This is India’s moment, and we must not lose a moment

Nearly 17 years ago, in November 2006, I wrote, in another newspaper, that the India-US relationship would be the “most important bilateral relationship of the century.” I was saying this at a time when the India-US civil nuclear deal, which was under negotiation then, had run into difficulties in the US Congress, and it looked like it would be better for India to walk away from the deal than to accept the conditions it would come with. I made the plea that even if India had to dump the N-deal, it should not let the overall strategic relationship with the US be damaged.

In my view, then and now, building a strategic relationship with the US (partnership, not an alliance) is the optimal path for India to rise to global power status quickly – we can do it on our own, but we would be exhausted by the time we got there, and perhaps would even find that the goalpost had moved.

Oh yes, India loves strategic autonomy. I do, too, and fully appreciate Nehru’s non-alignment then, as well as the more recent articulation of ‘multi-alignment’. But modern nations have short windows of demographic advantage that they must seize or lose out and go on a path of decline.

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There was a certain inevitability to the idea of India and the US coming closer together even then, and, as Modi for once acknowledged, successive Indian Prime Ministers and American Presidents have worked to make it happen. We have particularly George Bush and Manmohan Singh to thank for it.

The idea of strengthening democratic India against the single-party autocracy that is China has been American thinking -- and policy, on and off -- since at least Eisenhower. Bush put it into action, offering to help quicken India’s rise, including militarily, to major power status. He literally moved heaven and earth – if you can call the US House and Senate that – to remove the single biggest obstacle to doing so, with the India-US civil nuclear deal. Manmohan Singh put his government at stake, stood up to his own party leadership – and, in the spirit of full disclosure, critical articles by yours truly arguing that we cannot agree to the ‘no further testing’ condition, which caused his personal representative on the deal to blow up at me at a public event -- and made it happen.

Of course, it turned into a pyrrhic victory, thanks to the BJP, which insisted on such clauses in the nuclear liability bill that it cannot be put to full utility even now (and PM Modi seems to have simply given up on things nuclear anyway). Yet, today, thanks to the foundations laid by those who came before him, Modi is able to say, “India’s moment has come”. Indeed, it has, and he is fortunate to be at the helm at this moment. And India will be fortunate if his party and parivar do not lose it by inciting a million mutinies internally to win the 2024 election.

So, here’s the thing: A significant motive behind the Bush-Manmohan Singh nuclear deal was that it would help India become an alternative manufacturing base for America and Europe, thus raising its own economy as well as giving America the leeway to get tougher with China on trade and strategic matters. That did not happen due to failures in both India and the US as well as the fact that China’s economy was at the peak of its prowess. We have thus lost a decade and a half.

The logic behind the Biden-Modi deal of last week is also the same. Indeed, this time, not only has it been explicitly stated to be so, but the circumstances are propitious, too, given China’s demographic and post-Covid economic problems, and the US-China trade and tech war and the resultant China+1 rush by companies and investors. Moreover, the Biden pivot to India – most emphatically seen in the semiconductor supply chain opening we have got – will push the major European countries and companies to also pivot to India. This, indeed, is our moment. Let’s not screw it up this time.

That India would once again rise to be a world power in modern times has long been known, or at least felt. Jawaharlal Nehru articulated this as early as 1934 -- 13 years before India even broke free of colonial yoke, a struggle in which he was a pre-eminent participant. Nehru, applying the logic of geography, natural resources and populations of nations, said that eventually, there would be only four major world powers – America, the Soviet Union, China and…yes, India.

We can taunt him for getting one of the four wrong – the Soviet Union. But he got working on laying the foundations for India’s rise. No chest-thumping, he just quietly went about the job of building dams, power and irrigation projects, heavy industry, science and defence laboratories and research institutions, nuclear power, space, universities, cultural institutions, and most importantly, parliamentary democracy and secularism – amid Partition, famines, droughts, poverty, distress, ill-health and illiteracy -- striving to keep identity politics and communal hatred at bay. That’s the way to go now.

In 2003, Goldman Sachs’ ‘Dreaming with BRICS’ paper projected the trajectory of India’s rise through to 2050, when India would not only be the third largest economy (having gotten there already by about 2033) but still the world’s fastest growing major economy, and still a relatively young nation. All that was required was a consistent 6% growth annually. We have been on track for the most part since – except when administered shocks like demonetisation and Covid. It may just turn out that we will do even better than predicted – if only we can keep our sanity. What was it that Modi said to the US Congress? “Democracy, demography and destiny give us that purpose.”