 "Why India’s strategic partnership with the US-led West fails to click")
The most dominant question in Indian strategic quarters is whether India should align with the US against China. Proponents of this theory suggest that both countries are natural allies because of their common faith in a free market economy, human rights, liberalism, rules-based world order, freedom of expression, and democracy.
Second, after the Soviet collapse, India and the US have come closer. Today, they have strong economic, defence, and strategic ties. India has signed a civilian nuclear agreement and a range of defence and intelligence-sharing agreements, such as the Logistics Exchange Memorandum of Agreement (LEMOA), Communications Compatibility and Security Agreement (COMCASA), and Basic Exchange and Cooperation Agreement (BECA).
Third, the US can offer India critical and emerging technologies in science, space, and defence. Fourth, and most importantly, as eminent foreign policy expert John Mearsheimer suggests, the rise of China is the most crucial factor to bring the US and India closer, as both countries are disturbed and alarmed by China’s rise, military adventurism, and revisionism. In his much-talked-about interview with India’s daily, Indian Express, he said, “The rise of China is a serious threat to the US. So, the more powerful China grows, more India and the US will move closer.”
However, on a closer analysis, it appears there are several limitations to what the US can offer India in such a crisis. As mentioned above and in my previous articles, the US can share intelligence, satellite imagery, and some minor equipment and technology in communications and logistics. After the intelligence, the only option left is to fight.
Undoubtedly, intelligence is useful in planning operations, defence, and counterattack; however, it is doubtful whether it can turn the tables in the war with China to India’s advantage. Due to the glaring gaps in border infrastructure and defence technological, economic, and cyber capabilities between India and China, prospects for a decisive Indian victory and Chinese defeat remain abysmal.
Impact Shorts
More ShortsHowever, contrary to the enthusiasts of the intel support arguments, it is also pertinent to mention that due to the ongoing tirade by the Western media against the Indian intelligence apparatus over the alleged killing of Khalistani extremists by the latter, there are perceptions prevailing that the US wants to neuter the Indian counter-terrorism intelligence apparatus, which have cast major doubts on the US’ intent and sincerity in its offers to provide the crucial intelligence support against China in the event of war.
Shishir Gupta, an Indian journalist with access to the deepest alleyways of the Indian intelligence, has written that the government authorities in five-eyes-alliance countries are deliberately leaking intelligence information against top-level intelligence officials to the leftist Western media with the intent of interfering in the Indian elections and preventing Modi from coming to power.
While discussing the prospects of the India-US defence partnership, it needs to be noted that 86 per cent of the Indian equipment, weapons, and platforms are of Russian origin. Since 2014, 55 per cent of India’s defence imports have been from Russia. In the Air Force, 2/3rd of equipment is of Russian origin. The figures in the Navy and Army are 41 per cent and 90 percent, respectively. Replacing such a large inventory is a long-drawn process that can take over a decade. Given this, it will be highly challenging to align American spare parts and technology with the equipment of Russian origin.
Also, total alignment and strategic partnership with the US would mean the loss of India’s strategic autonomy, which has always been the fundamental aspect of India’s foreign policy. India has fiercely guarded its strategic autonomy since becoming independent of the British Empire. During the Cold War, it followed non-alignment and refused to join the power blocks. Even today, India is highly sceptical of joining alliances and pursues multi-alignment in its foreign policy.
Also, New Delhi feels that maybe Chinese adventurism on the borders is to deter India from getting too close to the US. Joining the US camp will only provoke China further to continue its aggression and incursions. If this argument is seen in the historical context, it has merit. Indians acted as a mediator in the Korean War, bringing the US and China to the negotiating table. However, the Chinese were suspicious of the growing US-India bonhomie and did not take Jawahar Lal Nehru at face value.
