Comment by Riaz Haq on June 18, 2023 at 8:06am

Derek J. Grossman
@DerekJGrossman
Me, before Modi’s visit: “The question is, are we propping up an increasingly illiberal democracy here? In my view, we are. We have taken the view that geopolitics and countering China is more important to us right now than the values-based diplomacy……the Biden admin came in saying they would prioritize.” Many thanks for reaching out,
@JohnReedwrites
!

https://twitter.com/DerekJGrossman/status/1670314349003702273?s=20


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In the weeks and days leading up to Narendra Modi’s state visit to Washington this week, US officials have been outdoing one another with words of adulation that have delighted the Indian leader’s supporters and made his critics cringe. 

“He is the most popular world leader for a reason,” commerce secretary Gina Raimondo said at an India House event in Washington in April, wearing a green and yellow sari and gesturing expansively. “He is unbelievable, visionary, and his level of commitment to the people of India is just indescribable.” 




Eric Garcetti, the US ambassador who arrived in New Delhi last month, has called Modi India’s “guru-ji” and Ajit Doval, the prime minister’s hard-boiled national security adviser, “not only a national treasure but an international treasure”. 

Local media reported that at a Quad meeting on the sidelines of last month’s G7 summit in Hiroshima, President Joe Biden told Modi that he was running out of tickets for next Thursday’s state banquet at the White House because the Indian leader is “too popular”.

In a world of post-pandemic supply chain shifts, a globally disruptive war in Ukraine and rising concerns about China, the US is not alone in rolling out the red carpet for India. France’s Emmanuel Macron has invited Modi to be its guest of honour at next month’s Bastille Day parade. 

But this charm campaign has been noted with dismay by India’s liberal elites. Analysts say western democracies are putting aside human rights principles, including concerns about New Delhi’s treatment of minority Muslims and Christians, its pressure on non-governmental organisations and journalism and weakening of democratic standards because they need India as a bulwark against China.



“Western countries have decided to look away from the decline in democratic credentials, press freedoms or treatment of religious minorities taking place in India because they think they need India to counterweigh China,” says Sushant Singh, senior fellow with the Centre for Policy Research. “They believe a stronger India would provide a counter to China’s rise.” 


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India’s government rejects the notion that its democracy is anything other than robust, and its defenders can easily find examples of democratic backsliding in western countries, not least the US.

From an American point of view, India is hardly the only country where Washington pushes human rights to the side and geopolitical considerations to the fore, as seen in its growing alignment on defence with Vietnam, a one-party non-democracy. Among other democracies, Israel, with its patchy human rights record and fraying of democratic institutions under Benjamin Netanyahu, is a perennial US ally with bipartisan support.

“The question is, are we propping up an increasingly illiberal democracy here?” asks Derek Grossman, senior defence analyst with the Rand Corporation, of the US-India relationship. “In my view, we are.”

He adds: “We have taken the view that geopolitics and countering China is more important to us right now than the values-based diplomacy the Biden administration came in saying they would prioritise.”

Comment by Riaz Haq on June 18, 2023 at 8:06am

Derek J. Grossman
@DerekJGrossman
Me, before Modi’s visit: “The question is, are we propping up an increasingly illiberal democracy here? In my view, we are. We have taken the view that geopolitics and countering China is more important to us right now than the values-based diplomacy……the Biden admin came in saying they would prioritize.” Many thanks for reaching out,
@JohnReedwrites
!

https://twitter.com/DerekJGrossman/status/1670314349003702273?s=20


India’s scale is what makes it different both in terms of what its western diplomatic partners are willing to overlook, and how much they have to gain from doing so.

The country is now the world’s largest buyer of arms, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. France, thanks to an order of 36 Rafale fighter jets, is now its second-largest military supplier after Russia, with the US third.


Modi will address Congress on Thursday and preside over the signing of a slew of deals involving US companies, the fruit of a widening US-India partnership in technology and defence. 

