Is India primarily an Asian superpower or an Anglosphere democracy? President Trump’s recent visit there — he joined Prime Minister Narendra Modi in India’s largest cricket stadium, a return match after Modi’s rally at a Houston stadium last year — dramatizes what may be the single most important question of the 21st century.
The Anglosphere is united by the English language, the common law, respect for private property and a tradition of constitutional liberty going back, ultimately, to the Magna Carta — the site of which in Runnymede, incidentally, was marked until recently by only two memorial stones, one raised by Americans and one by Indians.
Which countries qualify? Everyone agrees that the Five-Eyes security partners — Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States — are in. Most would also include Ireland and Singapore, along with the remnants of Britain’s imperial archipelago (Bermuda, Gibraltar, and so on). Some also add the more democratic Caribbean nations, Hong Kong, South Africa (or at least KwaZulu-Natal), and Israel, a common-law state that is English-speaking in practice, if not in theory.
The elephant in the room — for once, that metaphor seems entirely apt — is India, which has twice the population of all the others put together.
Will India remain a secular, law-based parliamentary democracy? Or will it, as the gloom-mongers believe, descend into Hindu chauvinism and the cult of the strongman?
One shouldn’t generalize about the nation that Jawaharlal Nehru called “an ancient palimpsest on which layer upon layer of thought and reverie had been inscribed.” India, in common with many countries, is going through an authoritarian spasm right now. Indeed, Modi is attacked on many of the same grounds that Trump is. Both are accused of being right-wing populists who have centralized power, ignored constitutional norms, stirred up prejudices, disdained minorities in general, and targeted Muslims in particular. All of which may help explain why two such different characters, an ascetic former tea-boy and a vulgar New York City developer, get on.
There is a smidgen of truth in some of the accusations, but we should set the Trump-Modi alliance against the backdrop of India’s Westward reorientation. When the two leaders visited Gandhi’s ashram, they were photographed next to a spinning wheel. That wheel, the Charkha, was the symbol of the independence movement. For Gandhi, self-government was a protectionist endeavor. The handloom stood for the rejection of cheaper textile imports, and of free trade more broadly.
After independence in 1947, India’s leaders duly applied the principles of self-sufficiency and socialism, as well as sought to promote Hindi, rather than English, as a common tongue for India’s many linguistic communities. A protectionist and anti-capitalist India led the Non-Aligned Movement even though, in practice, it tended to be closer to the USSR than to the West. The U.S. accordingly treated Pakistan as its regional ally, backing that country in its war with India in 1971.
Only since the early 1990s has India embraced market reforms. The ensuing prosperity has led to a surge in the numbers of Indian students in the core Anglosphere states — currently 250,000 in the U.S. alone. It has also accompanied a revival of the English language, the chief medium of communication in Indian business.
George W. Bush spotted India’s pivot to the Anglosphere and had the vision to reciprocate, accepting that country’s nuclear status and paving the way for India to be declared a Major Defense Partner of the U.S. in 2016. He saw the world’s largest democracy as a bulwark against Chinese expansionism. Delhi and Beijing are uneasily aware that the Tibetan plateau stands between them like a massive water tower, the source of all the fresh water of the region, including the Indus and the Ganges, the Yangtze, and the Yellow River. Indian and Chinese troops have skirmished four times at the border — in 1962, 1967, 1987, and 2017.
Bush also wanted India as an ally against Islamist extremism. India is home to 200 million Muslims, the second-highest number in the world, yet it has little history of jihadi violence.
In one sense, Bush’s reasoning has become more valid as India has continued to deepen its relationship with its diaspora communities around the Anglosphere, absorbing some of their attitudes and assumptions. Yet there is a danger that Modi will veer away from the pluralism that has characterized his country until now. Sectarian violence is making a comeback in India, and Modi’s crackdown in Kashmir can only inflame tensions.
India, in short, needs candid friends. Its own prosperity, as well as its value as an ally, depends upon its readiness to liberalize, both economically and politically — and, ultimately, to establish more or less cordial relations with Pakistan. That may not be the sort of message that Trump likes to deliver, but, sooner or later, someone is going to have to deliver it.
