What should America make of Modi's India?

Economic development, illiberalism, and a middle path between Washington and Beijing

This piece is written by Milan the Researcher, not the usual Matt-post.

Noah Smith recently wrote a post about the economic rise of India:

Here...comes...INDIA!!!

It’s an interesting piece, and I agree with his core thesis that India getting richer is good for humanity. But I disagree with two points that he makes. First, Smith’s waving aside of prime minister Narendra Modi’s autocratic tendencies (emphasis mine):

But even so, we have our work cut out for us. Indian politics, for example, is very confusing for Americans. For example, in my experience most Americans don’t know quite what to make of the country’s prime minister, Narendra Modi. Modi is extremely beloved in India — he’s currently by far the most popular democratically elected leader in Morning Consult’s global tracking polls:

But why? Is it because of all that infrastructure he’s building? Is it because he gave out all those subsidies to the poor during Covid, or improved sanitation? Or is it because of culture war issues? Do most Indians support “Hindutva”? What the heck is “Hindutva” anyway? Is Modi a bigot and/or an autocrat, as some writers and publications allege? Or is he a cosmopolitan modernizer, seeking to erase old caste boundaries, as some of my acquaintances in the tech world assert? Do I need to have a position on Aurangzeb?

Second, the implication that a stronger America-India alliance is likely to develop (again, emphasis mine):

Between economic linkages and cultural exchanges, I see the possible emergence of “Indiamerica” — a more deep and comprehensive societal integration than “Chimerica” ever was. The chances of that will be boosted, of course, if the U.S. keeps taking in Indian immigrants on a large scale. Nor do I think those influences will be limited to the U.S.; India might form similar bilateral relationships with other countries like Japan, Indonesia, Vietnam, and lots of other countries. When a country has 1.4 billion people, a booming economy, and an open society, there’s really very little limit to its potential influence.

I also think we should be at least a bit cautious about replicating the downsides of economic integration with China when seeking deeper engagement with New Delhi: namely, the incentive it creates for Western firms and governments to suppress legitimate criticism of India’s government in order to maintain access to the largest market in the world.

Before I get into it, however, I want to offer the following caveat: I am a diaspora kid, I don’t speak Hindi and am not super plugged into the latest developments in Indian politics. As Smith mentions in his piece, Indian politics is complex and multidimensional. I’ve tried my best to avoid gross oversimplifications in this piece, but I’m not a subject matter expert and you shouldn’t take me for one.

Why is Narendra Modi so popular?

India became an independent nation on August 15, 1947. When British rule ended, the subcontinent was partitioned into Pakistan¹ and India. The basis for creating two nations rather than one was, broadly speaking, religion: the Indian National Congress, led by Jawaharlal Nehru and Mohandas Gandhi (both Hindu), favored a secular, unified nation; the Muslim League, led by Muhammad Ali Jinnah argued that as a minority faith, Muslims would never truly be respected as equals in a unified nation. The compromise was Partition, with the predominantly Muslim areas of the region given to Pakistan and the predominantly Hindu areas given to India. This entailed splitting the provinces of Bengal and Punjab and giving the majority-Muslim districts to Pakistan and the majority non-Muslim districts to India. The maps were sloppily drawn and millions of people had to migrate, resulting in a lot of communal violence.²

After independence, Gandhi was assassinated in 1948 by Nathuram Godse, a Hindu nationalist (more on this later). Nehru served as interim prime minister until elections could be held in 1950, and was subsequently elected to the position as the head of a Congress majority government. From 1952-1967, the goodwill that Congress had earned during the independence movement allowed the party to dominate Indian politics at both the state and national levels. From 1967-1989, though, the party began losing power in the states. They managed to hold on at the national level, except in 1977 when voters punished them for Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s³ rule by decree during the Emergency.

After 1989, their power also dwindled nationally, and Congress was forced to rely on coalition governments to retain the premiership until 2014, when Narendra Modi was elected prime minister as head of the Bharatiya Janata Party. In 2019, Modi and the BJP easily won re-election, solidifying the transition to India’s fourth-party system. According to Morning Consult, Modi is currently the most popular world leader, with a net approval rating of +61 at home (78-17 approve/disapprove).

