I will take all these indexes with a large grain of salt. India has 20 political parties running various states and the central govt. How is that a lack of democracy?
India has 100 live news challenges and has the largest English Daily newspaper. Which other country can say that?
The citizenship act you mentioned is for persecuted minority religions from Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Burma etc. All of the minorities are Hindus and skihs etc.
Please check the atrocities against Hindus and others in Pakistan etc.
The whole point is to support these non-muslim religions who live Muslim dominated or Buddhist dominated countries.
The western media and progressives lack any real understanding of India.
"And in 2019, Modi’s government created a Citizenship Amendment Act that offered citizenship to refugees, but only for certain religions."
The CAA *didn't* do that. It provided an accelerated pathway to citizenship for certain persecuted groups in India's neighbourhood. Also singling out India is a bit rich given that American refugee policy has worked exactly that way (see: https://www.jta.org/archive/jewish-refugees-immigrants-benefit-from-clinton-budget-plan-2 ) and it currently has country of birth quotas that act as an exclusion act for Indian citizens from becoming permanent residents.
"Already some refugees are getting the boot."
You are confusing NRA stuff with the Rohingya situation. India is not a signatory to the UN HCR treaty and you are perhaps underestimating challenges in dealing with delicate balance of groups and ethnicities in India's northeast.
"Freedom House’s analysis is backed up by similar organizations like V-Dem, whose 2023 report called India “one of the worst autocratisers in the last 10 years”
Again, these rankings are heavily influenced with the very progressive ousted Indian elites and their methodologies have serious issues when it comes to India where they have been gamed. Prof. Babones of Uni. Syndey for instance has an excellent series of deep dives on these of See: https://newsletter.salvatorebabones.com/p/inside-the-v-dem-rankings
Absolutely well written, and this is probably the most nuanced and therefore also a realistic position on the situation. Another point to remember is that while Americans may not understand Indian politics very well, their source as you mentioned, the Indian progressives, are much worse and the major reason they despise Modi is because they no longer are in the ivory towers of Delhi, the downfall of NDTV is just one example. The point is that when people outside India question the health of democracy in India, I don't think they truly grasp the enormity of the task in a country with a population of 1.4 Billion where the cultural DNA changes every 100 of kilometres. The fact that not only have we survived but also thrived in certain areas is one of promise, and a strong US-India relationship is indeed crucial for the peace of the world.
Very helpful summary of the current relationship. It would be great to open up more opportunities for Indians to come to America. Two points about that:
1) There was an eye opening for me article in The Dispatch about the ineffectiveness of our legal immigration system. Here's an excerpt relevant to India:
"Indian applicants filing this year (those with a master’s or bachelor’s degree) face a wait of about 90 years.… As Table 1 shows, about 215,000 petitions will expire as a result of the death of the immigrant before the immigrant receives a green card, and more than 99 percent of these deaths will be Indians… Another roughly 90,000 children of employment‐based immigrants will “age out” of eligibility when they turn 21 — because only children under the age of 21 may qualify based on their parents’ application — largely children of Indian applicants"
From "America Has a Legal Immigration Problem
And it helps fuel illegal immigration:.
By Scott Lincicome
2) How eager is India for America to open its doors to Indians with specialized skills? It would be great for America, but I wonder if there would be any pushback.
While I always appreciate the evidence you cite, I don't trust the supposedly neutral rankings and indices of hard-to-quantify things like "press freedom" anymore. Do those numbers truly strive for objectivity or have they been subjected to the same progressive bias and ideological capture many other comparable organizations have fallen prey to? Informally, I think they're not totally off-the-mark in this case and there has been a bit of erosion, but I also think it's overblown.
I think your stance is good: be concerned, not hysterical.
Will this bonhomie last the test of time or at least the 2024 US presidential election? Trump being Trump will probably become pro-China if he comes to power simply because he admires authoritarian leaders.
"That dark and terrible history lingers on the minds of many Indians (Americans, by and large, don’t even know it happened)."
I find this summarizes much of world history. The Hungarians are still insulted over the WWI Trianon Treaty as if it was last month. The Japanese still complain about N. Korean abductions that happened in the early 80's. The Ukraine Russia conflict has roots stretching to the tsars.
We Americans see those things as "holding grudges", but most of the world sees them as "knowing history so you can avoid making the same mistakes twice."