More deals, including an expected agreement with GE to build jet engines in India, are expected as the country pushes an “indigenisation” plan to build up local defence production. 

Despite these priorities, some criticism of India on human rights does emerge from parts of the US administration. The state department’s most recent Religious Freedom Report listed India among 17 countries of particular concern, citing violence and hate speech against Muslims and Christians.

But these days, it is usually with a whisper. When opposition MP Rahul Gandhi was recently convicted of criminal defamation and stripped of his parliamentary seat, the US said it was “watching” the case in carefully worded language that stressed Washington and New Delhi’s “shared commitment to democratic values”.

Analysts following the upcoming visit say any US words on sensitive issues, including both human rights and India’s ties with Russia, will be similarly delicate, to the extent they are voiced at all.

Comment by Riaz Haq on June 19, 2023 at 7:59am

Washington and New Delhi Share Interests, Not Values
By Daniel Markey

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/india/markey-modi-biden-united-states


As the former diplomat Dennis Kux wrote in India and the United States: Estranged Democracies, “The effort succeeded.” During President Dwight Eisenhower’s second term, Kux notes, “US assistance grew substantially, surging from about $400 million in 1957, to a record $822 million in 1960.” Eisenhower himself seemed committed to India’s democratic future. As the president stated in remarks at the opening of the World Agriculture Fair in New Delhi in December 1959, “Whatever strengthens India, my people are convinced, strengthens us, a sister republic dedicated to peace.” Six months later, Eisenhower signed a breakthrough multiyear deal with India to deliver $1.28 billion in food aid under the United States’ Food for Peace program, because India’s domestic farmers were routinely unable to meet the country’s food needs.

But if Kennedy and Eisenhower hoped that praising India would turn New Delhi into an ally, they were sorely mistaken. In 1954, Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru had explicitly declared that his country would remain nonaligned in the Cold War, rankling Eisenhower. Kennedy, as president, hoped he could bring India closer by having Nehru visit Washington in 1961, but the trip changed nothing. The prime minister rebuffed all his efforts to bring India into the United States’ orbit.

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As Kux recounts, Kennedy’s Cold War successors were similarly frustrated by New Delhi. President Lyndon Johnson found Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s 1966 criticism of U.S. involvement in Vietnam to be particularly galling; his ambassador to India later recalled that the president’s reaction ranged “from the violent to the obscene.” Gandhi’s subsequent decision, in 1971, to conclude a “Friendship Treaty” with Moscow was later described by former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger as a “bombshell” that threw “a lighted match into a powder keg,” inflaming relations between India and Pakistan. And in January 1980, when India’s permanent ambassador to the United Nations effectively endorsed the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan, President Jimmy Carter was livid. Carter’s ambassador in New Delhi told Gandhi “what a devastating statement it had been from the American point of view and what a terrible backlash it had caused in the United States.”

Nonetheless, U.S. policymakers often praised India in the following decades, and policymakers continued to argue that India’s democratic principles made it a good partner. In his address to India’s Parliament in 2000, President Bill Clinton asserted that the strength of India’s democracy was the first of several important lessons it had taught the world. The administrations of Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama routinely employed the “oldest and largest democracies” formulation to describe Washington and New Delhi and their longtime ties. In a 2010 speech to the Indian Parliament, Obama repeatedly stressed the unique bond shared by “two strong democracies.” He then endorsed India’s effort to obtain a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, suggesting that cooperation between India and the United States on the council would strengthen “the foundations of democratic governance, not only at home but abroad.”

