Sub-Imperialist India in Washington’s Anti-China “Pivot”

Narendra Modi, the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) foremost leader, is, as of June 9, 2024, in his third consecutive five-year term in office as India’s Prime Minister. But unlike his earlier two terms in office, when the BJP had a majority in Parliament, he now heads a coalition government. A business-as-usual line of action, however, seems to be carrying the day. The Modi regime since 2014 has unleashed what I have called semi-fascism, which has been nourishing India’s sub-imperialist tendencies.¹ In this article, I try to understand sub-imperialist India’s role in U.S. imperialism’s Indo-Pacific, anti-China “pivot” project.² (New Delhi, of course, denies any role in China’s “containment.”)

How did India emerge as a sub-imperialist power and key collaborator with the United States in the U.S. Indo-Pacific anti-China project? I suggest the answer lies in the political-economic foundations of India’s “dependent development” and sub-imperialism. Within this structural setting, India has sought to derive “national advantage” from the trade and technology wars, as well as the New Cold War unleashed by U.S. imperialism against China. Key to this process is the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (the Quad), a strategic security dialogue between the United States, Japan, Australia, and India, paralleled by joint military exercises (named “Exercise Malabar”) of extraordinary scope. The U.S. imperialism/Indian sub-imperialism relationship has deepened following the putting in place of agreements related to consolidation of the interoperability of the U.S. and Indian armed forces. These moves are coordinated in opposition to China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and China’s presumed “String of Pearls” strategy. The reignition of hostility along the India-China border (the “Line of Actual Control,” or LAC) reflects an aspect of the relationship. Though directly antagonistic dimensions of the relationship are also present, India-U.S. relations in their entirety must be seen within “the whole,” centered on China’s resistance to U.S. imperialism.

Legacy of the British Raj: India’s 1962 China War

The British Raj (rule) left a recurring flashpoint in the Indian subcontinent in the form of ill-defined borders, and independent India has followed in its footsteps. Independent India fueled the fire of Tibetan separatism by extending help and support to Tibetans hostile to Beijing. By the 1950s, it had also claimed the territory of Aksai Chin (in 1958); insisted on complete adherence to the so-called McMahon Line; de facto junked UN Security Council Resolution 47 (adopted April 20, 1948) on the right to self-determination in Kashmir; and circumscribed—in certain aspects—the sovereignty of Nepal, Sikkim (which was eventually absorbed into India in 1974), and Bhutan.³

By 1958, New Delhi was refusing to negotiate the border dispute with China by insisting that the Chinese accept the lines demarcated by the McMahon Line in the Northeast and by its own 1954 maps in the Northwest. Worse, New Delhi began implementing provocative military measures that, in the British imperial vocabulary it used, were called “forward policy,” even more so since November 1961.⁴ Not only were these provocations underway, but an anti-Chinese hysteria was “manufactured” in the country. Moreover, New Delhi reckoned that it had the added advantage of the pro-India proclivities of the West, the Soviet Union, and the then newly established nonaligned movement.⁵

China, despite its position that, as a matter of principle, it cannot accept unequal treaties imposed by the imperialist powers, was (and has all along been) willing to negotiate to resolve all its border disputes. Indeed, by 1960, China tacitly went by the McMahon Line as it applied to the Eastern Himalayan region in its agreement with Burma. This was a hint that it was willing to do the same at the time in negotiations with India. But India persisted with its forward policy and its refusal to negotiate to resolve the dispute, leaving the Chinese People’s Liberation Army with almost no alternative but to engage in a rapid and clinical counteroffensive from October 20 to November 20, 1962.⁶

India’s defeat in its 1962 war against China precipitated a huge crisis of confidence. Indian “patriots” of all hues felt deeply humiliated. Moreover, the People’s Liberation Army, after defeating the Indian Army in “India’s China War,” and with India still refusing to negotiate, unilaterally declared a ceasefire and withdrew to twenty kilometers north of the McMahon Line (even though China then considered that line imperialist-imposed). Significantly, they withdrew to Ladakh, where they were stationed before the start of hostilities. As the English-born Australian journalist and scholar Neville Maxwell, who was the South Asia correspondent for the Times of London from 1959 to 1967, quoted a former Permanent Under Secretary of the British Foreign Office in the Sunday Times in June 1966: “The Chinese withdrawal to their original lines after a victory in the field [was] the first time in recorded history that a great power has not exploited military success by demanding something more.”⁷

Maxwell’s account exposed the myth of Chinese “aggression.” In his view, all China wanted (and still wants) was a negotiated settlement that would guarantee stability at its borders. But Jawaharlal Nehru stuck to the old colonial claims and a belief that Aksai Chin had been part of the Ladakh region of India for centuries. As Maxwell wrote: “On the diplomatic front India was meeting every Chinese appeal for a mutual military standstill and negotiations with demands for unilateral Chinese withdrawal from all territory claimed by India.”⁸ In the face of defeat, however, Nehru’s hegemonic position in the Indian establishment suffered a jolt. In the nonaligned movement, too, there was a loss of face. But India’s 1962 China War certainly brought the United States into a closer relationship with India following Nehru’s acceptance of U.S. military assistance.

All successor Indian governments have continued with Nehru’s refusal to “submit India’s border claims to negotiation.”⁹ Perhaps the Indian power elite’s deep-rooted antagonism, stemming from the humiliating defeat in India’s China War of 1962, has yet to be overcome. This power elite still wants the Indian public to continue falsely to believe that China was the invader and that India’s reckless, British colonial-inspired forward policy had nothing to do with the causes of the war. This effort includes the refusal to declassify the Indian army’s own 1963 assessment of the causes of this defeat, analyzed in the Henderson Brooks-Prem Bhagat Report (the main part of which Maxwell had access to when he was writing India’s China War). Indeed, once more, now in the twenty-first century, the Indian power elite has on occasion been more than willing to accept U.S. imperialism’s false depiction of China as an aggressive, expansionist power and widely propagate this image among the Indian public.

Legacy of the British Raj: The Himalayan States and More

Post-Independence, in the age of decolonization, New Delhi began to perpetuate colonial forms of domination over Bhutan, Nepal, and Sikkim, indeed absorbing the latter in 1974. To the extent that Nepal and Bhutan have achieved a degree of independence in India’s dealings with them at least one important reason has been “the emergence of a strong neighboring power, China.”¹⁰ India’s defense coordinates, however, continue to include Nepal and Bhutan, although Indian troops must not be openly stationed on these states’ borders with China. The two small Himalayan nations have been against such stationing of Indian troops since India’s 1962 China War.

In classic colonial categorization, Nepal and Bhutan (and Sikkim prior to its 1974 absorption into India) have been and are “buffer states,” an “explicit part” of the “colonial design of territorial insulation for India, three lines and two layers thick.” There was first an “inner line…where direct British administration ended.” This inner line included the North-East Frontier Agency, now Arunachal Pradesh, which, in the Chinese view, India held (and holds) as the heir of British colonialism. “The next line was represented by the Durand line in NWFP [the North-West Frontier Province, now part of Pakistan], the northern borders of Kashmir, Nepal, Sikkim, Bhutan, and the McMahon line for India proper.” The outermost lines “were the borders of Tibet and Afghanistan with China and Russia, the perceived hostile powers. In this way the Himalayan states became buffer states behind another buffer state, Tibet, after 1910,” even though Chinese suzerainty was a fact, reluctantly conceded.¹¹

No wonder Chinese suppression of the rebellion of the Tibetan oligarchy in March 1959 alarmed the Indian power elite. The Chinese communists were accused of violating the autonomy agreement of 1951, suppressing Tibetan Buddhism, depriving the Tibetan lamas and feudal landlords of their freedom (to ruthlessly exploit their serfs).¹² After all, for New Delhi, the “territorial insulation for India” of the “outermost line” and the “second layer” from China (the “perceived hostile power”) had disappeared. For India as the “successor” to British “rights,” forward policy was then, thus, more than due.

