US and India need to deal with their trust issues

Tensions over values impose hard constraints on the Indo-US relationship. Unfortunately, the very things we expected would bring us together are now driving us apart.

By Mihir Sharma

This week, Americans will once again be treated to the scenes of bonhomie that have come to mark visits by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to the US: cheering crowds of Indian-Americans, warm photo-ops with leaders of both parties, and a triumphant speech to a joint session of Congress. No doubt Modi will declare that India and the US have grown closer than ever. A few joint programmes will be announced. And most casual observers will conclude that all is well with what has been breathlessly described as the most important relationship of the 21st century.

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All is not, in fact, well. India has been visibly unenthusiastic about condemning the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and discontent has built up in New Delhi over expectations that it should declare itself on the West’s “side” in the conflict. Meanwhile, the US foreign policy establishment has belatedly woken up to India’s unwillingness to jump on any US-led bandwagon. A series of recent essays and op-eds have questioned where the Indo-US partnership is heading.

Some of the blame, according to these pieces, must be assigned to India’s “democratic backsliding” under Modi, which has opened up a gulf in values between the world’s two biggest democracies.

That argument has considerably intensified New Delhi’s resentment of US “lecturing.” As far as India’s foreign policy elites are concerned, values are a distraction: Mutual concern about an aggressive and coercive China has brought New Delhi and Washington together and little else is required to ensure the relationship grows ever closer. Whatever India’s attitude toward a free press or minority rights, its size and location ensure it cannot be abandoned by the US. At this point, not many US officials would disagree.

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In practice, however, values do matter. Having a shared set of organising principles allows governments to trust one another — and thus to make deals that last.

Before Modi came to power a decade ago, both US and Indian leaders believed precisely this — that common values, even more than shared interests, dictated a closer relationship. The expectation that liberal democratic principles would put us on the same page of history pushed the bilateral relationship beyond Cold War-era acrimony.

The landmark deals struck by US President George W Bush and India’s then-Prime Minister Manmohan Singh were not transactional in nature. Indeed, they represented a leap of faith on both sides. Choosing to strengthen ties with India despite few immediate benefits for the US represented, as one commentator said at the time, “one of the few foreign policy successes” of the Bush years, as India would grow into a new role as a leader of the free world.

The breakthrough came about because Indian leaders believed their nation’s future lay with other liberal democracies and because the US, in Bush’s words, wanted to enlist “India’s leadership in freedom’s cause.”

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Hope of this sort emboldens you to take long-term decisions. India opposed the Iraq war, did not send troops to Afghanistan, and was dissatisfied with continued US support for Pakistan. But that did not matter, because it seemed the arc of history would bring us together.

Today’s less hopeful, less trusting relationship limits the progress that the two nations can make. The Quad — which also includes Japan and Australia — looks less and less likely to grow into the Indo-Pacific NATO that China fears. Both the US and India see fewer benefits from trading with each other than they did a decade ago.

There are areas, of course, that continue to drive the relationship forward. Defence is one, investment flows another.

Yet both of these require long-term commitments, which are harder to make in an atmosphere of declining trust. While Indian decision-makers may want US arms, they balk at the possibility that their supply might one day be interrupted because of a breakdown in relations. US companies may not want to invest in India’s defense sector if, in the future, politics gets in the way of profit. And so the various deals that may be announced this week — India may start co-producing GE jet engines, for example — are small in comparison to India’s potential needs.

Tensions over values thus impose hard constraints on the Indo-US relationship. Unfortunately, the very things we expected would bring us together, our democratic traditions, are now driving us apart. It is impossible to imagine a US president being applauded in New Delhi today for a speech about standing with “reformers and dissidents and civil society organizations” because “history is on their side.” Yet Bush was, in 2006.

Jettisoning our search for shared values would be a mistake. When Modi’s predecessor addressed a joint session of Congress, he put it rather well: “There are partnerships based on principle and partnerships based on pragmatism. …We can embark on a partnership that draws on principle as well as pragmatism.” One supports and magnifies the other. Until this generation of leaders remembers that fact, the US-India partnership will continue to underperform.