Comment by Riaz Haq on June 19, 2023 at 7:59am

Washington and New Delhi Share Interests, Not Values
By Daniel Markey

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/india/markey-modi-biden-united-states

New Delhi’s position on Ukraine certainly cuts against its espoused values. But it is far from India’s biggest democratic failure. Since winning two sweeping national victories, one in 2014 and another in 2019, Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party has made India’s own attachment to liberalism more and more dubious. The BJP has hollowed out institutions that can check the prime minister’s behavior, including by politicizing India’s civilian bureaucracy and turning its Parliament into a rubber stamp for the party’s priorities. Modi also tolerates no criticism in the media, academia, or civil society. The government, for example, imposed an outright ban on a 2023 BBC documentary that detailed Modi’s role in the state of Gujarat’s deadly 2002 communal riots. The organizations that compile the three biggest rankings of democracy across the world—the V-Dem (Varieties of Democracy) Institute, Freedom House, and the Economist Intelligence Unit—have all downgraded India’s score since Modi took office.

New Delhi’s democratic failings extend beyond eliminating checks and balances. The BJP is deeply intertwined with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, an organization that aims to give India an exclusively Hindu identity (and to which Modi belongs). Created in 1925, the RSS was modeled on interwar European fascist groups and charged with promoting, in the words of one founder, “the military regeneration of the Hindus.” This goal was directly opposed by Mohandas Gandhi and Nehru, who championed freedom of religion, celebrated diversity, and defended minority rights. That is why a radicalized Hindu nationalist and RSS member assassinated Gandhi in 1948.

India’s autocratic turn creates many problems for the United States. One is that it simply makes New Delhi less trustworthy. Democratically accountable leaders need to justify and defend foreign policies to their own citizens, which makes their decisions more transparent and predictable. Authoritarian decisions, by contrast, are far harder to predict. In addition, the more ethnonationalist New Delhi becomes, the less secure India will be. India is home to roughly 200 million Muslims—almost the size of Pakistan’s entire population—and it has an extensive history of communal violence. By repressing its minorities, India risks its tenuous stability in the near term and mounting and debilitating violence in the long term. And an India consumed with internal security challenges will have fewer resources, less bandwidth for foreign policy, and less legitimacy to play a constructive role beyond its borders.

India’s Hindu nationalism at home also leads it to promote illiberal aims abroad. Hindu nationalists believe that one of their top foreign policy achievements has been mobilizing overseas RSS-affiliated groups in the Indian diaspora to lobby other capitals, including Washington, to support BJP initiatives. Hindu nationalists also believe that India should be a sprawling, civilizational power, and many of them say they want to create Akhand Bharat—a greater “Undivided India”—in which New Delhi would build a “cultural confederation” of territory stretching from Afghanistan to Myanmar and Sri Lanka to Tibet. In 2022, for example, the RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat claimed that this could be a reality in as little as ten to 15 years. His statements raised questions about what a Hindu cultural confederation would actually mean, and they have prompted at least some regional consternation about whether India’s drive for leadership will be as peaceful as the country claims.

Comment by Riaz Haq on June 19, 2023 at 8:00am

Washington and New Delhi Share Interests, Not Values
By Daniel Markey

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/india/markey-modi-biden-united-states


Despite the obvious evidence of the BJP’s illiberalism, top Biden administration officials have avoided publicly criticizing the Modi government. Instead, they have brushed aside concerns by declaring, as Blinken did in 2021, that every democracy is an imperfect “work in progress.” Presumably, that is because Biden believes that expressing any concerns about Indian policies would cause too much harm to the relationship.

This fear is not baseless. Like most countries, India does not like to be criticized, so an honest airing of grievances would not go down well. But the current, disingenuous approach has its own price. Soft-pedaling concerns about India’s authoritarian slide, for example, weakens Washington’s ability to champion democracy around the world. In fact, it might actively encourage democratic backsliding. India is no garden-variety struggling democracy: it is the world’s most populous country and a leader in the global South. When Modi uses his association with Washington to burnish his democratic credentials and even to strengthen his self-serving narrative that Hindu India is “the mother of democracy” (as he declared during Washington’s 2023 Summit for Democracy), it sets back liberalism everywhere.