So how did he do it?

As Noah Smith points out in his piece, part of the answer is the economy. While his record on inflation and labor force participation has been mixed, Indians are better off now than they were when he came into office. Since 2014 (when Modi became prime minister) to 2021 (when data ends), GDP per capita has increased by roughly 23%.

Domestic industrial production has also steadily increased, as Western firms such as Apple have sought to relocate manufacturing away from China.

Modi’s government has made substantial progress on reducing outdoor defecation — by 26% from 2014 to 2018, with the share of households with access to toilets rising from 37% to 71% over the same period — though the government has fallen short of its goal of eliminating the practice. Poverty has also gone down.

Those are genuine accomplishments. Smith is right to celebrate them, and Modi’s government should be commended for them. But that’s not the whole picture.

Modi and the BJP have an illiberal streak

Before Modi became prime minister, he was the chief minister (analogous to an American governor) of the state of Gujarat. And before that, he was a member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a Hindu nationalist organization.

The RSS advocates for Hindutva (the belief that India is fundamentally a Hindu nation, not a secular one) and has close ties to the BJP. In 2019, it mobilized to help re-elect Modi, and members of his government have consulted with the organization before making policy on certain topics.

One of the RSS’ goals is to ban the slaughter of cows, which are considered to be sacred in Hinduism. Because of this belief, the beef industry in India is predominately run by Muslims, and over the last few years, there have been several cases of “cow lynchings,” where Muslims have been harassed, beaten, and killed on the suspicion that they were involved in slaughtering cattle. According to a Human Rights Watch report, 44 people were killed between 2016 and 2019 in such incidents, 36 of whom were Muslims. The report alleged that BJP politicians have “increasingly used communal rhetoric that has spurred a violent vigilante campaign against beef consumption and those deemed linked to it.”

Modi, for his part, has publicly condemned the killings. Since he first took office, religious violence has increased some but is still down relative to 2008.

Still, the general perception seems to be that Modi’s government is at least somewhat hostile to Muslims. Members of his party have repeatedly made anti-Muslim statements. The government has taken the side of Hindus in religious disputes, including announcing the construction of a Hindu temple on the site where a mosque was demolished several decades ago at a Hindu nationalist rally, which sparked riots at the time. In 2019, Modi revoked the special status of Jammu and Kashmir — India’s only majority-Muslim state, part of which is the subject of a territorial dispute with Pakistan — which had granted the region extra autonomy from the central government.

Then there are the textbooks. Recall Nathuram Godse, the man who assassinated Gandhi: he was in the RSS, though the organization claims that he was no longer an active member at the time of the killing. Modi’s government recently revised the standards for history textbooks, removing sections that mention Godse’s Hindu nationalist ties, the brief ban on the RSS after Gandhi’s assassination, the secular beliefs of India’s founders, the 2002 religious riots in Gujarat,⁴ and Mughal rule in India (the Mughals were Muslims).

Perhaps the best analog for Modi is Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Both men rose from humble backgrounds: Erodgan is from a poor family in Istanbul; Modi is the son of a tea seller. Both have risen to the top of national politics in majority-religious nations (Turkey is about 90% Muslim; India is about 80% Hindu) with traditionally secular⁵ regimes. And both have done so by winning at the ballot box.

Modi is up for re-election in 2024, and most analysts expect him to cruise to a third term. Nobody thinks that Congress leader Rahul Gandhi is a serious threat; he’s lost to Modi twice before. In March, Gandhi was expelled from parliament after a court found him guilty of defamation. The crime? During the 2019 campaign, Gandhi compared the prime minister to a pair of thieves, who were then at large, with the same last name. An unrelated BJP politician also named Modi sued, and a court in Gujarat found Gandhi guilty and sentenced him to two years in prison. Which happens to be the minimum for mandatory expulsion from parliament.

Again, nobody considers Rahul Gandhi to be an actual threat to Modi, politically. But the fact that the prime minister has nonetheless worked to disqualify him from running is troubling. Modi has been elected and re-elected democratically. By all appearances, his policies are popular with voters, and if his political opponents want to undo them, they will have to find a way to sell that to voters. That might be unlikely — at least in the short term — but it becomes impossible if opposition candidates are going to get locked up on trumped-up charges.

