India-US Relations (PSIR Optional)

India’s relationship with the United States has travelled further in three decades than any other bilateral in its diplomatic history, and it has done so while refusing, at every point, the one thing the United States organises its foreign relations around — an alliance. Two large democracies that spent the Cold War on opposite sides of nearly every question now share intelligence, geospatial data, encrypted communications and logistics, and still owe each other nothing in a crisis. Understanding why that combination is deliberate rather than incomplete is the whole of this subject.

The Architecture of an Unfinished Partnership

• The relationship is alignment without alliance. The two possess the operational plumbing of allies — reciprocal base access, secure communications, geospatial intelligence sharing, joint exercises across all three services — with no mutual defence obligation of any kind.
• Three structural drivers explain the convergence, and they are of unequal durability.
  • China is the first. American strategy needs a large Asian power that absorbs Chinese attention without an American guarantee; Indian strategy needs external weight against a neighbour whose economy is roughly five times its own. Indian officials put the derivative benefit plainly: Beijing takes Delhi more seriously because Washington does.
  • Neither side wants the other too close to Beijing, or too far from it. A Sino-American condominium would leave India exposed; a Sino-American war would force a choice India does not want. Washington, equally, wants neither an India–China conflict that drags it in nor an India–China entente that erodes its Indo-Pacific position.
  • A partnership resting on China alone would be neither desirable nor durable, which is why both invest in trade, technology, energy and mobility content that would survive a change in the Chinese variable.
  • Technology and capital are the second: India needs semiconductors, jet engines and the American market; American firms need Indian engineers and an alternative manufacturing base.
  • Human connection is the third and least analysed — a diaspora of millions and roughly 300,000 Indian students in American universities as of January 2025.
• Three structural limits explain why the convergence stops short of alliance: India’s inheritance of decisional freedom, its dependence on Russian defence inventory, and an American political system whose India policy now swings with each administration.
• A fourth phase opened in 2025 — transactional rather than strategic in idiom — in which tariffs, purchase commitments and public claims of mediation sit alongside a ten-year defence framework and a semiconductor coalition. Whether that is turbulence or a new equilibrium is the live question.

The Long Estrangement, 1947–1991

An idea of India before there was a relationship

• The intellectual traffic between the two societies preceded the diplomatic relationship by a century, and it ran in both directions.
  • Henry David Thoreau’s essay on civil disobedience was among the texts that shaped Gandhi’s method in South Africa and India; the debt was repaid when Gandhian non-violence became a template for Martin Luther King Jr. and the American civil rights movement.
  • Swami Vivekananda’s address to the World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893 created the first sustained American audience for Indian philosophy, and the Ghadar Party, founded at San Francisco in 1913, made the United States an early base of anti-colonial organisation.
  • During the Second World War, Franklin Roosevelt pressed Winston Churchill on Indian self-government, seeing an independent India as useful against Japan; American interest evaporated after Quit India in 1942.

Non-alignment and American incomprehension

• The founding disagreement was about the meaning of neutrality in a bipolar world. Containment doctrine divided the world into those who had chosen and those who would be forced to; non-alignment insisted on judging each question on its merits.
• John Foster Dulles, Secretary of State under Eisenhower, publicly characterised neutralism as immoral — a judgement Indians remembered for decades, and one that fixed the American reputation in New Delhi as intolerant of independent judgement.
• Nehru’s American visits of 1949 and 1956 were not successes. He found American officialdom transactional and would not trade alignment for aid; his hosts found him lecturing and ungrateful.
• India’s positions compounded the impression. New Delhi declined to support the American-sponsored resolution branding China the aggressor in Korea, criticised American conduct in Vietnam, and led the Non-Aligned Movement, which Washington read less as neutrality than as a bloc of states voting against it.
• The Soviet Union filled the space this left, financing public-sector heavy industry, supplying defence equipment on rupee terms and using its Security Council veto on Kashmir for India — each deepening the American conviction that India was a Soviet-leaning state.

Pakistan as the organising factor

• The most consequential American choice in South Asia was made in 1954, and it was a choice against India. Pakistan entered SEATO (1954) and CENTO (1955), receiving military aid and a formal security relationship in exchange for basing and alignment against Soviet expansion.
• India’s objection was not the aid but its fungibility. Weapons supplied against a hypothetical Soviet advance were deployed on the Indian frontier in 1965, and American assurances to the contrary were never enforceable.
• Kashmir compounded the estrangement. Washington worked with Britain through the United Nations, supporting the observer mechanism that followed the Karachi Agreement of July 1949 and became UNMOGIP. India came to read any American involvement in Kashmir as favourable to Pakistan.
• There were counter-currents. Washington underwrote the Indus Waters Treaty of September 1960 through the World Bank, reasoning that a divided South Asia would be vulnerable to communism; American aid to India was, in absolute terms, very large.

Food, PL-480 and the politics of dependence

• The most humiliating episode was about grain, not weapons. Monsoon failures in 1965 and 1966 left India unable to feed itself, and American wheat under Public Law 480, sold against rupee payment at concessional prices, kept millions alive.
• The dependence became known in India as a “ship-to-mouth” existence, with imports arriving barely ahead of consumption. Johnson put the shipments on a short tether, releasing them in small tranches to extract Indian concessions on agriculture and, implicitly, on Vietnam.
• The political consequence outlasted the famine. Food used as leverage hardened the Indian conviction that self-sufficiency was a security question — a direct ancestor of the Green Revolution, of India’s defensive posture on agriculture in trade talks, and of the food-security carve-outs it still defends at the World Trade Organization.

1962 and the brief convergence

• The one Cold War moment of near-convergence was the Chinese attack of 1962, when the United States mounted an emergency airlift of arms and sent a carrier group toward the Bay of Bengal.
• The convergence did not survive the war. American assistance came coupled to pressure for a Kashmir settlement through the Nehru–Ayub talks brokered in 1962–63, which India resisted; and Washington’s parallel arming of Pakistan continued.
• The 1965 war removed the ambiguity. Washington suspended long-term PL-480 assistance and arms to both belligerents — which hurt India more, because Pakistan had a Chinese alternative and India did not.

