national interests and will pursue them narrowly. The oft-cited example is India’s refusal to condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The skeptics are right to note that India has long resisted the pull to become a full-fledged ally of the United States, a version of Britain in Asia. And it will continue to do so. Like any country, it does have its own interests to worry about.
But India is changing. In the past, the country has placed little emphasis on foreign policy, devoting its energies instead to managing the vast complexities of its own society, which is characterized by thousands of castes and communities, dozens of major languages and huge regional diversity.
Now, the rise of China has finally gotten India’s attention. The 2020 clash in the Himalayas — when Chinese and Indian soldiers fought bitterly over a disputed border area — was a wake-up call for India’s strategic elite and, to some extent, the entire country. Public sentiment shifted sharply, and today a large number of Indians regard China with hostility. For its part, Beijing has done little to try to solve the problem. It has actually reinforced its military infrastructure along the border, which would allow it to surge troops whenever it sees the need. Since the clash three years ago, India has constrained or outright banned many Chinese companies and technologies from operating in its market, including Huawei and TikTok. The threat from China will motivate India to strengthen its ties with the United States for decades to come.
Yet, as India emerges as a great power, it will have to adopt a more expansive vision of its interests around the world. It will need to define its attitude toward the international system itself, and how its own ideas and ideals should affect its stance. In the process, it might well decide that it values a rules-based international system, and see that, as the world’s largest democracy, it gains enormous soft power by adopting a foreign policy that is influenced by its democratic ideals, even if it won’t be feasible in every case to apply them. Such selectivity is, after all, true of most democratic countries, including the United States.
There is a separate critique of the overtures toward Modi that deal with his government’s policies toward minorities, the media, the judiciary and other independent agencies in the democratic system. Many of these criticisms are accurate. Modi has presided over a decay of democracy in India; all three of the major international think tanks that measure the quality of democratic governance have downgraded India in recent years. Sweden’s V-Dem Institute judges that India no longer ranks as a democracy at all, describing it instead as an “electoral autocracy.”
But how Washington should handle democratic decay in a country like India is a complicated problem. Modi is extremely popular in India and, what’s more, his Hindu nationalism is also popular. Like Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel and Viktor Orban in Hungary, Modi has tapped into an illiberal vein in India that scorns minorities, checks and balances, and liberal constitutionalism. In all these places, the nationalist-populist leader sets himself and his many followers against the old, secular, cosmopolitan elite that has ruled the country for decades. Truth be told, there is often much frustration with that elite, an establishment that seems disconnected from the heartland of the nation, from ordinary people and their ideas and emotions.
I sometimes wonder whether all these countries are revealing that the values of an open society — pluralism, tolerance, secularism — were an import from the era of the West’s dominance in the world, and that the erosion of these ideals is gradually revealing a more authentic, less tolerant nationalism. Former U.S. ambassador to India John Kenneth Galbraith said India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, told him, “I am the last Englishman to rule India.” The country Nehru and his fellow post-independence leaders created was built on values that its founders drew from their deep associations with Britain and the West. Their India was a secular, pluralistic, democratic and socialist state. All of those ideals have been fading in India in recent years.
In any event, lecturing Modi on human rights is not the best way for the Biden administration to deal with him. That would backfire — not only with him but also with most Indians who would resent Western bullying. Far better to ally with India’s society itself, expanding ties with its businesses, press, nongovernmental organizations, cultural groups and others. India is one of the most pro-American countries in the world, something that is palpable when you are there. Companies, students, scholars, activists — all want closer ties with the United States.
This people-to-people alliance will inevitably strengthen the government-to-government relations. But more importantly, I believe that an India that is more deeply connected to the United States will be a country that will naturally seek to perfect its democracy at home. It will also give it moral authority in a fracturing world that could use more of it.
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