Facing the Challenge of China, Should India Embrace the U.S.?

India’s Foreign Minister S.M. Krishna was in Beijing this week, inaugurating his nation’s new $10 million embassy and meeting with his Chinese counterpart as well as a range of high-ranking Communist Party officials. The biggest headline to emerge from the visit was invariably about the two countries’ commitment to reach $100 billion in bilateral trade by 2015. Sino-Indian summitry is notorious for its tiresome platitudespeak, full of stiff statements promising respect for the other’s sovereignty and even stiffer appeals to friendship and bonhomie between the two Asian giants. This is understandable. Presiding over vast, intensely nationalist publics, both governments need to tread lightly in order to stave off conflict. But there are reasons to expect a hardening of the geopolitical divide, despite Beijing’s and New Delhi’s talking points.

An Associated Press feature on India’s revamping of its military turned heads this week. While it may seem routine for a budding power to upgrade its arsenal, India is conspicuously the world’s largest arms importer. And it’s clear that its recent acquisitions — including 126 French fighter jets for an initial $11 billion and a flotilla of Russian submarines, including one nuclear-powered one — are geared toward rivaling China, the second biggest military spender after the U.S.

The two countries fought a bitter, wintry war in 1962 over stretches of the Himalayas. They have yet to settle their differences over the disputed land border, which remains one of the world’s most militarized frontiers. A somewhat alarmist Indian press routinely reports incidents of Chinese border incursions, while Beijing claims almost in entirety the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh as a southern extension of Tibet, a long-standing contention that has been revived in recent years by Chinese officials. Not surprisingly, New Delhi has set about enlarging its troop numbers there and elsewhere along the glacial boundary line with China.

While war may not be in the cards, there’s a growing sense that both countries won’t be able to rise on the global stage without butting heads. Indian wariness of China is echoed as far away as Washington; the Obama Administration is trying to spend this year “pivoting” U.S. security interests away from the Middle East toward Asia-Pacific, a move that is a thinly veiled reaction to the increased capabilities of the Chinese navy. In private, many senior Indian military officials make no bones about their suspicions of China’s intent, heightened, in part, by the opacity of the authoritarian Chinese state and its military, in particular.

To outsiders, a closer, more overt alliance with the U.S. would seem to make natural sense. But that furrows as many brows in New Delhi as the specter of China does. Relations between the world’s oldest democracy and the world’s largest still bear the baggage of the Cold War, during which India was closer to the Soviet Union than the U.S. In many corners, the traditional skepticism of an “imperialist” America remains. One of the most repeated pieties in Indian politics is that of the country’s desire to maintain an autonomous foreign policy. This is a relic of a time when, much weaker and much poorer, India resisted joining the competing blocs of the Cold War and helped forge the Non-Aligned Movement in the 1950s, a putative (now moribund) alliance of recently independent states that sought to stride boldly into the future free of Western hegemony and Soviet meddling.

Sadanand Dhume, a fellow at the right-of-center American Enterprise Institute in Washington, writes a piece worth reading in the Wall Street Journal, urging India to get over the hang-ups of its Non-Aligned past. The geopolitical map has changed greatly, but in Dhume’s estimation, New Delhi still clings to old habits — seeing the relatively new BRICS grouping (a linking of Brazil, Russia, China, India and South Africa dreamed up by an economist at Goldman Sachs) as a kind of bulwark against the West. Dhume writes:

Will it prop up the ridiculous BRICS grouping, or see it for what it is, the figment of a Goldman Sachs analyst’s imagination that serves as a vehicle for China’s anti-American drive for power? Are India’s core interests—the eradication of poverty and the maintenance of a multireligious democracy and open society—best pursued in opposition to the West or, despite occasional differences, under the rubric of a liberal international order underwritten by American power?

That last question is worth raising, though something of a false dichotomy. India’s communist parties — which, at least when it comes to discussing foreign policy, do still exist in the Cold War — are much diminished in parliament. Rarely do Indian politicians advocate action “in opposition” to the West. But there remains a question of values. The pluralism of India’s multilingual, multiethnic society stands in stark contrast to the ethnocentrism of Beijing, and in far greater kinship with the democratic ideals projected — if not always embodied — by the U.S. over half a century of global superpowerdom.

Realists will shrug their shoulders and argue that India should do what’s only in its strategic interests and through whatever channels it sees fit, especially in a geopolitical environment that is as “multipolar” and fragmented as it is today. But there are increasing signs that the U.S. and India may be inching toward a tacit consensus in Asia. This week, the Indian navy will conduct exercises with navies from 14 other Asian states, including many democracies. China, though, is not invited. India is also pushing its interests in the South China Sea, a pivotal conduit of international trade over which Beijing exercises sovereign claims. It’s a challenge welcomed in Washington.

As a member of the Security Council this year, India also voted in favor of last weekend’s U.S.-backed resolution on Syria, which was vetoed by the Russians and the Chinese. That position signaled New Delhi’s new intent to engage with global crises and rise up as an actor on the international stage. India scholar Sumit Ganguly writes:

Having finally demonstrated the necessary firmness at the Security Council when confronted with a potentially risky choice, it should now continue to display a similar willingness to play a more active and dexterous role there. Such a posture may enable it to garner the support that it so desperately seeks, and so urgently needs, to obtain an eventual permanent seat in a reformed and expanded Security Council.

Security Council reform (and a permanent spot on it for India) may be as distant a prospect still as colonies on the moon, but New Delhi has much to gain by raising its unique voice more articulately than it has in recent years — the imperatives of both competing and cooperating with China reduced its position on, say, supporting the junta in Burma to that of Beijing. While avoiding hostilities with its neighbor to the northeast, India should not hide from standing apart from China on critical international issues. This may not mean falling into the U.S.’s lap either. But it’s far better for India to wage a contest of ideas — rather than a race for arms — in the decades ahead.