1971: the nadir

• The relationship reached its lowest point during the Bangladesh crisis, and the reason was that India and the United States were pursuing incompatible objectives with the same instrument.
• The Pakistan Army’s campaign in East Pakistan from March 1971 produced mass killing and an immense refugee outflow into eastern India. Casualty estimates are contested — Bangladeshi official figures run to three million, independent estimates from several hundred thousand upward — and the refugee flow is conventionally put at about ten million.
• The American staff in Dhaka dissented in writing. The Blood telegram, sent by Consul General Archer Blood and his colleagues, accused Washington of moral failure. It was ignored, and Blood’s career was ended.
• Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger backed Pakistan for a reason unrelated to South Asia: Pakistan was the secret channel to Beijing, and the opening to China was the period’s central American project. Yahya Khan’s cooperation could not be repaid with abandonment.
• The despatch of Task Force 74, centred on the carrier USS Enterprise, into the Bay of Bengal in December 1971 was read in India as nuclear-capable coercion. It altered nothing, and became the founding memory of Indian distrust of American intentions.
• India had insured itself in advance. The Indo-Soviet Treaty of August 1971, with its consultation clause, deterred escalation and confirmed Washington’s view that India was a Soviet client. Each side validated the other’s worst reading.

Nuclear estrangement and technology denial

• India’s first nuclear test, at Pokhran on 18 May 1974, converted a political estrangement into a legal and technological one.
  • The test triggered the creation of the Nuclear Suppliers Group in 1975, an export-control cartel designed around precisely the Indian case, and later the Missile Technology Control Regime of 1987.
  • The Tarapur dispute followed: having supplied the reactors, the United States stopped supplying enriched fuel under its Nuclear Non-Proliferation Act of 1978, leaving India to source fuel from France and later China — and cementing the view that American commitments are revocable by American legislation.
• The 1980s were a period of managed indifference. Soviet intervention in Afghanistan restored Pakistan to the front rank of American partners and produced a decade of arms transfers, F-16s included, that India read as aimed at itself. The Reagan-era thaw moved slowly and was hedged with end-use conditions.

“Estranged democracies” — and why the phrase is only half right

• Dennis Kux’s phrase, estranged democracies, is the standard description of the period, and it captures a genuine paradox: two states with convergent political values and almost perfectly divergent strategic alignments.
• The phrase carries a hidden claim. “Estrangement” implies an accidental falling-out between parties who should have been close — a failure of understanding, of chemistry, of personal diplomacy.
• The structural reading is more persuasive. The two were not estranged; they wanted incompatible things in the same region. Washington wanted a bloc-aligned South Asia and found Pakistan willing to supply it; New Delhi wanted a South Asia insulated from bloc politics. No goodwill could have reconciled those objectives while the Cold War lasted.

The estrangement ended when the Cold War did. Its cause was never misunderstanding; it was two states wanting incompatible things in the same region.

The Turn, 1991–2008

What actually changed in 1991

Three things happened almost simultaneously, and their coincidence is the reason the relationship moved. The Soviet Union dissolved, removing India’s patron, its arms supplier on concessional terms and its Security Council protector at a stroke. India’s balance-of-payments crisis forced the liberalisation of a closed economy, making it commercially interesting to American firms for the first time. And the Gulf War demonstrated an American military dominance that no state could afford to ignore.

• India’s first accommodations were small and grudging. New Delhi granted refuelling rights to American military aircraft during the Gulf War of 1991, then withdrew them when the matter became domestically controversial — an emblem of the decade.
• Military-to-military contact began before political warmth did. The Kicklighter proposals of 1991, from Lieutenant General Claude Kicklighter of the US Army’s Pacific component, proposed service-to-service contacts across land, sea and air — consultative mechanisms, joint training, a defence-official dialogue. They are the origin of everything that followed.
  • The first Malabar naval exercise followed in 1992.
  • The Agreed Minute on Defence Relations of 1995 institutionalised the contact, creating the Defence Policy Group at defence-secretary level and a Joint Technology Group.
• The obstacles remained real. Washington pressed India to sign the NPT and the CTBT, and in 1994 pressured Russia into cancelling a cryogenic rocket-engine transfer to ISRO — setting the Indian cryogenic programme back by years, and still cited as evidence of American willingness to cap Indian capability.

Pokhran II, sanctions and the dialogue that followed

• India’s nuclear tests of May 1998, conducted under Operation Shakti, produced the most severe rupture of the post-Cold War period — and, paradoxically, the process that ended the estrangement.
  • The United States imposed comprehensive sanctions under the Glenn Amendment, targeting defence and scientific organisations, laboratories and named scientists. Japan, Canada and Australia followed.
  • Vajpayee’s letter to Clinton citing China as the security rationale was leaked, which angered Beijing without softening Washington.
• The response was a negotiation, not a punishment, which is the decisive fact. Between 1998 and 2000, Strobe Talbott and Jaswant Singh held fourteen rounds of talks across three continents — the most sustained strategic dialogue the two had ever conducted.
  • India signed neither treaty and the United States obtained no rollback. What emerged was mutual comprehension of each other’s constraints, and an American conclusion that India’s nuclear status was a fact to be managed, not reversed.
• Kargil, in 1999, was the test. The Clinton administration took an explicitly pro-India position, pressing Nawaz Sharif at Washington on 4 July 1999 to withdraw to the Line of Control — the first time the United States publicly assigned responsibility to Pakistan in a subcontinental crisis.
• President Clinton’s visit of March 2000 was the first by an American President in twenty-two years. It produced a joint Vision Statement, set up the dialogues that structured the next decade, and made the relationship politically respectable. Vajpayee’s formulation of the two as “natural allies in the twenty-first century” dates from this period.

The Bush years and de-hyphenation

• The George W. Bush administration made the most consequential conceptual shift since 1954: it de-hyphenated India from Pakistan, treating India on its own terms as a rising power rather than as one half of a subcontinental problem.
  • The reasoning was explicit. A strong India, not a weak one, served American interests, because only a strong India could balance China — the intellectual foundation of everything since, and the reason the American investment in Indian capability has survived four administrations.
• The post-9/11 war on terrorism supplied convergence of a different kind in counter-terrorism intelligence — while restoring Pakistan to indispensability as a supply route into Afghanistan, which capped how far it could run.
• The institutional sequence moved quickly. The Next Steps in Strategic Partnership of January 2004 opened civil nuclear, civil space, high technology and missile defence. Relief coordination after the 2004 tsunami, with Japan and Australia, produced the core group that was the Quad’s functional precursor.