As “independence for India loomed [in the mid-1940s], the British…[prepared] for the transfer of ‘responsibilities’ in the [three] Himalayan states.” Immediately following independence in 1947, “India made agreements with the Himalayan states freezing the status quo”: in 1949 with Bhutan, in July 1950 with Nepal, and in December 1950 with Sikkim.¹³

The treaty with Nepal had a “mutual defence article and an article regulating arms imports.” The treaty with Sikkim “reaffirmed Sikkim’s protectorate status and gave India the right to station troops in Sikkim for defence purposes.… Sikkim was but one step from absorption.”¹⁴ The treaty with Bhutan “refurbished the existing colonial relationship.” The second clause of it made Bhutan agree “‘to be guided by the advice of the government of India in regard to its external relations’…[which] infringes Bhutan’s sovereignty and raises questions of the validity [in international law] of the entire treaty.” Article Six of the treaty allows Bhutan’s import of arms, but only at the discretion of India. Article Nine, on the adjudication of disputes, is “weighted in India’s favour.” Article Ten “declares the validity of the treaty will be ‘in perpetuity.'”¹⁵

However, China wanted (and wants) Bhutan to be sovereign and independent, and especially so with the deepening of the Sino-Indian border dispute that witnessed “increasing Indian involvement in Bhutan’s affairs,” to the extent that New Delhi even began to consider Bhutan “as part of its ‘forward policy’ in the Himalaya.” In December 1958 and March 1959, “Zhou Enlai in notes to India claimed that any border dispute that there might be between China and Bhutan was none of India’s business.… After the first Sino-Indian border clashes took place, Bhutan refused an Indian request to allow its troops to enter Bhutan. The following day 21 October 1962, China issued a statement…declaring China would never invade Bhutan.”¹⁶

Almost a decade following India’s China War of 1962, India relaunched its bid to be acknowledged as the regional power in South Asia. Military “aid”—including, crucially, Indian military intervention in East Pakistan during the Bengali nationalist war of liberation from Pakistan in 1971, leading to the creation of Bangladesh—seemed to have proved such prowess. But it did not take long to evoke Bangladeshi resentment when New Delhi tried to exercise a predominant influence over Dacca. Then, in 1988, India’s military intervened under the rubric of Operation Cactus in the Maldives (a former British colonial protectorate) to prevent an attempted coup d’état to overthrow the Washington-, London-, and New Delhi-backed autocratic Maldivian president, Maumoon Abdul Gayoom. Significantly, an Indian Peace Keeping Force intervened militarily in Sri Lanka in 1987−1989, backed by Washington in the civil war that had begun in 1983, to “neutralize” the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. However, this turned out to be a costly misadventure in which India persisted, even when the Indian Peace Keeping Force was eventually perceived as an “occupation army” and asked to leave, which it finally did in 1990.

In sum, following in the footsteps of the British Raj and in line with ultranationalist delusions of an Akhand Bharat and “Greater India,” New Delhi seems to have sought to establish unequal, superior-subordinate relations with the countries of South Asia.¹⁷ But there is a larger perspective in which to examine the roots of India’s sub-imperialist proclivities in the new millennium.

The Political Economy of Indian Sub-Imperialism

Drawing on the Brazilian Marxist scholar and activist, Ruy Mauro Marini, and his understanding of dependency, I conceive of dependency for India as a structural relation of subordination of the state (and big Indian capital) in the post-Independence period to the state (and monopoly capitalist class) of the United States and other monopoly capitalist countries. This is in a framework within which the composition of the forms of superexploitation in the relations of production in India were significantly modified over time to ensure the expanded reproduction of this subordinate relation. The three forms of superexploitation in the relations of production are surplus value derived from the real wage being lower than the value of labor power; surplus value from significant extension of the working day without adequate remuneration; and surplus value from increase in the productivity of labor (through systematic reliance on import of more capital-intensive technology), together with severe intensification of labor.

The disparate parts of the production system in India are: domestic and subsistence production; petty-commodity production; production from subordinate small and medium Indian capital; production from subordinate big Indian capital; and production from relatively less-subordinate big Indian capital and leading multinational capital. This structure of production stems mainly from the historical reality that India has not been through the stage of competitive capitalism. Moreover, this unequal, disparate structure of production, scarred by superexploitation, has been marked by value transfers, unequally divided in their upward flow through the degree of monopoly/monopsony hierarchy within the economy and onward to the global imperialist center. Superexploitation is rationalized on the basis that subordinate capitals, including big Indian business, deem it necessary to compensate for the loss of value and surplus value they endure. Or to put it the other way around, the India’s loss of value to international capital in the unequal exchange process is predicated on the superexploitation of those at the lower income levels in its population.

Over time, the relative weight of the surplus value from high labor productivity cum severe intensification of labor in the superexploitative relations of production increases. A part of the surplus product/value also transfers to big Indian capital and multinational capital, with onward transfer to the global imperialist center. Even as these changes have been necessary for the expanded reproduction of dependency, they also bring about the transition from peripheral underdevelopment to semiperipheral underdevelopment. The latter, euphemistically called “dependent development,” signifies change in how the country is integrated in the world-capitalist system following national capitalist development. However, there are additional conditions required to ensure the expanded reproduction of the relations of dependency and “dependent development.”¹⁸

“Workers” in India are engaged in domestic and subsistence production, petty-commodity production, production based on the formal subsumption of their labor to capital, and production based on the real subsumption of their labor to capital.¹⁹ Taken together, they constitute one huge mass of human beings whose “living [and working] conditions represent the focal point of all [the] inhuman conditions in modern [Indian] society.”²⁰ In India, this huge, exploited majority also includes at its bottom the socially oppressed, toiling Dalit and tribal communities. There has been no marked improvement in the relative standard of living of the exploited majority. This is mainly because the change in the structure of production has not been accompanied by a similar change in the occupational structure of the labor force. And with the relatively greater opening of the Indian economy to international trade, investment, and finance from the 1990s onward, this structural malady is worsening.

Domestic and subsistence production, petty-commodity production, and production from the formal subsumption of labor to capital are subordinate forms of production under capitalism. Large corporate capital engaged in the real subsumption of labor takes advantage of these conditions to negate labor’s potential gains that have been institutionalized in protective labor law. A large reserve army of labor relative to the active army of wage labor, relatively low-priced worker-consumption goods and services produced by the subordinate forms of production, and resort to subcontracting to subordinate capital together make possible payment of low money wages—benefiting institutionalized large corporate capital that extracts surplus value by the real subsumption of labor. All of this is done by violating laws regarding the minimum wage rate, working conditions, and social security payments.

Unpaid domestic work, subsistence/petty-commodity production, and production based on the formal subsumption of labor to capital lay the groundwork for big Indian business and the subsidiaries of multinational corporations to potentially gain super-profits through a combination of twentieth/twenty-first-century technology and nineteenth-century labor practices. But, of course, such super-profits also come from capture of the hindmost of the value transfers, including concealed “value” transfers from unpaid reproductive, domestic, and subsistence labor.

For Marini, sub-imperialism “implies two basic components: on the one hand, an intermediate organic composition of national productive systems on the world scale and, on the other hand, the exercise of a relatively autonomous expansionist policy, not only accompanied by a greater integration in the imperialist productive system but also maintained within the hegemonic framework exercised by imperialism on the international scene.”²¹ A sub-imperialist power is not able to overcome the structure of dependency—technological and import dependence, especially in the production of capital goods, capitalist consumption goods, and sophisticated armaments.²² Big Indian businesses cannot do without reliance on the center’s multinational corporations, both within India and where they engage in outward foreign direct investment in the state-of-the-art manufacturing sector.

This understanding of the main political-economic characteristics of sub-imperialism suggests why the Modi government was driven to legislate labor codes (yet to be adopted) to replace India’s protective labor laws, and thus to institutionalize the superexploitation of those who produce the surplus value and the surplus product. Importantly, the labor codes also legitimize severe intensification of labor in the factories of companies like Maruti Suzuki India, the Indian subsidiary of Suzuki Motor Corporation, which use high labor-productivity technologies.

But despite the superexploitation of Indian labor, technological dependence and lack of international competitiveness in the manufacturing sector vis-à-vis the East and Southeast Asian economies have forced India to withdraw from the Asia-Pacific Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP). India withdrew from the RCEP because its manufacturing sector has not been able to withstand the import competition that came from implementation of the free trade agreements it had already entered with the member countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), plus Japan and South Korea.

The most significant structural change since the 1980s has been the emergence of a relatively independent financial complex that sits on top of the world’s real economy and its national units, significantly influencing the structure and behavior of those real economies and the corporations therein.²³ Following the globalization of India’s financial markets in the first decade of the twenty-first century, international financial capital has been a prominent structural characteristic of the Indian economy.

