C Raja Mohan writes on Jake Sullivan’s India visit: Narendra Modi’s Deng Xiaoping moment

This geoeconomic agenda is deeply tied to the Biden Administration’s geopolitical priorities, centred on competing vigorously with China, rebooting traditional alliances, building new partnerships, and constructing new regional and global coalitions. The major allies of the US including Britain, the European Union, and Japan – also Washington’s main economic partners and members of the G7 group – are engaged in intense internal debates on Biden’s new geoeconomics and negotiating with Washington in addressing its consequences.

The discourse in Delhi, however, remains focused narrowly on geopolitics. What Delhi needs is a thorough discussion on Washington’s new geoeconomics that promises not only to radically change the international order but also to create pathways to re-engineer the Indian economy and open the door for the modernisation of its technological toolkit. As the US brings its geoeconomics in alignment with its geopolitics, Delhi needs its business leaders, technological entrepreneurs, and economic policymakers to weigh in a lot more on the future of bilateral relations with Washington.

Thanks to the strong support from successive prime ministers and the sustained efforts of its diplomatic corps, Delhi and Washington have largely overcome the geopolitical divergence that shaped their bilateral relations in the second half of the 20th century. The story of the India-US relations over the last three decades is about the two governments defying the entrenched scepticism within the strategic communities in both capitals.

Consider India’s “historic hesitations” – which Prime Minister Narendra Modi publicly discarded when he last addressed the joint session of the US Congress seven summers ago – over the last three decades in engaging the US. One hesitation related to India’s concerns about America’s relationship with Pakistan. The conventional wisdom in Delhi until recently was that the US will never abandon Pakistan; today Islamabad and Rawalpindi are marginal to the American geopolitical calculus. In the 1990s, the Indian security establishment was deeply concerned about US meddling in Kashmir by the Bill Clinton administration. Clinton’s successor, George W Bush took Kashmir off the agenda by ending the US activism on the question.

The nuclear dispute with the US was considered unresolvable since the early 1970s. George W Bush moved decisively in 2005 to alter the US domestic law on nonproliferation and pushed the international community to change the global rules of nuclear commerce in favour of India. It was Delhi, then ruled by the UPA, that got its political knickers into a twist on how to deal with a nuclear offer that it could not say no to.

The last few years under Donald Trump and Biden have left no room for India’s longstanding resentment against the US partnership with China. The US now has a bipartisan consensus on standing up to the China challenge and limiting the possibilities for Beijing’s hegemony over Asia. This has coincided with the growing Chinese threat to India and facilitated a convergence of interests between Delhi and Washington on stabilising the Asian balance of power.

To add a final twist to the new geopolitical bonhomie, the US is eager to assist and benefit from India’s long-pressing need to reduce its massive reliance on Russian weapons. If PM Modi has insisted on reducing weapons imports and making them at home, Biden is now offering US technology and capital to expand and modernise India’s defence industrial base.

The challenge for Delhi and Washington now is to translate the new geopolitical convergence into concrete outcomes. NSA Sullivan’s visit to Delhi this week is about sorting out the details of a new strategic compact and overcoming multiple regulatory bottlenecks and getting their large bureaucracies to work together.

Looking back over the last 75 years, the problem has never been the lack of room for India-US geopolitical cooperation. The trouble on the Indian side at least was the elite’s default ideological positions–persistent pessimism about the possibilities with the US, exuberant optimism about partnering China, and a complacent over-dependence on Russia.

The current geopolitical churn in the world has made this default mode unsustainable. The real challenge and opportunity today for India and the US lie elsewhere – in seizing the possibilities for geoeconomic collaboration that have been opened up by the Biden Administration.

Three decades ago, when India embarked on its economic reforms, the so-called Washington Consensus on globalisation was a given. The only question was about the pace and sequence of measures in India’s adaptation. Today, the US is seeking India’s cooperation in restructuring the global economic order and making the world less vulnerable to Chinese pressures.

Unlike at the turn of the 1990s, India today is the world’s fifth-largest economic entity and poised to become the third-largest in a decade. For the first time since independence, Delhi is in a position to shape the global economic order.

The current juncture could be seen as PM Modi’s “Deng Xiaoping moment”. Building on the geopolitical convergence with the US in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Deng rapidly transformed the Chinese economy by gaining access to Western capital, technology, and markets and made his country the second most powerful nation. He reminded us that geopolitics is not an end itself but an instrument to build national prosperity that is at the root of all power. China’s current leader Xi Jinping, in contrast, offers a lesson in the dangers of geopolitical and ideological overreach.

Converting the India-US geoeconomic possibilities into positive outcomes will demand the kind of hard work that went into bridging the geopolitical divide between Delhi and Washington over the last three decades. India’s business elites and policymakers, however, don’t have the luxury of time; they need to move a lot faster amidst the rapid changes unfolding in the global economic order; the engagement with national security adviser Sullivan this week is a good moment to start.

The writer is a senior fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute in Delhi and a contributing editor on international affairs for The Indian Express