Technology to be focus of Biden-Modi state visit as both leaders face challenges
Naomi Lim
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President Joe Biden rolling out the diplomatic red carpet for Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is an overture to both leaders’ domestic and foreign audiences.
As the two men contend with international challenges presented by China and Russia, they are also preparing for reelection campaigns next year.
BIDEN’S CLIMATE AGENDA DREAMS COLLIDE WITH MILITARY REALITIES
Despite the White House‘s insistence that Modi’s official state visit is not about China, the United States and India want to broadcast the partnership’s “robustness” abroad, according to former State Department policy planning staffer Paul Kapur, particularly since the prime minister has not condemned Russia’s war in Ukraine.
“They want to make that clear, so China will see that,” Kapur, now a U.S. Naval Postgraduate School national security professor and Vandenberg Coalition advisory board member, said. “That will also give Modi some legitimacy heading into his elections, India’s elections, next year. And also domestically, the Biden administration will be able to demonstrate that it has a strategy in the Indo-Pacific.”
The U.S. and India have drifted closer since the Cold War to offset China’s rising influence in the Indo-Pacific, and this visit is set to result in closer cooperation regarding critical and emerging technology, from semiconductors to telecommunications, artificial intelligence, space, and biotechnology, as India’s military arsenal continues to depend on Russia, including sophisticated defense systems such as the S-400 Triumf and Pantsir missile system.
Fellow Trump administration alumni Victoria Coates, a former deputy national security adviser-turned-Heritage Foundation senior research fellow, applauded Biden for being open to expediting arms sales to India, especially approving the co-production of General Electric F414 engines for Indian fighter jets and the purchase of General Atomics MQ-9 Reaper drones.
“This is an important step in a much bigger process to help India reduce its security dependency on Russia and become more interoperable with the U.S., as well as Japan and Australia,” she said. “Unfortunately, the Biden administration is not coupling this progress with deals for increased energy exports to India, notably for natural gas, which would help India reduce its reliance on coal and so reduce emissions.”
Supplementing education and people-to-people programs, Brookings Institution nonresident fellow and Johns Hopkins University international affairs professor Joshua White previewed the prospect of an agreement for Micron Technology Inc. to build a semiconductor plant in India, describing the visit’s series of announcements as “significant and substantive.
“When you look at the string of senior officials that have been making the rounds in Delhi to button this up, it’s quite significant,” he said. “India has many partners around the world, and a relatively small bureaucracy to service those engagements, so making progress requires this kind of intense tempo that we’ve seen over the last few months.”
More broadly, Modi’s visit underscores the importance of India to Biden as an Indo-Pacific “rising tide” and the “personal bond” between the pair, however strained by Indian democratic backsliding, according to American Enterprise Institute senior fellow Sadanand Dhume, after 70 lawmakers implored Biden to press the prime minister on his treatment of religious minorities and the news media, in addition to his country’s internet outages.
Simultaneously, it is “undeniable” that there is more economic and security collaboration between the U.S. and India under Modi, with renewed focus on the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue with Australia and Japan and roughly $20 billion in new defense spending, per Dhume. It is also undeniable that China has outcompeted India economically, with China’s capita per income approximately six times that of India, their geopolitical imbalance exacerbated by their disputed 2,000-mile border.
“China becoming more, from an Indian perspective, more aggressive on that boundary as the economic gap between the two countries has widened has driven India closer to America’s arms,” Dhume said.
For Hudson Institute Future of India and South Asia Initiative Director Aparna Pande, who predicted there would be a “bro hug” between Biden and Modi, the prime minister’s visit also provides him with the opportunity to appear courted by the world’s leading superpower during his self-proclaimed “Year of India” before New Delhi hosts the Group of 20 summit this September and his reelection bid next year.
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“The [Bharatiya Janata Party] does have an upper hand, it is still popular, and Mr. Modi is personally very popular, so, barring any problems, his party has a high chance of winning next year’s election,” Pande said. “But the economy is one of India’s challenges because even though India is the fastest growing economy right now in the world, at 6.9%, India needs to grow in double digits in order to get over all the labor problems, unemployment, invest in infrastructure, invest in the economy, invest in military modernization.”
“If some of those deliverables help India on the unemployment front or labor front, investment by U.S. companies or ways in which Indians can get skilled or get jobs, that would really help both India and Mr. Modi,” she added.