National production systems, including India’s, have witnessed a gradual dismantling. The production of capitalist consumption goods and capital goods have a relatively lower domestic value added to the value of production than before. Given the structural problem of effective demand that comes with the pursuit of a private, investment-led growth strategy, exacerbated by extreme inequality, self-imposed limits on deficit spending for civilian purposes, and limping mass consumption demand, the importance of “capitalist” consumption goods production, military production, nuclear energy, the nuclear weapons program, and exports has been emphasized.²⁴

A domestic military-industrial complex and nuclear program are predicated upon relative autonomy vis-à-vis U.S. imperialism, but such autonomy is constrained by technological dependence and failure to develop national systems of integrated production. Militarism and the imperative to build a military-industrial complex are driven not merely by refusing to negotiate with China to resolve longstanding border disputes and the de facto voiding of the Security Council’s 1948 resolution on Kashmir, but also from becoming a strategic partner in U.S. imperialism’s anti-China project.

A dependent military-industrial complex is in place in India, for, even as India has been one of the world’s largest importers of armaments, its market for armaments never becomes saturated.²⁵ This process begins with the ever-increasing supply of armaments to the U.S. armed forces and those of U.S. allies and strategic partners, mainly from the U.S. military-industrial complex, especially those armaments based on advances in science and technology devoted to constantly developing the means of destruction. China’s demand for armaments increases in response to overt U.S. hostility.²⁶ When there is a supply of such armaments to China’s armed forces to defend China—mainly from the U.S. military threat—the demand for such armaments by India’s armed forces also increases and is met through both imports and domestic military production. It is U.S. imperialism that has been drawing and driving China and India into arms races, cementing the role of the United States as a “major defense partner” to India.²⁷

Big Indian business has been making significant inroads in defense procurement aided by the government using the “offset policy,” under which foreign suppliers of defense hardware must source a part of the contract value locally, to encourage the foreign companies to set up joint ventures with big Indian private business partners. The latter are mere junior partners of the foreign equipment manufacturers.

India’s Production Linked Incentive Scheme and associated “Make in India” (for India and the world) initiative must be viewed in the international context as attempting to derive national advantage from the trade and technology wars and the New Cold War unleashed by U.S. imperialism against China.²⁸ The U.S. government has been pressuring U.S. multinational capital to shift production in the global supply chains they control from China to countries like India.

Increasingly, big Indian businesses have become arbitrageurs of India’s cheap “human capital,” with a structural propensity to rely systematically on imports of technology, especially following the institution of stronger intellectual property rights and the rules governing them, and structurally adjusting to the imperialist center-determined, changing international division of labor. But, of course, these businesses compensate, through superexploitation and surplus transfers from subordinate producers, the loss of value and surplus value that they suffer due to being a dependent capitalist class.

The digital economy has, however, excited top managers of U.S. big tech companies to applaud India as a “global technology/software superpower.” The reality is found in the “Silicon Valley Imperial Innovation System,” the principal features of which are the derivation of innovation advantage through adroit network management of an unequal international division of scientific-technological labor in research and development efforts, with Silicon Valley as the pivot around which the semiperipheral research and development links are entwined, while strategic investment (including “venture capital”) and intellectual property management ensure control over the resulting innovations.

The knowledge and efficiency of a semiperipheral workforce in the science-technology-engineering-mathematics field (who are paid a fraction of the salary of their Silicon Valley counterparts) assembled in technological innovation-oriented “global capability centers” and startups, and—through outsourcing and offshoring—in Indian cities such as Bangalore, Hyderabad, and Chennai are significant sources of profit capture by U.S. tech companies.²⁹ Silicon Valley’s technological advantage stems, in part, from technologically innovative labor in India carried out by an Indian science-technology-engineering-mathematics workforce, mainly for U.S. tech companies. The unequal relation between Silicon Valley in the United States and the so-called New Silicon Valleys in India reflects the imperialism/sub-imperialism relation.

Another aspect of U.S. big tech’s unequal relation with big Indian capital is in the realm of “mining” the data of users, or what India’s topmost billionaire, Mukesh Ambani, has called “data colonization.” Ambani has asked Modi to end this capture by global corporations.³⁰ But after Ambani’s telecom business Reliance Jio (a part of his conglomerate, Reliance Industries) grabbed a major share of the telecom market, he opportunistically collaborated financially (through selling Reliance Jio stock) and technologically with U.S. tech giants such as Facebook (Meta) and Google (Alphabet), both of which were given representation on the Reliance Jio’s board. Mining the data of users is at the core of the business models of both Facebook and Google. Indeed, by then Reliance Jio was already collaborating with Microsoft, a major supplier of cloud storage services in India, to set up data centers in India.

Now if one considers the fact that U.S. big tech companies like Microsoft, Google, and Facebook give the U.S. government direct access to their users’ data, and that the U.S. government advances the global business interests of U.S. big tech companies, then one has to reckon with the reality of the U.S. “government-corporate surveillance complex.”³¹ Will there then be the possibility of user data access to the Anglosphere intelligence alliance, Five Eyes (comprising the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand)? There is an indication that India is also on its radar, for instance, following intelligence shared among Five Eyes partners that New Delhi’s covert operatives were involved in an assassination in Canada.³² Here is the possibility of sub-imperialist India entangled in U.S. imperialism’s worldwide web of surveillance capitalism.³³ Unlike China’s digital sovereignty, India, despite its abundant talent, does not seem to be bent on having its own companies equivalent to Facebook, Google, or WhatsApp.

Sub-Imperialist India in Imperialist Geopolitics

It should by now be evident that I consider the framework of sub-imperialism important in understanding India’s role in U.S. imperialism’s confrontation with China. In this account of Indian sub-imperialism, it is necessary to emphasize the current global (and unstable) balance between the U.S.-led Triad imperialism of the Global North and an emerging multipolar Global South, with a few semiperipheral countries—China most prominently among them—showing the way toward multipolarity. This is through a rejection of Washington’s “rules-based international order” (the rules set by the United States in a clique with other powerful countries, and hence, hardly international), while instead advocating abiding by the UN-based order of sovereign states reinforced by international law.³⁴ Acutely aware of this global and unsteady balance, and with the United States bent on retaining its global dominance by “containing” China, Russia, Venezuela, Cuba, and Iran, among others, India has been engaged in a contradictory role, trying to appear neutral, or “multi-aligned,” but, given the structure of India’s rule by its dominant classes, it is essentially partisan, siding with U.S. imperialism.

What are the geopolitical moves that have taken India to where it is now as a sub-imperialist power in the U.S.’s Indo-Pacific, anti-China “pivot”?

The obscurantist Hindutva “nationalist” BJP sensed a golden opportunity when in 1991–1992 the hegemonic bloc promoting consensual support for the dependent, monopoly capitalist, ruling class across Indian civil society, took a complete ideological U-turn toward neoliberalism.³⁵ The BJP rapidly consolidated (not entirely successfully) the majority Hindu electorate into a unified vote repository to win electoral mandates. Electoral successes in 1999, 2014, and 2019 opened the way to making and furthering inroads into the political management of the ideologically transformed hegemonic bloc, and, from there, to entrenchment in the citadel of political power—the office of the prime minister.

Fortunately for the Modi government that took office in 2014, integrating India into Washington’s anti-China, Indo-Pacific “strategic planning was well under way during the [Congress party-led] United Progressive Alliance government (2004–2014).” The then U.S. president Barack Obama had launched Washington’s “Pivot to Asia” in late 2011, aimed at ending China’s resurgence—economic, diplomatic, and strategic/military—in the region, by which time the U.S.-India strategic partnership was already off the ground. The process only had to be undertaken “much faster under the Modi government.”³⁶

Much of the anti-Communist Asian security architecture put in place from the 1950s onward took the form of the San Francisco system of highly asymmetric, “hub-and-spoke” bilateral security alliances, with the United States as the “hub” and the Philippines, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand as the “spokes.” U.S. pressure on Japan over the years, especially post-September 11, 2001, to shoulder more of the defense responsibility, and the resources increasingly demanded, has been instrumental, among other driving factors, to the revival of Japanese militarism. Moreover, even as the United States has retained the highly asymmetric, hub-and-spoke architecture of bilateral security alliances marked by domination-subordination, Washington has been exhorting and guiding the “spokes” countries to also enter security alliances among themselves.

