Why West is wary of Modi and China is threatening a repeat of 1962 — yet it’s not bad news for India

In the ‘Introduction’ for Dennis Kux’s book, India and the United States: Estranged Democracies, 1941-1991, then Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan recalled how in 1992, The New York Times obtained a copy of the United States Defense Planning Guide for the post-Cold War era. “The planners in the office of the Undersecretary for Policy at the Pentagon had looked around the world for suspicious characters. This used to be called threat analysis. At the height of the Cold War it would have been ‘threat analysis in the worst possible case condition’. This time, there were fewer threats on the horizon. But wait! There’s India! Fearsome hegemon. There’s Pakistan, beleaguered friend of yore!”

The draft document declared: “We should discourage Indian hegemonic aspirations over the other states in South Asia and on the Indian Ocean. With regard to Pakistan, a constructive US-Pakistani military relationship will be an important element in our strategy to promote stable security conditions in Southwest Asia and Central Asia.”

Moynihan wondered how after half-a-century of relations between what were “the world’s two largest democracies”, the US government defence planners thought it was in America’s interest to suppress India’s “hegemonic aspirations” in South Asia, while gleefully arming a failed state called Pakistan.

Three decades later, India may have scaled over much of its anti-Americanism — a byproduct of toxic Nehruism that made Jawaharlal Nehru, much like “a British university man”, as Ramachandra Guha describes him in India After Gandhi, look “down snobbishly at American deficiency in culture”, and which pushed defence minister VK Krishna Menon to snub Army Chief General KS Thimayya’s request to upgrade military weapons by saying he was not going to have “a NATO arms in the country” — but the West, especially the US, seems to have its reservations intact. Over the years, if there’s one thing that comes out consistently about India, it’s the image of a responsible power that takes pride in being democratic, liberal and secular. And yet, India continues to evoke suspicion, arouse jealousies and court censorship from the West, the self-proclaimed paragon of democracy and liberalism.

The latest being the Ukraine war, which saw the West come out hard on India for refusing to abandon Russia. Interestingly, these very Western countries sanctimoniously exhorting India in the name of democracy were looking for cover when China was seen grabbing Indian territories in the Himalayas in early 2020 — the military standoff between India and China continues till date. Instead of coming in support of India, they advised the Modi dispensation to engage with China through diplomacy and trade! India found itself lonely and isolated among the comity of democratic nations. Much of Europe and North America, as Professor Gautam Sen wrote quite scathingly in his article, ‘Why West is so uncomfortable with rising India and happy to sponsor its enemies’ (Firstpost, 18 July 2022), “have uses for India but no real camaraderie or commitment towards it”.

The true feeling of the West towards India cannot be gauged through the formal and formalised statements of the Western head of the state. Instead, one must heed how the mainstream media, the academia and the entrenched bureaucracy of that country are reporting, writing and reacting, respectively. After all, for all its institutional autonomy, the press and the academia in the West, especially the US, align themselves with the larger interest of the state: One just needs to look at the Ukraine war reportage of The New York Times and Washington Post, to see how the state and the media work in tandem.

So, when there’s constant and consistent bad press for India in the US media, when antagonistic research works are regularly being conducted in American universities, and when institutions like USCIRF club democratic India with communist China, Islamist Pakistan, autocratic North Korea, fundamentalist Saudi Arabia, and terror-infested Syria and Afghanistan, then one knows what the US is actually thinking about India, despite its verbose and friendly statements! The West, for all its democratic pretensions, continues to be largely anti-India. It may, for its convenience, give it an anti-Modi colour, though.

However, before falling into the anti-American trappings, one needs to understand that foreign affairs are largely and decisively shaped by each country’s national interest. The West, especially the US, while acknowledging India’s democratic credentials, is well aware of the fact that if allowed to grow unfettered, Delhi will soon propel out of the West’s orbit of influence. The West is no doubt concerned about China’s rise, but it is equally uneasy with India’s rise.

