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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 would expect that if push came to shove, India would sacrifice its relationship with Russia (already a white albatross apart from the cheap oil, since all the military equipment they sold us is now looking extremely suspect), if they had an opportunity to really kick China in the balls with the assurance of US support.
Such sentiment is not common among the people that matter, in the upper echelon of the government, who still have an inferiority complex that is greatly pleased by validation from the States.
To see that phenomenon in action, albeit not at the state level, look at the popularity of the genre of YouTube videos that involve a random white person praising any aspect of India.
Does this matter when there's a reasonable expectation that in the case of a shooting war, the Indian navy would turn the Strait of Malacca into a graveyard for any vessel that had red in its flag?
China certainly fears opportunistic attacks, even if India itself doesn't particularly care about Taiwan (and we ought to care more, if only for the sake of the supply of semiconductors).
We have no real reason to beef with our neighbors with the notable and glaring exception of Pakistan and China, both nuclear powers. That takes a lot of the oxygen out of the air when it comes to an appetite for other interventions, since there's always the chance that the former clown will attempt to take advantage of it. Pakistan at this point is a shambling zombie mostly motivated by a desire to stick it to India.
I'm sure that in an alternate universe where the US shared a land border with hostile great powers like Russia and China, expeditionary sentiments would be dampened by a need to conserve force where it counts.
Only to propagandised idiots of the 'everything Russia bad school of t hought'.
Nobody with even a small amount of sense who's been paying attention to Ukraine was is saying Russia is losing due to 'bad equipment'.
I don't think "everything Russia bad". Ukraine itself uses a lot of Soviet equipment, the same as Russia does.
What I'm getting at is that getting locked in to the Russian equipment is a bad idea for the same reason that you don't just buy a weapons platform, you also need to buy support, both logistical and technical. Russian equipment seems significantly worse than Western equivalents when it comes to complicated electronics and avionics, and it's a dead-end platform as the West shoots further ahead.
You can see how poorly the AK-12, T-14 and Su-57 do compared to their western counterparts, if Russia had enough confidence in the latter two to field them.
West is superior in radards and avionics, however, that's a very small % of overall military equipment.
Overall the western MIC doesn't seem to be in a good shape. It produces very little, and given the levels of dysfunction in its leadership I doubt it can learn from the war and develop useful things needed for a future war. E.g. they're still building aircraft carriers despite it being fairly obvious carriers won't survive modern missiles, whether hypersonic cruise or guide ballistic.
It's really quite something that e.g. in Ukraine, Russia apparently has better recon and more drone capabilities than the west, somehow.
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