Importantly, Washington has brought together trilateral partnerships/alliances (U.S.-Japan-India and U.S.-Australia-Japan) and a quadrilateral partnership (the Quad and U.S.-Australia-Japan-India). A significant geopolitical reception that the concept and term “Indo-Pacific” received was in the U.S. renaming in 2018 of its “Pacific Command” as “Indo-Pacific Command.” Japan’s role should, however, not be underestimated. One influential view is that “Japan originated the concept of a “free and open Indo-Pacific”—even though the term itself was revived (it was originally used by the German-Nazi geopolitical analyst Karl Haushofer) by Hillary Clinton in 2010. Japan inaugurated the first iteration of the Quad in 2007, and cooperated with the United States in 2017 to revive a more robust Quad 2.0.”³⁷

Renaming and assigning credit aside, it is obvious that now the eastern Indian Ocean and the Western Pacific have together become the organizing framework for security and military strategy and its related aspects of deployment and partnerships. India has a distinct locational advantage in concentrating and deploying its forces in the Indian Ocean Region (IOR) compared to China, given the latter’s extended and more vulnerable lines of communication that would hinder the rapid concentration and deployment of its forces. The Andaman and Nicobar Islands, once a naval base and penal colony of the British Raj, have been developed as a vital defense establishment hosting the Andaman and Nicobar Command operated jointly by India’s army, navy, and air force. Constant development of and upgrades to military and related civilian infrastructure despite the ecological threat this entails, especially since 2001, have been considered pivotal, as the southern group of these islands are close to the main shipping lane from the Indian Ocean to the South China Sea via the Malacca Strait.

With respect to U.S. naval deployment in the IOR, New Delhi has been insisting on application of the Goldilocks principle—neither a “too hot” deployment nor a “too cold” stationing of the U.S. Navy there, but “just the right amount,” envisaging a leading role for the Indian Navy in this expanse. India has been designated as a “net security provider” in the IOR. Exercise Malabar, which has eventually become an integral part of the Quad, originated as a U.S.-India initiative. Following the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991, Washington began to establish “defense cooperation” with New Delhi. Of course, New Delhi had already begun to alter its foreign policy in line with what Washington expected, for instance, secretly allowing U.S. military planes to refuel at Indian airports during the 1990–1991 Gulf War that witnessed U.S. imperialism’s barbaric bombing of Iraq. At the time, India needed IMF and World Bank conditional loans in the wake of fiscal and balance of payments crises. Exercise Malabar was on its way, which started in 1992 as a bilateral U.S.-India naval exercise, the main aim being the building of interoperability between the participating naval forces.

Exercise Malabar was expanded to include Japan, Australia, and Singapore in 2007, the year the Quad was initiated, but the next year, Australia became ambivalent regarding the implications of participation in this Indo-Pacific anti-China Quad. However, in 2010 Australia indicated its intent to return, eventually becoming a permanent partner in Exercise Malabar from 2020 onward. This followed the 2017 Quad meeting in Manila at which the then U.S. president (Donald Trump) and the then prime ministers of India (Modi), Japan (Shinzo Abe), and Australia (Malcolm Turnbull) agreed to counter China militarily and diplomatically in the Indo-Pacific region, particularly in the South China Sea.³⁸

The United States, Japan, and Australia (so far tentatively) envision a multinational NATO-like military alliance to sustain U.S. hegemony, which is being challenged by China, in the Asia-Pacific/Indo-Pacific region. Note the eastern drift of the Malabar exercises. In 2020, the U.S., Japanese, Australian, and Indian naval forces of the Quad came together for Exercise Malabar in the Arabian Sea and Bay of Bengal, near the Malacca Strait. In 2021, the exercise was held by the Quad countries’ navies in the Philippine Sea and the Bay of Bengal; in 2022, in the East China Sea; and, in 2023, in the South Pacific Ocean.

As we have seen, the Indian Navy has been in military exercises with the U.S. and Australian navies and the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force not merely in the Indian Ocean—the Indian Navy’s “primary area of interest,” according to its Maritime Security Strategy of 2015—but also near the Malacca Strait, in the Philippine Sea, in the East China Sea, and in the South Pacific Ocean. What is so far absent is a Quad Malabar exercise in the South China Sea. But, provocatively, a U.S. Seventh Fleet’s guided-missile destroyer led ships from India, Japan, and the Philippines in a military cruise through the South China Sea on May 2–8, 2019. The Indian and Republic of Singapore navies also cohosted the first ASEAN-India Maritime Exercise, held on May 2–8, 2023, in the South China Sea.

A July 2016 ruling at the Hague of the Permanent Court of Arbitration—in a proceeding in which China was not represented—in favor of the Philippines declared that Beijing’s claimed territorial “historic rights” in the South China Sea over the area within the “nine-dash line” have no legal basis.³⁹ With alacrity, Washington insisted that the court’s ruling was “binding.” But, under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, China was wholly within its rights to opt out of and not be bound by any arbitration to which it had not agreed. Indeed, in the past, several developed capitalist countries, including Australia and the United Kingdom, have done the same. Moreover, the United States is not even a signatory to the Convention. The other claimants in such disputes in the South China Sea, Malaysia and Vietnam, also joined in to support the arbitration court’s ruling, but so too did India, Australia, Japan, the United Kingdom, and others.

The use of “international law” in the service of the colonial powers and imperialism, its place of origin, was hardly challenged prior to the advent of the United Nations, and largely remains shaped by those same powers today.⁴⁰ In no area is this truer than in relation to sovereignty. China has opted out of international arbitration on sovereignty issues but has always been willing to resolve such disputes through negotiations leading to a bilateral agreement.⁴¹ Washington, however, is bent on imposing its way. It deployed the U.S. Navy to conduct a joint patrol with its Philippines counterpart to the Scarborough Shoal, a reef in the South China Sea that is also under dispute. Although such patrols risk initiating military standoffs with Chinese vessels, Washington seems bent on militarizing the disputes in the South and East China Seas.⁴²

The Imperialism/Sub-Imperialism Relationship and “Greater India” Geopolitics

How then may one characterize the imperialism/sub-imperialism relationship between Washington and New Delhi, especially with respect to the former’s Indo-Pacific anti-China project? Marini emphasized the fact that the sub-imperialist state and its capitalist class are “not in any kind of strategic conflict with imperialism. Instead, the lines in the relationship between imperialism and sub-imperialism are blurred by an ‘antagonistic cooperation’ which ties the dependent country’s own cycle of capital to the dominant economy of the advanced centre.” The term “antagonistic cooperation” used by Marini implies that there is “a degree of conflict” between the state (and capitalist class) of the imperialist country and the state (and big business) of the sub-imperialist country, but this does not lead “to a breakdown in relations or open confrontation.” Cooperation and collaboration “prove more the rule than the exception.”⁴³

This “antagonistic cooperation” framework (underlying the imperialism/sub-imperialism relationship) is illustrated by the course taken by Washington’s conflict with New Delhi over India’s nuclear program and its eventual resolution. Washington was initially antagonistic toward New Delhi in the wake of Pokhran-II—five nuclear bomb test explosions conducted by India at the Indian Army’s Pokhran Test Range on May 11 and 13, 1998.⁴⁴ The United States imposed direct economic sanctions and temporarily suspended the joint Exercise Malabar. New Delhi, however, to the satisfaction of Washington, explained that it had conducted the nuclear tests because of the imperative to develop nuclear weapons and capabilities to counter the “China threat,” and offered to collaborate with Washington.⁴⁵

After extensive negotiations, Washington’s response was the Civil Nuclear Cooperation Initiative of July 2005, leading to the U.S.-India Civil Nuclear Agreement of 2008. This in turn cleared the pathway for Nuclear Suppliers Group states to export uranium to India, which had rejected the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. This agreement also facilitated New Delhi’s civil nuclear cooperation agreements with a few other “friendly” countries. Moreover, Washington assisted India in joining the multilateral export control regimes, such as the Missile Technology Control Regime, the Wassenaar Arrangement, and the Australia Group, in order to gain access to dual-use imports.⁴⁶ But one must ask: in enabling the 2008 nuclear agreement with India and getting India, which was not party to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, a waiver for nuclear trade, to what extent was the United States going to force India to align its foreign, defense, and security policies with those of its own?

The intent of the United States to force India to align its foreign, defense, and security policies with those of its own was undisguised. The Henry J. Hyde United States-India Peaceful Atomic Energy Cooperation Act of 2006 (the Hyde Act) adapted the prerequisites of Section 123 of the U.S. Atomic Energy Act to authorize nuclear cooperation with India. What conditions did the Hyde Act oblige the United States to fulfill? India must have “a foreign policy that is congruent to that of the United States.”⁴⁷ Moreover, the conditions governing nuclear transfers to India, that is, “nuclear or nuclear-related material, equipment, or technology” or “ballistic missiles or missile-related equipment or technology” must, among other things, be consistent with “the common defense and security” of the two countries.⁴⁸ Further, “nuclear commerce with India” must remain “in the national security interest of the United States.”⁴⁹ This is imperialism written into U.S. law.