Praising India’s democracy also makes it hard for Biden to build the domestic political alliances he needs to cooperate with New Delhi on security. Many powerful U.S. constituencies, including evangelical Christian groups, are deeply concerned about India’s poor treatment of minorities, its crackdown on religious freedoms, and its stifling of the press. The New York Times and The Washington Post, along with other top U.S. media outlets, run stories and columns on these issues so frequently that BJP leaders have gone out of their way to label the publications “anti-Indian.” And influential figures in Washington are expressing growing alarm about India’s illiberal policies. In March 2021, for example, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chair Bob Menendez wrote a letter to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, asking that he use his upcoming India trip to “make clear that in all areas, including security cooperation, the U.S.-India partnership must rest on adherence to democratic values.” If Biden continues to emphasize principles in his pitch for better relations, his calls could face mounting opposition.

ENEMY OF MY ENEMY
India’s turn away from democracy is deeply unfortunate. But New Delhi is still an invaluable partner for Washington. In addition to being the world’s most populous state, India boasts the world’s fifth-largest economy, the world’s second-largest military, and a significant cadre of highly educated scientists and engineers. It has a large arsenal of nuclear weapons. And like the United States, India is deeply concerned about China, which it sees as a dangerous power intent on challenging the regional and global order. In a way, now may be the best moment for the United States to cooperate with India. The question is how far Washington should go.

In many cases, the decision to help India is easy. When China began encroaching on Indian territory along the Chinese-Indian border, prompting deadly clashes between the two countries’ militaries in 2020, Washington rightfully provided New Delhi with urgently needed cold-weather gear and intelligence on Chinese positions. It also expedited already planned deliveries of surveillance drones. Since then, U.S. officials have correctly concluded that they can have far more candid discussions with India’s leaders than they have had in the past about defense cooperation, both on land and at sea. They hope that the threat from China, combined with Russia’s disastrous invasion of Ukraine, presents Washington with a once-in-a-generation opportunity to decisively (if not immediately) get New Delhi to shift its heavy reliance on Russian-made military gear to U.S. systems.

Comment by Riaz Haq on June 19, 2023 at 8:01am

Washington and New Delhi Share Interests, Not Values
By Daniel Markey

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/india/markey-modi-biden-united-states



Greater U.S.-Indian alignment on China also means the two states could cooperate on certain kinds of technology. Washington, for example, could work with New Delhi to develop alternatives to Chinese-built information and telecommunications infrastructure as a means to compete in a global industry that Beijing has threatened to dominate. The United States could also speed up its efforts to diversify essential industrial inputs away from China and toward India. New Delhi, in turn, would benefit from new economic investments.

But Washington must be careful about the ways it deals with New Delhi. It must remain keenly aware that India’s desire to work with the United States is born of circumstance, not conviction, and could quickly disappear. New Delhi, after all, spent most of the post–Cold War years vacillating about what role it should play between Beijing and Washington, and it often signed on to the former’s initiatives. Even after the border clashes, China and India have roughly the same volume of trade as India and the United States have. New Delhi is still part of the Beijing-founded Shanghai Cooperation Organization. And many Indian policymakers and analysts would much prefer a multipolar world in which India is free to navigate flexible relationships with other great powers to a world led by the United States or defined by a new cold war between Beijing and Washington—a world in which New Delhi must take sides. One of New Delhi’s greatest fears is being indefinitely consigned to the geopolitical sidelines.

For U.S. officials, then, cooperation with India must be tightly targeted to countering immediate threats posed by China. It is fine, for example, for the United States to conduct joint military exercises with India near the Chinese border, as the two states did in November 2022. It is also fine for Washington to strike transactional deals that obviously advance U.S. interests, such as a deal that gives the United States access to Indian seaports in exchange for finite technology transfers or additional intelligence. But when U.S. policies do not clearly enhance U.S.-Indian cooperation with respect to China, they should not receive the benefit of the doubt. The United States should think twice, for example, before approving a proposal General Electric put forward earlier this year to co-produce and transfer U.S. technology to India for advanced fighter jet engines. Washington may benefit from a better Indian military in the short term, but the GE deal could strengthen India’s indigenous defense industry for decades, which might not serve U.S. interests in the long term.

