Who let the dogs out? – Firstpost
As 2024 comes to a close, it is worth reassessing the state of the “most important bilateral relationship in the 21st century”. To be fair, Kurt Campbell, the US deputy secretary of state, has always been bullish about India-US ties. And yet it is evident that under the outgoing Joe Biden administration, the most consequential strategic partnership of this era has fallen into a strange state of ennui, if not disrepair. It is marked by lack of dynamism and erosion of trust despite deep-seated advancement in some sectors.
In a year that ends with two wars raging in two different theatres, two violent overthrowing of governments in Syria and Bangladesh, and a thousand mutinies in between, the relationship between India and the United States should have been the anchor of stability and predictability.
That it is grappling with the reawakening of the old malaise of distrust and unreliability is entirely owing to actions undertaken by some parts of the Biden administration. A stock-taking shorn of cosmetic enthusiasm or vested interests will show that beyond the tightening of technology, defence and security partnership, ties have suffered body blows owing to “value-driven” activism, regime change operations in India’s backyard and sly attempts at interfering in India’s domestic politics.
What makes sweeping generalizations difficult about the state of the ties is that the United States, a diverse democracy like India, consists of a powerful administrative state run by a perma-bureaucracy where competing interests often run at cross purposes. For instance, as Washington DC-based journalist Seema Sirohi writes in Economic Times, the targeting of Indian industrialist Gautam Adani by the US Department of Justice and market regulator Securities and Exchanges Commission, may have taken even some within Biden’s team by surprise. “It seems senior US officials who manage the relationship didn’t know the Adani indictment was dropping. They were reportedly as shocked as GOI”.
It would be unfair to say that Biden has not done his bit in taking forward the relationship since Donald Trump took it to robust health. He strengthened the QUAD framework, institutionalized the strategic technology partnership and defense industrial cooperation through efforts such as Indus-X and iCET to rope in the private sector and insulate ties from bureaucratic inertia, moved to align the respective defence ecosystems and engineered a collaboration across civil, security, and commercial space sectors.
A recent White House readout on Indo-US space collaboration, post a visit by India’s ambassador to the US Vinay Mohan Kwatra along with Campbell and Jon Finer, the US deputy NSA to the Johnson Space Center in Houston noted that the partnership is now moving to address global security threats and touching “new frontiers” such as “human spaceflight, joint space exploration, and a commitment to facilitating commercial partnerships between US and Indian space companies to advance shared interests in the growing space economy.”
And yet a pall of gloom permeates ties that have been dominated of late by negative headlines over the Khalistan issue, the indictment of Adani, differences over the coup d’é·tat in Bangladesh and a myriad other pinpricks designed to test the resilience of the relationship and stoke internal divisions within India’s rambunctious democracy.
New Delhi is sending certain signals of discontent. During his visit to Moscow this month during the commissioning of INS Tushil, the stealth frigate built at Yantar Shipyard in Kaliningrad, Russia, defence minister Rajnath Singh said , “India has made a conscious decision to not only continue its close engagement with Russia, but also to deepen and expand the cooperation” despite “geopolitical challenges and great pressure both in public and in private.”
And after calling on Russian president Vladimir Putin at Kremlin on December 12, Singh described India-Russia friendship as “higher than the highest mountain and deeper than the deepest ocean,” and added that “India has always stood by its Russian friends and will continue to do so in future.”
Only a fool will deduce that Singh wasn’t aware of the import of his words in Washington.
Or, take external affairs minister S Jaishankar, whose communication skills are perhaps second to none, addressing an event in Mumbai on Saturday via video and making the point that “India can never permit others to have a veto on its choices and will do whatever is right in the national interest and for the global good without being intimidated to ‘conform’.” Despite mounting pressure from the West, India has not stopped buying Russian oil that it says is crucial for its energy security.
In a strategic culture predicated on ambiguity, two senior ministers in the Modi cabinet dropping rather large hints that they know will be picked up by Washington DC points to an atmosphere of uneasiness.
And in reacting to a US Congressional committee’s report expressing “concern” over “India’s human rights record, particularly regarding religious freedom and communal violence”, and the “recommendation” by USCIRF, an arm of the US Department of State, that India be designated as a “country of particular concern”, minister of state in ministry of external affairs Kirti Vardhan Singh minced no words in saying from the floor of the Rajya Sabha that the Modi government is “aware of reports issued from time to time by various foreign entities, including in the US, about the situation of human rights in India.
“Such reports are often found to be subjective, misinformed and biased in nature. Government does not take cognizance of internal reports by foreign institutions. The US Commission for International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) is an organization with a political agenda and Government attaches no credibility to its reports, which misrepresent facts and peddle a motivated narrative about India.”
New Delhi is rarely, if ever, this forthcoming and scathing with its condemnation, and that too from the floor of the House against what it perceives as machinations from the US State Department. Clearly, a red line has been breached and patience has run out. This extraordinary development is testament to the extent of damage inflicted on the bilateral relationship by the outgoing administration.