Nevertheless, in turning a potentially conflictual situation into one of cooperation and by treating India as an exception and a de facto nuclear weapons state, Washington thus found a way for India to supplement or make available the limited supplies of uranium ore mined and processed in India for military purposes. After all, a strategic partnership in the making, with New Delhi as a junior partner in Washington’s Indo-Pacific anti-China project, was what mattered.

Marini’s characterization of the relationship between imperialism and sub-imperialism as one of “antagonistic cooperation” throws light on the contradictions, i.e., internal conflicts tending to split the two functionally united entities. Antagonism and cooperation, however, cannot go on together for long, unless cooperation turns the antagonism into its opposite, non-antagonism, as when India became a nuclear weapons state. This is what leads me to reformulate the imperialism/sub-imperialism relation by suggesting that although the contradictions between an imperialist power and its sub-imperialist partner are both antagonistic and non-antagonistic in nature, for the sub-imperialist power is both a victim and a beneficiary of imperialism, the antagonistic contradictions tend to be handled by the two entities in a manner that prevents them from developing into open antagonism.

In other words, given the Indian ruling class and its interests, when a contradiction assumes an antagonistic form, it is handled in a cooperative manner that fashions it as non-antagonistic, as in the instance of India’s emergence as a nuclear weapons power. But this is no more than a tendency. The cause of antagonism may, however, also be India taking advantage of Washington’s antagonistic contradictions with China, deriving a much better bargain for allowing itself to be drawn into the Sino-American conflict in the Western Pacific. This included its continuing embrace of Russia, India’s largest external source of crude oil, for cheap oil, fertilizers, S-400 Triumf mobile surface-to-air missiles, and nuclear power plants, all with payments in national currencies. Russia has helped to resolve India’s LAC dispute with China, mainly in what India refers to as Eastern Ladakh. Keeping some antagonistic elements in the U.S. imperialism/Indian sub-imperialism relation alive and well might just be to sub-imperialist India’s advantage. Of course, the likely outcome of a contradiction on this scale between an imperialist power and its sub-imperialist partner is that there is potential for such a non-antagonistic contradiction to turn antagonistic, or a managed antagonistic contradiction to turn openly antagonistic, if it is not handled properly by making mutual adjustments. After all, the imperialist/sub-imperialist partnership evolves and develops over time with the emergence and resolution of contradictions.⁵⁰

The opposing tendencies in the imperialism/sub-imperialism relation have so far not been allowed to turn openly antagonistic. The provisions in all the agreements related to the consolidation of the interoperability and other aspects of the military partnership of the armed forces of the U.S. and India are now being implemented. These include the General Security of Military Information Agreement (signed in 2002) and its Industrial Security Annex (signed in 2019); the Defense Trade and Technology Initiative (signed in 2012); the Logistics Exchange Memorandum of Agreement (signed in 2016); the award of U.S. Strategic Trade Authorization status (in 2017); the Communications Compatibility and Security Agreement (signed in 2018); the Basic Exchange and Cooperation Agreement (signed in 2020); and the initiative on Critical and Emerging Technology (signed in 2022). In addition, there are the Security of Supply Arrangements and Reciprocal Defense Procurement Arrangement agreements signed in 2023. Among other things, the security agreements enable the United States to store armaments in India for use in times of supply disruptions.⁵¹

The Indian power elite considers such enhancement of the Indo-U.S. strategic partnership as vital to the process of India realizing its “leading power” ambitions. At Washington’s behest, since 2019, India has been what self-styled Indian security analysts call “a permanent invitee” to G7 summits. Specifically, designating India as a Major Defense Partner in 2016 entitled it to defense technology sharing at a “level commensurate with that of…[the] closest [U.S.] allies and partners” in return for the Logistics Exchange Memorandum of Agreement, under which the U.S. military can “forward deploy” at Indian military bases.⁵² India has also become one of the hubs for the U.S. Navy’s maintenance, repair, and forward deployment of its ships and other military assets in the Indo-Pacific. In return, India now has access to U.S. military bases, including refueling facilities, in Djibouti, Diego Garcia, Guam, and Subic Bay.

The Quad is now widely viewed as an anti-China “diplomatic” and military arrangement, that is, relatively “loose.” However, unlike India, Japan and Australia are “key NATO global partners,” whose national security policy is beholden to the U.S. “nuclear umbrella,” and they are hosts to U.S. military bases. New Delhi has not yet opted for that kind of military alliance with Washington. Nevertheless, India does not seem to have any strategic discord with the United States over the latter’s approach to questions regarding Israel-Palestine, Iran, and Taiwan, or over the functional U.S. relations with Pakistan—even as New Delhi continues to maintain its beneficial relations with Russia and Iran despite the U.S. sanctions. The case of India’s friendly relations with Russia has clear antagonistic aspects in the sub-imperial relations that now are increasing.

The Indian state also exercises a degree of relative political autonomy vis-à-vis the United States by tactically leaning on the semiperipheral country bloc, BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) and the Chinese and Russian-led Eurasian Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). But unlike China and Russia, countries in the BRICS, and the SCO, which have unambiguously rejected the geopolitics of Triad imperialism led by Washington, India has been (and is) running with the hare and hunting with the hounds.

India’s state-led infrastructural projects in South Asia are, however, overshadowed by China’s BRI, which some member countries of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation have joined, with the exceptions of India and Bhutan (the latter under the former’s tutelage). Importantly, as part of the BRI, the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) and the Gwadar Port infrastructure combined with onward shipping has been creating a significant alternative route. Oil is to be brought via pipeline from the Gwadar Port to southwestern China; exports from that region are in turn to be transported to Gwadar for onward shipment to their destinations.

Financed mainly by the China Development Bank, the China Ex-Im Bank, the China-promoted Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, and the BRICS New Development Bank, the BRI combines debt-financed infrastructural development tied to contracts with China’s state-owned and private enterprises, with industrial development in the vicinity.⁵³ Of course, BRI projects also cover Central Asia, West Asia, and Africa, as well as the Indochina Peninsula, through the China-Indochina Peninsula Economic Corridor. In South Asia, these projects are mainly in Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Myanmar, operating through, respectively, the CPEC (including the aforementioned expansion of the Gwadar Port); the expansion of the Hambantota Port, operating since 2010 in Sri Lanka; the Belt and Road cooperation between China and Bangladesh; the Trans-Himalayan Multidimensional Connectivity Network between Nepal and China; and the China-Myanmar Economic Corridor.⁵⁴

Under Sri Lankan management, the Hambantota Port incurred heavy losses, and, in the face of deep financial distress and unable to service the debt, the Sri Lankan government in 2016 went in for a debt-equity swap, handing over the port on a ninety-nine-year lease to a Chinese state-owned enterprise that was given a majority stake in the company managing the port. As per the agreement, the Chinese state-owned enterprise consented to undertake substantial investments to make the port profitable, and then divest a part of its equity stake to a Sri Lankan company within ten years.⁵⁵

The long lease of Sri Lanka’s Hambantota Port and Chinese management of it have raised security concerns and apprehensions in New Delhi and Washington. The imperialist power and its sub-imperialist partner decided to match Chinese influence. They began by building a deepwater terminal in Colombo Port, with a U.S. International Development Finance Corporation loan tied to Modi’s favored big Indian business group, the Adani Group of Companies, one of whose ventures, Adani Ports and Special Economic Zone, has a 51 percent equity capital stake in the Colombo Western Container Terminal.⁵⁶

What has stirred deep security apprehensions in India’s power elite are the CPEC, including the Gwadar Port, and the Hambantota Port. This is evident in repeated references to the U.S. military-intelligence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton’s “String of Pearls” geopolitical presumption that China is putting into place military-cum-economic assets and relationships along its maritime communication lines from the South China Sea through the Strait of Malacca, across the Indian Ocean, and on to the Persian Gulf.⁵⁷

In the IOR, New Delhi and Washington have been warning Sri Lanka and the Maldives against allowing growing Chinese influence. Enhanced Indian military influence in the Maldives has been resented locally, and elections in the fall of 2023 and spring of 2024 brought an overwhelming victory for forces demanding national sovereignty. The new government expelled the Indian armed forces and ended secret agreements that infringed national sovereignty. But, for India and the United States, the fact that the Maldives—a British protectorate from 1887 until independence in 1965—is located on the main marine routes of the Indian Ocean and is close to the U.S. military base in Diego Garcia seem crucial to keeping this archipelago away from “Chinese influence.”⁵⁸ Already, the national sovereignty forces have been universally termed “Pro-Chinese” in the Western media.⁵⁹

Renewed Hostility Along the India-China Border LAC

Renewed hostility along the India-China border LAC is related to India’s deepening strategic partnership with the United States. Crucially, it was the United States that provided India with real-time military intelligence in 2020−2021 related to the military skirmishes along the Sino-Indian border, including near the disputed Pangong Lake in Ladakh and West Tibet, and where Ladakh touches Xinjiang in the north and Tibet in the east and south. On the ground, the skirmishes have been due to differences in what China considers the LAC and what India insists is the LAC. Yet, soon after these military encounters, China seemed to indicate that it was not intent on gaining territory in areas lying between the LAC as defined by the Indian and the Chinese sides and that it was willing to keep in mind the actual state of the border areas. This is when it withdrew from “the grey zone around Pangong lake.”⁶⁰ But, despite this conciliatory gesture on Beijing’s part, in late 2022, the Indian government organized a U.S.-India high-altitude military exercise in the northern state of Uttarakhand, just one hundred kilometers from the disputed India-China border.

