"Prime Minister [Narendra] Modi's big bet is that as more and more companies are seeking to exit China … India is poised to play in a very big way," says Milan Vaishnav, who directs the South Asia program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a nonpartisan international affairs think tank.
It would build on India's achievements in attracting manufacturing as the mood against China grew hostile during the first Trump administration, and through the pandemic, when concerns grew over China's dominance of global supply chains. India continued attracting manufacturing through the Biden years, as the former president kept Trump-era tariffs on some Chinese-made products and raised others.
"The fact that China was discriminated against," says Subramanian, "meant that India was a good place from which to sell back to the United States."
Thus, as Reuters relates, "India is open to cutting tariffs on more than half of U.S. imports worth $23 billion in the first phase of a trade deal the two nations are negotiating, two government sources said, the biggest cut in years, aimed at fending off reciprocal tariffs."
The question to be asked is whether this benefits the United States and American citizens.
Obviously, if all that happens is that we trade one low wage manufacturing country (China) for another (India), that doesn't bring manufacturing jobs back to the U.S. Moreover, similar to China, India has a history of stealing intellectual property from the U.S., including trade secrets. As I've written about before, cheating seems endemic to the Indian education system and there is no reason to believe this doesn't bleed over into business and trade.
Nor will India prove itself an ally. Back in 2023, Tim Willasey-Wilsey wrote a piece for the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) entitled "Washington’s Indian Delusion," in which he explained:
The US believes it has secured India as a strategic ally in the Indo-Pacific region. There will certainly be mutual benefits from the deepening partnership, but India has no intention of sacrificing its ‘strategic autonomy’ to join the Western camp against China, or of abandoning its friendship with Russia.
At the time he wrote his piece, India was cozening up to the Biden Administration in order to gain approval to purchase fighter jet engines from General Electric and drones from General Atomics.
India’s urgent military requirements might suggest that New Delhi is ready to abandon its Russian ally. But this could not be further from the truth. A prominent Indian journalist wrote to me that ‘the only time the Indian Parliament discussed Ukraine, not a single member from any party among the 25 MPs who took part in the discussion supported Ukraine. None. Indians are absolutely thrilled that Modi got a state visit in Washington. But their heart… is with Putin’.
Russia–India ties have been further strengthened by India importing cheap Russian oil since Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. This has been a huge boon for the Indian economy and has been done with the tacit approval of the US, which has been unwilling to endanger its relationship with India even at the cost of providing Russia with much needed oil revenue (albeit paid for in currencies which are not always easy for Russia to use).
So what will the U.S. get out of this? Willasey-Wilsey states:
... US arms suppliers will sell well to India (but will worry about losing Intellectual Property) and US manufacturers will be relieved to move some of their offshored production from China to India (a process known as ‘friend-shoring’). The exchange of IT expertise will continue, with Indians retaining and extending their prominent position in the US technology sector.
But when push comes to shove, Washington will find that India will be unwilling to support it in taking tough measures before, during or after a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. Indeed, India was even disapproving of the AUKUS deal when the US, the UK and Australia decided to supply Australia with nuclear submarines, partly because it was seen as unduly provocative towards China.
Of course, now it isn't even just jet engines and drones: plans are in the works to sell other high tech weapon systems to India, including F-35 fighter aircraft. In other words, short term gains will be long term losses to the U.S. and the American people.
Alyssa Ayres, a dean and professor of history and international affairs at the George Washington University Elliott School of International Affairs, and adjunct senior fellow for India, Pakistan, and South Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations, essentially agreed, writing in Time Magazine that "India Is Not a U.S. Ally—and Has Never Wanted to Be." She warns:
To see relations with rising power India as on a pathway that culminates in a relationship like that the United States enjoys with Japan or the United Kingdom creates expectations that will not be met. Indian leaders across parties and over decades have long prioritized foreign policy independence as a central feature of India’s approach to the world. That remains the case even with Modi’s openness to the United States.
