A footnote once, tech is the new driver of India-US diplomacy

On his part, Modi has been eager to rescue Indian science and technology from excessive statism and bring the industry, especially the private sector, and the innovation communities into play. Biden has sought to cut through a welter of regulations limiting US technology cooperation with India. If their plans unfold according to script, one will see the technical interface between the two countries rapidly broaden and thicken.

If the Modi-Biden vision is implemented purposefully, technology will ease itself into the driver’s seat of bilateral relations. For, the new productive forces unleashed by new technologies create possibilities to reboot the Indian and American economies, enhance their national security, and rearrange the global economic order. India-US technological cooperation also opens the door for addressing global challenges such as climate change.

In his typical fashion, Modi turned the abbreviation for Artificial Intelligence, AI, into a metaphor for the technological moment in bilateral relations in his address to the joint session of the US Congress; for him, AI is “America and India”.

America and technology have been part of the same dream for Indians dating back to the late 19th century, when a number of India’s business houses in western India started sending their children to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology rather than the liberal arts courses in Oxford and Cambridge.

Entrepreneurial capital believed that India’s future lay in mastering technology. But the Indian elite trained in Oxbridge would have its revenge. They would bureaucratise science, keep the private sector at arm’s length, and limit international collaboration with the US and the West.

Before the system got down to the wrecking job, there was a brief flowering of India-US technology cooperation. Washington was at the forefront of assisting India’s nuclear and space programmes in the 1950s and 1960s. India’s first nuclear power plant at Tarapur was built by General Electric and its first satellite was by Ford Aerospace. The US also contributed to India’s Green Revolution.

Yet within a decade, India-US technology cooperation became a forgotten footnote. As anti-Americanism gripped the Indian political class from the late 1960s, there was a deliberate attempt to snuff out academic and research links to the United States. India, the would-be IT power, threw out the world’s pre-eminent computer company, IBM, from the country in the late 1970s.

The US on its part, began to actively restrict technology cooperation with India as America’s post-war scientific internationalism was replaced by the non-proliferation theology.

At precisely the moment India and the US turned from each other, China broke from the Soviet Union and warmed up to the United States. Deng Xiaoping’s communist China would become more open to academic and technological collaboration with the US than India. Deng’s successor, Xi Jinping may now be returning the favour to the US and India.

Although Indira and Rajiv Gandhi sought to restore India-US technology cooperation in the Cold War, it was hard to get going. The end of the Cold War did not immediately solve the problem as nonproliferation concerns in Washington took precedence over all else.

It was the historic civil nuclear initiative unveiled by George W Bush and Manmohan Singh that broke through the paradigm of nonproliferation. What Modi and Biden have done this week is to develop a pathway for expansive technology cooperation between the two nations by removing many of the persistent obstacles. The new political will in Delhi and Washington to overcome hurdles to technological collaboration is aided by two developments that the governments had little to do with.

While Delhi and Washington remained deadlocked and India left little room for its entrepreneurs to rise, droves of Indian engineers walked through America’s open door for technological talent. Within a few decades, these newly minted Indian Americans would take pole positions in the US technology industry as well as the scientific establishment in the universities and government agencies.

The 1990s saw US companies set up research and development centres in Bengaluru and Hyderabad; GE might now work with HAL to build the F414 engines in India; but it already had an aerospace engineering centre in Bengaluru and actively collaborated with Indian companies like the Tatas.

This significant technology bridge, which has been empowered by the Modi-Biden plan, is all set to play a crucial role in reshaping the relations between the two countries. Assuming of course that the vision does not fall foul of India’s administrative state.

(C Raja Mohan is a senior fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute, Delhi and a contributing editor on international affairs for The Indian Express)