When Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi arrives in Washington to meet with U.S. President Joe Biden on Wednesday and Thursday, he will be trailing along with him a nimbus of Western expectations.
By becoming the world’s most populous nation in April with 1.425 billion people, surpassing China for the title it had held since the mid-18th century, India has unleashed what are probably exaggerated hopes that the emergence of a powerful new giant on the world stage can alter a potentially terrifying unfolding dynamic of zero-sum contest between Washington and Beijing.
This wish, or more likely chimera, takes several forms. At its least plausible, it imagines that as the world’s largest democracy, India will somehow reach common cause with the West and balance together in competition with China. A somewhat less naive variant, meanwhile, supposes that even if India never becomes a tacit Western ally, its growing wealth and power will divert enough of China’s attention to render prohibitive the prospect of confrontation with the United States and its more explicit security partners.
It is in the service of these dreams that Washington recently, for the first time, gave quiet approval to the companies of a non-treaty ally, India, to manufacture U.S.-designed advanced fighter engines. This agreement, along with a deal for New Delhi to purchase U.S. Predator drones and other armament deal breakthroughs that are expected, have caused Modi to hail what he called the “unprecedented trust” between his government and the Biden administration.
U.S. anxieties over China have made it especially difficult for policymakers to think through their initiatives to engage with India as carefully as is warranted. If they could take a step back and obtain a more serene view of things, they would realize that India is nearly the equivalent of the Lucy-and-football metaphor from the old Charlie Brown comics. Over and over, she tees them up for Charlie to kick, only to snatch them away from the path of his foot at the very last instant.
Something about very large countries renders the illusions that build up around them almost fatally irresistible. As recently as a generation ago with China, and for many years before then, a prevalent illusion held that the West would derive unlimited wealth by selling one yard of cloth, or one finished shirt, or one new automobile, on average, to each Chinese consumer, depending on the vintage of the tale, in order to profit wildly from that country’s opening.
China has drawn massive Western investment on this basis, and China indeed performed a kind of opening. Western companies, and also consumers, have profited, but China all along was operating on its own premises, as only seems logical. That meant cordoning off many sectors of its economy from Western companies as well as duplicating many of the West’s most profitable businesses and letting them operate at high profit as China’s own national champions, protected by high walls that kept unwanted foreign competition at bay.
A brief review of the history of India’s diplomatic dance with the United States shows that, at least since the demise of the Soviet Union, there has been a periodic revival of dreamy hope in Washington that India can be enticed out of its long-standing position as a nation committed to nonalignment with whoever the prevailing superpowers may be.
I covered a moment like this myself, visiting and writing about India during the government of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in the early 2000s. Singh was offered groundbreaking U.S. cooperation to build civilian nuclear power plants by then-U.S. President George W. Bush in 2006, despite U.S. concerns about India’s nuclear weapons program. In the first of two White House visits to Bush’s successor, Singh was given a lavish reception as a guest for the very first state visit offered to a foreign leader by President Barack Obama in 2009. Around each of these occasions, and others, Americans permitted themselves to dream that India might join the United States, however gradually, in an alliance of great democracies.
I have written before about the serious problems of democracy in India under Modi and won’t pursue that topic here, except to say that in addition to a skepticism about India’s willingness to break with its diffident brand of neutrality and strategically align with the United States, there are also profound and growing reasons to worry about India’s health as a democracy. To brush these aside or let them escape mention in a summit meeting now would constitute a bald display of cynicism on the part of the United States.
There are other things about India that worry me, though, that I would like to pursue further here. Apart from democracy as we usually understand the word as a strictly political term, India suffers grave deficiencies in a democracy of another kind, meaning the relatively equal participation of its citizens in the fruits of its economic growth. After the recent hype over India’s surpassing of China for the population title, news consumers have been treated to depictions of the country’s supposed economic takeoff. It has recently been growing at a substantially faster rate than China, yesteryear’s economic miracle story, for example.
But what does this really mean in the lives of Indians? India’s per-capita income is still roughly only one-sixth that of China’s, even though they were roughly equivalent in the early 1990s. In fact, this gap between the two countries may still be widening under Modi. Allowing for a relatively broad definition of middle class, India has seen an impressive expansion of this segment of its population. Nonetheless, in 2019, fully 10 percent of India’s people subsisted under a poverty line defined quite austerely at an income of $2.15 per day.
This means that India still has more desperately poor people than any African country, for example. Meanwhile, about a quarter of India’s population remains illiterate, and many more are only marginally literate. Also, female workforce participation has declined in recent years to a mere 23 percent, slightly more than one-third the level seen in China and in many Western countries. Industrialization in India, which many economists see as the surest way out of poverty, may have peaked in 2002.
I would be the first to admit my lack of qualifications to be prescriptive about how India should remedy painful realities like these, which easily get lost in all the strategic and alliance conversations. I do have questions, though, and I hope that queries like mine can be pushed to the fore both in India and during Western engagement with the country. Actually, two of them more or less suffice.
Why should a country that presents a profile like this be the world’s largest arms importer? India’s leaders, present and future, should be called upon to justify this. That, to me, is as good a measure of democratic health as one can likely find.
Yes, part of the answer may be China, and this is what incentivizes the West beyond the simple pursuit of profit, but another part of the answer, and probably more important to Indian armament, is its next-door neighbor and principal rival, Pakistan. That country’s economic health and the welfare of its citizens are even more precarious than India’s, and yet it, too, spends hugely on its military.
India and Pakistan, both nuclear-armed countries, have not enjoyed true and stable peace between themselves since they were partitioned at independence from Britain in 1947. Washington is now reportedly pushing Saudi Arabia to formally normalize relations with Israel. But which great powers—the United States, Pakistan’s ally China, Russia, or the Europeans—are investing their diplomacy at a high level to help permanently settle the raw differences that divide these South Asian rivals over Kashmir and other issues? The fact that we can’t point to anyone lays bare the awful reality of great-power competition itself: It is seldom about the common good at all.