Interestingly, India engages in much of the same conduct for which we rightly condemn China. India's PM Modi "has been accused of political interference and assassinating dissidents overseas," including threatening Indians living in Australia. India has also revoked visas and residency permits of critics of his government. Christians are officially and unofficially persecuted, including being attacked and jailed.
To many Hindu extremists, the attacks are justified — a means of preventing religious conversions. To them, the possibility that some Indians, even a relatively small number, would reject Hinduism for Christianity is a threat to their dream of turning India into a pure Hindu nation. Many Christians have become so frightened that they try to pass as Hindu to protect themselves.
“I just don’t get it,” said Abhishek Ninama, a Christian farmer, who stared dejectedly at a rural church stomped apart this year. “What is it that we do that makes them hate us so much?”
The pressure is greatest in central and northern India, where the governing party of Prime Minister Narendra Modi is firmly in control, and where evangelical Christian groups are making inroads among lower-caste Hindus, albeit quietly. Pastors hold clandestine ceremonies at night. They conduct secret baptisms. They pass out audio Bibles that look like little transistor radios so that illiterate farmers can surreptitiously listen to the scripture as they plow their fields.
And it has only gotten worse in recent years. (See also this article from Christianity Today). As another article sums up, "Hindu nationalists attacking Christian churches and pastors enjoy nearly complete immunity from the Modi-led government as they harass and even kill."
In other ways they have been more successful than China in infiltrating other societies. For instances we see senior politicians and policy makers in most Western countries including the United States, the UK, Canada, Ireland, and Australia. A similar take over is occurring in the private sector. And while Indians like to advertise it as their inherent superiority (as in the just cited article), much of the dominance comes from their tribalism and discrimination against non-Indians. The Center for Immigration Studies notes:
There is a very real immigration policy problem and that is the domination of human resources positions in many tech companies by Indians (usually south Indian males), a domination that leads to two different kinds of discrimination: against non-Indian workers of all kinds, including U.S. citizens, and a bias in favor of young, male, Hindu workers from the south of the country and of the right castes, as we have reported in the past.
Aggravating that problem is the fact that virtually nothing has been written on the subject.
We now have found a mixed blessing, a lengthy “report” on the subject, but one that is deeply flawed by overly sweeping generalizations and a hard-breathing bias against all things Indian. It is called “Why dealing with Indian recruiters is futile for domestic workers”. The author is Shaun Snapp of Brightwork Research and Analysis, and was published about four years ago. I had not previously heard of either the author or the organization.
The report echoes what I have been hearing for years from U.S. tech workers: that inevitably jobs in the IT sector are in the hands of Indian HR people, that it is hard for citizen workers to compete with Indians (and H-1B workers), that it is sometimes difficult to understand the HR people, and that sometimes they appear to be in India. In one case reported to me recently, the phone interview went nowhere as the HR person could not speak English.
What Snapp adds to the debate is a flurry of anecdotes about this process — I do not recall any statistics in the report. He writes that many of the interviews of domestic candidates for IT jobs are just for show so that the hiring unit could say “we interviewed both citizen and H-1B candidates for the jobs in question”, but for other motives as well.
In some cases, text from the U.S. workers’ resumes is, he says, lifted and installed in the resumes of rival Indian candidates for the same job, making them more attractive than they would have been otherwise.
In other cases, the U.S. workers’ descriptions of their job at Employer A is used as background information in the re-write of Indian workers’ resumes when they seek jobs at the same place.
These are two dirty tricks that were new to me.
The report also states “It is easy for Indians to trick Westerners because Westerners think that Indians are following Western rules.”
Nothing good will come of exposing our belly to India. As Alan Schmidt wrote in his piece "On Indians," about the H1B visa program, "[w]e are missing recruiting talent among our underemployed white population by design." Conversely, writing about Indian workers, he stated: "those strange, foreign traditions, their willingness to enter tribal politics above social norms, and capability of creating little fiefdoms that exclude Heritage Americans make them a danger to my children who will inherit this country."
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