U.S. officials must understand that, deep down, India is not an ally. Its relationship to the United States is fundamentally unlike that of, say, a NATO member. And India will never aspire to that sort of alliance. For this reason, U.S. officials should not frame their agreements with India as the building blocks of a deeper relationship. The country is not a candidate for initiatives such as the AUKUS deal among Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States (which will help Australia develop nuclear submarine technologies) because such deals entail sharing important security vulnerabilities that only sturdy liberal democracies—ones with broadly shared values and aspirations—can safely exchange. India’s uncertain commitment to democratic principles is also why Washington will never be able to share intelligence with New Delhi in the way that it does with its so-called Five Eyes partners: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom.

Comment by Riaz Haq on June 19, 2023 at 8:02am

Washington and New Delhi Share Interests, Not Values
By Daniel Markey

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/india/markey-modi-biden-united-states



In fact, Washington should qualify its support for greater Indian participation in the international organizations to which New Delhi already belongs. India’s voice is essential on the world stage, especially because of its vast and diverse society. But considering how often India and the United States diverge on important issues, it is not a bad thing that no one has taken up Obama’s proposal to offer India a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. Washington should similarly temper its expectations for the Quad—the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, among Australia, India, Japan, and the United States. The White House clearly hopes that the Quad can be an Indo-Pacific league of liberal democracies. But given India’s identity, it simply cannot. What the Quad can do is better deter Chinese aggression in the region, and it should dedicate itself to that task.

TRUTH BE TOLD
As the Biden administration pivots away from seeking an imaginary relationship based on values to acknowledging a real one based on mutual interests, it must be forthright. The administration ought to explain to Indian and U.S. audiences alike that shared concerns about China and a wide array of other common interests create strong and constructive incentives for cooperation; there is much that the two sides can do together. But Washington needs to cease endorsing Modi’s BJP. It must stop altruistically subsidizing the rise of another illiberal Asian giant. And the Indian government should know that its domestic political decisions have the potential to complicate and endanger relations with Washington. Indian voters should know that, too.

The Biden administration should also write and publish more reports that accurately depict India’s record on human rights, freedoms, and democratic practices. Such analysis should then become required reading for U.S. leaders, including Pentagon policymakers and uniformed officers, who need to understand how undemocratic the world’s largest democracy is. These reports must be scrupulously accurate, because they will certainly draw fire from Indian diplomats. But Biden should not worry that U.S. criticism will derail cooperation. Unlike Chinese military activities, a critical report from the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom does not materially threaten New Delhi. If India and the United States are going to be strong partners, both sides need to learn how to navigate serious disagreements without sweeping them under the rug, even if that means suffering some unpleasantness along the way. U.S. officials can unapologetically explain the American perspective without being undiplomatic, just as their Indian counterparts frequently do.

Many U.S. opponents of the Modi government would go even further, arguing that criticism of India’s democratic shortcomings should be bolstered by active U.S. government initiatives—such as giving material support to Indian rights groups. Some critics have even encouraged Washington to withhold U.S. security cooperation unless India rolls back recent autocratic measures. But New Delhi is likely to balk at conditional defense ties, and pro-democracy investments will not be effective. India is almost unimaginably enormous and complicated, making it nearly impervious to outside political influence. As a postcolonial state, it is quite practiced at resisting, ignoring, or mitigating external interference. Better, then, to leave the task of strengthening India’s democracy to the Indians themselves.

