What Relationship Should the U. S. Have With India?

Motivated, no doubt, by the ongoing state visit of Indian Prime Minister Modi with President Biden there are a number of opinion pieces on our relations with India. Indian ex-pat Fareed Zakaria uses his Washington Post column to urge a “people to people” relationship. He seems to have a realistic appraisal of the situation:

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.

No wonder he urges a “people to people” relationship between the two countries:

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.

Unfortunately, he never tries to reconcile those two very different points-of-view. How can both Modi and the U. S. be popular? IMO the answer is to be found in the fact that about 3% of India’s GDP, a vast amount, comes from overseas remittances from Gulf states and the United States.

Sadanand Dhume’s Wall Street Journal column takes a somewhat different tack:

In the long term, India’s value as a counterweight to China depends on its getting a handle on economic underperformance and domestic unrest.

During Mr. Modi’s tenure, the economic gap between China and India has continued to widen. As recently as 1990, the two countries were roughly on par in per capita income. By 2014, the year Mr. Modi took office, China’s per capita income was 4.9 times India’s. According to the World Bank, by 2021 the average Chinese earned 5.6 times as much as the average Indian—around $12,550 compared with $2,250. India doesn’t need to match the Chinese economy to challenge Beijing along the two countries’ Himalayan frontier. But if the economic and technological gap continues to grow, prolonged confrontation may become unsustainable, diminishing New Delhi’s main value to Washington.

India’s ability to play a larger role on the world stage also depends on its ability to control domestic strife. Nine years after he became prime minister, Mr. Modi retains powerful appeal in the most populous parts of India. A Morning Consult poll regularly shows Mr. Modi as having the highest domestic popularity of the 22 global leaders it tracks. But the BJP’s strident Hindu nationalism has little appeal to the 1 in 5 Indians who follow other faiths. In recent years unrest has flared in Muslim-majority Kashmir, Sikh-majority Punjab and the northeastern state of Manipur, home to a large Christian minority.

concluding:

India is an important country, and the Biden administration is right to pursue closer ties. But unless Mr. Modi can find a way to close the gap with China and embrace all Indians equally, the durability of America’s bet on India will remain in question.

My own view is that the relationship between China and India is inherently if not adversarial at least competitive. We don’t need to foster that or harness it. It will be a reality whatever we do.

I think we should look at India much as we do Israel and for the same reasons. There are presently about 4 million Indians in the U. S. There are about 8 million Jews. Just as our Jewish fellow Americans are interested in Israel so are our Indian fellow Americans interested in India. American, Israeli, and Indian interests are not identical but they are congruent at times, in discord at others. Both Israel and India are becoming more nationalistic and less liberal. There is little that we can do about either of those developments. To me that means we should make common cause with both of them when we can but recognize that will not always be in our best interests.