印度总理莫迪抵达华盛顿与美国总统拜登会晤时，顶着西方人期望的光环。据传4月份印度超过中国，成为世界人口最多国家。这激发了可能被夸大的希望，即世界舞台上一个强大的新巨人的出现，可改变华盛顿和北京之间潜在的零和竞争态势。这种愿望或者说更可能是幻想，有几种表现形式。最不靠谱的，是认为印度将与西方达成某种共识，在对华竞争中发挥共同制衡作用。不那么天真的看法认为，即使印度从未成为西方的默契盟友，其不断增长的财富和力量也会转移中国的注意力，从而牵制中国与美国及其安全伙伴的对抗。

为实现这些梦想，华盛顿最近悄悄批准在印度生产美国战机的发动机。这项协议以及新德里购买美国无人机的交易等，令莫迪大赞其政府与拜登政府达到“前所未有的信任”。

对中国的焦虑导致美国政策制定者难以周密考虑与印度的接触。简要回顾美印的外交历史会发现，华盛顿一直有周期性幻想，以为印度能被引诱摆脱不与任何超级大国结盟的态度。

除了政治术语意义上的民主，印度在公民相对平等地分享经济增长成果方面，还存在严重缺陷。最近关于印度超过中国成为人口第一大国的新闻被炒作后，读者看到印度经济起飞的大量描述。但这对印度民众的生活到底意味着什么？印度人均收入仍只有中国的约1/6（原文如此——编者注），两国差距可能仍在扩大。印度极端贫困人口多于任何非洲国家。印度约1/4人口仍是文盲。经济学家认为印度的工业化是摆脱贫困的最可靠途径，但它可能早在2002年就见顶了……

为何这样一个国家会成为最大武器进口国？无论现在还是将来，印度都应给出令人信服的理由。

Washington’s Perennial India Fantasy

U.S. wishful thinking that New Delhi will counter Beijing has created an arms import behemoth.

By Howard W. French

When Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi arrives in Washington to meet with U.S. President Joe Biden on Wednesday and Thursday, he will be trailing along with him a nimbus of Western expectations.

This wish, or more likely chimera, takes several forms. At its least plausible, it imagines that as the world’s largest democracy, India will somehow reach common cause with the West and balance together in competition with China. A somewhat less naive variant, meanwhile, supposes that even if India never becomes a tacit Western ally, its growing wealth and power will divert enough of China’s attention to render prohibitive the prospect of confrontation with the United States and its more explicit security partners.

It is in the service of these dreams that Washington recently, for the first time, gave quiet approval to the companies of a non-treaty ally, India, to manufacture U.S.-designed advanced fighter engines. This agreement, along with a deal for New Delhi to purchase U.S. Predator drones and other armament deal breakthroughs that are expected, have causes Modi to hail what he called the “unprecedented trust” between his government and the Biden administration.

U.S. anxieties over China have made it especially difficult for policymakers to think through their initiatives to engage with India as carefully as is warranted. If they could take a step back and obtain a more serene view of things, they would realize that India is nearly the equivalent of the Lucy-and-football metaphor from the old Charlie Brown comics. Over and over, she tees them up for Charlie to kick, only to snatch them away from the path of his foot at the very last instant.

Something about very large countries renders the illusions that build up around them almost fatally irresistible. As recently as a generation ago with China, and for many years before then, a prevalent illusion held that the West would derive unlimited wealth by selling one yard of cloth, or one finished shirt, or one new automobile, on average, to each Chinese consumer, depending on the vintage of the tale, in order to profit wildly from that country’s opening.

But what does this really mean in the lives of Indians? India’s per capita income is still roughly only one-sixth that of China’s, even though they were roughly equivalent in the early 1990s. In fact, this gap between the two countries may still be widening under Modi. Allowing for a relatively broad definition of middle class, India has seen an impressive expansion of this segment of its population. Nonetheless, in 2019, fully 10 percent of India’s people subsisted under a poverty line defined quite austerely at an income of $2.15 per day.

This means that India still has more desperately poor people than any African country, for example. Meanwhile, about a quarter of India’s population remains illiterate, and many more are only marginally literate. Also, female workforce participation has declined in recent years to a mere 23 percent, slightly more than one-third the level seen in China and in many Western countries. Industrialization in India, which many economists see as the surest way out of poverty, may have peaked in 2002.

I would be the first to admit my lack of qualifications to be prescriptive about how India should remedy painful realities like these, which easily get lost in all the strategic and alliance conversations. I do have question, though, and I hope that queries like mine can be pushed to the fore both in India and during Western engagement with the country. Actually, two of them more or less suffice.

Why should a country that presents a profile like this be the world’s largest arm importer? India’s leaders, present and future, should be called upon to justify this. That, to me, is as good a measure of democratic health as one can likely find.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/06/21/modi-biden-meeting-china-counter-arms-sales-democracy-economy/