What explains the renewed hostility along the LAC in the India-China border dispute?

On June 26, 2017, Indian troops crossed over the Sikkim section of India’s border with China to block the construction of a road on the Chinese side in the Doklam (or Donglang) Plateau, creating a third point of conflict on the border with China. India’s Ministry of Defence, Ministry of External Affairs, Indian big media, and most self-styled security experts suggested that China was bent upon pushing the Sino-Indian-Bhutanese border further south so that in the event of war, it would be better placed to “grab” the Siliguri corridor—the so-called chicken’s neck—linking West Bengal and the rest of India to seven northeastern states, thereby cutting off the only in-country direct land link with those states. That this far-fetched presumption justifies incursion into territory claimed by China and under Chinese control (but disputed by Bhutan, which is under Indian domination) reflects the extent of the buildup of hostility towards China since the Modi regime came into office in 2014.

India under the Modi government has disregarded the September 1993 India-China Agreement on the Maintenance of Peace and Tranquility along the Line of Actual Control in the India-China Border Areas, the 1996 Agreement on Military Confidence Building Measures, and the 2005 Protocol for the Implementation of Military Confidence Building Measures. Taken together, these were accords on maintaining the status quo on the LAC pending a settlement of the border dispute (the 1993 agreement); military confidence building measures to be undertaken to avoid the outbreak of hostilities (the 1996 agreement); and modalities to implement the confidence building measures (the 2005 protocol).

Indeed, with India under the Modi regime deepening its strategic partnership with the United States, the government ignored commitments made in the April 2005 India-China Agreement on the Political Parameters and Guiding Principles for the Settlement of the India-China Boundary Question. The first article of this agreement explicitly states that the “differences on the boundary question should not be allowed to affect the overall development of bilateral relations.” Article Four states that the “two sides will give due consideration to each other’s strategic and reasonable interests, and the principle of mutual and equal security.” Article Five states that in attaining a resolution of the border dispute the “two sides will take into account, inter alia, historical evidence, national sentiments, practical difficulties and reasonable concerns and sensitivities of both sides, and the actual state of border areas.” Moreover, as reflected in Article Seven, in “reaching a boundary settlement, the two sides shall safeguard due interests of their settled populations in the border areas.”⁶¹

With the imperialist power’s support for the sub-imperialist power’s sovereignty claims, and the sub-imperialist power in partnership with the imperialist power in the latter’s anti-China Indo-Pacific project, will India, like China, conscientiously seek a reasonable negotiated settlement of the dispute with China? Will it adhere to the April 2005 India-China Agreement on the Political Parameters and Guiding Principles for the Settlement of the India-China Boundary Question? The India-China LAC remains on the list of the most militarized frontiers in the world. But here too, the aspect of antagonism in the U.S. imperialism/Indian sub-imperialism relation appears as, on at least the immediate, bounded aspects (that is, agreeing on an LAC) of the border dispute between India and China, talks continue in the context of both powers’ participation in the SCO. After an SCO meeting in the first week of July 2024, Indian External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar noted: “Met with CPC [Communist Party of China] Politburo member and FM [Foreign Minister] Wang Yi in Astana this morning. Discussed early resolution of remaining issues in border areas. Agreed to redouble efforts through diplomatic and military channels to that end.”⁶²

The Big Picture and Some Inferences

I have explained the emergence of India as a sub-imperialist power and a key U.S. collaborator in the latter’s anti-China Indo-Pacific project. But what of the big picture, “the whole” within which Indian sub-imperialism’s role in this U.S. imperial project is embedded?

Historically, the Asia-Pacific/Indo-Pacific has witnessed invasion, occupation, colonization, and semi-colonization by the United States and the Western European powers—British, French, Dutch, and Portuguese—and Japan. Following the period of decolonization, catching up, economically and militarily, through various forms of delinking, has been an ongoing process, more concertedly in China.⁶³ Since 1949, China has been on a long transition within and beyond capitalism, most unlike and in total contrast with India.

Especially since 1978, China adroitly has balanced its stakes in the face of challenges associated with developing within the confines of the global capitalist system dominated by Triad imperialism and led by Washington. The leadership of the Communist Party of China continues to safeguard the Chinese state’s independence, directs the nation’s development and modernization, and constantly reminds itself that the people, the exploited and the dominated, “aspire to socialism.” The party’s perspective is that of “a long—very long—global transition from capitalism to socialism.”⁶⁴ There has been and is a socialist horizon in China’s anti-imperialist struggle.⁶⁵

China considers its historical territory to be the Chinese mainland, Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan. As far as land-sea boundaries and exclusive economic zones are concerned, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and Australia (Papua New Guinea was ruled by Australia over nearly sixty years), and, later, Japan (which had colonized the Korean Peninsula), have benefited the most. Disputes have arisen in the East China Sea involving Japan, China, and South Korea over delimitation of exclusive economic zones and over sovereignty claims of Japan, China, and Taiwan to the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands administered by Japan.

With the deterioration of Sino-Japanese and Sino-U.S. relations, Chinese aircraft “incursions” into Japan’s Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ)—itself a creation of the U.S. Armed Forces, and like all such ADIZs, having no basis in international law—raised alarms in Tokyo and Washington. China responded in 2013 by declaring its own ADIZ over the East China Sea, identifying, locating, and controlling aircraft there in the interest of its national security. Indeed, Beijing even hinted that it was considering proclaiming an ADIZ in the South China Sea.

Unnerved at this former semi-colony’s straightforward assertion of its sovereignty and its rights to development and modernization, economic and military—even with around four hundred U.S. military bases virtually surrounding China, the United States and Japan decided to further advance their Indo-Pacific organization for security and military advantage and its requirements of military deployment and strategic partnerships. With Australia and India as partners in the Quad, the four countries have been securing their sea lanes of communication in the Indo-Pacific. China’s main response has been in the form of the BRI from 2013 onward, including its Maritime Silk Road, its Indo-Pacific Sea routes through Southeast Asia to South Asia, West Asia (the Middle East), and Africa, linked by the development of ports.⁶⁶ In April 2022, China proposed a Global Security Initiative based on a rejection of military blocs, and adhering to the principle that one nation’s or bloc’s security should not be designed to undermine the security of other nations.

What I am suggesting here is that the whole in which sub-imperialist India’s participation in Washington’s anti-China project is embedded can be perceived when one looks at China’s catch-up, economic and military. China is responding to its past humiliation in the face of part invasion, part occupation, and semi-colonization, as well as the present U.S. imperialist threat. The latter is backed by U.S.-led, NATO-like allies (Australia and Japan) and sub-imperialist India. Essentially, what has ensued is a sequence of political, economic, geopolitical, military, and diplomatic moves and countermoves, with one side or the other anticipating the other’s moves/countermoves in advance. Thus, a perilous spiral has been proceeding upward, constituting a grave threat to the peoples of the Asia-Pacific and the world.⁶⁷

As far as India is concerned, I have no doubt that its dependent, monopoly-capitalist ruling class knows very well what kind of actions and policies promote what it regards as its interests. In the late 1950s, the Indian government felt that a negotiated settlement of the border dispute with China was not in its interests. Anti-Chinese hysteria was manufactured in the country to prepare the Indian people and the armed forces to bear the costs of the ambitions of the dependent capitalist class and the Indian power elite (who thought and acted much like the British did).

Tragically, even today this dependent, monopoly-capitalist ruling class reckons its interests—and the Indian power elite thinks and acts—not very differently from what they considered, thought, and did then. The U.S. ruling class during India’s 1962 China War convinced the U.S. government to extend military aid to India, which Nehru promptly accepted, thus improving U.S.-India ties. Like the U.S. government, the U.S. ruling class wanted India in the U.S. camp, with a military alliance and all the other components that went with such an association.

