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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.
You've blocked me, although I'm not sure why since we haven't had any particular conversations I recall.
In any case, this article has been making the rounds recently that presents a more pessimistic look at the US-India alliance. India has historically been a friend of Russia, and while that friendship has been slowly melting as Russia kamikazes itself in revanchist furor, there are still several downstream ramifications. First, India has refused to join Western sanctions regimes against Russia and is actually probably the second-largest economic lifeline to Russia after China. Second, there's a significant amount of anti-US sentiment in India, often portraying the '03 Iraq war as just as bad, or even far worse than what's going on in Ukraine.
India is a curiously isolationist country. There hasn't been a single invasion going out from India in recorded history, and its generally tried to eschew formal alliances if at all possible. The USA wants to do to India what the UK did to the USA, i.e. use a nation with a bigger population to secure a favorable future. But thus far it looks like India has no real appetite to be a global actor. It's refused to join any agreement to help defend Taiwan and instead looks only to counter Chinese influence within its own subcontinent. It's kind of bizarre that a nation with the third largest GDP (by PPP) has minimalistic international aims, but it might be just something about the Indian character. In any case, it'll most likely take decades before any larger India-US alliance happens, by which point the world will look far different.
I'd like to start by saying this isn't intended to be a nit-pick, but rather that you combine a lot of points in a few lines, points I think are worth bringing up separately.
I'd disagree that the article is pessimistic. While the title is pessimistic ('America's Bad Bet on India'), the article is much more measured in a 'don't have unrealistic expectations,' and the author- Ashley J. Tellis- was allegedly one of the key actors in Washington in the Bush years who helped facilitate the nuclear normalization agreement that fundamentally changed the trajectory of US-India relations. I don't think it's fair to say Tellis is pessimistic, or even that the article actually says the US wrongly (badly) invested into the relationship with India, as much as telling people not to be unreasonably euphoric... and I think there's a
This is a Eurocentric viewpoint on the Western sanctions regime against Russia. Most of the world hasn't joined the Westerns sanctions regime against Russia in the sense the Europeans did. This is one of those times where 'Europe' does not mean 'the international system.' There is no expectation of participation by most of the world, because for most of the world this is a European problem, not their own problem, and their policies tend to be for reasons other than Russia or Europe itself. This goes for the US far eastern allies as well, where there are some substantial parallel interests in play with support to Ukraine- such as the South Koreans getting paid a lot of money for ammo, and the Japanese having a view for shaping the precedents for a Taiwan scenario.
India isn't joining the Western sanctions regime... but India IS aligning with one of the most critical points of the regime, which is the structured energy sanctions to depress the cost- and profits to Russia- of Russian energy exports. India likes this because that means they get to buy below-cost energy. India buying great volumes of Russian is the sanctions working as intended. What India isn't doing is aggressively trying to screen dual-purpose technologies- of which they are a drop in the bucket.
There's a significant amount of anti-US sentiment in Europe, who before Ukraine portrayed the '03 Iraq war as reason not to support the US in a Taiwan scenario. There's a significant amount of anti-US sentiment in South Korea, where the Americans are in some circles tied to the rightwing dictatorship and preventing national reunification. There's a significant amount of anti-US sentiment pretty much anywhere in the world, even in the US, where self-flagellation is practically a political sport.
This isn't the sort of thing parties base their pragmatic balance-of-power interests off of either. This would be an obstacle if there were no other topics to consider.
There also hasn't been a polity known as India for most of recorded history, which makes this a bit of a just-so narrative. India as a unified polity is a consequence of the the British Empire, before which no one had a major maritime empire and the geographic region of India being divided was precisely what enabled the East India Company's divide-and-conquer strategy to work.
In the brief historical span of India being a unified and independent power, much of it was spent not only trying to maintain internal coherency and getting over the legacies of colonialism, in the international context of the Cold War (where it was not a superpower) and the American hyperpolar period. The next period of multipolarity will be the literal first historical opportunity for India to both be a polity to act with agency and have the means to.
And why should it, when not even the US has done so?
The number of treaty allies Taiwan has is 0. The number of international agreements to help defend Taiwain is 0. There's no agreement to join.
This comes off as selective standards no one else is held to... but also no one has proposed. If your standard for India is vocal intent to defend Taiwan, you'll be disappointed by everyone, which says less about everyone and more about the standard.
What major international aims does it need to have? The American-led world order was very conducive to allowing India to develop in peace under its own terms. The security threats are not particularly existential. India doesn't need a navy to go secure vital imports, it doesn't need an empire to provide raw materials, it's primary ideological project of Hindu nationalism is internal rather than missionary, and it's people and politicians can make very real cases that spending attention and resources abroad detracts from very real domestic concerns. India doesn't have a primary international problem that can be 'solved' by being more active- nukes in Pakistan see to that- so why not, beyond appeals to ambition?
India's not, say, the United States, whose international system will be taken apart or changed if it doesn't actively compete. India is generally content with the system for the time being, and changes/attempts by others to change the system now have a good chance of either being in its favor, or offering it a good position to solicit concessions from courting powers.
Here's I'll conclude by agreeing whole heartedly... and say that's probably the expectation. The US attempts to court India haven't been about immediate-term things like Taiwan, but with a view for long-term balancing, which will exist regardless of what happens with Taiwan.