The civil nuclear agreement: the hinge of the relationship

• The nuclear deal converted a warming relationship into a strategic one. It required the United States to change its own law and to persuade a forty-five-member cartel to change its rules, for a state that had refused to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
• The sequence is worth setting out precisely.
  • 18 July 2005 — the Bush–Manmohan Singh joint statement: the United States would seek full civil nuclear cooperation; India would separate civil from military facilities, place the civil ones under IAEA safeguards, and maintain its testing moratorium.
  • March 2006 — the separation plan, identifying fourteen of twenty-two reactors for safeguards.
  • December 2006 — the Henry J. Hyde United States–India Peaceful Atomic Energy Cooperation Act, which carved out an India-specific exemption from the requirements of the US Atomic Energy Act of 1954.
  • August 2007 — the bilateral 123 Agreement, the operative instrument, named for Section 123 of the American statute.
  • 1 August 2008 — the India-specific IAEA safeguards agreement approved.
  • 6 September 2008 — the Nuclear Suppliers Group waiver, granted by consensus after strenuous American lobbying, permitting nuclear commerce with a non-NPT state. It ended thirty-four years of technology denial begun by Pokhran I.
• What the deal delivered is more modest than its symbolism. Nuclear power is still a small share of Indian capacity; the Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage Act of 2010, with its supplier-liability provision in Section 17(b), deterred American vendors; no American-built reactor has been completed.
  • The real product was political — it ended India’s nuclear untouchability.
• The secondary consequences were substantial. India’s admission to the Missile Technology Control Regime (2016), the Wassenaar Arrangement (2017) and the Australia Group (2018) followed from it; NSG membership itself remains blocked, principally by China.

Parliament and the 123 Agreement

The nuclear deal is the most instructive case in modern Indian foreign policy of a legislature shaping an executive negotiation, and it is worth setting out carefully because Indian practice ordinarily gives Parliament no formal role in treaty-making at all.

• India’s constitutional position is that treaty-making is an executive function. Article 253 lets Parliament legislate to implement treaties and Union List Entry 14 places them in Union competence, but no provision requires ratification. The government could in principle have concluded the 123 Agreement without a vote.
• Parliament nonetheless became the decisive actor, through politics rather than law. The United Progressive Alliance government depended on outside support from the Left parties, whose objection was strategic: they read the agreement as the instrument of India’s absorption into an American alliance system.
• The mechanisms Parliament used are worth naming, because they show how a legislature without formal treaty power still constrains an executive.
  • Sustained parliamentary debate in both Houses, in which the government was compelled to defend the agreement clause by clause.
  • The commitment to bring the text before Parliament before operationalisation, which the government gave under pressure and which delayed signature.
  • The UPA–Left Coordination Committee on the nuclear deal, an extra-constitutional body created in 2007 purely to satisfy the Left — an unusual instance of a coalition partner obtaining an institutional veto over a foreign-policy negotiation.
  • The confidence motion of 22 July 2008, after the Left withdrew support and amid cash-for-votes allegations that were themselves investigated. The agreement proceeded only because the government won a confidence vote on it.
• The substantive parliamentary objections were three, and they were not frivolous.
  • That the Hyde Act bound India through American domestic law — its provisions on testing, annual presidential certification and Indian alignment with American policy on Iran — although the 123 Agreement was the operative bilateral instrument.
  • That it compromised deterrent credibility by making future testing prohibitively costly.
  • That fuel-supply assurances were unenforceable, given the Tarapur precedent.
• The episode’s significance is constitutional. On a foreign-policy question of sufficient salience, an Indian government must command a parliamentary majority for it, whatever the formal position on treaty-making — which is why later governments signed the foundational defence agreements quietly, as technical instruments, and never put them to a vote.

From the Asia pivot to the “hesitations of history”, 2009–2020

• The Obama period supplied rhetoric ahead of delivery. Addressing the Indian Parliament in November 2010, Obama endorsed India’s candidature for a permanent Security Council seat and called the partnership one of the defining relationships of the century; the Asia pivot of 2011 gave India a place in American regional strategy.
  • The Khobragade consular episode of December 2013 was the period’s low point.
• The Modi period converted rhetoric into machinery. Obama invited Modi to Washington in 2014 despite the visa denial of the preceding decade, and became the first American President at the Republic Day parade, January 2015, when the two issued the vision statement “Chalein Saath Saath” and the Joint Strategic Vision for the Asia-Pacific and Indian Ocean Region.
  • Addressing the US Congress in June 2016, Modi said the two had overcome the “hesitations of history” — the phrase that has organised Indian official description ever since.
• The first Trump administration pushed in two directions at once, hardening on trade, immigration and education while deepening defence and intelligence cooperation.
  • Its 2017 South Asia Strategy acknowledged India’s role in Afghanistan and criticised Pakistan; the National Security Strategy of the same year named India a leading global power. The Asia Reassurance Initiative Act of December 2018 placed India in a second tier of strategic partners below the treaty allies.
  • The Blue Dot Network of November 2019, an American, Japanese and Australian scheme certifying infrastructure projects for transparency and sustainability, was a standards-based answer to the Belt and Road.
  • “Howdy Modi” in Houston, September 2019 and “Namaste Trump” at Ahmedabad, February 2020 produced the label Comprehensive Global Strategic Partnership, and in October 2020 India was invited to a Five Eyes meeting.

