https://x.com/suryakane/status/1753937514224582753?s=20 ---> The dots are almost always connected circuitously. On the one hand, the US partners with India to advance its own objectives in the Indo Pacific. On the other, it deploys quasi non-state agents of Balkanization below the surface to keep New Delhi’s ambitions in check.
The Five Eyes seem to have reactivated their Khalistani network after their old network in Kashmir got dismantled post-370. It didn’t happen overnight - the Khalistanis were simply kept relatively quiet for nearly two decades and pressed into action when deemed strategically fit. Meanwhile, FCRA licenses are getting cancelled. Shadowy foreign-funded NGOs and think tanks surreptitiously engaging in lawfare are feeling the pain as are Churches and their local political partners. Efforts are on to stabilize the North East which faces direct threats from foreign-backed narcoterror militants from Myanmar. Any effort to dismantle areas of leverage the US tries to maintain in and around India will naturally have a fallout somewhere, even if it’s not official.
From Washington’s standpoint - profit from investing in India, secure supply chains, and help the country get only so wealthy that it can pay for American arms. Meanwhile, engage in subversive subnational diplomacy, activate arms import lobbies, actively back conversion rackets, sow social divisions, run disinformation campaigns, manipulate social media, and keep ties with Pakistan warm enough that they can be upgraded when required. On an ideological level, deny India’s Hindu civilizational raison d'être by rebranding decolonization as revisionism. Use a plethora of para state actors which lend the cover of plausible deniability.
Of course, many Indians would claim skeptics see ghosts where there are none. But they exemplify how common sense is rather uncommon these days. They are the same opportunists who may side with the Modi government today in public but trust US MSM as the gospel truth. Even the hardline skeptics refrain from criticizing the US openly. That should be revealing in and of itself.
If India navigates the next twenty years largely on its own terms without stumbling, it would set off real alarm bells in Washington. Even nascent aspirations of turning into a strategically autonomous global power has invited threats of all kinds. Ending foreign subversive operations inside the country, starting with the narrative machine and ending with the tacit support for Islamists and missionaries, won’t come without costs. Bearing these costs when seen appropriate, like how NDA1 did after the nuclear tests, is the wayforward.
Everything depends on indigenizing weapons manufacturing. India doesn’t always need the highest spec kit in the world. It needs good enough kit in large numbers. New Delhi must be laser focused on building its military-technology-industrial complex and that demands bigger budgets. Given the probability of an armed conflict in India’s neighborhood is rising at the fastest rate in decades, neither 2.6% nor 0.7% of GDP probably would suffice as defense and R&D budgets respectively. If the coat has to be cut according the cloth, there’s no other way but to reform, turbocharge the economy, and eventually, cut back on freebies. Money must be freed up for bigger strategic mission-mode projects with severe penalties for bureaucratic underperformance.