Mercifully, this did not happen then, even though sections of the Indian ruling class would have welcomed it. But as I have shown, there are hints that at least some of this can possibly happen now, though, of course, in a totally different international and national context. India is not yet in a security alliance with the United States in the same way that Japan and Australia are. But the Indian power elite, more than ever before, consider themselves the inheritors of the Akhand Bharat and Greater India that (in their imagination) is to come. Envisioning India becoming a “leading power” by collaborating with the United States in the latter’s anti-China Indo-Pacific project, New Delhi seems to be becoming a de facto military-security ally of Washington in the region.

In the big picture, “the whole,” centered on China resisting U.S. imperialism, with India, as a sub-imperialist power collaborating with U.S. imperialism in the latter’s anti-China Indo-Pacific project, is appalling. It is tragic that India’s power elite; its dependent, monopoly-capitalist ruling class; and its so-called Vishwa Guru (“tutor of the world”) have brought a country with a vibrant tradition of anti-imperialism, including solidarity with China’s resistance to Japanese imperialism during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945), to such a deplorable denouement.

Notes

1. ↩ For an earlier analysis of Indian semi-fascism and sub-imperialism, see Bernard D’Mello, India after Naxalbari: Unfinished History (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2018), chapter 9.
2. ↩ The term pivot is a military expression related to “defense” in accordance with deterrence. I argue that Washington has brought India into its anti-China Indo-Pacific pivot to militarily constrain China. Its hostile anti-China policy is shared by both the Republican and Democratic parties.
3. ↩ The Aksai Chin area/tract, linking Tibet with Xinjiang, and part of Xinjiang and Tibet provinces of China, has been claimed by India since 1954, when the government of India put a definitive northern boundary on its official maps. The so-called McMahon Line is a unilateral British colonial claim dating back to 1914 of a boundary between Tibet and British India in the eastern Himalayan region along northeast India and northern Burma (Myanmar).
4. ↩ India’s forward policy entailed patrolling as far as possible from present positions in the area claimed by New Delhi to belong to India, attempting to set up additional posts to prevent the Chinese from further advancing in this area, and striving to dominate Chinese posts already established in the area.
5. ↩ Neville Maxwell, India’s China War (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970).
6. ↩ Maxwell, India’s China War.
7. ↩ Maxwell, India’s China War, 419. China made a political decision not to retain the territorial gains of the war. A recent book, authored by a scholar who worked for three decades in the archives division of India’s Ministry of External Affairs, which analyzes India-China relations from 1949 to the Indo-China war in 1962 and its aftermath, is also very insightful: A. S. Bhasin, Nehru, Tibet, and China (New Delhi: Penguin Random House, 2021).
8. ↩ Neville Maxwell, China’s Borders: Settlements and Conflicts (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014), 110.
9. ↩ Neville Maxwell, “India-China Dispute Revisited: How It Could Be Resolved,” Economic and Political Weekly 47, no. 51 (December 2012): 10.
10. ↩ Srikant Dutt, “India and the Himalayan States,” Asian Affairs 11, no. 1 (1980): 71. In introducing India’s relations with these small Himalayan states, I draw on this paper, as well as Srikant Dutt, “Bhutan’s International Position,” International Studies 20, no. 3–4 (1981): 601–23.
11. ↩ Dutt, “India and the Himalayan States,” 73.
12. ↩ Leo Huberman and Paul M. Sweezy, “A Fool’s Game: India-China,” Monthly Review 14, no. 9 (January 1963): 471.
13. ↩ Dutt, “India and the Himalayan States,” 74.
14. ↩ Dutt, “India and the Himalayan States,” 75.
15. ↩ Dutt, “India and the Himalayan States,” 75; Dutt, “Bhutan’s International Position,” 603–4.
16. ↩ Dutt, “Bhutan’s International Position,” 609–12.
17. ↩ “Akhand Bharat,” in one version of ultranationalist thought, is an undivided India as it is claimed to have existed prior to Partition in 1947, which defined the nation’s geographical “Greater India” in such thought is the entire area around the Indian Ocean region adjoining the Persian Gulf, East Africa, and Southeast Asia, which (according to this line of thought) defines the nation’s ideological frontiers.
18. ↩ My account in this and the preceding two paragraphs is an application and adaptation of the thought of Ruy Mauro Marini, The Dialectics of Development (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2022),15, 117, 165, 171, 177–78.
19. ↩ Formal subsumption occurs when labor processes that originate outside of the capital relation are brought within it, as by imposition of the wage, while real subsumption occurs when the social relations and modes of labor arise upon, and are imbued with, the requirements of capital. See the draft of the sixth chapter of Capital: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, “The Results of the Direct Production Process,” in Collected Works, vol. 34 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2010).
20. ↩ The matter in quotation marks is paraphrased from Karl Marx and Frederick Engels’s description of the proletariat in England in the 1840s in their book, The Holy Family.
21. ↩ Adrian Sotelo Valencia, Sub-Imperialism Revisited: Dependency Theory in the Thought of Ruy Mauro Marini (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 72.
22. ↩ Capitalism is marked by an inherent drive from the capitalist side to reorganize the labor process and introduce new technologies to increase labor productivity so that more time is left to produce surplus value. But underdeveloped capital has a structural propensity to be dependent on developed capital for, and in the adoption of, more developed labor processes and technological changes.
23. ↩ For an understanding of this process at the global level, see Paul M. Sweezy, “The Triumph of Financial Capital,” Monthly Review 46, no. 2 (June 1994): 1–11.
24. ↩ In 2022–2023, the shares of income and wealth belonging to India’s top 1 percent, which “skyrocketed since the early 2000s,” were 22.6 percent and 40.1 percent, respectively. Considering the top 1 percent wealth share, “the ‘Billionaire Raj’ headed by India’s modern bourgeoisie is now more unequal than the British Raj headed by the colonialist forces.” Nitin Kumar Bharti, Lucas Chancel, Thomas Piketty, and Anmol Somanchi, “Income and Wealth Inequality in India, 1922–2023: The Rise of the Billionaire Raj,” World Inequality Lab Working Paper 2024/09, March 2024.
25. ↩ The United States is, by far, the largest exporter of armaments (responsible for 42 percent of global arms exports in 2019–2023), and India is the world’s largest importer of armaments (9.8 percent of global arms imports in 2019–2023). Although in 2019–2023 Russia was India’s main armaments supplier, its share of Indian arms imports shrank from 76 percent in 2009–2013 to 58 percent in 2014–2018, and then to 36 per cent in 2019–2023. India has since been increasing its major armaments imports, mainly from France and the United States. Pieter D. Wezeman et al., “SIPRI Fact Sheet: Trends in International Arms Transfers, 2023,” Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, March 2024.
26. ↩ The U.S. nuclear warhead stockpile is 7.4 times more than that of China (as of 2023). Although China has been left with no alternative but to modernize and expand its nuclear arsenal, and may have even deployed a small number, its nuclear warhead stockpile will continue to remain much smaller than that of the United States. Still, this is enough to drive India (along with Pakistan, given their mutual nuclear arms race) to enhance its own nuclear stockpile. SIPRI Yearbook 2024: Armaments, Disarmament and International Security—Summary (Stockholm: Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, 2024).
27. ↩ A centerpiece of the U.S. 2022 National Defense Strategy is “integrated deterrence,” which, among other things, involves the U.S. armed forces working together with its allies and strategic partners to contain the “most consequential strategic competitor”—the Peoples Republic of China (PRC). The strategy states that the U.S. Department of Defense will “foster advantage through advanced technology cooperation with partnerships like AUKUS and the Indo-Pacific Quad…advance our Major Defense Partnership with India to enhance its ability to deter PRC aggression and ensure free and open access to the Indian Ocean region…[and] support Ally and partner efforts, in accordance with U.S. policy and international law, to address acute forms of gray zone coercion from the PRC’s campaigns to establish control over the East China Sea, Taiwan Strait, South China Sea, and disputed land borders such as with India” (U.S. Department of Defense, 2022 National Defense Strategy of the United States of America, 7, 14–15, 15).
