Thoughts on India’s grand strategy: Rise can’t be achieved at a bargain, and it’s time for a new modus vivendi with China

Apropos Prof Happymon Jacob’s thought-provoking piece in India’s World where he builds a case for ‘De-Americanising India’s Grand Strategy’. I posit that it is not so much decoupling India’s grand strategy from the priorities of the United States as realizing that greatness can’t be achieved at a bargain by hitching a ride and skipping indigenous capacity building.

The Donald Trump administration has perhaps done India an inadvertent favour by presenting it with stark choices: vassalisation for a status of ‘friends with benefits’, or transactionalism without any expectation of preferential treatment. That gives strategic clarity.

The heartburn among India’s strategic circles arises from the fact that freeriding on America’s coattails has come to an end. The gravy train is at risk. I also posit that this inflection point -- with one of the crucial signifiers being removal of India’s status as the lynchpin of the US Indo-Pacific policy with ‘Indo’ getting a watery burial in the Pacific Ocean -- presents India with an opportunity to strive for a new modus vivendi with China. More of that in a bit.

More from Opinion

As the debate over India’s grand strategy was raging on, The US held a two-day Pax Silica summit in Washington DC that concluded Friday with India, along with 34 other countries, becoming joint signatories to a US-led initiative to build ‘trusted and resilient supply chains’ to support AI and emergent technologies.

The US State Department-led initiative is essentially a mechanism to bypass China and establish an allied-only semiconductor supply chain among 35 partner nations. It is a reflection of American anxiety at China’s rapid, recent strides in the areas of new and critical emerging technologies. One of the new schemes launched this year was “Pax Pass” for ‘trusted logistics’ and building of ‘collaborative foundry capacities’, for which the US announced a commitment of $50 million.

Jacob Helberg, the US under-secretary of state for economic affairs, who played the host for this edition of Pax Silica, was at pains to underscore India’s role as a key member of the initiative and declared that Washington intends to embed New Delhi more deeply in the AI and chip supply chain architecture. Helberg called the US-India relationship one of the “most consequential bilateral partnerships of the 21st century”, as his boss Marco Rubio did during the recent visit to India.

All that sounds reassuring. When the US under-secretary stresses ‘global collaboration’ for development of secure tech framework, it shows that the US perceives a threat from China’s swift advancement in global tech ecosystem and frontier technologies like AI, quantum computing, Beijing’s near monopoly over the critical minerals supply chain, and wants US partners to further its objectives.

This structural alignment of objectives -- because joining this framework also serves India’s interests – remains one of the rare instances where strategic convergence persists and is not subject to the vagaries of White House mood swings.

It is interesting to note that amid all the optimism and bonhomie from the US on Pax Silica partnership, when it came to the brass tacks, Washington was non-committal.

Put simply, when India wanted an assurance from the US that it will get consistent, long-term access to frontier AI technologies (such as Anthropic’s advanced model Claude), emphasizing that for India to integrate such tools into its broader digital infrastructure and public-facing services, the partnership must be immune to kill switches, all that Washington could offer was a roundabout obfuscation.

As a report by news agency ANI points out, when asked directly if Anthropic Fable model was discussed with India, Helberg hemmed and hawed and essentially said, “no”.

“We continue to have ongoing conversations about this topic with our Indian friends. These are very sensitive national security discussions that are not quite right for public consumption. But I think both sides really understand each other’s perspectives, our intention is very much to continue a gradual measured approach to how we release Anthropic’s models in a way that is safe, both for ourselves but also for our Indian counterparts as well as all our trusted partners for our critical infrastructure, for our power grid and so we are going to continue making sure that we do the hard work in having those conversations.”

You get the drift. The lesson here is India must focus on cutting-edge model development instead of trying the route of local adoption or layered networking. It cannot cling on to the coattails of the US and become a vital cog in the semiconductor industry or critical technology value chain no matter the comforting rhetoric or membership of select clubs.

As a consumer for America’s frontier AI models, India’s data will always be coveted but it will never have any leverage if the US cuts it off from technological advancements, as the Trump White House has already done, regardless of how many assurances it seeks.

Without India addressing critical weaknesses in military-industrial complex, technological gaps or advancing its capabilities in critical technologies through targeted industrial policies, massive R&D spending and systemic supply-chain integration, it will forever remain a client state.

The harsh reality is India’s military-industrial complex cannot support modern warfare if relabeling of imported parts takes precedence over building indigenous content. True deterrence requires companies to own the core design and source code to adapt technology in accord with India’s needs, rather than outsourcing manufacturing without self-reliance.

It is pointless, therefore, to accuse the US of “betrayal”, as Prof Jacob does. The US rightfully interprets India as opportunistic that seeks to rise on the cheap. This jugaad from the land of jugaads won’t take India anywhere, except keeping it boxed as a consumer and open to exploitation by US Big Tech and frontier tech companies with no access to the “source code”.

This scenario is playing out right at this moment with France flatly denying “source codes” for Rafale to India and India’s AMCA fighter jet project falling in limbo with General Electric hiking up its F414 engine.