In the last few years, there has been a change in the US approach in dealing with India and China. Early in the 2010s, China seemed unstoppable. Historian Ian Morris writes in his 2014 book, War: What Is It Good For?, “Till a decade ago, it was believed that China’s economy would outgrow America’s sometime between 2017 and 2027 (probably in 2019, and almost certainly by 2022, says The Economist). According to the accountants at PricewaterhouseCoopers, China’s GDP will be 50 percent bigger than the United States’ in the 2050s, and India’s economy will also be catching up with or overtaking America’s.”

Morris likened the United States to the Britain of 1900, and like the latter, it “may have to farm out parts of its beat to allies, multiplying unknown unknowns… Absent an American economic revival, the 2050s may have much in common with the 1910s, with no one quite sure whether the globocop can still outgun everyone else”.

Had China continued to grow with the same intensity, as predicted by Morris, the US would have bent backwards to keep India into its orbit. But then Chinese growth has in recent years slowed down remarkably. A new study by Lowy Institute researchers Roland Rajah and Alyssa Leng casts doubt upon the speed with which China can overtake the US to become the biggest economy in the world and questions whether it will ever become the most powerful. “China would overtake the United States to become the world’s largest economy in nominal US dollar terms by about 2030,” the report says. “But it would never establish a meaningful lead… and would remain far less prosperous and productive per person than America, even by mid-century.”

The slowing down of the Chinese economy keeps the US in the race, thus allowing American policymakers to have some leeway in handling India. After all, if China threatens Pax Americana, so does India. But then this is just one part of the story that helps explain America’s not-so-friendly attitude vis-?-vis India in recent years. The other part is the emerging ‘New India’ under Prime Minister Narendra Modi that is working towards institutional course correction in the way the country has operated so far. Most of these reforms, especially on the economic and policy-related fronts, might not appear as “bang bang” as the revocation of Article 370, but they seem to be transforming the very DNA of post-Nehruvian India and Indians. This may explain why the West, which in the past exhorted India about farm reforms, was seen to be siding with protectionist/obscurantist forces against the Modi government’s farm reforms. This also explains why, suddenly, in the last two-three years, there has been an avalanche of anti-Modi stories in the American media (the AAP’s education model finding a front-page space in The New York Times recently is an extension of anti-Modism).

Unfortunately, for India, the West alone is not alarmed by rising India. Xi Jinping’s China too seems to be deeply anxious about how India is making great strides. And this explains why the PLA troops have been stationed along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) in eastern Ladakh for the past two years, testing India’s perseverance and self-belief. For, the Dragon believes India is on the cusp of change. It can be made to submit now — or never. As the saying goes, when China talks of peace, one must prepare for war. So, when China is talking of war today, one won’t be surprised if it actually moves in with peace overtures in the near future. For, communist China with Confucian characteristics has always had an overdose of pragmatism, howsoever ideological it might appear on the exterior. But for that India has to keep the gunpowder dry.

Maybe America’s deep state, having dealt closely with communist China for 50 years, knows it too well. It, thus, can’t let things go easy for India. For, if India weathers this storm and moves towards attaining its $10 trillion dream, maybe India would become too big for China to swallow and the Dragon could stop behaving like a rival. India, in that case, might not need America for its survival. That would be the end of Pax Americana, and global power would shift decisively to the East and the South — to Asia.

This may well explain why India should stop expecting the West by its side anytime soon. This may seem tragic, and the travesty of history, for no other country — culturally, civilisationally and through its national temperament — deserved to be an ally of the democratic West than India. In the 1950s, Nehru with his obsessive anti-Americanism chose to stand on the wrong side of history. Today, when India is ready to embrace the West, the Americans seem to be wary by the sheer weight of India’s rise. Now that’s unfortunate. But then this makes the Indo-American saga interesting. No?

Read all the Latest News, Trending News, Cricket News, Bollywood News,India News and Entertainment News here. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.