The India-China border frictions started worsening in 1959 when the Dalai Lama sought refuge in India. In a bid to open another anti-China front in Tibet, in the same year, the CIA office in Calcutta established communication channels with Dalai Lama’s elder brother, Thupten Norbu. Then, the CIA trained Tibetan Khampa guerillas in Colorado and airdropped them in Tibet to incite an insurrection and made the Chinese believe that Indians executed it and were collusive with the CIA. The Chinese complained about the Indian incursions. However, the Indians were clueless about it.
In 1960, President Kennedy sent John Kenneth Galbraith as the US envoy to India, with a vision to nurture democratic India as a strong bulwark against Communist China. Amb Galbraith, the renowned economist, came close to PM Nehru, who often consulted him even on internal policy matters. With his good offices in the White Office, Amb Gailbraith got a $1 billion economic assistance package sanctioned for India, which further cemented the Chinese fears of India and the US getting into a strategic partnership with an anti-China focus.
In today’s context, many Indian experts continue to believe, and rightly so, that closer association with Washington DC troubles China, to which it retaliates either by ramping up militancy in Kashmir, the North East, or by incursions in the border areas.
In addition to the bottlenecks mentioned above, India’s distrust of the US is another crucial factor that hinders the India-US alliance. Though it is fashionable among scholars to talk about India and the US being natural allies because of their robust democracies and burgeoning trade relations, there is a long history of distrust, misunderstandings, and friction going back to the Cold War days. America’s support for India’s arch-enemy, Pakistan, in the 1971 war and its continuing partnership with Pakistan are etched deep in the Indian collective psyche.
Hence, to this day, the veterans in India’s armed forces, diplomatic cadre, bureaucracy, politics, academia, and geo-strategic community continue to nurture strong distrust and scepticism toward the US.
Further, India’s policy wonks view Washington as sympathetic to all kinds of India’s enemies, such as Khalistani extremists and Kashmiri separatists, adding more weight to their suspicious attitude towards the US. Some of the recent developments, such as the Iraq war, the Arab Spring, abandoning the Ukrainians and Armenians to their fate, and the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, leaving its proxy local government to be gobbled up by the barbaric Taliban within a few hours of the US withdrawal, have further dented the credibility of the US.
In addition, the global narrative of the US ‘stumbling’ towards an irreversible decline also blurs the vision and dampens the hopes of the Indian strategic establishment.
In his Foreign Policy article, Derek Grossman, an American geopolitics expert, wrote, “US-India ties remain fundamentally fragile.” Despite widespread optimism generated by India’s membership in Quad and strengthening India-US ties after the Galwan crises, the fundamentals remain weak. Except for the common interests, like the China challenge, there is a huge trust deficit. Mearsheimer has rightly said that “if the Chinese threat were to disappear, then the US and India wouldn’t be nearly as friendly”.
The US has deep-rooted concerns about so-called ‘democratic backsliding’ in India, particularly under the Modi-led BJP government. The US-based organisations, official ones, and civil society organisations have raised issues of declining press freedom, suppression of the opposition, rising Hindutva extremism, and discriminatory treatment of minorities, particularly under the current Modi-led BJP government.
Human Rights Watch criticised the abrogation of Article 370 and stated that since the abrogation, the Kashmiris had faced repression. The US Commission for Religious Freedom condemned India’s controversial Citizenship Amendment Act, which was brought to expedite the process of providing citizenship to the persecuted non-Muslims of India’s neighbouring countries, as “a significant downward turn in religious freedom in India”. More recently, the relationship between the two countries has gone sour over the US and Canadian allegations of India orchestrating the assassination of Sikh extremists and terrorists in Canada and the US.
Though there are no official estimates of the public perception, an overwhelming majority of Indians abhor America’s sermonising on the issues of democracy and human rights and the recent killings of Sikh extremists. American attitude is seen as unnecessary bullying, derisive, and hubristic to pressure India to secure its strategic goals.
The core Hindu vote bank of Modi finds the US’ lecturing on the issues of minorities, democracy, and targeted killings of Indian enemies on foreign territory highly anti-Hindu and anti-Modi, which adds fuel to high-pitch hyper-nationalism, which defines India’s socio-political and cultural landscape these days.
