By Tom Fowdy
Following a meeting between China's foreign minister Wang Yi and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the two countries, as Reuters reported, "on Tuesday to resume direct flights and step up trade and investment flows as the neighbours rebuild ties damaged by a 2020 border clash." The warming of relations between the two Asian giants has been caused, undoubtedly, "against the backdrop of U.S. President Donald Trump's unpredictable foreign policy," and in a stunning reversal of Modi's hardened anti-China stance, the two countries will "boost trade and investment."
It only feels like yesterday since Modi, believing that his country could exploit Western anti-China sentiment to secure strategic capital for India's rise, weaponized a clash on the border to systematically ban TikTok, squeeze Chinese investment out of the country, and then tried to woo Western manufacturers to lure their supply chains to the subcontinent. Indeed, Modi believed that prolonging tensions with Beijing was a necessary act of national interest, which would allow India to develop into a manufacturing giant, having been placed at the centre of the "Indo-Pacific" strategy marshalled by the United States.
New Delhi was, ideally speaking, in their point of view, the ultimate counterweight to China, a country whose geography made it strategically indispensable and, on paper, had the scale to match Beijing in the long run. As such, the nationalist media of the country blasted China as strangling the country's rise through dominating global manufacturing and squeezing space for its development. With the border skirmish of that year, Indian anti-China sentiment subsequently became extreme, a factor which was no doubt exacerbated by the punishing impact of the pandemic on India, with its government not having the resources to deal with outbreaks in a population of that scale.
It is a testament to the era we live in today that only half a decade after all of this, the world has changed several times over. The horrors of the pandemic already feel like an ancient, long-forgotten past, buried under the huge political upheavals that have followed with Russia's invasion of Ukraine and Donald Trump's return. It is not surprising at all that the strategic implications of that COVID world have also evaporated very quickly, with it soon turning out that India's relationship with the West was not as golden as it was promised to be. Instead, beneath the surface of the Anti-China sentiment was the reality that India premises its foreign policy on maintaining strategic autonomy, thus striking a fine balance between all powers.
This foreign policy is a structural outcome of India being a very large country that requires multiple partnerships in order to maintain its sovereignty and national interests. While India, of course, may make diplomatic shifts and tilt within that spectrum (as it did towards the US against China), it ultimately will not compromise on core matters of national interest so easily. India might see the West as bidding partners, but it increasingly has the mindset of a great power in its own right and does not see itself as an "ally", "vassal," or any kind of subordinate.
As a result, the India-Russia relationship, which is premised on India's energy and arms interests, has proven to be a decisive wedge issue which has sunk its ties with the United States, a trajectory which started with the Ukraine war in 2022 and subsequently got worse since Donald Trump attempted to coerce New Delhi to stop buying Russian oil and slapped a massive tariff on the country in its refusal to do so. Trump's renewed and much harder-line protectionist stance also has no interest in enabling India to become a manufacturing power at America's expense, even if it is to hurt China. Thus, amidst the chaos caused by the White House, New Delhi has had to do the unthinkable, that is to reconsider and thus reverse its 2020 era hostile policy towards Beijing, precisely because, on facing such punitive measures from the United States, the bright hopes that America might otherwise boost India to counter China have dimmed.
Of course, such a diplomatic breakthrough does not mean that India and China are going to be best friends suddenly. The two countries are still uneasy neighbours who are locked in a series of uncompromising territorial and sovereign disputes, which have been enough to even take them to war in the past. India still sees Beijing as an unwanted competitor in its own strategic space of South Asia, which likewise backs its number one enemy, Pakistan, a country that was even able to down Indian fighter jets using Chinese military technology. This has been a diplomatic relationship that cycles between uneasy cooperation, tension, and conflict.
Still, neither country wants war, and mutual distrust does not override the structural realisation that China and India are good for each other's economic development, and in a world being turned upside down by Trump, it is better the devil you know.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of DotDotNews.
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