Amid this ambience of wariness and irritability, the behaviour of the strategic community both in India and the US is worth noting. There are now more constituencies vocal about and committed to nurturing perhaps India’s most consequential strategic partnership than there ever were in the past. One, however, notices a fervent urge to gloss over the problems and focus only on the positives.
While understandable given the stakes involved, this approach leads to a situation where whenever a question arises of American unreliability, inconsistency or interference in India’s domestic politics, there are more voices eager to shut out the debate than there are of examining the various facets of the relationship, as it should be in democracies.
Some analysts behave as if the act of even questioning the status of the relationship is blasphemy unless portrayed in overtly positive light.
This group, either in New Delhi or Washington DC, chafes at apportioning blame to the US for the current state of dissonance, and seems to think that airing of dissenting views over the state of the ties would somehow be detrimental to its health – that doesn’t speak highly of the resilience of ties – and either indulges in name-calling or points blinkered eyes at the progress in security and technological partnership to deflect criticism and cancel the dissenters as “conspiracy theorists” or “trolls”.
Little wonder that when the BJP came out with a series of posts on X (formerly Twitter) accusing the US State Department of interference in India’s domestic politics and of lending a hand to the Congress Party in its effort to unseat the Modi-led government at the Centre in collusion with billionaire investor George Soros, some analysts were quick to blame the BJP for ‘damaging’ “one of the long-standing pillars of the relationship—multipartisan support in both capitals”, as
Michael Kugelman did at Foreign Policy.
To be fair, Kugelman wasn’t alone in taking this line. Several voices among the strategic affairs community interpreted BJP’s posts from its official handle squarely blaming the Foggy Bottom for trying to unseat Modi through
covert means as taking a unilateral torch to the valuable strategic partnership, and some even suggested that it goes against the efforts of its own government at the Centre.
This ‘backlash’, not entirely unexpected, from analysts of a certain kind to BJP’s open attack is premised on a deliberate conflation of US-India ties with the deep state’s sly attempts at interference in India’s domestic politics and covert ploys to increase and boost Opposition space against a democratically elected government at the Centre. This conflation is a clever device to obfuscate issues.
The attempt is to show that an America that strikes deep security-technological partnership with New Delhi and seeks to strengthen its hand as a democratic bulwark against China, cannot realistically be accused simultaneously of trying to undermine the Indian state.
Except that is not the real issue. The real issue is sly undermining of India’s democratic choice, interference in domestic politics and regime change games in India’s backyard. Progress in one aspect of the relationship cannot mask the drawbacks in another when the relationship is so deep and multifarious between two of the world’s largest and diverse democracies.
It is also disconcerting to note that the accusations brought by the BJP instead of being adjudged on merit have instead been relegated summarily to “conspiracy theories” floated ‘in medias res’ when adequate indications exist for deeper inquiry.
BJP’s core accusation, that “OCCRP (one of the world’s most influential global investigative news organizations whose investigative ‘reports’ have toppled governments around the world) is funded by the US State Department’s USAID, along with other deep state figures like George Soros and the Rockefeller Foundation” is hardly a state secret and all the information is available in public domain, including the fact that lion’s share of the “OCCRP’s funding comes directly from the US State Department.”
The Drop Site News report (along with French investigative group Mediaparte) has incriminating details of how the tentacles of US deep state work, how intricate, robust and effective its networks are, and how “the journalist’s pen was not just mightier than the sword, but less
embarrassing to wield on a global stage in an era where overtly US-backed military coups had gone out of fashion (if not entirely out of the toolkit).”
The word ‘deep state’ carries the burden of conspiracy and mockery. The distance between action and accountability is everything, and its operatives go to great lengths to keep it that way, so that plausible deniability becomes the first line of defence.
The Mediaparte report has been widely read, and the US deep state’s covert attempts at
regime change in India through a labyrinthine network of NGOs, ‘independent organizations’, media outlets, activists and other instruments of statecraft are not so covert anymore.
I’ll still cite a relevant paragraph from Drop Site News report that elaborates on the delicate arrangement between OCCRP and the US State Department, the bureaucratic mothership for deep state operatives.
“Critics of OCCRP often parrot Putin’s caricature of the organization as taking direct orders from Langley (CIA headquarters). But that misunderstands the nature of American soft power… OCCRP doesn’t have to provide the USG with any info to be useful to them. It’s an army of ‘clean hands’ investigating outside the U.S… But it’s always other people’s corruption. If you’re getting paid by the USG to do anti-corruption work, you know that the money is going to get shut off if you bite the hand that feeds you. Even if you don’t want to take USG money directly, you look around and almost every major philanthropic funder has partnered with them on some initiative and it gives the impression that you can only go so far and still get funded to do journalism.”
The trouble is that the US is too powerful, too rich and too convinced of the moral justification of liberal hegemony to refrain from interfering in sovereign nations to shape the world in its image. Its relationship with India, regardless of the strength of the partnership or its usefulness to Washington to check China, is not one among equals.
There can be no even-handed arbitrage in a relationship where one side has clear heft along with the ability and intention to interfere in the domestic politics of the other. The faux even-handedness, in this instance, undermines India’s position. Analysts should keep that in mind.
Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.
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