The Afghanis and the Iraqis and the Yemenis aren't going to forgive us for 100 years at least. And based on history (even recent) India wanting to make Muslims feel uncomfortable does not seem particularly unreasonable. Again, compared to China... nothing to see here at all.
"If the U.S. is going to help India get back to full liberalism, we’re not going to do it by publicly denouncing or shaming the country."
Wait, you mean sanctions don't work? Who knew? :-)
More seriously, India likely sees the US as a cautionary tale of where liberalism ends. Why? Because of stuff like this (https://youtu.be/wdrvpSfJM1w) -- trying to convince devout Muslims in Afghanistan that urinals are art. Or this (https://youtu.be/BWtGzJxiONU) -- SCOTUS nominees who don't know what a woman is. Or peasants whose pre-teen daughters become convinced they are boys from watching Tumblr. Or our incarceration rate -- India has 4 times our population and 2/3rds of our prisoners.
From outside the WEIRDs, liberalism doesn't look all that great anymore. Heck, even inside the WEIRDs it's starting to fray. It turns out that "liberating" your citizens from all the religious bonds and cultural constraints and moral norms of your a society doesn't appear to end well. We may yet pull out of our dive, but much of the developing world has dropped out of formation for good reason.
Do you have a recommendation for a good introductory book to the history of India? Reading the news for the past few months has made me realize that I know embarrassingly little about the country (among other things, I had no idea that the US supported Pakistan during the massacre in Bangladesh, or that India stopped it).
It’s the right choice to turn to India to counter China, just would have been nice if we’d done it in the 90s before we got so enmeshed with China to begin with and when the economic boost it would have given the country would have helped the Congress Party electorally and prevented/slowed/reduced the rise of Hindu Nationalism and Modi
One other very interesting thing with India has been its growing confidence, you even see this in cricket, back in the 80s & early 90s they had great players from Kapil Dev to Tendulkar (with Lara the greatest batsman of his generation and one of the best of all time) but they used to come to Australia and get bullied and be very meek while doing so, but as Indias economy grew and the country became more confident you saw the same with its cricket teams and players, starting with the Ganguly team that was very in your face and now with the current Kohli team they’re much like the very aggressive early aughts Australian teams, it’s quite cool to see in some ways
Less cool and maybe more instructive to how a Superpower India might act on the world stage is as India became the economic powerhouse of cricket with the IPL you saw them start to throw their weight around in the international administration of the game and not in a collaborative way and despite them now being the kings of that particular jungle, when challenged they bring up ‘western arrogance’ and ‘western colonial attitudes’ to try and guilt westerners and shut down debate of genuine troubling issues, I can see them doing the same in future in much more important things than Cricket administration
India-America relations will grow leaps and bounds and their partnership will be one of the defining moment of 21st century but India will "NEVER BE an ALLY" of America. It is interesting to see that many of the Americans see foreign relations in binaries i.e. enemy or an ally. This is partly shaped by their experiences so far since their independence whereas India's experience is different from that of America. Coming out from under the colonial rule, India has always been on the path of strategic autonomy.
I think following discussion is one of the best analysis of India's current political environment and her foreign policy by Ashley J Tellis (he was part of the American delegation which helped in drafting of US-India civil nuclear deal)
There is convergence in terms of multipolar Asia among both US and India but the difference lies in the fact that India also advocates for multipolar world. This explains the relations of India and Russia, where India sees Russia as one of the pole of the multipolar world. Given the fact that India already has disturbed relations with 2 of the Asian countries, India doesn't want Russia to be isolated and become a vassal state of China (although Russia is increasingly becoming so), but India is not yet ready to sign off on Russia yet and thus wants to keep her options open.
Also another point of divergence is Iran, where India sees Iran as source of energy and pathway to Central Asia (since it cannot use the traditional route through Pakistan) and also to balance Pakistan, whereas USA has been on warpath with Iran since 1978.
There are also some other divergences such as Bangladesh and Myanmar which are again neighbours of India and India would naturally like to have a good relations with her neighbours, irrespective of who is in the power(although India would have preferred democratic govt. in Myanmar but you play with the cards you have been dealt).