The Defence and Strategic Architecture

The institutional ladder

• Defence cooperation is the densest strand of the relationship and the one with the most machinery attached to it, built up in layers over three decades rather than created at once.
  • The 2+2 Ministerial Dialogue (from 2018) sits at the apex, pairing the External Affairs and Defence Ministers with the Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense. The fourth round met in Washington in April 2022, the fifth in New Delhi in November 2023.
  • The Defence Policy Group, created by the 1995 Agreed Minute, is the apex official-level mechanism between the two defence ministries; its seventeenth meeting was held in Washington in May 2023.
  • The Joint Technology Group (1995) links the two defence research establishments; its twenty-fourth plenary was hosted by the DRDO in New Delhi on 3–4 February 2026.
  • Below these sit the Defence Procurement and Production Group, the Maritime Security Dialogue and the Counter-Terrorism Joint Working Group, whose twenty-first meeting was held in New Delhi on 6 December 2025. More than fifty bilateral dialogue mechanisms now exist — a density that is itself insurance against political turbulence.
• The Defence Trade and Technology Initiative, launched in 2012, was intended to move the relationship beyond the buyer–seller dynamic into co-development and co-production, and its record is the clearest evidence of the relationship’s limits.
  • Almost none reached production, consumed by American export controls, Indian offset requirements and procedural mismatch. INDUS-X, launched in June 2023, attempts the same objective through the two defence start-up ecosystems rather than through governments.

The four foundational agreements

The United States concludes a standard set of agreements with defence partners; they are technical instruments, not alliances, and their purpose is to make cooperation legally and physically possible. India signed all four across eighteen years, and the pace of signature is itself a measure of how far Indian comfort travelled.

Agreement	Signed	What it actually does
GSOMIA — General Security of Military Information Agreement	2002	Framework for exchanging classified military information and protecting the other’s classified material; the enabling condition for everything else
LEMOA — Logistics Exchange Memorandum of Agreement	29 August 2016	Reciprocal access to each other’s land, air and naval facilities for refuelling, replenishment, spares and repair, on a reimbursable basis; no basing rights and no obligation to grant access in any given case
COMCASA — Communications Compatibility and Security Agreement	September 2018	Permits transfer of encrypted, secure communications equipment so that Indian and American platforms can talk to each other; without it, American-origin aircraft sold to India arrive with their secure communications suites removed
BECA — Basic Exchange and Cooperation Agreement	October 2020	Sharing of geospatial intelligence — topographical, nautical, aeronautical data, maps and satellite imagery — with the US National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency; materially improves the accuracy of missiles, armed drones and automated navigation

• Two further instruments complete the set. The Industrial Security Agreement of 2019 extends classified-information protection to private defence firms, and the Security of Supply Arrangement of 2024 gives each country priority access to the other’s defence industrial base in an emergency.
• BECA is the most often misdescribed. It gives India not American satellites but American geospatial products and positioning accuracy. In targeting, the gap between commercial-grade and military-grade data is the gap between a near-miss and a hit — visible along the Line of Actual Control after 2020.
• What the four agreements collectively achieve is interoperability without obligation. They make joint operations possible. They do not make joint operations required. That distinction is the whole architecture of the relationship in miniature.

Interoperability without obligation is not an unfinished alliance. It is a finished design, and India built it deliberately.

The framework agreements and the October 2025 renewal

• The strategic relationship rests on a decadal framework document rather than a treaty, which is itself revealing.
  • The New Framework for the US–India Defense Relationship was signed in 2005 for ten years, establishing the architecture of dialogues, exercises and technology cooperation.
  • Renewed for ten years in June 2015, alongside the Joint Strategic Vision for the Asia-Pacific and Indian Ocean Region — the first time India publicly associated itself with an American regional strategic document.
  • A new ten-year framework for the Major Defence Partnership was signed on 31 October 2025 at Kuala Lumpur by Rajnath Singh and Pete Hegseth, on the margins of the ASEAN Defence Ministers’ Meeting-Plus. Covering 2025–2035, it commits both to joint research and development, defence-industrial cooperation, information sharing and annual exercises.
• The timing of the October 2025 signature matters. It was concluded while punitive American tariffs of 50% were in force — evidence that the defence and trade tracks had decoupled, and that the security relationship had acquired momentum independent of the political weather.
• Two status designations sit alongside them. Major Defence Partner (2016), a category created for India alone and given statutory force by the National Defense Authorization Act for 2017; and Strategic Trade Authorization Tier 1 (30 July 2018), the licence-free category otherwise reserved for NATO members, Japan, South Korea and Australia.

Procurement: what India has actually bought

• Indian procurement from the United States has crossed $20 billion since 2008, from a base of about $500 million in all preceding years combined. The transformation is real, but its composition tells a specific story.

Platform	Role	Note
C-17 Globemaster III	Strategic airlift	Used extensively for the 2020 Ladakh deployment
C-130J Super Hercules	Tactical airlift, special operations	Operates from high-altitude strips
P-8I Poseidon	Maritime patrol and anti-submarine warfare	Also used for overland reconnaissance along the LAC
AH-64E Apache	Attack helicopter	Anti-armour role in the western sector
CH-47F Chinook	Heavy-lift helicopter	Artillery and equipment movement in the mountains
MH-60R Seahawk	Naval multi-role helicopter	Fills a long-standing Indian Navy gap
M777 ultra-light howitzer	Mountain artillery	Helicopter-transportable; assembled in India
MQ-9B SeaGuardian / SkyGuardian	Armed high-endurance UAV	31 aircraft, about $3.5 billion, signed October 2024
GE F414-INS6 engine	Fighter propulsion	For Tejas Mk2 and the AMCA; agreement reached on close to 80% technology transfer, the deepest propulsion transfer the United States has offered India

• The pattern is unmistakable. India has bought enablers — transport, surveillance, maritime patrol, artillery — and almost no combat aircraft or major warships. Fighters and submarines have come from Russia and France; the strike core of the Indian order of battle remains non-American.
• This is Indian choice and American constraint. India resists the end-use monitoring and inspection rights American sales carry; the United States distinguishes transfers to allies from transfers to non-allies, and India sits on the wrong side of the line. The F414 arrangement breaches the pattern.
• The comparative picture keeps this in proportion. Across 2018–22 Russia supplied about 45% of Indian arms imports, France 29% and the United States 11%, down from a Russian 64% in the preceding period. The American share is smaller than the political weight of the relationship suggests.

