The symbolism of the visit will be hard to avoid. As Narendra Modi arrives in Washington DC on Wednesday – the capital of a country he was once prohibited from visiting for almost 10 years – he will join the ranks of Winston Churchill, Nelson Mandela and Volodymyr Zelenskiy as one of the few leaders to address a joint session of Congress more than once.
Statements from US officials ahead of the visit have been rapturous on the subject of US-India relations, praising the “significant defence partnership” and describing it as “a unique connection between the world’s oldest and largest democracies”. Before his departure from India, Modi said: “This special invitation is a reflection of the vigour and vitality of the partnership between our democracies.”
Yet this trip – Modi’s sixth to the US since he came to power in 2014 but the first where a full state dinner will be given in his honour – is expected to yield more than good optics for the Indian prime minister. Many expect it to further crystallise ties between two countries and boost a relationship that has been on an upwards trajectory for two decades – even as they remain fundamentally opposed on several key issues. Defence, technology, security, AI, telecoms, visas, manufacturing and space are all said to be on the table. Meanwhile, the issues of the erosion of democracy in India and the shrinking space for dissent and civil society under Modi are unlikely to be discussed in depth.
Now the world’s most populous country – with 1.4 billion people and rising – and the world’s fifth largest economy, India’s growing prominence, both economically and geopolitically, makes it a country that the Biden administration – like those of Trump, Obama and Bush before it – could not ignore. Yet most experts say that it is China that has been the fundamental driver of this growing alliance; and as Modi touches down in DC, mutual concerns over Beijing’s aggressive, expansionist agenda have never been more acute.
Since Modi last visited the US in 2019, when Donald Trump was in the White House, China’s actions along its 2,100-mile (3,500km) border with India have become increasingly antagonistic. In 2020, the two sides came the closest they had been to war in 70 years when troops clashed along the Himalayan border in Ladakh, killing dozens of soldiers, after Chinese troops encroached on land typically patrolled by India. Since then, China has built up vast amounts of infrastructure along disputed territory and shown little desire to disengage in key areas of contention.
This has coincided with a shift in Washington’s relationship with China, from that of strategic competitor to rival or outright threat that must be deterred and contained. The bipartisan consensus is that India is a crucial geopolitical, and even economic, counterweight to China’s dominance in the Indo-Pacific region.
“In Washington, the hope is to build out an extended framework of deterrence to try and keep China in check,” said Milan Vaishnav, director of the south Asia program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Both geographically as well as strategically and economically, India has become a linchpin in this framework.”
This geopolitical alignment over China – which also drove the formation of the Quad, a security grouping of India, the US, Australia and Japan – has led to an unprecedented flourishing of security and defence cooperation between the US and India. There has been increased intelligence sharing and joint military exercises in the Himalayas close to the China border, and Modi’s US visit is expected to yield several defence deals for surveillance technology and drones.
India has embraced Washington’s new willingness to share its advanced technology and cyber resources, given that its own technological advancements have lagged far behind China’s. Modi will be hoping to close a landmark deal allowing US giant General Electric to produce jet engines in India, to power Indian military aircraft. It will be the first time such a collaboration on military technology has taken place, sending a clear message to China.
While there is little expectation of trade deals between the two countries, trade between India and the US reached a record $191bn in 2022, making the US India’s largest trading partner. There is an interest on both sides in building up India as an economic and manufacturing alternative for big western companies to wean it off its dependency on China – 95% of iPhones are currently made in China, for example, but Apple is slowly shifting manufacturing to India, which is expected to produce 25% of iPhones by 2025.
The limits of a US-India relationship
Yet for all the gushing rhetoric about being “partners of first resort”, experts have also been quick to point out the limitations of the US-India relationship.
Writing in Foreign Affairs, Ashley Tellis, one of the key negotiators for the US nuclear deal with India, warned that even as the Biden administration continued to invest heavily in India, it should not have any “delusions of New Delhi becoming a comrade-in-arms during some future crisis with Beijing”, particularly in terms of India actively taking the US side if China invades Taiwan.
“India will never be the kind of ally that the Americans have found in the Anglosphere: this is not going to be Australia, Canada or the United Kingdom,” said Avinash Paliwal, an associate professor in international relations at Soas University of London.
“India thinks of itself as a power on its own merit and it has its own geographical compulsions, its own kind of power and its own aspirations on a regional and global scale. There is a meeting of minds and interests at the moment but that’s not something that will last for ever.”
Another issue that looms large over Modi’s visit is that of human rights, in particular the democratic backsliding and the attacks on minorities in India since his populist, Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power. They are allegations that have haunted Modi even before he was prime minister, when his alleged role in the Gujarat riots led to him being banned from the US for a decade.
They have been well documented by the Biden administration. Last year, the state department’s report on international religious freedom documented the challenges to freedom of expression, extrajudicial killings and discrimination against minority groups in Modi’s India, prompting India to call the report “flawed and biased”. More recently, the Commission on International Religious Freedom, a bipartisan agency appointed by Congress, recommended in May that the state department designate India a country of concern for “ongoing and egregious religious freedom violations”.
Before Modi’s visit, Amnesty International called on the US to confront India on the deterioration of human rights and Human Rights Watch organised a screening for US policymakers of a BBC documentary that was critical of Modi, and which was banned in India earlier, as a deliberate reminder of the attacks on freedom of speech under his government.
Yet no US president since Bill Clinton has been forthright on human rights in India, and though the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, did make a rare reference to a rise in “human rights abuses” last year, the Biden administration is expected to continue to keep quiet on any discomfort it may have over Modi’s populist, religious nationalist politics in the name of building strategic security ties. Already several White House officials have made recent references to India’s “vibrant democracy”.
“It’s unlikely to come up, at least in this round of conversations,” said Paliwal. “The Americans are OK doing business with quasi- or undemocratic countries and so I don’t see the democratic decline in India dislocating the glue that is binding the top levels of the two governments or preventing them coming together to deal with the China question.”
Russia, which was briefly a source of contention between India and the US, is also unlikely to be brought up by Biden. India’s historic ties to Russia, which provides almost 80% of its defence and weapons, have ensured that Modi has refused to condemn Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, instead taking a neutral stance, and in the meantime India has become the biggest buyer of cheap Russian oil. While there was initial pushback from Washington, the consensus among analysts is that the Biden administration has now accepted India’s deep-rooted relationship Russia; some believe it has even hastened US cooperation with India on defence to help the country become less dependent on Russia.
But for Modi, this visit can also serve a more personal political purpose. In the US, the Indian diaspora is now one of the largest immigrant groups – second only to Mexicans – and its members occupy influential positions in tech, business, banking and law, and some have even become well-known faces in Hollywood. Emphasising these people-to-people ties, and the vital contributions Indians have made in the US, is also likely to be a prominent part of Modi’s trip.
With India’s next general election less than a year away, the optics of Modi being given full honours by the US president are also likely to play well to the electorate back home. Modi is expected to win a third term in office and his popularity is credited in part to an image among voters that he has made India into a respected player on the world stage and is now courted by powerful western leaders.
“Since independence, India has seen itself as an international power but felt it did not get the recognition or role it deserved,” said Tanvi Madan, director of the India Project at the Brookings Institution in Washington DC. “But Modi seems to believe that endorsements from the US, far from generating a backlash, generate a sense of optimism that this is India’s moment.”