Modi Visit Part of a Geopolitical Great Game

India is seen as a strategic counterweight to China, and that has overridden any U.S. concerns about repression against ethnic minorities and the press.

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Over the past few months ahead of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s official state visit to Washington, Biden administration officials have worked overtime to praise his leadership. In April, Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asia Donald Lu applauded the state of India’s free press: “You have India as a democracy in part because you have a free press that really works.” During her trip to India in March, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo called Modi a “visionary” and his “commitment to the people of India … indescribable and deep and passionate and real and authentic.”

These warm sentiments don’t bear any resemblance to the actions of the real Narendra Modi, whose regime has turned India away from its roots as the world’s largest secular democracy and toward becoming a right-wing Hindu nationalist state. During his tenure, Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) have created the conditions for widespread democratic backsliding. The government has cracked down on press dissent, in fact, and stoked violence against Indian citizens who happen to be Muslims, ethnic and tribal minorities, and oppressed castes.

This is nothing new. In 2005, while Modi was chief minister of the state of Gujarat and oversaw deadly riots against Muslims, the Bush-era State Department denied Modi a visa to visit the United States, citing a 1998 law called the International Religious Freedom Act, which banned officials responsible for “severe violations of religious freedom.” He is the only person who has ever been denied a visa on those grounds.

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The Biden administration is clearly eager to put that past behind them. Today, Modi will give a speech to a joint session of Congress, and will be the guest of honor at a state dinner at the White House.

In an official statement released in May, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre framed Modi’s visit as one that will “affirm the deep and close partnership between the United States and India and the warm bonds of friendship that link Americans and Indians together.” This is a much more honest assessment of the relationship, as the Biden administration believes they have strategic cause to claim India as a strong ally. India’s presence as a military counterweight to China provides the U.S. additional leverage in the cold war they have created. “This visit is not about China,” White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan stated in a recent interview. “But the question of China’s role in the military domain, the technology domain, the economic domain will be on the agenda.”

The United States also sees an opportunity in India’s changing relationship with Russia, which has for several decades been India’s biggest supplier of arms. Over the past decade, the United States has sold over $4 billion in military equipment to India, and has run FBI-sponsored training in the militarized region of Kashmir. A number of major technological and defense agreements have been unveiled during this visit, among them a partnership between General Electric and state-owned Indian corporation Hindustan Aeronautics to produce engines for Indian fighter jets, as well as the sale of American MQ-9B SeaGuardians, which are high-precision armed drones.

There is also a massive effort to make India’s burgeoning semiconductor industry a real counterweight to China. U.S. semiconductor manufacturer Micron Technology will be building a $2.75 billion chip facility in India, with $800 million from Micron and the rest from India. U.S.-based Applied Materials is set to start a collaborative engineering center in India focused on semiconductor development and commercialization, and Lam Research will launch a training program for tens of thousands of Indian engineers. India has long been talked about as a potential manufacturing rival to China, and dedicated American investment could finally make that happen.

Ahead of the 2024 presidential election, there is also an electoral calculus to the White House’s embrace of Modi, as Indian Americans are the second-largest immigrant group in the United States and broadly supportive of the PM. They are also solidly Democratic voters, with as many as 74 percent of Indian Americans estimated to have voted for Biden in 2020, despite Donald Trump’s friendly relationship and overt pitch to Indian American voters. Notably, studies showed U.S.-India relations had little salience in 2020 for Indian American voters, who were much more concerned about health care and the economy.

White House officials say Biden will raise concerns about human rights in India during the visit, but will avoid “lecturing” Modi. “Ultimately, the question of where politics and the question of democratic institutions go in India is going to be determined within India by Indians. It’s not going to be determined by the United States,” Sullivan said of the visit.

It is certainly true that American intervention in Modi’s internal affairs would not produce any positive outcomes. But this is an odd time for the United States to suddenly be interested in national sovereignty, and the White House’s insistence that they are voiceless in this situation is disingenuous. The Biden administration, like all previous presidential administrations, has a selective memory on promoting human rights, based on its own self-interest. This White House has decided that gaining some geopolitical advantage over China in the Indo-Pacific is worth the lives of millions of Muslims, caste-oppressed Indians, political dissidents, and journalists. The least they could do is to be honest about the stakes involved.

Modi’s visit to the White House, only the third state dinner so far during Biden’s term and the most lavish one yet, will no doubt be hailed by Americans and Indians across the political spectrum as a triumph of the world’s oldest and largest democracies. A sweeping narrative of historic partnership and progress has already been created, despite widespread opposition both in the Democratic Party and among the Indian diaspora. The White House wants the public to believe that their warm embrace of a despotic figure will pay dividends for the American and Indian people alike, but it’s not clear that anyone besides defense contractors stands to benefit.

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