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US secretary of state Marco Rubio’s decision to skip Delhi in his visit to India is symptomatic of the state of India-US relations. No doubt immediate electoral concerns, such as the need to reduce diesel prices in the US, has prompted his visit to the Jamnagar refinery. In a perceptive article in the Indian Express, Pratap Bhanu Mehta suggests that this signifies a diminution of India’s place in the American mind. “India is not a partner in building a world order, or an actor whose political status has priority,” noted Mehta, “it is simply an amalgam of corporate interests.”

This is a long way from the somewhat breathless declaration by a US State Department official in 2005 that the goal of US relations “is to help India to become a major world power in the 21st century” and that the US understood the military implications, of that statement. Through the Indo-US nuclear agreement that year, nuclear sanctions on India were lifted and arms sales opened up. The US sought to fit India into its global strategic equations.

The fall from there has been abrupt, marked by incidents of name calling and threats and breath-taking hypocrisy. India has had to bear the whiplash of high tariffs and is named in the now suspended Graham Act as a country that could suffer 100% secondary tariffs on account of the Russian oil trade. On account of US secondary sanctions, India has been forced to abandon oil imports from Iran and the status of its handling of Chahbahar port remains uncertain.

Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty.

There is a school of thought that believes that India has to wait out the Trump administration and all will be fine thereafter. This is self-delusion. India is not being targeted by the administration out of any special hostility. Simply put, it is, as in the case of Russian oil trade, a collateral casualty of American domestic and international policy shifts.

What made India attractive to the US in 2005 was a combination of things. While fighting its ‘Global War on Terror’, the US realised that India was a powerful model of stability and modernisation in Asia. Economically, India was doing well and US exports to India nearly doubled in the 2000-2005 period. The rapid expansion of the Information Technology sector in the US had created a huge demand for outsourcing as well as computer engineers. Highly skilled Indians entered through the H1B programme to fill this gap. IT outsourcing to India played a massive role in the growth, cost efficiency and global dominance of the US technology sector.

The US technology sector is now increasingly shaped by AI, where China is simultaneously its principal strategic competitor and a formidable technological challenger. India’s AI industry does not yet have the........

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