A much more mercenary US – worried about its own relative decline – won’t have the bandwidth or patience to provide the stable international order needed for India’s rise, much less ensure global public goods such as a stable financial system, freedom of navigation or security umbrella that great power aspirants rely upon. In this context, the question of preferential treatment for India (strategic altruism, if you will) does not arise.

Prof Jacob writes, “…we have no say over whether the American-led order persists; it is dissolving regardless of what Delhi would prefer. We also have no say over whether the US continues to focus on China and considers it as a rival.”

I posit that the US-China rivalry is here to stay, but India’s strategic importance in that equation has drastically reduced in America’s eyes. As the renaming of USINDOPACOM to USPACOM and shunning of ‘Indo-Pacific’ in favour of returning to Asia-Pacific exemplified, the US has become less interested in making India a fulcrum of its policy to deter China. That does not mean the US is abandoning the rivalry in favour of an entente with China.

The US is still consolidating its military and strategic resources along the ‘first island chain’ – an imaginary defensive line stretching from Japan through Taiwan to the Philippines. In its new burden-sharing approach, regional allies and partners are expected to manage security operations in other areas. From a core pillar of Washington’s broader strategy for the entire Asian continent, however, India has been banished to the margins even though New Delhi is still expected to function as the primary maritime security provider in the Indian Ocean region.

It is possible that Trump, who has little patience for long-term coalition building or strategic thinking, sees India as unreliable in any contest with China.

And just as well. As I wrote in an earlier piece, India will never become a pawn in Washington’s great power game. I differ from Prof Jacob’s formulation that India “outsourced its view of the wider world, and China, to Washington” and “borrowed Washington’s eyes for the wider world, and for China above all.”

India’s China policy is driven by its own history, experiences, needs, adversity and insecurities. The rivalry is based on China’s repeated betrayals, its persistent territorial transgressions along the Himalayan frontier, its military and diplomatic patronage of Islamabad, and its systematic efforts at regional encirclement of India. These immediate, sovereign security imperatives and not foreign agendas dictate India's defence calculus.

There’s a caveat to be added. While India’s foreign policy is never downstream of American grand strategy, and while it is also true that geopolitical alignment between India and the US stems from independent threat assessments of an increasingly assertive China, in certain aspects India’s China policy became reliant on the Indo-Pacific framework.

It may have been driven by two factors. One, a bet on America’s continued dominance and focus on deterring China from becoming a peer competitor. Two, a strategic culture that prioritized ‘continuum’ over relevant changes to mitigate crucial shifts in threat perception. Post Galwan, there have been noticeable corrections in the second factor.

With the US disinterested in investing in India’s strengths, relegating it to the margins of its China strategy, and simultaneously inching towards an extortionist policy and squeezing New Delhi on multiple fronts, it makes sense for India to do two things.

One, ramp up internal balancing. India must mobilize domestic resources, ensure that it remains the fastest growing large economy, modernize its military and develop a mature military-industry complex, fix the R&D deficit and develop indigenous technology to counter an aggressive China and an unpredictable, unreliable US.

Two, India must aim at a new modus vivendi with China while ensuring deterrence at the border. This might raise a few eyebrows. While China looks at India as a long-term rival and puts in place structural deterrents to constrain India’s rise, it does not see India as an immediate threat. In fact, if Beijing perceives that US-India alignment is falling apart – an alignment that was underwritten by an external threat perception – it might be agreeable for a new modus vivendi in the short term.

Deepening India-US ties have always heightened China’s threat perception of India, and Beijing has never interpreted India-China relations except from the prism of its greater rivalry with the US. It had never accepted the Indo-Pacific terminology and has always been hostile towards frameworks such as Quad. Since the US factor remains an important determinant in India-China ties, a deterioration in India-US ties concurrently makes China feel more secure.

While it is possible that China may also find this an opportune moment to test India’s resolve and become more adventurous, such an eventuality carries little benefit China at the moment. Open hostility towards India may result in a rapprochement of sorts between India and the US, that is contrary to China’s strategic goal.

A better compact with China may actually help in India becoming more Aatmanirbhar (self-sufficient), a realization that is driving recent policy initiatives such as India easing FDI rules for Chinese investments, visa relaxation for Chinese technicians, etc.

India’s rivalry with China will remain structural, and as adjacent great powers with regional hegemonic ambitions, friction is inevitable. As the much stronger power, China has far more tools in its command to make life uncomfortable for India, and it will continue to deploy balancing strategies in the Indian subcontinent by boosting Pakistan and developing ties with smaller countries in India’s neighbourhood.

It is not in China’s interest, however, to seek open confrontation with India, rile up India’s public opinion even more against it, trigger a reconciliation of sorts between New Delhi and Washington and lose access to India’s lucrative consumer market. There is space, therefore, for a limited and better working relationship. This recalibration may lead to a tactical mutual compromise. It won’t be easy, but a grand strategy for India cannot be formulated without tactical compromises.

(Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.)