Exercises

• India exercises more with the United States than with any other country, and the exercises have grown in scale, complexity and geographic ambition.
  • Yudh Abhyas (army), running since 2004; the twenty-first edition was held in Alaska in September 2025, and editions have deliberately been staged at high altitude on both sides.
  • Vajra Prahar (special forces), Cope India (air forces, since 2004), Tiger Triumph (tri-service humanitarian assistance and amphibious, since 2019), and Sangam (naval special warfare).
  • Malabar, begun as an India–US naval exercise in 1992, which took Japan as a permanent participant in 2015 and Australia in 2020. Malabar is a naval exercise and not the Quad, a distinction worth holding firmly.
  • Multilateral participation in Red Flag (air combat) and RIMPAC (the largest naval exercise in the world, which India joined in 2016).

Why India has not become an ally

• The proposition that the two are strong enough strategic partners that they need not become formal allies is India’s own settled position, and the case for it is substantive rather than sentimental.
• The arrangements already deliver operationally what an alliance would — logistics access, secure communications, geospatial intelligence, industrial priority in a crisis, exercises, a decadal framework. What is absent is the guarantee, and the guarantee is what India does not want to give.
• Five reasons an alliance would cost India more than it gained.
  • It would forfeit decisional freedom, which is the organising objective of Indian foreign policy and the accumulated inheritance of non-alignment. An ally is consulted; it is not free.
  • It would commit India to contingencies not its own — most obviously Taiwan, where India has no stake worth a war with China and a very large stake in not having one.
  • It would foreclose the Russian and Iranian relationships, on which Indian defence inventory and Indian energy and connectivity respectively depend.
  • It would import American volatility. The 2025 tariff episode showed how fast American policy can move; a state just tariffed at 50% will not bet its security on an American guarantee.
  • It would divide Indian domestic opinion across the political spectrum, in a way no Indian government would choose.
• An alliance would cost the United States too. An allied India becomes a claimant on American guarantees rather than an independent balancer, confirms Chinese narratives about containment, and is less useful in Southeast Asia than an India whose autonomy is credible.
• The honest limit must be stated. Neither party is obliged to help the other. In the eastern Ladakh crisis of 2020, American support was intelligence, cold-weather equipment and diplomatic backing — real, but not a commitment. The design has never met a contingency requiring one.

Technology: The New Centre of Gravity

• Technology has displaced defence procurement as the most dynamic strand of the relationship, and the vehicles have changed name three times in four years, which obscures a real continuity of purpose.
  • iCET — the Initiative on Critical and Emerging Technology — was announced in May 2022 and launched in January 2023, run between the two National Security Advisers rather than trade ministries. Its pillars: the innovation ecosystem, defence technology, resilient semiconductor supply chains, space, STEM talent and next-generation telecommunications.
  • TRUST — Transforming the Relationship Utilizing Strategic Technology — succeeded it, announced on 13 February 2025, adding critical minerals, biotechnology and an AI Infrastructure Roadmap for large-scale computing capacity in India.
  • COMPACT — Catalyzing Opportunities for Military Partnership, Accelerated Commerce and Technology — announced at the same meeting, is the umbrella under which the defence, trade and technology tracks were bundled together.
  • ASIA — the Autonomous Systems Industry Alliance — extends this into unmanned and autonomous platforms.
• The naming churn is itself a criticism. Rebranding every eighteen months signals novelty while the substance stays much the same, and each renaming resets the clock on accountability for delivery.
• The substantive gains are nonetheless real.
  • Semiconductors: American design and equipment firms are central to India’s fabrication and assembly-testing plans, and the supply-chain diversification logic is mutual rather than charitable.
  • Critical minerals: a Strategic Mineral Recovery initiative from February 2025 and a Critical Minerals Ministerial on 3–4 February 2026 — driven by China’s control of roughly 70% of global processing and over 90% of production of several key minerals.
  • Pax Silica: India signed the Pax Silica Declaration in February 2026 at the AI Impact Summit in New Delhi, the twelfth signatory to an American-led coalition covering the whole artificial-intelligence stack. It is the most consequential technology commitment India has made to an American-led arrangement, and not a risk-free one — the architecture is hub-and-spoke.
• Space is the most visible and least contested strand.
  • NISAR, the NASA–ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar mission, launched on 30 July 2025 from Sriharikota — an American L-band and an Indian S-band radar on an Indian bus and launcher.
  • Group Captain Shubhanshu Shukla flew as pilot on Axiom-4, launched 25 June 2025 and returned 15 July 2025, the first Indian in orbit since 1984 and a direct input into the Gaganyaan programme.
  • India signed the Artemis Accords in June 2023, and a US Space Trade Mission visited India in February 2026 — the commercial layer arriving behind the governmental one.

The Economic Relationship

Trade: the figures and their basis

Ranks and totals in this relationship are quoted on two incompatible bases — the American calendar year and the Indian financial year — and much confusion follows from mixing them. The figures below state which is which.

Measure	Basis	Figure
Total goods and services trade	Calendar year 2024	about $210 billion
US goods exports to India / imports from India	CY2024	$41.8bn / $87.4bn — goods deficit $45.7bn
US services exports to India / imports from India	CY2024	$40.3bn / $40.7bn — services deficit only $0.5bn
India’s exports to the US	FY2025-26	$87.3 billion, up 0.92%
India’s imports from the US	FY2025-26	$52.9 billion, up 15.95%
India’s trade surplus with the US	FY2025-26	$34.4 billion, down from $40.89 billion in FY2024-25
Cumulative US FDI into India	April 2000 – September 2025	$77.27 billion, about 10% of India’s total inward FDI

• The near-balance in services is the most counter-intuitive number here. Indian commentary treats services as the reliable surplus; on the American calendar-year measure the flows are almost equal, because American education, travel and financial services sold to India roughly match Indian software exports to America.
• China displaced the United States as India’s largest trading partner in FY2025-26, ending a four-year American run — a function of Indian imports from China rather than exports to it, and a complication for the claim that Washington is India’s economically decisive partner.
• The composition is stable and asymmetric. India sells textiles, polished diamonds, generic pharmaceuticals, petroleum products, machinery and steel; it buys crude, LNG, coking coal, rough diamonds, aircraft and, increasingly, GPUs and data-centre hardware.
• The pharmaceutical relationship is the most under-stated element. Indian firms supply roughly 47% of all generic prescriptions dispensed in the United States, and hold the largest concentration of US FDA-approved plants outside America. This is a dependence running from the United States to India, and there are very few of those.
• Information technology is the mirror-image dependence. About 60% of Indian IT industry revenue comes from the American market, which makes American immigration policy, data-localisation disputes and visa rules matters of direct Indian commercial interest rather than diplomatic irritants.
• Investment runs both ways and the second direction is neglected. American FDI was India’s third-largest source in FY2024-25 ($5.45bn, 11%) and second-largest in April–September FY2025-26 ($6.6bn, 19%); Indian firms have invested over $40 billion in the United States and support several hundred thousand American jobs.

