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There's a lot of hype surrounding India. The US clearly wants to boost the country to provide a Western-oriented alternative to China. No other country has the scale comparable to China and India's demographics are much better (26 million births compared to China's 10). The Indian diaspora is very successful in the US and largely pro-American and anti-China. So what's not to like here?
To India boosters like Noah Smith, there's pretty much nothing to be skeptical of. He sees the emergence of an Indo-US alliance in all but name as a necessity.
For this alignment to make sense, India must actually become a real alternative to China. Is this plausible?
First, India's economic structure is dominated by services and elite services at that (IT exports). Its manufacturing sector has been very weak. Modi tried to change this with his 2014 "Make in India" campaign. We've now gone almost a full decade since then and there's basically been zero movement on this issue. India boosters will claim that this is simply because decoupling never really got serious until now. But the problem with this line of argument is that the rhetoric is changing. Even Raytheon's CEO is claiming decoupling is impossible; the new watchword is "de-risking" which is a tacit admission that China's integration into the world's supply chains is far greater than the Former Soviet Union ever was, which is why the analogies to the Cold War are often misleading at best.
Second, a key part of China'a ascent was built on skilled, but cheap labour. Economists often overstate the importance of labour costs. What matters is productivity. Labour costs can increase as long as productivity increases faster: this is what drives long-term growth.
Nobody is denying that India has cheap labour, but is it skilled? Moving past the rarefied IT, pharma and finance sectors that dominate India's services, we find a much bleaker landscape.
50% of Indian kids are functionally illiterate. Female literacy has actually worsened over time. Though this is partly a function of the school system taking in far more kids than before. Yet Vietnam and Indonesia did the same yet did not notice such a fall. Finally, there's no improvement over the past decade.
We can argue over whether education matters much for simple manufacturing. Economists like the heterodox Ha-Joon Chang of South Korean descent has argued that it really doesn't. Perhaps this was true when SK, JP, TW and other East Asian "tigers" took off in the 1960s. Today, everything is far more digital, even relatively simple manufacturing. Workers need to read basic instructions and should at least be able to operate basic machinery, which in turn requires them to read and operate screens. Being unable to read a simple sentence immediately disqualified half the Indian workforce.
If India were to really become a fully fledged alternative to China, then it means that it would need to scale the value-added ladder the way China has. It can't just produce toys or textiles. It would have to create a fully industrial ecosystem covering the greatest sophistication. Simply put, does India has the human capital base to pull that off? The data seems to draw us to a stark conclusion: not really.
Poverty cannot be an explanation either. Vietnam had a similar per capita GDP to what India has now in the mid-2010s. Yet it did very well in international tests and it has continued to draw in a great number of manufacturing projects in a way that India has been unable to. Some of this may be related to government: Vietnam is a one-party dictatorship like China and can bulldoze through various projects of importance. But a more important explanation is simply that Vietnam has the same combination that China had a generation ago: skilled labour but at cheap rates.
In short, if American elites are now betting big on India supplanting China - or at least becoming a real viable alternative - for manufacturing then it is very likely that they will become disappointed. By the same logic, any talk of decoupling (or "de-risking") is likely to run into the hard wall that the alternatives are either too small (Vietnam) or not up to par (India).
On a sociological note, we should acknowledge that discussions on India are colored by their diaspora in the West, primarily in Anglo countries. This group are an incredibly elite selection, particularly in the US. They come from highly privileged homes with house maids and a cultural aversion to manual labour, and by extension manufacturing. It can hardly be surprising that India was ground zero for fantasies that developing countries can "leap frog" manufacturing into prosperity, despite there being virtually no examples of this in world history (barring petrostates, financial êntrepots like Singapore etc).
I've hoped to convince you of becoming more realistic about India's prospects, even if I support a move to diversify away from China for obvious geopolitical reasons. India's own potential can be hotly debated. Certainly their smart fraction is highly capable and we know that smart fractions are important for driving prosperity. The question before us is if India's much less capable "middle" will prevent it from rapid convergence once the easy gains from growth are gone. East Asia managed to educate the broad masses to fairly decent levels whereas India clearly has not. Should we really expect them to emulate East Asia given these sharp differences? As things stand, the West's current policy completely ignores this question.
While India alone is not likely enough to provide an alternative to China for the reasons you and other posters have described, I think that collectively the ASEAN nations, India, and Bangladesh can. With a combined population of over 2.2 billion, this block of more or less pro-American nations (China may invest heavily in some of them, but it's not my impression that they have enough leverage to force Cambodia or Bangladesh to issue a wholesale trade embargo against the US and its allies, since ultimately those countries mostly just care about getting rich) would be sufficient even if we assumed their citizens had on average only half the human capital of China's. That assumption seems a bit harsh even for India, and is certainly not true for places like Vietnam and Malaysia.
It's true that coordinating trade relations with a dozen countries is a lot more complicated than managing a single relationship, but it also spreads out the risk, and the supranational organizations (i.e. ASEAN) that can facilitate this already exist. Looking at the tags on clothing and cheap manufactured goods in recent years, it seems to me that this shift is well underway for economic reasons irrespective of US foreign policy decisions, but there are a few moves that could perhaps help secure its future, such as negotiating a formal alliance with Vietnam.
With so many Muslims in India and the zeitgeist being against them - a block consisting of India and 90%+ majority Muslim countries is somewhat unstable.
It's my impression that even people who hate Muslims often tend to forget about or ignore Indonesians. I may be wrong, but Hindus and Muslims in South Asia just feel viscerally different to me in a way that Southeast Asians, whether they be Catholic Filipinos, Muslim Indonesians, Buddhist Cambodians, or Hindu Balinese, just don't. It seems like Islam is a less salient aspect of Indonesian political identity when compared to say Pakistan.
Certainly. Headscarf and shorts from which the ass will fall out is combo most often seen in Jakarta and KL.
But it looks to me that the country as a whole is moving to more radical version of islam in the last years - mostly due to gulf money and their influence. Not sure if they can nudge the foreign policy yet but it is not out of the question.
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Only if you include Pakistan in there.
Relationships between India and Bangladesh have had their ups and downs, but overall they remain quite warm. And I'd hope so too, given that we bailed them out of being genocided and the people who we saved are of the age group currently running the country!
The only minor sticking point is Bangladesh occasionally cozying up to China, but even then nobody expected them to join a war against them, or join them in a war against India.
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The percentage of Muslims in the ASEAN countries is about 40% not 90%+.
But they are not equally distributed. You have 90-ish percent in Indonesia and Bangladesh. And Malasia is a majority Muslim country. And Indonesia is a heavy hitter there.
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