New Delhi might not want to be Washington’s friend

I recently attended a campus event about the war in Ukraine. One of the speakers wondered aloud why India is not doing more to support Ukraine, and why India continues to buy Russian oil. The answer, to quote the Indian foreign minister, is that buying Russian oil “has worked to our advantage.”

Many Americans, including Noah Smith, Matt, and Rep. Jake Auchincloss, would like to form a closer alliance with India as a hedge against China. Joe Biden seems to want the same, hence, his recent efforts to bolster the “Quad” (the United States, India, Australia, and Japan). And Matt is correct to note that American efforts to compete with China will necessarily involve working with nations with less-than-spotless records on democracy and human rights.

So yes, from the perspective of America, it would be very helpful if India and America formed a closer alliance. But what about from the perspective of India?

Historically, India was closer to the Soviet Union during the Cold War, while the United States backed Pakistan. Separately, India has a long-running border dispute with China in the Himalayas. Today, America is out of Afghanistan, so we don’t need Pakistan’s cooperation to fight the Taliban anymore. And Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has pushed Russia into a de facto alliance with China while making it even more of a pariah in the West. In principle, this sets the stage for America to more or less drop Pakistan as an ally, for India to more or less drop Russia as an ally, and for Washington and New Delhi to forge closer ties against China. But in practice, this is all a lot harder. India has a bunch of legacy Russian weapons systems; phasing those out in exchange for American kit would take time and might leave it more vulnerable in the interim. America’s rivalry with China might be more intense than India’s, so the latter might not be as interested in making common cause against Beijing. India is the largest country on the planet and is primed for further economic growth, so New Delhi might well decide that it’s better for India to play Moscow and Washington off each other rather than become America’s junior partner in an anti-China coalition.

Here, again, I think Erdogan’s Turkey is a useful analog: Ankara is partly integrated with the West (it’s a NATO member), but not fully (its EU ascension is essentially on permanent hold). As such, Turkey sometimes works with the West (it sold Ukraine armed drones before any other Western nation) and sometimes doesn’t (Erdogan has publicly talked about further economic integration with Russia and is holding up Sweden’s ascension to NATO in order to get Stockholm to crack down harder on Kurdish nationalist groups at home).

That’s not to say that I don’t think that it would be good for America to pursue closer ties with India — I think we should. But in doing so, America should recognize that a closer alliance might be something that we want more than India does. We should act and temper our expectations accordingly.

We should also remember that opening our markets to China created an incentive to suppress criticism of the CCP and its policies in the West, and we should be cautious about the risk that pivoting to India will do the same. Plenty of the Western media’s coverage of Indian politics is ill-informed; some of it may even be biased against Modi. But there are legitimate criticisms to be made here — criticisms that might be suppressed by American companies with business interests in India who would rather not be on the prime minister’s bad side. It might create a climate of fear domestically, where Indian business leaders are afraid to publicly disagree with Modi or the BJP, which could constrain investment and innovation and ultimately drag on India’s long-term growth trajectory. That would be bad. There are a lot of people in India, and I would like to see their living standards improve.

1. Originally made up of West and East Pakistan; the latter later became the independent country of Bangladesh in 1971.

2. Again, this is a brief summary. Nehru, Gandhi, and Jinnah are complex figures, I am far from an expert on this, and this is somewhat of a simplification of their beliefs. The purpose here is to provide some context for readers who may not be familiar with the events rather than to write a comprehensive history of independence and partition.

3. No relation to Mohandas Gandhi; Indira Gandhi was Nehru’s daughter. Part of the reason for Congress’s decline is the perception that they are corrupt and out of touch: the party has been led by the Gandhi-Nehru family since its founding.

4. Modi was chief minister of the state during the riots and has been accused of complicity in the violence, but was cleared in a formal investigation.

5. The Indian definition of secularism in this context is that the government should be equidistant from all faiths (e.g., if there are three bank holidays for Hindu celebrations, there should be three for Muslim ones); the Turkish definition is that the government should suppress the public display of religion and religious symbols (e.g., the now-defunct ban on the hijab).