The tariff escalation and the interim agreement

• Between April 2025 and February 2026 the economic relationship went through the sharpest coercive episode in its post-Cold War history, and the sequence must be held precisely.

Date	Development
April 2025	Vice President J.D. Vance visits India; Terms of Reference for a bilateral trade agreement announced
7 August 2025	25% reciprocal tariff on Indian goods takes effect
27 August 2025	A further 25% secondary tariff, expressly penalising Indian purchases of Russian crude, is stacked on top — a combined 50%, among the highest rates applied to any American partner
31 October 2025	The ten-year defence framework is signed at Kuala Lumpur, with the tariffs still in force
2 February 2026	The interim trade agreement is announced
6–7 February 2026	Joint statement issued; the reciprocal tariff falls from 25% to 18% and the additional 25% Russian-oil tariff is removed

• What India obtained: the reciprocal rate cut to 18%; removal of the secondary tariff; on completion, removal of tariffs on generic pharmaceuticals, gems and diamonds, and aircraft parts; and preferential quota access for automotive components.
• What India conceded: elimination or reduction of tariffs on all American industrial goods and a range of food and agricultural products, named down to sorghum, tree nuts, soybean oil and spirits; commitments on medical devices, on import licensing for ICT goods, on accepting American standards in identified sectors within six months, and on bilateral digital trade rules.
• The headline purchase commitment should be read with care. The joint statement records that India “intends to purchase” over $500 billion of American energy, aircraft, precious metals, technology products and coking coal over five years — against annual Indian goods imports from America of well under $60 billion.
  • No plausible growth path supports a multiple of that size, and the American fact sheet’s wording was amended from “committed to” to “intends to”.
• This is an interim arrangement, not a trade agreement. A full Bilateral Trade Agreement remains to be negotiated, and the hardest questions — agricultural market access, dairy, digital rules, data localisation, intellectual property — are deferred, not resolved.

The disputed Russian-oil pledge

• The most contested element of the February 2026 understanding is whether India agreed to stop buying Russian crude. The two governments have described the same agreement differently, and neither has conceded.
  • The White House fact sheet states that the additional 25% tariff was removed “in recognition of India’s commitment to stop purchasing Russian Federation oil.”
  • It does not appear in the joint statement, which is the jointly negotiated text. India has neither confirmed nor denied it.
  • On 7 March 2026 India’s Press Information Bureau stated that “India has never depended on permission from any country to buy Russian oil”, adding that imports had continued through February 2026 and that Russia remained India’s largest crude supplier.
• Both accounts survive because each serves its author. Washington needs the tariff reversal to look like a concession extracted; New Delhi needs to have conceded nothing on energy sovereignty. The gap is a designed ambiguity, not a misunderstanding.
• The underlying commercial movement is real but partial. Indian purchases of Russian crude fell to multi-year lows under sanctions pressure on Rosneft and Lukoil from late 2025, and recovered partially thereafter. Volumes moved; the stated principle did not.

Washington describes a concession. New Delhi denies one. The tariff came off regardless, which tells you what each side actually needed.

Mobility, visas and the H-1B question

• Immigration touches the largest number of individual lives, and it is where American policy has been least stable.
  • Indian nationals receive the large majority of H-1B specialty-occupation visas each year, and the employment-based green-card backlog for Indian applicants runs to decades because of the 7% per-country ceiling.
  • A $100,000 fee on new H-1B petitions was imposed by presidential proclamation in September 2025. It was struck down on 8 June 2026 by the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts in California v. Trump as an unlawful tax; the ruling was stayed on 18 June 2026 pending appeal, so the fee is still collected.

The older economic frictions

• India’s removal from the Generalized System of Preferences in June 2019 ended duty-free treatment for a range of exports; India had been the largest GSP beneficiary, with about $6.3 billion entering duty-free in 2018, and answered with retaliatory tariffs.
• Intellectual property is a structural disagreement rather than a dispute. India remains on the Priority Watch List of the American Special 301 report; the American complaint is about patents, trade secrets and enforcement, the Indian position rests on Section 3(d) of the Patents Act. This is a value conflict, not a misunderstanding.
• At the World Trade Organization the two are opposed — on agricultural support and public stockholding for food security, on fisheries subsidies, on the e-commerce moratorium, and on India’s self-designation as a developing country. Each has also litigated the other’s tariffs directly.

The Indian Diaspora as a Political Instrument

• The Indian-American community is the most cited soft asset in the relationship and the one whose influence is most often overstated. The honest treatment sets out what it has demonstrably done and what it has not.
• Its scale and profile are exceptional. About 5.4 million people of Indian origin live in the United States, including roughly 2.07 million non-resident Indians — the third-largest Asian-origin group, among the best-educated by census measures, and a substantial source of remittances to India.
• Its existence is a policy artefact. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 abolished national-origin quotas and prioritised skills and family reunification, opening the door to the professional migration that followed. The community’s shape was set by an American statute, not by Indian diplomacy.
• Its institutional infrastructure is dense: advocacy organisations and political action committees, professional bodies of physicians and hoteliers, and a legislative anchor in the Congressional Caucus on India and Indian Americans, founded in 1993 and once the largest country caucus in the House, with a Senate India Caucus from 2004.
• Its representational high-water mark is recent. Six members of Indian origin sat in the US Congress from 2025, and Indian-origin appointees have held senior executive and cabinet-rank positions under both parties.
• Two episodes are usually offered as evidence of influence.
  • Lobbying to lift the post-1998 sanctions, in which Indian-American organisations were visibly active in congressional advocacy.
  • The nuclear-deal campaign of 2005–08, where the community’s mobilisation on Capitol Hill is generally credited with helping secure the Hyde Act’s passage.
• The counter-argument deserves equal weight, and the volumes rarely give it.
  • Correlation is not causation. Congress passed the Hyde Act because the Bush administration invested heavily in it and because the strategic case for India had already been made; diaspora advocacy amplified an existing direction rather than creating one.
  • The community is not politically homogeneous and has never voted or lobbied as a bloc on Indian questions. Its congressional representatives have been among the sharpest critics of Indian domestic policy on religious freedom and civil liberties.
  • Influence now cuts both ways. Diaspora-linked constituencies have driven congressional attention to human-rights questions in India, and the Khalistan question inside the North American Sikh diaspora has generated the single most damaging security episode in the relationship.
  • The community’s interests and India’s are not identical. On immigration, on visa liberalisation and on green-card backlogs the diaspora lobbies for itself, and those campaigns have produced less than the community’s economic weight would predict.
• The diaspora is an enabling condition rather than a driver. It makes India legible in American politics, supplies expertise and access, and lowers the cost of Indian advocacy. It has not, on any occasion, moved American policy against a settled American strategic preference.

