Between superpower and wannabe: Is US double-timing India and China?

While focusing near-exclusively on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s very successful maiden state visit to the US, where he also became one of the few visitors to address a joint session of Congress, the Indian media especially seems to have missed a parallel track. That’s about the side-show between the US and China, which India can afford to risk ignoring only at great peril in the future. From a bilateral perspective, the Modi visit was an unqualified success, even if one were to side-step or squarely criticise former US President Barack Obama, who joined 70 congressional representatives, all Democrats like him, in criticising the visitor’s human rights record back home. The incumbent administration of US President Joe Biden, who was Obama’s veepee while in office, too has made light of the latter’s criticism of Modi. The congressional members wrote to Biden on the eve of Modi’s arrival, but nothing has been heard from their side has been heard, post-visit. Maybe, there is something in it all for them all, too, to muse about and feel satisfied on the overall direction and traction between the two democracies. As social media critics muse, for this kind of a deal, any American President would give his left hand to make it happen. To them all, like incumbent Obama getting the Manmohan Singh government to order a substantial number of Boeing civilian aircraft in his re-election year, the current contract also involves American jobs which Biden and his bipartisan congressional representatives could do with, a year ahead of their re-election bids. Win-win visit… The Modi visit is noted more for its military content than political formatting. If those that thought out the PM’s scheduling in the US had concluded that the nomenclature of a state visit and his congressional address would help keep down the security/military part of bilateral discussions, it was not to be. After all, the US has its own constituency of ‘peaceniks’, who also at times double as ‘human rights activists and believers’, and a Democrat President seeking re-election next year could not afford to antagonise them. Yet, in the eyes of almost every Indian analyst, it was a win-win visit, only that none of them seems to have explained how. If optics played a good part in projecting and promoting the visit as a huge success — it has been the case with everything that Modi does or does not do — the finer details are missing. Or, so says critics, most of whom are almost exclusively from the political Opposition. Even their voice is muted, not because they, like Modi, have learnt to love America and Americans. Again, like Modi, post-Galwan, they are unsure of what China, closer to the Indian borders, is really up to. Modi had a taste of real China after the informal summits at Wuhan and Mahabalipuram. Technical than sensitive The Modi visit is noticeable for specifics. Apart from his congressional address and joint news conference with President Biden — some reports claimed without evidence that the Indian side did not want it to happen — the real force and focus were on technology-transfer for America’s GE and Indian public sector HAL to jointly manufacture fighter engines in India. The numbers are high and the percentage of tech-transfer/home production is also equally high. However, as the wag points out, in tech-transfer between any two entities, what is left out matters more than what is on offer. Is it metallurgy, where India still faces an insurmountable problem, which has also come in the way of producing a more efficient fighter engine than at present? Then, there is the agreement for India purchasing Predator drones from the US — rather, the US selling the same to India, which is how Washington would view it, especially in the aftermath of India defying American sanctions to purchase Russian oil through the past year. It is not without reason that bilateral tensions between India and America have peaked before the relations soared even higher. After US-led western sanctions against India, post-Pokhran-II, they began negotiations that later ended up in the unprecedented ‘civilian nuclear deal’. The Vajpayee government that commenced the contours of negotiations on it was not around when the successor Manmohan Singh dispensation, from an opposing political ideology, signed it. In doing so, the Congress leader of the ruling coalition in New Delhi was ready to throw out the communist allies, who were opposed to it, often owing to unfounded suspicions and doubts, flowing from their own ideological adversity with the US than anything real and immediate. For the US, the civilian nuclear deal proved the existence of an unsaid bipartisan consensus between India’s two leading political parties, namely, the ruling BJP and the rival Congress. Today, the Congress has been near-muted in its criticism of the US on real issues, even while focusing on the optics part of it. The real success of the civilian nuclear deal for India was not in getting it signed, but in reserving for the self, the right to acquire technology of its choice from whoever, whenever — and not just the US. If the Americans were/are stunned by the uncanny Indian adeptness at cutting the deal, they are not talking about it. The question is the current deals have ‘safety clauses’ against such Indian ‘malfeasance’. If there is however a later-day probe into the current deals, as with the one for Bofors gun of the Congress-led government of slain Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, like the Rafale pact with France, it could be expected to go near-exclusively into the procedural aspects of the deal or even corruption involving the so-called middle-men, and would not want to wade through