What should India make of America’s warm geopolitical embrace? United States President Joe Biden has gone out of his way to elevate India-US ties to a strategic partnership across security, defence and technology.
As the relationship between the US and China nosedives, India is now seen as Washington’s indispensable ally in a fraught and uncertain world order.
National Security Advisor (NSA) Ajit Doval’s recent week-long visit to Washington was a sign of how the US and India are steering the strategic partnership in a new direction. Doval’s trip focused on the India-US Initiative on Critical and Emerging Technology (iCET).
In a rare move, Doval was accompanied at the Washington meet by the chiefs of both the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) and the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO).
The importance India attaches to iCET was underlined by the presence at the Washington meeting of three other key officers who liaise closely with the prime minister’s office (PMO): the principal scientific advisor to the prime minister, the scientific advisor to the defence minister, and the secretary, department of telecom (DoT).
It is unusual for such a high level Indian delegation of scientists and security chiefs to hold a joint series of meetings with top US officials, including National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo.
According to one report, “In support of the iCET, the US chamber of commerce held a roundtable with industry executives across the spectrum of advanced technologies, including semiconductor design and manufacturing, commercial electronics, advanced telecommunications, aerospace, defence and information technology services.”
China spent decades stealing advanced US technology, right through the early 2000s under the benign gaze of Washington which sought to bring Beijing into the global ecosystem. By the time it discovered China’s deception, it was too late: Beijing had reverse-engineered some of America’s most advanced technologies.
Ironically, days after Doval’s delegation left Washington, the US shot down a high-tech Chinese surveillance airship balloon controlled by artificial intelligence (AI) monitors in China.
Washington has woken up late to India’s homegrown technological strengths. India’s Unified Payments Initiative (UPI) and Open Network Digital Commerce (ONDC) are world-leading innovations. UPI’s international launch will enable anyone in the UAE, Singapore, Nepal and Bhutan to make online payments in foreign currency through UPI. In space technology collaboration between ISRO and NASA is growing stronger.
The increasing trust between Washington and New Delhi is in stark contrast to the prickly relationship between the two countries during the Cold War when the US-led West tilted heavily towards Pakistan. That era is over. Islamabad has rapidly turned from a geostrategic asset for the US into a geostrategic liability.
The US recognises that India will be the third largest economy in the world by 2028, possibly earlier. A market of one billion consumers, of whom over 300 million are aspirational middle-class, makes India the world’s most attractive emerging market. Add to that an increasingly powerful military, expanding infrastructure, the world’s largest pool of software engineers, and a strong legal and regulatory system.
But, of course, there is an elephant in the room: Russia.
Washington tried hard during the early months of the Russia-Ukraine war to dissuade India from buying Russian crude oil. It soon gave up when India pointed out — in robust terms Washington was unused to hearing from New Delhi — that national interest dictated India’s economic and foreign policy.
Washington has since fallen into line. It turns a blind eye to India now buying nearly 30 percent of its total oil imports from Russia at discounted rates, refining some of this in Indian petroleum refineries and shipping it onwards to Europe.
Since the refined petroleum is technically sourced from India — not Russia — it escapes US sanctions. Washington has an interest in maintaining supplies of petroleum products, including diesel, to avoid global shortages and rising prices.
The arrangement with India grates with hawks in the Pentagon. The Blinken-run state department counters this by pointing out the growing threat of the China-Russia axis. US foreign policymakers believe that it is imperative for Washington to build an “accommodative” relationship with India across domains, ignoring pinpricks such as trade with Russia.
The world is cleaving into two halves. On one side is the US-led West. On the other is the China-Russia axis. Latin America, Africa, Asia and the Middle East remain uncommitted to either half. Grouped together as the Global South, India is its natural leader.
But New Delhi needs to tread carefully. The danger of the Global South becoming a new version of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) is real. NAM was the brainchild of three leaders: Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, Egyptian President Gamel Abdel Nasser and Yugoslavia’s President Josip Broz Tito. They led a group of developing countries, many newly independent, who wanted to remain geopolitically equidistant from the US and the Soviet Union blocs during the Cold War.
As Kawashima Shin, a professor at the University of Tokyo, wrote in The Diplomat: “In the middle of last month, the Indian government hosted the online ‘Voice of Global South Summit: for Human-Centric Development’, which brought together more than 120 ministers and leaders. Along with an in-person summit meeting, the conference consisted of 10 sessions, addressing key topics such as the global economy and climate change, rising inflation, energy and food issues, and the debt problems that are plaguing many developing countries.”
“The summit underscores India’s aspirations, as chair of the G-20, to set the agenda as a representative of the Global South. In addition to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the presidents of Guyana, Vietnam, Mozambique, Senegal, and Uzbekistan as well as the prime ministers of Bangladesh, Cambodia, Thailand, Mongolia, and Papua New Guinea took part in the in-person summit. India was clearly taking advantage of the opportunity of its tenure as G-20 chair to engage in active diplomacy to realise its agenda.”
For India, leadership of the Global South has utility value today but the country’s true place in the world lies elsewhere. It is as a balancing pivot between the two main power axes — the US-led West and China-Russia.
The writer is editor, author and publisher. Views expressed here are per personal.
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