“When two countries have that deep human bonding, that’s a completely different ballgame. That is today the defining characteristic of our relationship.”

— S. Jaishankar

Frictions and Divergences

Russia, CAATSA and the American instrument

• India’s Russian relationship has been the most persistent American objection to the partnership, and the American instrument for expressing it has been legislative rather than diplomatic.
• The Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act of 2017 requires sanctions on states making significant transactions with the Russian defence and intelligence sectors. India’s contracting of five S-400 squadrons in October 2018 fell squarely inside it.
  • CAATSA sanctions were never imposed on India. Successive administrations declined to use the discretion the statute allows, and Congress declined to force the issue, because sanctioning India would have defeated the strategic purpose of the relationship.
  • The 2025 secondary tariff applied CAATSA’s logic through trade law — a penalty on Indian purchases of Russian energy rather than Russian arms, imposed by proclamation rather than by statute, and reversed by negotiation in February 2026.
  • Congressional pressure outlived the settlement. The Sanctioning Russia Act passed the United States Senate in August 2026, authorising tariffs of up to 100% on the largest purchasers of Russian energy with a presidential waiver, and awaits House action. The instrument changed; the pressure did not.
• The Indian answer has been consistent across governments: an inventory built over five decades cannot be replaced quickly; a developing economy cannot absorb an energy shock for a war it is not part of; and pushing Russia wholly into China’s orbit serves neither side.
  • The energy relationship and India’s Ukraine position are treated with the subject of India–Russia relations.

Iran, Chabahar and the sanctions problem

• Iran is the second divergence. India’s interests are the diversification of crude sourcing, land access to Afghanistan and Central Asia bypassing Pakistan, and the International North–South Transport Corridor.
• Chabahar is the concrete case. India’s Shahid Beheshti terminal has run for two decades through American sanctions waivers granted and withdrawn as Washington’s Iran position shifted. It rests on an exemption no Indian planner can rely on.

Pakistan and the Af-Pak policy

• The Af-Pak framework of March 2009 revived the oldest Indian objection to American South Asia policy in a new form. India’s responses were of three kinds.
  • Objection to hyphenation. The original conception was a regional framework covering Afghanistan, Pakistan and India, with Kashmir linked to Pakistani conduct in Afghanistan. India lobbied the incoming administration successfully to keep itself and Kashmir out of Richard Holbrooke’s mandate, titled Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan.
  • Objection to the aid architecture. The Enhanced Partnership with Pakistan Act of 2009, the Kerry–Lugar–Berman Act, authorised $7.5 billion of non-military assistance over five years. India objected that aid is fungible, that certification conditions were unenforceable, and that the army would be strengthened whatever the label on the money.
  • Objection to reconciliation with the “good Taliban”. India argued that distinguishing reconcilable from irreconcilable insurgents would restore Pakistani strategic depth in Afghanistan and place at risk India’s substantial development investment there — the Salma dam, the Zaranj–Delaram highway, the Afghan parliament building.
• Indian objections were vindicated by events. Withdrawal timelines, the Doha agreement of February 2020 negotiated with the Taliban without the Afghan government or India present, and the collapse of August 2021 delivered what India had warned of. India was neither consulted nor protected.

Operation Sindoor and the mediation claim

• The most damaging recent friction concerned not policy but narrative. After the Pahalgam terrorist attack of 22 April 2025, India conducted Operation Sindoor with strikes on 7 May; hostilities ceased on 10 May 2025.
• Trump repeatedly claimed to have brokered the ceasefire, and to have used trade access as leverage to obtain it; he also offered repeatedly to mediate on Kashmir.
• India rejected both claims flatly and consistently, restating the position held since the Simla Agreement of 1972 that all questions with Pakistan are bilateral and that no third party has a role in Kashmir.
• The Indian military account is explicit. General Anil Chauhan, the Chief of Defence Staff, has said publicly that the cessation was arranged directly between the two Directors General of Military Operations.

“So the ceasefire is decided between two DGMOs. And that’s it. I don’t see the role of anyone else.”

— General Anil Chauhan

• Why this matters beyond the dispute: mediation on Kashmir touches the constitutive Indian position on sovereignty, and re-hyphenation is the American habit Indian diplomacy spent twenty years dismantling. A single set of remarks undid much goodwill — evidence of how much rests on tone rather than structure.

Climate, values and the security of the relationship’s edges

• On climate the disagreement is about justice, not science. India argues from historic responsibility, per capita rather than aggregate emissions and common but differentiated responsibilities; the United States leads the position that current emitters must act regardless of past shares.
  • Clean-energy cooperation — the Strategic Clean Energy Partnership, American accession to the International Solar Alliance in 2021, the Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure — coexists with the unresolved argument about who pays.
• American commentary on Indian domestic matters is an irritant of a different order.
  • The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom has repeatedly recommended designating India a Country of Particular Concern; the State Department has never adopted the recommendation. India rejects the exercise as interference, and the gap between an independent commission and executive policy is a distinction Indian commentary often misses.
• The Pannun case is the sharpest sovereignty episode of the period. American prosecutors alleged a 2023 murder-for-hire plot against Gurpatwant Singh Pannun on American soil, directed by an Indian intelligence officer.
  • Nikhil Gupta pleaded guilty on 14 February 2026; Vikash Yadav, a former official, was indicted in October 2024. India set up a high-level enquiry committee and denies that any such operation reflects policy.
• The contrast with Canada’s handling of the Nijjar allegation is instructive. Washington chose prosecution and private pressure over public accusation, which is why the American relationship absorbed the same category of allegation that ruptured the Canadian one.