Comment by Riaz Haq on June 19, 2023 at 8:02am

Washington and New Delhi Share Interests, Not Values
By Daniel Markey

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/india/markey-modi-biden-united-states

For now, that means the United States will have to deal with an unsavory government in New Delhi. But for Washington, this is nothing new. The United States has spent years cooperating with regimes it dislikes in order to bolster its security. At one point, it even worked with the country New Delhi and Washington are now trying to outcompete. The Nixon administration’s 1972 opening to China was intended to exploit the differences between Beijing and Moscow to deliver a decisive advantage to the United States in the Cold War. It succeeded: President Richard Nixon’s gambit deepened splits in the global communist movement, helped tie down Soviet army divisions along the border with China, and provided Washington with additional leverage over Moscow.

What followed, however, is much more controversial. Nixon’s opening eventually led to a deluge of U.S. investment in China’s economy and cooperation across many sectors—including, at times, defense and security. The United States’ contributions helped China quickly become the world’s second-largest economy. Washington instead should have had a greater appreciation for the ways in which U.S. and Chinese interests would most likely diverge as China’s power grew. American policymakers could have then lowered their expectations, narrowed the scope of official cooperation, and even ruled out certain types of commerce. In hindsight, it is clear they could have partnered with Beijing to contain Moscow without contributing so much to the rise of a peer competitor.

India, of course, is not China, and it may never pose the same sort of challenge. And New Delhi’s authoritarian turn has not been total. Despite the government’s best efforts, India still has free (if not fair) elections and a vocal domestic opposition. Americans and Indians can, and should, hold out hope that India’s diverse society will remake India into a liberal democracy more fundamentally aligned with the ideals that Washington seeks to uphold.

That, however, is not where India is today. The country is instead led by an ethnonationalist who tolerates little dissent. It is in thrall to an illiberal and increasingly undemocratic party, and that party’s grip on politics is only becoming firmer. Unless that changes, the United States will not be able to treat India as it treats Japan, South Korea, and NATO allies in Europe. It must instead treat India as it treats Jordan, Vietnam, and any number of other illiberal partners. It must, in other words, cooperate with India on the reality of shared interests, not on the hope of shared values.

Comment by Riaz Haq on June 19, 2023 at 9:18pm

The Modi Decade by Shashi Tharoor - Project Syndicate

By Shashi Tharoor

The BJP’s belligerent Hindutva nationalism – which promotes a narrow interpretation of history and demonizes India’s minorities, particularly Muslims – can be likened to a toxin injected into the veins of Indian society.

https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/indian-modi-government...


Last week, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government inaugurated a new parliament building in New Delhi. It was supposed to symbolize the vision of a “new India” that Modi and his ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) claim they have been realizing during nine years in power. But the building has proved highly controversial, with 20 opposition parties boycotting the inauguration ceremony – the latest manifestation of the seemingly irreparable breakdown in relations between the opposition and the government.


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Such initiatives are not perfect – toilets lack enough running water, women are unable to afford to refill gas cylinders, and electricity supplies are erratic. But they have undoubtedly improved the quality of rural life, especially in the poor states of the northern “Hindi Belt.”


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But these successes have been offset by far less admirable policies. The BJP’s belligerent Hindutva nationalism – which promotes a narrow interpretation of history and demonizes India’s minorities, particularly Muslims – can be likened to a toxin injected into the veins of Indian society.

With BJP leaders and their acolytes in the Hindutva “Parivar,” or “family” of associated organizations, regularly spouting inflammatory and divisive rhetoric, it should be no surprise that violence has surged. Muslims have faced lynching by so-called cow vigilantes, and some Christians have been subjected to vandalism and assault during the Christmas season.

Though Indian elections remain free and fair, anti-democratic trends have taken hold between votes. Dissent is framed as disloyalty, with criticism of government policies labeled “anti-national.” The tax agencies and financial police have been unleashed against opposition leaders and their supporters, and “bulldozer justice” has been dispensed mainly against Muslim protesters – whose homes and businesses are literally bulldozed – without due process.

Moreover, the autonomy of Indian institutions – from the Reserve Bank of India to the Election Commission – has been weakened. Even the judiciary has come under pressure. Parliament has been reduced to a bulletin board for government decisions.

