The return of a familiar distrust in India's global political outlook

Two decades ago, it was possible to believe that reflexive anti-Americanism would no longer determine how India positioned itself globally. But, in recent months and years, it has become clear that, far from declining to rational levels, an unthinking distrust of the West continues to be a major factor in Indian politics. It might be, in fact, increasing in intensity rather than decreasing. 

This is not a product of American President Donald Trump, nor a consequence of his unfair singling out of India over the past few months. It had become a visible factor in Indian public life shortly after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. A poll conducted by YouGov six or so months later found that slightly more Indians held “the West” responsible for the invasion than Russia. (The difference, however, was within the margin of error.) This had global implications. A study by Ashoka University’s Centre for Analysis of Network Data and Insight Derivation demonstrated that in the first few months of the Ukraine war, Twitter users based in India were the most common source for posts making Russia’s side of the argument. Nor was it purely a social media-led phenomenon. One journal article conducted textual analysis of primetime television and found that “the most prevalent theme emerging from the narratives was the portrayal of the US (United States) as the ultimate beneficiary of the war”. The upsurge of anti-US sentiment in the past months, therefore, cannot be explained entirely by Mr Trump’s bad behaviour. In fact, the climate of tension under Mr Trump has merely created fresh space for sentiment that was already visible. 

In some sense, the two decades between 2004 and 2024 could well be considered the exception in India’s independent history. It was only in this period that India’s leaders have allowed themselves a degree of comfort with the US as an actor in our region or in the world. It is easy to forget that this uneasiness was an attitude associated once most closely with the leadership of the Congress, which inherited a certain Oxbridge disdain for the vulgar Americans from the aristocratic generation that ran it during the freedom movement. (It is worth remembering that the only US-educated person of note in that generation was B R Ambedkar.) Even by 1956, the notion that non-alignment meant equidistance between the two poles of the Cold War was difficult to support; the difference in tone between India’s condemnation of the Anglo-French adventurism in the Suez and the Soviet Union’s invasion of Hungary made that very clear. 

Much of this was due to the personality and preferences of the man who, for better or for worse, continues to be the greatest influence on India. Walter Crocker, in his notes on India’s first Prime Minister, says that it was Jawaharlal Nehru’s “fastidiousness” that caused him to find “a certain type of American, and certain American ways, uncongenial”. Dennis Kux suggests that Nehru’s policy reflected the “anti-American social prejudices of the British elite and the anti-American policy views of the left-wing of the British Labour Party”. 

It was, in fact, the capital-friendly Bharatiya Jan Sangh that occasionally pushed back against the Congress-socialist faux-neutrality in the Cold War. As the political scientist Rahul Sagar has explained, by the 1960s the Sangh was urging closer relations with the US — although the West was not making it easy for the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP’s) predecessors, given that a tilt towards Pakistan was already very visible in 1965. US diplomatic cables from 1977 — now declassified — celebrated the appointment of a new foreign minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who they said was critical of the Congress’ pro-Soviet posture, “while expressing admiration for democracy and freedom in the United States, which he contrasted with conditions in the USSR”. 

The current Prime Minister has certainly made quite an effort to keep conditions with the US stable under difficult conditions. This is quite remarkable, given that he personally has excellent reasons for disliking a country that did, after all, revoke his visa in 2005. But the BJP’s leadership has also realised that many of its voters do not share this attitude. They see the West and the US as civilisational competitors, and its cultural ethos as inherently expansive and predatory; they do not have the same attitude to Russia or China. It is they who will determine the future orientation of this country — and they may take a line on the US that is closer to Nehru than to Narendra Modi. I suppose their embrace of China is also as well thought out as was Nehru’s.