Diego Garcia and the Indian Ocean

• Diego Garcia is where the American presence became permanent, and where India’s oldest objection to great-power basing was first tested.
• The facts of its creation are colonial. In 1965 Britain detached the Chagos Archipelago from Mauritius, three years before Mauritian independence, creating the British Indian Ocean Territory and making the islands available to the United States under a 1966 exchange of notes.
  • The Chagossian population was forcibly removed between 1968 and 1973, and the base became America’s principal power-projection node between Africa and the Pacific.
• India’s historical position was principled objection. New Delhi backed the Indian Ocean Zone of Peace proposal, adopted by the General Assembly in 1971, which sought the removal of great-power bases and was aimed at the American and Soviet presence alike. It was aspirational and it failed.
• The legal position changed in 2019. The International Court of Justice, in its advisory opinion of 25 February 2019, held the detachment unlawful and Britain obliged to end its administration as rapidly as possible. The General Assembly endorsed the opinion in May 2019 by 116 votes to 6, India voting in favour.
• The dispute was settled by agreement in 2025. Under the UK–Mauritius treaty of 22 May 2025, sovereignty over the archipelago passes to Mauritius while Britain retains Diego Garcia on a 99-year lease, against annual payments. India welcomed the settlement as decolonisation completed consistently with international law.
• India’s position is two-sided, and worth stating without embarrassment. New Delhi backed Mauritian sovereignty on legal grounds, and is equally content for the American base to continue, because Diego Garcia counterweights a Chinese naval presence India cannot yet balance alone. The Zone of Peace was abandoned in practice.

The Scholarly Debate

• The academic literature is sharply divided, and the standard treatment is too celebratory. Both the optimistic and the sceptical cases deserve their strongest form.

The case for convergence

• C. Raja Mohan is the most influential Indian advocate, and his case is structural rather than sentimental. He reads Indian foreign policy through three concentric circles — the neighbourhood, the extended Asian and Indian Ocean space, and the global stage — and argues that American partnership is what lets India operate in the second and third.
  • India spent decades wanting a multipolar world and must now learn the harder art of living in one.

“The India-US defence compact, it should be clear, is not an effort to contain Beijing. China is too large and powerful to be boxed in.”

— C. Raja Mohan

• Harsh V. Pant frames the convergence as an American necessity as much as an Indian opportunity: under resource constraint, the United States needs partners like India to shore up its credibility in the Indo-Pacific against Chinese pressure — which gives India leverage it has not historically enjoyed.
• S. Jaishankar describes the change as one of mode rather than degree — the two once dealt with each other and now work with each other — and rests its durability on human and institutional density rather than strategic calculation alone.
• Tanvi Madan supplies the historical correction, showing that China has been a variable in India–US relations since the 1950s rather than a recent discovery, and that the relationship has run in cycles keyed to how each capital assessed Beijing.

The sceptical case

• Ashley Tellis is the most formidable critic, and his argument has hardened over time. The United States, he contends, has been buying an alliance India will not sell — investing in Indian capability while New Delhi keeps full freedom of action.
  • He argues further that India will remain the weakest of the great powers, unable to close the gap with a Chinese economy close to five times its size.

“The current Indian strategy of seeking continued U.S. support for its own rise while simultaneously attempting to promote a multipolarity that limits American power is not merely counterproductive but unwise.”

— Ashley Tellis

• Robert Boggs puts the same point more bluntly, arguing that American policy is built on an inflated estimate of both Indian enthusiasm and Indian utility.

“The US overestimates both India’s desire to improve the relationship and the benefits doing so would bring.”

— Robert Boggs

• Happymon Jacob cautions against Indian susceptibility to American flattery, arguing that a chaotic international order rewards keeping options open and that India should not permit Washington to define the range of choices available to it.
• Rakesh Sood locates the difficulty in American categories rather than in Indian conduct: the United States has historically sorted states into allies and adversaries, and India fits neither, which makes the relationship structurally hard for Washington to operate.
• Shivshankar Menon supplies the constraint that limits how far any of this can go: India’s strategic autonomy is bounded by material asymmetry, and a state that must manage a far larger neighbour on its own frontier cannot afford commitments that reduce its room for manoeuvre.
• Daniel Markey and Sumit Ganguly hold the middle ground: expectations on both sides have consistently outrun capacity — American expectations of Indian alignment, Indian expectations of American technology transfer — so periodic disappointment is built into the design rather than a symptom of failure.
• The condition of American power is India’s environment, not India’s question. Whether the United States is a hyperpower in Hubert Védrine’s term, a predominant rather than dominant power in Joseph Nye’s, or a state in relative decline, is not New Delhi’s to settle.
  • What matters is that American power is contested — which is what makes India valuable to Washington.

Assessment

The achievement is real: two states that spent forty years on opposite sides of the central conflict of the age now share the most sensitive categories of military information, and India conceded no element of its formal autonomy to get there — an outcome produced by patient institutional construction rather than by any single breakthrough.

• Its three genuine strengths are the density of institutional linkage, which survives turbulence; the convergence on China, which no plausible political change reverses; and a human and commercial connection that operates independently of governments.
• Its three genuine weaknesses are the absence of obligation, which leaves the design untested where it matters most; the asymmetry of vulnerability, since India needs the American market and American technology more than the reverse; and the volatility of American politics, which moves faster than any Indian hedge.
• The verdict that fits the evidence is a partnership of converging interests rather than shared commitments. Its resilience through 2025 and 2026 — a fifty per cent tariff, a claim of mediation on Kashmir, an assassination prosecution, and a ten-year defence framework signed through all of it — is the strongest evidence that the convergence is structural.
  • The relationship survived a year designed to break it; that is not proof of an alliance, but proof that an alliance is not required.

Two states that owe each other nothing, and cooperate anyway, have built something more durable than they are willing to admit.