In election year, domestic politics see India and US converge on taking a hard line on China

Every summer, amidst the skateboarders and the shoppers strolling to the farmers’ market at Manhattan’s Union Square, Tibetan protesters and their supporters gather to remind the world about the occupation of their homeland by the Chinese.

This year, their campaign got a lift as former US House speaker and Democratic Party leader Nancy Pelosi along with a group of US lawmakers travelled to Dharamshala in India to meet the Dalai Lama on June 19. A few days later, the Dalai Lama was in New York City to receive medical treatment.

Pelosi’s visit to Dharamsala was an indication of how the ruling parties in New Delhi and Beijing are giving up their hesitancy about offending Beijing and are making visible gestures on matters that strike against China’s modern conception of itself: Tibet and Taiwan. Beijing has refused to engage with the notion that either are independent entities.

Expectedly, Pelosi’s visit drew a sharp reaction from China. Her meeting came as a sequel to the passage on June 12 by the US Congress of the Resolve Tibet Act, which urges China to re-engage with the Dalai Lama and other Tibetan leaders.

In India, the Narendra Modi-led coalition government also seemed to indicate that it is willing to intensify its signals to China. In addition to facilitating Pelosi’s visit to Dharamshala and meeting with her delegation, Indian leaders in public speeches for the first time have mentioned Taiwan, which China regards as a renegade province.

Even though New Delhi does not formally recognise Taipei, trade between the two has been growing.

The position of New Delhi and Washington with regard to Beijing must be seen in the context of their domestic dynamics.

For the Democrat-led US administration in an election year, China – and its economy – is a prime foreign policy issue. China’s rise as a manufacturing hub has caused significant reverberations in the US in recent decades. As production migrated from the US to China, the loss of jobs paved the way for the rise of Donald Trump. Trump’s claims that he will bring back to the US jobs from countries like China has a lot of resonance in key battleground US states.

In the past, the US has ensured it does not cross the undeclared Chinese red lines on Tibet. In October 2009, Barack Obama, who was US president at the time, decided not to meet the visiting Dalai Lama as it was believed that it would hurt a forthcoming trip to China.

This changed with Trump’s election as he imposed a minimum 60% tax on Chinese imports and ignited a trade war with China. President Joe Biden continued with Trump’s import tariffs on China. The Biden administration has been emphasising “de-risking” rather than ‘de-coupling’ from China’s economy as its approach.

US policy makers has been insistent that they want to ensure that supply lines are resilient in all possible situations and that US technology meant for potential military use by China is guarded. However, the US till now avoided an all-out confrontation considering China’s current manufacturing heft, as no other country at the moment, including the most populous, India, is ready with the relevant human resource and physical infrastructure.

With the Democratic Party fearing that it could lose swing states to the Republican Party, which advocates a more muscular approach on foreign policy issues, both parties in the US are inadvertently aligned on China-related issues. Now, Beijing’s support for Moscow in its war in Ukraine has pushed Washington to take a stronger position against China.

For India, China’s hostility along the Line of Actual Control has not only resulted in loss of territory but it is also weakening counter-terrorism operations in Jammu and Kashmir. It has emboldened militants to take vantage positions in hilly areas as they have ambushed military convoys as well as civilian buses.

In addition, with a more assertive Opposition after the 2024 elections, the Modi government is likely to be subjected to greater public scrutiny on its inability to push back on the Line of Actual Control. This could find resonance with voters in the upcoming assembly elections.

In recent months, New Delhi has been on the backfoot trying to explain accusations that an Indian government official was allegedly involved in a plot to assassinate an American Sikh supporter of Khalistan in New York. On Wednesday, the Indian government’s record on the shoddy treatment of its minorities elicited concern from the United States Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

For the Modi-led government, these gestures by the US on containing China bring some reassurance that the Indo-US relationship that has a bipartisan consensus in both countries will not be disrupted.

Luv Puri’s book Across the Line of Control has been published by Columbia University Press.