Also USA has a myopic view in her assessment of Bangladesh. It is true that current dispensation under Sheikh Hasina has arrested opposition members but USA fails to realise that her opposition party openly advocates enmity against India, supports radical islam and advocates strong military (origin of BNP party lies in Bangladeshi military which has through coups in the past toppled democratically elected leaders). She has done tremendous job in dismantling terrorist organisations operating on Bangladeshi soil and thus has helped in curbing insurgency in North East region of India.
And I genuinely think that if another opposition party rises which is based on democratic values she will accommodate that party. It should be noted that her entire family was killed by military coup in 1975 which also included her father who is considered Bangladesh's father of the nation i.e. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and she is alive because at that time she wasn't in Bangladesh. She spent her exile in India and was inspired by Indian democracy.
So from all this one can summarise that India lives with disturbed periphery and would like to keep her options open and thus would never constraint her movement space by allying with USA.
It would be interesting to see how USA deals with rising India since USA has no experience so far in dealing with equal powers who haven't been on warpath against US (Imperial Germany, Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, Soviet Union and now Communist China). How will USA accommodate an equal power which she doesn't have hostile relations with?
Thank you for a more even-handed view of India than I have read anywhere else. It is also helpful to remind people of America's transgressions against democracy. Many people think America has no warts of its own and they are always willing to throw stones at others.
First off, appreciate your calling out the US mistake / double-standard / hypocrisy in 1971 for what it was. Yes, most Indians have not forgotten that. Nor have they forgotten the Soviet help in that period. This goes a long way in explaining why India finds it hard to consider Russia an enemy or 'evil' even 50 years later.
The progressive viewpoint does dominate how India is looked at by the West. This is a big failure of the Indian right-wing to get its point of view across beyond our shores. Just as US politics is widely polarised between the two parties on almost all issues, Indian polity is split vertically in the middle as well. I don't think this means any one side has a morally superior position over the other. But the dominance of the progressive view does mean that Modi is looked upon as a 'bad guy' who must be schooled by the Americans.
Noah, thanks for the balanced approach.
I will take all these indexes with a large grain of salt. India has 20 political parties running various states and the central govt. How is that a lack of democracy?
India has 100 live news challenges and has the largest English Daily newspaper. Which other country can say that?
The citizenship act you mentioned is for persecuted minority religions from Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Burma etc. All of the minorities are Hindus and skihs etc.
Please check the atrocities against Hindus and others in Pakistan etc.
The whole point is to support these non-muslim religions who live Muslim dominated or Buddhist dominated countries.
The western media and progressives lack any real understanding of India.
"And in 2019, Modi’s government created a Citizenship Amendment Act that offered citizenship to refugees, but only for certain religions."
The CAA *didn't* do that. It provided an accelerated pathway to citizenship for certain persecuted groups in India's neighbourhood. Also singling out India is a bit rich given that American refugee policy has worked exactly that way (see: https://www.jta.org/archive/jewish-refugees-immigrants-benefit-from-clinton-budget-plan-2 ) and it currently has country of birth quotas that act as an exclusion act for Indian citizens from becoming permanent residents.
"Already some refugees are getting the boot."
You are confusing NRA stuff with the Rohingya situation. India is not a signatory to the UN HCR treaty and you are perhaps underestimating challenges in dealing with delicate balance of groups and ethnicities in India's northeast.
"Freedom House’s analysis is backed up by similar organizations like V-Dem, whose 2023 report called India “one of the worst autocratisers in the last 10 years”
Again, these rankings are heavily influenced with the very progressive ousted Indian elites and their methodologies have serious issues when it comes to India where they have been gamed. Prof. Babones of Uni. Syndey for instance has an excellent series of deep dives on these of See: https://newsletter.salvatorebabones.com/p/inside-the-v-dem-rankings
Indiamerica sounds like a cult classic movie and I’m all here for it
Absolutely well written, and this is probably the most nuanced and therefore also a realistic position on the situation. Another point to remember is that while Americans may not understand Indian politics very well, their source as you mentioned, the Indian progressives, are much worse and the major reason they despise Modi is because they no longer are in the ivory towers of Delhi, the downfall of NDTV is just one example. The point is that when people outside India question the health of democracy in India, I don't think they truly grasp the enormity of the task in a country with a population of 1.4 Billion where the cultural DNA changes every 100 of kilometres. The fact that not only have we survived but also thrived in certain areas is one of promise, and a strong US-India relationship is indeed crucial for the peace of the world.