The Modi government has also fallen far short on economic policy. Despite the progress in areas like transport infrastructure and technology diffusion, India has a long way to go on many fronts, particularly schooling, skills development, sanitation, and public health-care facilities.

Likewise, the benefits of economic growth have failed to reach the poor and lower-middle class. Unemployment is at record highs, and female labor-force participation is plummeting. Many small and micro-enterprises had to be permanently closed after the disastrous demonetization of 2016. Farmers are struggling to cope with falling incomes. Budgetary allocations for many essential welfare programs, including the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, have dwindled. Crony capitalism is rampant.

The Modi government’s response to the COVID-19 crisis also left much to be desired. Though Indians were eventually vaccinated, images of migrant workers trudging homeward during a nationwide lockdown still haunt the country. And while the government claims that less than 500,000 people died, the World Health Organization estimates that the real figure is ten times higher, raising questions about the reliability of official statistics.

Comment by Riaz Haq on June 20, 2023 at 4:33pm

India’s Worsening Democracy Makes It an Unreliable Ally

https://time.com/6288505/indias-worsening-democracy-makes-it-an-unr...


by Salil Tripathy

India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi arrives in the United States on 21 June, which is World Yoga Day. Asserting India’s soft power, he will participate in a yoga demonstration at the United Nations headquarters in New York, while the Biden administration will be laying out the red carpet in Washington. On the sidelines of the G-7 summit in Japan last month, Indian media claimed President Joe Biden reportedly quipped to Modi that that his staff was struggling to cope with the demand surge for invitations to the State dinner he will host. Modi will also address a joint session of the Congress.

World leaders visit Washington all the time, but the hyper-nationalist Indian media sees American eagerness in welcoming Modi as a sign of India’s arrival on the international stage. The drum roll began in April, when commerce secretary Gina Raimondo gushed over Modi, anointing him as the world’s most popular leader, calling him “unbelievable” and “visionary.” The White House called India “a vibrant democracy.”

India’s pliant media is projecting the visit as unprecedented. Don’t rule out stories that count the number of times Congress members will applaud Modi, whether they stand up when they clap, measure the duration of the applause, and compare it with responses to similar addresses by former Indian leaders, hoping that Modi will set a record. For Modi likes adulation and believes in superlatives, and the bulk of the Indian media today aims to please him.

To be sure, India has arrived. The U.S. wants closer, stronger, and more meaningful relationship with India as a destination of investments, as a strategic ally, and as a bulwark against the rise of China. India is now the world’s most populous country. As it regularly holds elections, India is called the world’s largest democracy, although most indices that measure human rights or democracy show the precipitous decline in India’s record on both counts in the nine years Modi has been in power. Depending on how you measure economies, India is now the world’s fifth-largest—according to the World Economic Forum, it overtook its former ruler, the U.K., last year. While some international economists are skeptical over India’s public statistics, its chief economic adviser claimed in March that India’s economy grew 7.2% last year. It remains among the top ten destinations for foreign direct investment in the world.

No doubt India is a military power, and it is part of the Quad, a diplomatic alliance including Australia, Japan, and the United States, ostensibly intended to spread stability and prosperity in Asia-Pacific, but really a thinly-veiled alliance to rival China. Surely India is an ally of western democracies?

Not so fast. India unequivocally defended anti-colonial struggles until the end of the Cold War (it was one of the earliest countries to impose sanctions on apartheid South Africa, and supported Palestine and many African liberation movements). But it has dragged its feet in supporting democracies since. The generals who annulled elections in Myanmar consider India a steadfast friend. It has issued only tepid, pious platitudes for peace in response to Russia’s illegal war in Ukraine. Its trade with Russia has not stopped, and it is accused of selling Russian oil in international markets undermining sanctions. It is wary of China, but only with regard to its disputed border; it has abstained U.N. resolutions on the treatment of Uyghurs and is unlikely to say anything meaningful if China invades Taiwan.

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