Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s state visit to Washington next month is about celebrating the transformation of bilateral relations under the NDA government as well as setting a more ambitious agenda for the future. The Modi years have seen the emergence of the United States as the most important and comprehensive strategic partner of India.
The US is India’s largest trading partner, with commerce worth $190 billion flowing between the two nations. While trade with China is significant, Delhi’s deficit with Beijing has crossed $100 billion, while India continues to enjoy a surplus with the US. And unlike Beijing, Washington is on India’s side when it comes to territorial integrity and terrorism.
While China blocks India’s regional and global aspirations, the US actively supports Delhi’s major power ambitions. Russia dominates the Indian military inventory, but the US has become an important supplier of weapons.
The US is offering to modernise India’s defence production and transfer advanced civilian and military technologies. The five million-strong Indian diaspora in the US and its continuing rise in the US business and political spheres makes Delhi’s relationship with Washington unique.
This extraordinary transformation of bilateral relations was not anticipated by students of Indian foreign policy. In fact, scepticism has been the dominant feature of the Indian foreign policy discourse on the US, while sentimentalism envelops the discussion on Russia and romanticism on China. Although US-India relations have been on an upward trajectory since the end of the Cold War, there was much ambivalence in Delhi in successive governments since the 1990s about the kind of relationship India should have with the US.
This ambivalence came sharply to the fore in the UPA years, when Washington made big moves — including the civil nuclear initiative — to transform the relationship but Delhi clung on to its suspicions and sought to reinvent the idea of non-alignment.
It fell upon Modi to discard India’s “historic hesitations” in engaging the US over the last decade. Modi also found common ground with the US in the Indo-Pacific and Middle East. India participates in such coalitions as the Quadrilateral Forum with US, Japan and Australia in the east and with Washington, Tel Aviv, Abu Dhabi and Riyadh to the west of the Subcontinent.
As the White House announcement this week on Modi’s state visit makes clear, there is an even more ambitious agenda awaiting the Indian PM in Washington — ranging from defence to clean energy and from outer space to health security. Modi’s strategic embrace of the US, however, stands in contrast to the anti-Americanism within the BJP’s support base.
Bristling at the liberal American criticism of India’s democratic backsliding under Modi, the Hindutva forces are ready to pull out the xenophobic anti-Western tropes that were once the staple of the Indian left.
The fact is that the Biden administration has chosen to bite its tongue on India’s new internal dynamic rather than undermine the strategic partnership with India, but it can’t stop its media and civil society from pointing to the troubling signs of Indian democracy.
The PM’s impending visit to the US should encourage the BJP and its supporters to reflect on why India has lost much goodwill in the US even as the strategic convergence between Delhi and Washington continues to grow.