Very helpful summary of the current relationship. It would be great to open up more opportunities for Indians to come to America. Two points about that:
1) There was an eye opening for me article in The Dispatch about the ineffectiveness of our legal immigration system. Here's an excerpt relevant to India:
"Indian applicants filing this year (those with a master’s or bachelor’s degree) face a wait of about 90 years.… As Table 1 shows, about 215,000 petitions will expire as a result of the death of the immigrant before the immigrant receives a green card, and more than 99 percent of these deaths will be Indians… Another roughly 90,000 children of employment‐based immigrants will “age out” of eligibility when they turn 21 — because only children under the age of 21 may qualify based on their parents’ application — largely children of Indian applicants"
From "America Has a Legal Immigration Problem
And it helps fuel illegal immigration:.
By Scott Lincicome
2) How eager is India for America to open its doors to Indians with specialized skills? It would be great for America, but I wonder if there would be any pushback.
Russia still remains relevant and useful to India, and there have been no other signals about that from
India. How does getting in bed with US, with so much pomp, affect India-Russia relations?
While I always appreciate the evidence you cite, I don't trust the supposedly neutral rankings and indices of hard-to-quantify things like "press freedom" anymore. Do those numbers truly strive for objectivity or have they been subjected to the same progressive bias and ideological capture many other comparable organizations have fallen prey to? Informally, I think they're not totally off-the-mark in this case and there has been a bit of erosion, but I also think it's overblown.
I think your stance is good: be concerned, not hysterical.
Will this bonhomie last the test of time or at least the 2024 US presidential election? Trump being Trump will probably become pro-China if he comes to power simply because he admires authoritarian leaders.
Good article, Noah, and very fair to both sides.
"That dark and terrible history lingers on the minds of many Indians (Americans, by and large, don’t even know it happened)."
I find this summarizes much of world history. The Hungarians are still insulted over the WWI Trianon Treaty as if it was last month. The Japanese still complain about N. Korean abductions that happened in the early 80's. The Ukraine Russia conflict has roots stretching to the tsars.
We Americans see those things as "holding grudges", but most of the world sees them as "knowing history so you can avoid making the same mistakes twice."
The Afghanis and the Iraqis and the Yemenis aren't going to forgive us for 100 years at least. And based on history (even recent) India wanting to make Muslims feel uncomfortable does not seem particularly unreasonable. Again, compared to China... nothing to see here at all.
"If the U.S. is going to help India get back to full liberalism, we’re not going to do it by publicly denouncing or shaming the country."
Wait, you mean sanctions don't work? Who knew? :-)
More seriously, India likely sees the US as a cautionary tale of where liberalism ends. Why? Because of stuff like this (https://youtu.be/wdrvpSfJM1w) -- trying to convince devout Muslims in Afghanistan that urinals are art. Or this (https://youtu.be/BWtGzJxiONU) -- SCOTUS nominees who don't know what a woman is. Or peasants whose pre-teen daughters become convinced they are boys from watching Tumblr. Or our incarceration rate -- India has 4 times our population and 2/3rds of our prisoners.
From outside the WEIRDs, liberalism doesn't look all that great anymore. Heck, even inside the WEIRDs it's starting to fray. It turns out that "liberating" your citizens from all the religious bonds and cultural constraints and moral norms of your a society doesn't appear to end well. We may yet pull out of our dive, but much of the developing world has dropped out of formation for good reason.
Do you have a recommendation for a good introductory book to the history of India? Reading the news for the past few months has made me realize that I know embarrassingly little about the country (among other things, I had no idea that the US supported Pakistan during the massacre in Bangladesh, or that India stopped it).
