In the last year, India has become the world’s most populous nation. It has held the G20 presidency. It has nurtured the fastest-growing major economy in the world. And it has achieved a successful lunar mission. Despite these high-profile demonstrations of growing power, external coverage of the country remains relatively sparse compared to its neighbor, China, and its position within U.S.-China competition may not be all that widely understood.
A key reason for that is that India’s foreign policy comes with contradictions. Historically, New Delhi identified as non-aligned during the Cold War, though it shifted toward the Soviet Union during the 1970s, and the U.S. supported Pakistan in the two countries’ 1971 war. Relations with the U.S. were seen to have thawed by 2008, when the two countries signed the civic-nuclear deal, in which the U.S. lifted a three-decade moratorium on nuclear trade with India. But around the same time, in 2009, India joined BRICS, a grouping of developing countries that included China. Then, over the past ten years, border skirmishes with China and China’s growing influence in South Asia have seen India’s aim of a “multipolar world” include clear nods toward a “multipolar Asia,” whereby there is a clear sense of attempting to push back against China. However, “credible” allegations that Indian agents were linked to the assassination of Sikh separatist leader in Canada earlier this year, and a further foiled attempt in the U.S., are evidence that there remains no binary shift toward the U.S. camp. In geopolitical terms, India remains hard to pin down.
So, how should India be seen in relation to an ongoing, increasingly stark competition between the U.S. and China, that elsewhere is forcing major countries and regions to pick sides?
The first part of any answer is that it clearly is capable of standing up for itself. The “remarkably consistent” factor in Indian foreign policy “from the word ‘go’” has been that “[on] issues which are of vital interest to India, those decisions should be taken primarily in the Indian capital itself and not be outsourced to somebody else,” Shyam Saran, former Indian foreign secretary, said at a Chatham House forum last week.
The difference in this position from the Cold War “non-aligned” movement, Saran said, was that India, like Saudi Arabia and others, now has an emerging economy, with a “sizeable pool of scientific and technical manpower,” that allows it greater agency than was previously possible.
In practice, harnessed by a Hindu nationalist government seeking to hold together a country with massive internal inequality, that agency means loud calls for greater institutional recognition, such as demanding a seat on the U.N. Security Council. It also means a “more uncompromising willingness” to defend its own interests, according to Loiuse Tillin, professor of politics at King’s College London’s India Institute, who highlights the assassination in Canada as a key example. India should now be defined as an “aspirational rising power” in its own right, she said, also speaking at the Chatham House forum.
However, crucially, having the power to dictate its own interests does not mean India is neutral in dealings with China and the U.S.
The simple fact to put alongside its capabilities is that it has more areas of friction with China than the U.S. right now. They are military rivals with real violence on the border, and economic rivals, competing to be the world’s manufacturing hub. “China is a strategic adversary, [the] U.S. is not,” as Pranay Kotasthane, deputy director of the Takshashila Institution in Bengaluru, recently put it to Brookings.
Open tension between the two has been normalized since an infamous border clash in 2020, in which at least 20 Indian and four Chinese soldiers died. There have been repeated flare-ups since then. A further high profile expression of tension has been the Indian government’s banning of scores of Chinese apps, a trend beginning in 2020 and continuing into this year.
“There has also been a shift away from the rules of engagement [in terms of] the non-use of force along the border,” Chietigj Bajpaee, senior research fellow for Chatham House’s South Asia, Asia-Pacific Programme said, naming part of the paradigm shift. The previous atmosphere of “accomodation” regarding the border has become “thinner and thinner,” said Saran — who attributed this to the increasing assertiveness of the Chinese side.
“They keep reminding India that we are now five times your size, things cannot remain the same as they were before,” he said.
Of course, this does not mean there are no limits to the negative atmosphere around the relationship. Both sides are focusing on domestic issues right now. And there remains major economic reliance on one another: China is India’s top trading partner. But tensions are expanding rather than contracting, and there is likely more to come.
“They’re going to encounter more tools and platforms to interact with one another. And that means you’re going to see a spillover effect. So not only are you going to see tensions along the Sino-Indian border, or in the domain of their trade or economic interaction, but potentially on issues of global governance,” Bajpaee said. “So for instance, we saw President Xi Jinping not joining the G20 summit this year [in India], we’ve seen on climate negotiations … over ten years ago China and India were working very closely … [but] increasingly they’re pursuing their own separate climate discussions. On issues of debt sustainability as well, there are potential areas of friction.”
So, the entry-level takeaway is this: India can certainly stand apart from great power competition between the U.S. and China, but quite separately from that, it has increasing reason and opportunity of its own to be competing with China.
Photo: ANI via Reuters Connect
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