India isn't winning friends with its openly aggressive lurch to the right

The Indian government is behaving like Viktor Orban of Hungary or Donald Trump himself in its happy embrace of the global right.

For decades, Indian foreign policy has been moving slowly but methodically in a single direction: toward a greater embrace of the West. The days of non-alignment, when India believed it led the developing world in standing apart from either Cold War bloc, are over. Although successive governments in New Delhi have worked hard to avoid antagonizing Beijing, it has been taken for granted that India’s future lies in ever closer ties to other liberal democracies.

Equally, support for India’s rise has been one of the few subjects of bipartisan consensus in Washington. Both Democratic and Republican administrations have pushed for