It’s the right choice to turn to India to counter China, just would have been nice if we’d done it in the 90s before we got so enmeshed with China to begin with and when the economic boost it would have given the country would have helped the Congress Party electorally and prevented/slowed/reduced the rise of Hindu Nationalism and Modi
One other very interesting thing with India has been its growing confidence, you even see this in cricket, back in the 80s & early 90s they had great players from Kapil Dev to Tendulkar (with Lara the greatest batsman of his generation and one of the best of all time) but they used to come to Australia and get bullied and be very meek while doing so, but as Indias economy grew and the country became more confident you saw the same with its cricket teams and players, starting with the Ganguly team that was very in your face and now with the current Kohli team they’re much like the very aggressive early aughts Australian teams, it’s quite cool to see in some ways
Less cool and maybe more instructive to how a Superpower India might act on the world stage is as India became the economic powerhouse of cricket with the IPL you saw them start to throw their weight around in the international administration of the game and not in a collaborative way and despite them now being the kings of that particular jungle, when challenged they bring up ‘western arrogance’ and ‘western colonial attitudes’ to try and guilt westerners and shut down debate of genuine troubling issues, I can see them doing the same in future in much more important things than Cricket administration
India-America relations will grow leaps and bounds and their partnership will be one of the defining moment of 21st century but India will "NEVER BE an ALLY" of America. It is interesting to see that many of the Americans see foreign relations in binaries i.e. enemy or an ally. This is partly shaped by their experiences so far since their independence whereas India's experience is different from that of America. Coming out from under the colonial rule, India has always been on the path of strategic autonomy.
https://time.com/6288459/india-ally-us-modi-biden-visit/
I think following discussion is one of the best analysis of India's current political environment and her foreign policy by Ashley J Tellis (he was part of the American delegation which helped in drafting of US-India civil nuclear deal)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zix4tBdizF4&ab_channel=PacificCouncil
There is convergence in terms of multipolar Asia among both US and India but the difference lies in the fact that India also advocates for multipolar world. This explains the relations of India and Russia, where India sees Russia as one of the pole of the multipolar world. Given the fact that India already has disturbed relations with 2 of the Asian countries, India doesn't want Russia to be isolated and become a vassal state of China (although Russia is increasingly becoming so), but India is not yet ready to sign off on Russia yet and thus wants to keep her options open.
Also another point of divergence is Iran, where India sees Iran as source of energy and pathway to Central Asia (since it cannot use the traditional route through Pakistan) and also to balance Pakistan, whereas USA has been on warpath with Iran since 1978.
There are also some other divergences such as Bangladesh and Myanmar which are again neighbours of India and India would naturally like to have a good relations with her neighbours, irrespective of who is in the power(although India would have preferred democratic govt. in Myanmar but you play with the cards you have been dealt).
Also USA has a myopic view in her assessment of Bangladesh. It is true that current dispensation under Sheikh Hasina has arrested opposition members but USA fails to realise that her opposition party openly advocates enmity against India, supports radical islam and advocates strong military (origin of BNP party lies in Bangladeshi military which has through coups in the past toppled democratically elected leaders). She has done tremendous job in dismantling terrorist organisations operating on Bangladeshi soil and thus has helped in curbing insurgency in North East region of India.
And I genuinely think that if another opposition party rises which is based on democratic values she will accommodate that party. It should be noted that her entire family was killed by military coup in 1975 which also included her father who is considered Bangladesh's father of the nation i.e. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and she is alive because at that time she wasn't in Bangladesh. She spent her exile in India and was inspired by Indian democracy.
So from all this one can summarise that India lives with disturbed periphery and would like to keep her options open and thus would never constraint her movement space by allying with USA.
It would be interesting to see how USA deals with rising India since USA has no experience so far in dealing with equal powers who haven't been on warpath against US (Imperial Germany, Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, Soviet Union and now Communist China). How will USA accommodate an equal power which she doesn't have hostile relations with?
https://twitter.com/scienceisstrat1/status/1669464294793048065
Thank you for a more even-handed view of India than I have read anywhere else. It is also helpful to remind people of America's transgressions against democracy. Many people think America has no warts of its own and they are always willing to throw stones at others.
Do we think the quad can stay aligned
Well done! Thanks for your work examining the big picture and presenting it so intelligently!
Thanks for the article, balanced as always!
First off, appreciate your calling out the US mistake / double-standard / hypocrisy in 1971 for what it was. Yes, most Indians have not forgotten that. Nor have they forgotten the Soviet help in that period. This goes a long way in explaining why India finds it hard to consider Russia an enemy or 'evil' even 50 years later.
The progressive viewpoint does dominate how India is looked at by the West. This is a big failure of the Indian right-wing to get its point of view across beyond our shores. Just as US politics is widely polarised between the two parties on almost all issues, Indian polity is split vertically in the middle as well. I don't think this means any one side has a morally superior position over the other. But the dominance of the progressive view does mean that Modi is looked upon as a 'bad guy' who must be schooled by the Americans.