What matters for India in the ongoing US presidential elections? Visa/immigration, trade, troubling gaps in Indian democracy that are fair game for India-baiters and continued competition with China are oft-discussed stakes for India, and these matter. However, policies and principles that transcend bilateral engagement could be at least as vital.
Indo-US relations are built on a fair degree of strategic convergence, which does not depend on any particular US President or Indian Prime Minister. America has one global rival in the superpower weight category, and that is China. China continues to rise -- economically, militarily, technologically and in terms of academic/scientific depth. That cannot be stopped. The point is to keep that rise peaceful, instead of it turning into a malign force of destabilisation.
Roots of strategic partnership
The only way to keep China’s rise peaceful is for India to rise simultaneously, as a countervailing force in the Indo-Pacific. It is this realisation that led the George Bush administration to work to secure India’s quasi-admittance into the nuclear club without India having to sign up for the discriminatory non-proliferation treaty, in the teeth of China’s opposition.
Many things flow from this quasi-admittance into the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group. One is India’s membership of all other crucial technology control regimes – the Missile Technology Control Regime, the Wassenaar Arrangement on dual use technologies and the Australia Group on chemical weapons. If the technology denial regime in which India found itself after US-led sanctions following India’s nuclear tests in 1998 continued, India would not have been able to join the ongoing International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) project, either.
Formation of the Quad, a four-way alliance among the US, India, Japan and Australia, is another. India’s readiness to join the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, and warmer relations with Japan – all flow from the font of mutual utility that President Bush and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh jointly unstoppered, with the Indo-US nuclear treaty.
Elections can influence tactics but not strategy
The election results might vary particular articulations of this strategic convergence, but will not affect the convergence itself, the basis of India-US ties.
But other things are at stake in the presidential elections. Many of those things might appear purely internal to America’s national politics, but, in the age of social media, what happens in the world’s most impactful culture will not stay confined to that culture.
Downside of Trump’s advent
Trump is supported by white supremacists and those opposed to any set of liberal values, collectively condemned and dismissed as wokeism. It is not just migrants who are anti-American, in the Trumpian worldview, so are all those who oppose him and any of his policies of intolerance. In India, we are familiar with the deft use of the label, anti-national. A Trump victory would normalise demonisation of the political rival, and this would inflame the temper of WhatsApp messages in India, besides in the US.
Democracy is an ongoing march, anywhere in the world, towards the ideal form of coexistence and self-governance. This is particularly true of the world’s oldest democracy than either Americans or those outside realise. Citizens are politically disengaged, for the most part, and latch on to simple-minded notions of who is good for them based on transient events – bouts of inflation or a hurricane, whose fury is blamed on an incumbent leader’s failings – with little thought to long-term policy or values.
Divisions are created among voters based on religion, ethnicity, alleged proclivity to elitist liberalism, particularly on gender. People are cocooned in social media echo-chambers that reinforce prejudice and keep out inconvenient facts.
Trump’s popularity leverages every one of American democracy’s flaws. A Trump victory would reinforce every one of these, and give it extra-territorial legitimacy. Women’s right to full humanity, which is what the right to equality amounts to, would receive a setback across the world, if Trump is elected president, after being convicted of sexual assault, opposing abortion rights and announcing his determination to protect them, whether they like it or not.
Threat to World Order from Trump’s positioning
Trump stands for the principle that might is right, in global affairs. He would, he said, allow Israel to complete its job. That job, although Trump did not elaborate in so many words, could include bombing Iranian nuclear facilities or clearing Palestinian land for new Israeli settlements.
Trump’s commitment to protect treaty allies is conditional. His policy choices are unpredictable. Before the prospect of arbitrary withdrawal of America’s nuclear shield, under a Trump presidency, Japan and South Korea would discard their nuclear inhibitions. The world would spend more on arms, less on healthcare, education and welfare. At the same time, it would turn a more dangerous place.
When the law of the jungle becomes the guiding principle in how nations interact, India would have to sacrifice a lot, to acquire the might needed to stand up to a much bigger bully in the neighbourhood.
Trump is a climate change denier. His presidency would reverse the progress the US has made under Biden in developing green technology, including for CO2 removal, the only viable way to prevent global warming at a disastrous pace. The world at large would suffer needlessly, sweltering in heat waves, fleeing forest fires and flash floods, struck by extreme weather events.
Harris might not be any knight in shining armour. But Trump definitely rescues Darth Vader from being reduced to a piece of fiction in a universe far, far away.
Let us stop fooling ourselves that for India, only the number of H1B visas are at stake on November 5.
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