Additionally, George Soros and his Open Society Foundation’s vitriolic attacks on the Modi government’s Hindutva ideology and abetting the Dravidian states, Dalits (lower castes), and religious minorities to stand against the Modi government are perceived as divisive and lethal attacks to foment social and ethnic strife in India and threaten India’s territorial integrity, sovereignty, and Hindu cultural and religious values.
After the recent regime change in Bangladesh and the return of hardcore Jamaati extremists and the alleged US role in the whole process, the apprehensions in India have further strengthened that after Dhaka, the next target is India.
Having said that, Delhi needs to have a better understanding of Western society and government systems and be a bit more thick-skinned.
In the long run, India can benefit immensely from the US, particularly in technology, manufacturing, investment, and trade. However, credible voices in the Indian strategic community believe that relations with the US can only be transactional and there is no love lost or genuine meeting of the minds on critical issues. They are highly pessimistic about the US genuinely transferring technology to India. Drawing their lessons from the Ukraine war, some of the hawkish and sceptical voices even argue that the US wants to ignite a war between India and China to benefit its weapons lobby and expedite India’s total shift towards the Western camp, leaving it no position to maintain strategic autonomy.
Indians are also wary about the US-led Western world’s close economic relationship with China. The entire narrative of the US-China rivalry is questioned. Indian diplomats from the 70s and 80s believe that the US has created the Chinese behemoth, which has now become Frankenstein’s monster. Henry Kissinger mainstreamed China in the world economy and multilateral institutions. If the US had facilitated China’s entry into the World Trade Organisation, Beijing would not have achieved such economic might.
In many quarters, it is believed that the US still considers Russia as its real enemy, not China. In February 2024, China remained the second largest holder of the US government debt. The US prefers ‘ diplomacy over deterrence’ to set the troubled relationship with China on the right course. China expert Brahma Chellaney opines that the US’ goalpost has shifted backwards from containing China to ‘managed competition’.
In his Hanoi visit last September, Biden said that they ‘are not trying to hurt China, and the aim is to get the relationship right’. Biden’s defence budget curtailing the funding for the Indo-Pacific and the production of Virginia-class submarines clearly shows that the US does not take the China threat seriously. In November 2023, Biden met Xi Jinping in a summit meeting in California.
More recently, after her April 7, 2024, meeting with the Chinese Premier Li Qiang to resolve trade and economic issues, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen informed that the US-China relationship is on a ‘more stable footing’.
For New Delhi, these periodic bouts of US-China camaraderie are perplexing, adding more to its apprehensions about trusting the US. In the words of India’s eminent foreign policy expert, Rajamohan, “The traditional fears in Delhi swing between two familiar extremes—that India will either be “entrapped” or “abandoned” by the US in dealing with China.”
India’s pessimism about the Western block is further strengthened by the robust economic ties of the other prominent powerhouses of the Western camp with China. China recently opened an automobile factory in Hungary to bypass the EU’s protectionist policies against technologically superior Chinese cars. China continues to be Germany’s top trading partner. In 2023, German FDI in China rose to a record 12 billion euros.
Finally, the last factor that prevents India from totally switching towards the US is its geography. In 1971, the US, with all its might, could not prevent the disintegration of Pakistan and the independence of Bangladesh because India, the lead actor, had a geographic advantage of having a border with West Pakistan. More recently, the US could not stop Russia invading Ukraine. Hence, India’s security czars find no sanity in worsening ties with a powerful neighbour like China by a complete shift towards the West.
The author is a Cornell University graduate in public affairs, bachelors from St Stephen’s College, Delhi, and has done his PhD on Jaish-e-Mohammad. He is a policy analyst specialising in counterterrorism, Indian foreign policy and Afghanistan-Pakistan geopolitics. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not represent the stand of this publication.
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