This is a sentiment I hear often, but it's a cop-out to some degree. During the early days of the war, there were many who wanted the sanctions to entail full isolation of Russia, and India's refusal to sign on caused a few minor diplomatic incidents. Eventually the West decided that the oil price cap was all they could reasonably achieve, but that in turn has meant that Russia's economic situation is far more stable than it otherwise would have been. Saying after-the-fact that "we never actually wanted a FULL oil embargo" is Western cope more than anything.
I meant that no Indian power has tried to conquer outside of the subcontinent. I wasn't referring specifically referring to the modern state of India. For the most part it's true for the thousands of years of recorded history, apart from brief incursions trying to control Himalayan passes like Kabul, and notably the Chola empire which I had never heard of until this thread.
I wasn't specifically referring to binding treaties here, but rather future intent. The US clearly signaled an intent to defend Taiwan IF Taiwan actually chooses to resist (which is still an open question at this point, admittedly). Japan has also indicated that its open to the idea. There's near-zero interest from anyone else though, including Europe and India.
You could ask a similar question to basically any geopolitically active country. For India it could be countering the BRI, countering Chinese influence in SE Asia, building a Middle Eastern network to isolate Pakistan, forging diplomatic and economic links around the rim of the Indian Ocean to turn it into an Indian lake, etc.
Fortunately, I am not many people, and I never said that, nor did the people who were proposing the oil price mechanism, who were separate from the people who wanted a full embarge (or, good heavens, a blockade).
The people who wanted the sanctions to entail full isolation of Russia were never realistically going to get that, and I noted at the time that sanctions were crafted from the start to leave critical parts of the Russian-European trade, including significant parts of the energy relationship, untouched. That the oil price cap was all that they could reasonably achieve does not change the point that the oil price cap is not nothing, and that it is having the intended impact by the people who won the push for that instead of an embargo.
More most of the thousands of years of recorded history, there was no technological ability to meaningfully conquer outside of or into the subcontinent. The two primary historical actors that conquered into the subcontinent at all (Alexander the Great and the Mongols) fractured from their outside polities almost immediately, and even the Mongols were promptly stuck in the functional non-unity of the system which was so busy locally competing there was no meaningful point in trying to conquer outside of the continent, far away and technologically unsustainable, when there were still immediate neighbors who weren't conquered.
This has nothing to do with cultural character, and everything to do with a lack of means and opportunity. The hindu kush is big and expensive to move armies through. Armies that hadn't even dominated the much richer neighbors. Even the Romans prioritized their conquests.
And yet, you're still not explaining why they should, which was the point of the question.
This is, again, a selectively claimed standard based on, well, not even a notional obligation. If only two countries maybe- conditionally- without any binding obligation to- might involve themselves, where is the obligation of expectation for future intent coming from. That Europe- formal treaty allies, openly aligned- are not interested in such a position only weakens any basis of expecting India to take a higher position than them.
You're claiming India fails some nebulous standard... but why should anyone care about this standard in the first place that they never pretended to agree to?
I... am. India is a geopolitically active country. You may be unaware of its activities, but this just sets up the point that your understanding of India's priorities and interests and the Indian government's are not aligned.
These are nice for you to want India to seek, but that's not what I asked ('needs'), or a position of what India believes its needs are.
This is a pushback against a sort of typical minding of 'India makes no sense for not pursuing its interests as I see them,' without actually identifying if those interests are what India agrees are goals ('countering' BRI means what?), practical (how is a Middle Eastern network going to practically isolate Pakistan rather than the same Arabs maintaining relations with both), or not already in the process (forging diplomatic and economic links around the Indian Ocean).
Hogwash. The Himalayas form a powerful shield but they're really only an extreme barrier to the northeast. To the east is SE Asia which Indian states rarely bothered with, which stands in contrast to China's centuries of bashing on Vietnam. Invasions from the northwest happened several times (Alexander, Mongols, Ghurids, Timurids, Mughals) while invasions from Indian nations rarely happened in the reverse direction, and when they did they didn't go far. Finally, in the south was the rich trade of the Indian Ocean. If the Greeks and the Vikings could send colonists and military expeditions hundreds or thousands of miles from their original homeland, then the technology certainly existed for India to do something similar, at least more than just Chola.
Because an emboldened China would presumably be bad news for India. One could ask why Poland and the Baltics are sending every gun and tank they can spare to Ukraine, but I'd say the reasoning is pretty obvious. Yet those countries have Article 5 to fall back on if Ukraine collapses, while India has nothing similar. China still claims hundreds of square miles of Indian land in the Northeast, and border disputes flare up pretty frequently these days. India has a vested interest in seeing Chinese revanchism flame out in Taiwan rather than on its own territory, either in the Northeast or by a China-Pakistan alliance doing something in Kashmir.
This is a non-answer.
"Why isn't India more geopolitically active?"
"Because it's government doesn't want to be. "
"Why not?"
"Because it doesn't think it would gain much"
"Why not?"
If the response is that India is perfectly content to free-ride on Pax Americana, that explanation goes out the window when China seeks to explicitly overthrow that order and bring about a Chinese Century.
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