Head-on | Why a rising India worries both the West and China

Never before has a former European colony, impoverished and subjugated for centuries as India was, risen to the status of an economic power.

By 2027, India will be the world’s third largest economy. Only the United States and China will be larger. The rear view mirror in both Washington and Beijing shows an accelerating Indian economy growing at nearly twice China’s rate and thrice America’s.

That wasn’t part of the geopolitical script. The US and China are predatory powers. America rose from a European settler-colony to a great power using brutal instruments of slavery and indigenous land theft.

China overcame poverty, famine and a devastating civil war to emerge as a challenger to US economic and technological supremacy.

For both superpowers, India is a distraction. It still too small to be taken seriously as a future great power. But it is too big to be ignored. If its economy continues to grow at 7-8 per cent a year, India will be more than a distraction for Washington and Beijing.

There are entrenched interests in both countries that go to great lengths to slow the geopolitical rise of a potential rival. America has tried to weaken Russia ever since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.

China has tried to do the same with India. The Galwan Valley clash in 2020 did not come as an after-thought. The confrontation at the LAC was planned meticulously in advance by Beijing.

The only reason China retreated at the LAC last month was worries over its own structurally slowing economy and President-elect Donald Trump’s impending harsh tariffs on Chinese exports. For China, making temporary peace with India removes one distraction as it concentrates on fighting Trump’s sanctions.

For Washington, India is a prickly ally. It is independent-minded. Washington is used to snapping its fingers at allies to do its bidding. India’s autonomous foreign policy irks it.

The Narendra Modi government has however played its cards adroitly with Washington, forming an alliance with the US on technology, defence and security. Washington too has indulged Modi, inviting him to address a joint session of the US Congress (twice) and supporting India’s presidency of the G20.

In America’s crosshairs

The deep state that inhabits the entrails of Washington’s labyrinthic lobbies is not happy with India’s aggressive pursuit of extremists on US soil.

The spate of US court indictments of Indians follows a pattern. The incarceration of businessman Nikhil Gupta without trial since June 30, 2023 is an abuse of international law that the US expects others to follow. The indictment of the Adani group over bribery allegations was ready a year ago. But the deep state times its hits with practised precision.

As soon as the US presidential election results confirmed that Donald Trump would win, the faceless bureaucrats in the Department of Justice (DoJ) went public with the charges against Adani.

Why Adani? And why now?

Trump has promised to clean up the deep state as soon as he takes office on January 20, 2025. Democratic Party neocons in the deep state had a one-month window to get the Adani indictment done before Washington breaks for the long Christmas holidays in mid-December and gets busy with Trump’s inauguration in January.

What does the Adani indictment mean for India? Will it slow India’s infrastructural rise? As TK Arun wrote in The Economic Times last week: “Only about 1 per cent of SEC’s enforcement actions come under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), and these tend to lead to the largest fines. At the same time, 98 per cent of SEC’s actions end up in settlements, with or without fines and with or without admissions of guilt.”

The narrative that Gautam Adani could be arrested following summons issued to him and others by US authorities was debunked by this independent New York-based report:

“The US SEC will have to serve the summons on the Adani group founder and chairman Gautam Adani and his nephew Sagar in the alleged $265 million (Rs. 2,200 crore) payoffs through proper diplomatic channels as it has no jurisdiction to summon a foreign national directly. The request will have to follow the established protocol of routing it through the Indian Embassy in the US and following other diplomatic formalities. The US SEC has no jurisdiction over foreign nationals and cannot send anything by post to them.”

Deep State vacuum-cleaned

Under the Trump administration the deep state is set to be vacuum-cleaned. Since senior CIA and FBI agents are a part of this notorious government-within-a-government, they will be the first to be hung out to dry.

Tulsi Gabbard will play a key role in this. As Trump’s nominated Director of National Intelligence (DNI), Gabbard will oversee 18 US intelligence agencies, including the CIA and FBI. Both have thwarted India’s security agencies from bringing to book anti-India extremists operating on US soil.

An increasing segment of Western opinion now believes that despite poverty and social challenges, India’s economy, markets and digital technology make it a natural balancing pivot in the evolving US-China duopoly.

This is a deeply discomfiting thought for Western historians like Niall Ferguson. Ferguson’s book, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World, reflects the hubris that still infects Western minds.

Those minds have finally begun to realise that the West’s global influence is in terminal decline. China and India contributed over 50 per cent to global economic output in 1750. They will do so again in 2050.

The writer is an editor, author and publisher. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.