Giant leap of faith in India-US ties

HYPERBOLE, breathless proclamation of undying friendship and ecstatic announcement of a slew of projects mark the hugely successful state visit of PM Narendra Modi to Washington. From technology to defence partnership, from clean energy transition to deepening strategic convergence, there is little of import that is not there in the joint statement. But the most striking averment of the yet-to-be formalised alliance was the declaration that the “President and the PM affirmed a vision of the US and India as among the closest partners in the world… No corner of human enterprise is untouched by the partnership between our two countries, which spans the seas to the stars.” Such effusive overstatements are normally characteristic of Eastern diplomacy and underscore an attempt to spread warmth and camaraderie in a hitherto mutually suspicious relationship.

India’s long engagement with the US, particularly in the last three decades, was a one-sided effort to please the superpower.

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Even without these embellishments, the goals of the joint statement are staggeringly constructive for the India-US relationship. The deliverables are manifold and make the unsourced briefing by a senior State Department official to the Press Trust of India in the run-up to the visit seem like a statement of fact: “The US supports India’s rise as a great power and this will be central to ensuring American interests in the years ahead.” The General Electric-Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd agreement to jointly produce GE F414 fighter jet engines, acquisition of MQ-9B Predator drones under the US Foreign Military Sales programme, chipmaker Micron setting shop in Gujarat with an investment of $825 million, Applied Materials investing in a Bengaluru facility to develop equipment for semiconductor manufacturing and Lam Research planning to train their engineers these represent a giant leap of faith, awaited for long.

For, the 2005 India-US civil nuclear deal was seen only as an attempt by the US to tie India to its apron strings. In fact, unlike China, India had opened up all its sectors for American companies to monopolise, with little in return. The US Big Tech companies run the entire Indian digital business spectrum much as they please. Google determines the rates of advertisements that Indian digital publishers get and throws a pittance at them without even disclosing how much it earns from India. Microsoft still has absolute control over the computer operating systems that Indians use, except those who buy Apple devices that run on iOS. Amazon, Uber and app-based US businesses like Netflix have simply taken over the Indian landscape. Chips, devices, the software that runs them and the entire digital media world; well, it may not be an exaggeration to say that there is no emerging tech sector American company that has not benefitted from the Indian market. In fact, the combined revenues of these companies ought to figure in the India-US bilateral trade outcomes.

And all this while, India has not got much in return it has mostly got platitudes, sermons on minority welfare, regime-change attempts and a stamp of de-legitimisation of the Indian democracy and institutions. India’s long engagement with the US, particularly in the last three decades, was a one-sided effort to please the superpower, whose post-1945 world order had little role for India. It was as if the US inherited the mantle of the leadership of the ‘free world’ along with the Churchillian suspicion of India’s rise and the diktat to deny it a role in its own region. Even now, Barack Obama has advised Biden to tell Modi that “if you do not protect the rights of ethnic minorities in India, there is a strong possibility that at some point of time India will start pulling apart.”

It is ironic that it was a US diplomat who helped found the Hurriyat Conference in order to ‘pull India apart’ and to legitimise the idea that Muslims cannot live peacefully with their Hindu neighbours. This was just 20 years after a Hindu genocide by a US ally in East Pakistan that killed 30 lakh people, including a huge number of Bengali-speaking Muslims. No other Asian regime has even attempted anything close to the ethnic cleansing that the US ally Pakistan had done, or set up concentration camps like China, which the US helped rise. Western cultural imperialism has, by effectively discrediting Gandhian nationalism, set the context for a deeply insecure post-colonial society to unleash a countervailing religious bigotry against Islamist secessionism. Anyway, the memory of the Obama administration’s bombing expeditions and the ensuing casualties make his homilies sound terribly hollow.

On the other hand, the joyous embrace of the US and India has every reason to become a civilisational partnership, if the US elite drops its Churchillian goggles of disdain. Certain Western commentators have talked about an Indian contradiction in seeking Western help while being suspicious of it, which is not really true because much of the Indian elite, even during the freedom movement, has always been their collaborators. It is the common Indian people who, though inarticulate, have a sense of grievance against the West for the colonisation, the Partition and the attempts to tear them apart in the name of religion. It is the Indian elite which derides itself as an elected democracy or approves of religious secessionism, while the people simply vote out bigoted or corrupt governments, the latest example being the Karnataka Assembly polls.

Sure, Indians would not want the embrace to become a Dhritarashtralinganam (Dhritarashtra of the Mahabharata is supposed to have possessed powers to reduce to dust an enemy whom he deceptively hugged). But at the same time, India is starved of technology and new-age defence capabilities. And in this context, they should not be asked to abandon Russia. The India-Russia friendship is the only bulwark against the dominance of a possible Russia-China-Pakistan axis in Central and South Asia. The Economist has termed Modi’s state visit “the most important transaction of the 21st century.” For this prediction to come true, the West should redraw its post-1945 world order, offering India its rightful role. And when India rises up to its existential Chinese challenge, it benefits the West most. Let the partnership soar from the seas to the stars.