unchartered territories, like the required technology, cost per piece of equipment purchased and the number of those things that would be adequate for the requirements of the security forces in India. More than being sensitive, they are all highly technical for either the political class or the judiciary — called in often to fix responsibility and accountability — to make sense. The long and short of it Otherwise, there was the joint criticism of cross-border terrorism against India, being perpetrated by Islamabad. Pakistan has reacted in ways and words that it could be expected to do. It was there in the joint statement issued by the two leaders. Pakistan has reacted the way it was expected to, and had to. In international politics, as in matters domestic, beggars are not choosers, and given the current state of the nation’s economy, Pakistan is in no place to do anything more. At least, the Washington deal-makers do not seem to expect even the so-called rogue-elements in the Pakistani hierarchy to target installations inside India. If anyone would be so tempted or provoked, it could be China, instead. It is the China angle that India should now be worried about — and not always as understood and taught to be understood. As scheduling coincidence would have it, PM Modi’s America visit came at a time when US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken was in China, conferring with local interlocutors. It was a meeting that the US had formally postponed without cancelling on previous occasions. At the end of Blinken’s China visit, both sides agreed to the ‘stabilise tense relationship’ of the past months and years. The long and short of it all was/is that the US cannot stomach China’s upended growth and the consequent political muscle that it grew at the expense of the West over the previous decades since the advent of Deng Xiaoping. Working backward, the West has concluded that China’s political strength and military capability to provoke its neighbours especially owed to the economic muscle that they had fed to acquire. Yet, a day after the Bliken visit, and possibly when he was still flying high back home, President Biden named Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping, a ‘dictator’ — and without any immediate provocation. Was it to impress the Indian visitor, whose camp might have displayed nervousness at the hosts playing hide and seek with sworn-adversary China? Or, did they too get the feeling that like strategically-located smaller nations in South Asia, the US too was playing India and China against each other? If they had felt that way, the visitors did not show their concerns in what all followed. What is even more of the interesting/intriguing part of it was Biden later declaring that his calling Xi ‘dictator’ was of ‘no consequence’ to continuing bilateral relations between their two nations (on the lines, Blinken had agreed to in Beijing?). If, so why did Biden say what he said – and when he said. Was it only to please the Indian visitors, and their back-up team back home? Or, was there more to his usage of the term ‘dictator’ in the context of democracy-deficiency in China (rather the absence of it)? If so, how is he going to match and marry, revived American desire to minimise areas of tension with China, and for all right reasons with his declaration on ‘Xi, the dictator’, and thus implying that the original American agenda of targeting non-democratic, undemocratic nations and leaderships was still very much on the agenda? Bedrock credentials The immediate question for India is where the twine met or did not meet or would not meet. Yes, India-US relations are built on the bedrock of shared democratic credentials of the two nations, or that is what the Americans often want Indians to believe. But in India, the nominal and normative perceptions are devoid of such ideological moorings that the US and the rest of the West choose to flag at a time of their convenience. Else, India would not have been doing business with Russia now, and the erstwhile Soviet Union in its times — not certainly to this level of mutual trust and support. That trust suffered a jolt when India signed a defence cooperation pact with the US in 2005, behind the back of Russia, and followed it up with the civilian nuclear deal. It got restored subsequently, both under the Manmohan Singh government that did the earlier two acts and more so now under the Modi regime, especially over the purchase of cheap Russian oil, defying American sanctions and all the western pressures brought upon New Delhi. The new deals that Modi has signed with Biden has the potential to rock the Russo-Indian boat, but Moscow may not be in a place to complain, especially after it has proved not to be the kind of military power that it was thought to be even at the commencement of the Ukraine War. But nations do have long memories — and that is what foreign policy is all about, keeping them, working on them, or dumping them. All of it still raises the question: Are India and America on the same page as some, and at times many in India, think, believe or at least desire? Or, is it that the US, as on other occasions, is double-timing India and China, and so very obviously as Biden has done this time? If the former is the truth, more proof is needed. If the latter is the case, then India needs to be alive to and aware of the continuing possibility of becoming the ping-pong ball in unending new-Cold War games of ups and downs, between the American superpower and wannabe China. The writer is a Chennai-based policy analyst and political commentator. Views are personal.  Read all the  Latest News,  Trending News,  Cricket News,  Bollywood News, India News and  Entertainment News here. Follow us on  Facebook,  Twitter and  Instagram.