When Prime Minister Indira Gandhi visited Washington, D.C. in 1982, she had long harbored rather negative feelings for America. This contrasted with her warmth toward Britain, where she had fond memories of her years as a student at Oxford.
After meeting with President Ronald Reagan, she admitted that she had expected to dislike him, but that he had disarmed her with his charm. Still, that was about as far as the American-Indian relationship went at the time.
India continued for many years to keep close to the Soviet Union, its major arms supplier, and it remains on good terms with Russia today. Throughout the Reagan years and into the post-Cold War period, New Delhi cooperated with Washington primarily on matters relating to counterterrorism.
It was only in the late 1990s when the Hindu Indian People’s Party or BJP came to power that relations with the U.S. truly underwent a sea change. The BJP has now been leading India for more than a decade under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and relations with the U.S. have became increasingly close.
President Trump has invited Modi, with whom he famously gets along personally, to visit the White House next month, shortly after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit next week. India, already sensitive to Trump’s concerns about illegal immigration and in anticipation of the Modi visit, is planning to repatriate some 18,000 of its citizens who entered the U.S. illegally.
India’s decision to do so may also be due to its worries that the U.S. will cut back on the number of H-1B visas it issues each year. Indian citizens hold 70 percent of these visas.
Trump wants more from India, however. In his phone conversation with Modi earlier this week, Trump emphasized to the Indian leader the importance of New Delhi’s increasing its procurement of American military equipment. The U.S. lags far behind Russia and France in arms sales to India.
In addition, Trump stressed the need for a more balanced bilateral trade relationship. He has threatened to impose heavy tariffs on Indian exports, which could exacerbate India’s record trade deficit, since the U.S. is India’s biggest export market.
When the two men meet, there will no doubt be smiles all round. After all, that was the case when Reagan met Gandhi. Moreover, the two countries share a sense of unease about China, and together with Australia and Japan they constitute the Quad grouping.
Indeed, India has moved increasingly closer to Japan, even as Tokyo has beefed up its defense spending while further deepening its military cooperation with the U.S. India also joined America in 2022 in working with Israel and the United Arab Emirates (called the I2U2 Group) to pursue “joint investments and new initiatives in water, energy, transportation, space, health, and food security.”
And while Trump may seek more arms sales to India, New Delhi’s purchases of American military equipment, virtually nonexistent during the Cold War, are already increasing annually.
But India is still determined to pursue its own independent course in world affairs. Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, India’s external affairs minister since 2019 and a former ambassador to both Washington and Beijing, has made that very clear in two widely noted volumes titled “The India Way: Strategies for An Uncertain World” and “Why Bharat Matters.”
Jaishankar argues that India embodies global multipolarity because it has a special role as a leading force apart from America, Russia and China. He underscores the need to preserve India’s long-standing relations with Russia, to expand India’s increasingly close partnership with the U.S. and to maintain stable and proper relations with China. Nevertheless, Jaishankar stresses that these relations must only be guided by India’s state interests.
In laying out India’s strategy for the 21st century, Jaishankar not only is providing the intellectual heft for Modi’s own worldview, he is following in his father’s footsteps: K. Subrahmanyam was Indira Gandhi’s closest strategic advisor, a leading proponent of India becoming a nuclear power and for many years cool toward America. Like Gandhi, whose relations with Reagan and the U.S. reflected her advisor’s outlook, Modi’s interactions with Trump will likewise reflect the intellectual approach of his leading advisor on foreign affairs.
The Modi-Trump relationship will therefore remain cordial, even friendly, and the president may get some of what he wants from the Indian leader, as he has already obtained with regard to immigration. But he is unlikely to get all of what he wants.
New Delhi is prepared to work closely with Washington, but, as Jaishankar has made so clear, it has absolutely no intention of kowtowing to the U.S., even if Modi is prepared to go at least some way to accommodate the American president with whom he gets on so well.
Dov S. Zakheim is a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and vice chairman of the board for the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He was undersecretary of Defense (comptroller) and chief financial officer for the Department of Defense from 2001 to 2004 and a deputy undersecretary of Defense from 1985 to 1987.