28. ↩ For the U.S.-China trade and technology wars and the cold war unleashed on China, see Zhiming Long, Zhixuan Feng, Bangxi Li, and Rémy Herrera, “S.-China Trade War: Has the Real ‘Thief’ Finally Been Unmasked?,” Monthly Review 72, no. 5 (October 2020): 6–14; Junfu Zhao, “The Political Economy of the U.S.-China Technology War,” Monthly Review 73, no. 3 (July–August 2021): 112–126; John Bellamy Foster, “The New Cold War on China,” Monthly Review 73, no. 3 (July–August 2021): 1–20.
29. ↩ This barebones summary account of the “Silicon Valley Imperial Innovation System” and its India connection analytically draws on Raúl Delgado Wise and Mateo Crossa Niell, “Capital, Science, Technology: The Development of Productive Forces in Contemporary Capitalism,” Monthly Review 72, no. 10 (March 2021): 33–46.
30. ↩ On U.S. big tech’s mining the data of Indian users, see “Digitalisation in India: The Class Agenda [Part IV],” Research Unit for Political Economy, May 23, 2024, rupe-india.org.
31. ↩ Beatrice Edwards, “The Zombie Bill: The Corporate Security Campaign That Would Not Die,” Monthly Review 66, no. 3 (July–August 2014): 54–69.
32. ↩ Norimitsu Onishi and Ian Austen, “Two Hooded Gunmen, a Silver Getaway Car and a Slain Sikh Leader,” New York Times, September 23, 2023.
33. ↩ The term “surveillance capitalism” and its analysis was first introduced in John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney, “Surveillance Capitalism: Monopoly-Finance Capital, the Military-Industrial Complex, and the Digital Age,” Monthly Review 66, no. 3 (July–August 2014): 1–31.
34. ↩ In a world abiding by the UN-based order of sovereign states reinforced by international law, the U.S. military would have to pull out of Taiwan—a recognized part of China—and Washington would have to abide by the UN Charter and any UN resolutions related to Taiwan.
35. ↩ The hegemonic bloc is composed of big Indian businesspersons and a significant segment of small and medium enterprise owners, managerial personnel, government officials, technocrats, the middle class, big capitalist landowners, and rich peasants/farmers. The dependent monopoly-capitalist ruling class has, historically and contemporarily, mostly controlled huge conglomerates (“large business houses”). For instance, Tata emerged from the British opium trade to ultimately become a multinational conglomerate, with companies like Tata Steel Netherlands and Tata Steel UK as subsidiaries of Tata Steel, and Jaguar Land Rover as a subsidiary of Tata Motors. Tata Steel and Tata Motors, both parts of the Tata conglomerate, are headquartered in India. Other business houses include the Ambani and Adani conglomerates, the success of which can be tracked down to shrewd, parvenu businesspeople backed by powerful politicians.
36. ↩ Research Unit for Political Economy, “India, COVID-19, the United States, and China,” Monthly Review 72, no. 4 (September 2020): 49; John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, “Imperialism in the Indo-Pacific,” Monthly Review 76, no. 3 (July–August 2024): 1–4.
37. ↩ Brendan M. Howe, “Geopolynomics and Japan: Asia-Pacific Policy Prescriptions,” Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus 22(1), no. 5 (January 2024): 6.
38. ↩ India’s “Look East” and “Act East” policies, carried out within the ASEAN framework, could not have made much headway without Washington’s backing and Canberra’s and Tokyo’s support.
39. ↩ The “nine-dash line” is a group of line segments on maps that set out the claims of China and Taiwan in the South China Sea.
40. ↩ See B.S. Chimni, “Third World Approaches to International Law: A Manifesto,” International Community Law Review 8 (2006): 3–27.
41. ↩ “China’s Position Paper on South China Sea,” China Daily, May 6, 2024. This is the full text of the “Position Paper of the Government of the People’s Republic of China on the Matter of Jurisdiction in the South China Sea Arbitration Initiated by the Republic of the Philippines,” December 7, 2014.
42. ↩ In its April 2024 military exercises, the United States deployed an intermediate-range missile system in the northern Philippines, taking its New Cold War with China to a higher level. In May 2024, three Indian warships, as part of the Indian Navy’s long-range deployment to the South China Sea, docked at Manila to take part in a military exercise with the Philippines navy.
43. ↩ Valencia, Sub-Imperialism Revisited, 74, 76–77.
44. ↩ This was India’s second instance of nuclear testing; the first, its “Smiling Buddha” Pokhran Nuclear Test, was conducted in May 1974.
45. ↩ This explanation appeared in a 1998 open letter that the then Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee wrote to then U.S. President Bill Clinton: Atal Behari Vajpayee, “Nuclear Anxiety; Indian’s Letter to Clinton on the Nuclear Testing,” New York Times, May 13, 1998.
46. ↩ In 2008, with strong U.S. backing, India and the International Atomic Energy Agency entered a “safeguards agreement.” Thereafter, the Nuclear Suppliers Group gave India a waiver to engage in trade in nuclear materials, equipment, and technology without signing the nonproliferation treaty. India’s high expectations were, however, unmet. Nonproliferation measures, such as the separation plan, an “Additional Protocol” (that is, one additional to the safeguards agreement) with the international agency, and the group’s decision to tighten its controls on trade with nontreaty nations (for example, India), were, reportedly, influenced by U.S. dictates.
47. ↩ Hyde Act of 2006, 22 United States Code 87, § 8001, 6B.
48. ↩ Hyde Act, 22 USC 87, § 8003, d(3A).
49. ↩ Hyde Act, 22 USC 87, § 8003, g(2D[ii]).
50. ↩ I have here applied the principles outlined in Mao Zedong’s 1937 essay “On Contradiction” and his 1957 elaboration in the essay “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People,” both available at marxists.org.
51. ↩ After assessing some of these developments in the India-U.S. defense relationship, Atul Bhardwaj, an ex-Indian naval aviator and a strategic affairs columnist in Economic and Political Weekly, wrote: “Despite these developments, both India and the US continue to deny that they are allies. India is relying on semantics to remain in denial about being a US military ally and…feign ignorance about the power asymmetries with the US.” Atul Bhardwaj, “India in Quasi Alignment with the United States: China Remains the Most Significant Factor that Strengthens the Ties between the United States and India,” Economic and Political Weekly 58, no. 28 (July 15, 2023): 8.
52. ↩ White House, “Joint Statement: The United States and India: Enduring Global Partners in the 21st Century,” June 7, 2016.
53. ↩ For instance, the BRI has been developing a Digital Silk Road in South Asia, based on 5G base stations and the digital economy. Pravin Sawhney, The Last War: How AI Will Shape India’s Final Showdown with China (New Delhi: Aleph, 2022), 46–47. I am, however, highly skeptical about Sawhney’s main prediction—”India’s Final Showdown with China”—regarding AI-driven warfare.
54. ↩ China and Myanmar, as well as China and Bangladesh, took the initiative to establish the China-Myanmar Economic Corridor and the Belt and Road projects in Bangladesh, respectively, after India boycotted what was to be a Bangladesh, China, India, and Myanmar Economic Corridor connecting India and China through Myanmar and Bangladesh. China resurrected this proposal in 2015 as part of the BRI. In this section, I partly draw on John A. Mathews, “China’s Long-Term Trade and Currency Goals: The Belt and Road Initiative,” Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus 17(1), no. 1 (January 2019): 1–6.
55. ↩ Mathews, “China’s Long-Term Trade and Currency Goals,” 5.
56. ↩ Ranga Jayasuriya, “Adani is Building a Port, Sri Lanka Is Trying to Sail Again,” Times of India, November 11, 2013.
57. ↩ Christopher J. Pehrson, String of Pearls: Meeting the Challenge of China’s Rising Power Across the Asian Littoral, Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, Carlisle, Pennsylvania, July 2006.
58. ↩ On May 22, 2019, a nonbinding resolution in the UN General Assembly declared that the Chagos Archipelago was a part of Mauritius, but the United Kingdom has continued to claim sovereignty over Chagos. Importantly, India has supported Mauritius’s claim to sovereignty over the archipelago. What might explain India’s stance? The United States and United Kingdom are bent on continuing to use Diego Garcia as a military base, and, apparently, Mauritius has indicated that it will allow the United States to retain its military base in Diego Garcia if it regains sovereignty over the Chagos Archipelago.
59. ↩ See, for example, “Maldives: Pro-Chinese President’s Party Wins Big in Parliamentary Election,” Le Monde, April 21, 2024.
60. ↩ Prem Shankar Jha, “What Lies Behind China’s Belt and Road Initiative?,” The Wire, March 19, 2021, in.
61. ↩ For the text of this agreement, see the website of the Government of India’s Ministry of External Affairs, mea.gov.in.
62. ↩ “EAM Jaishankar, His Chinese Counterpart Wang Hold Talks in Astana,” Hindustani Times, July 4, 2024.
63. ↩ “Delinking” is here understood as “submitting the external relations to the logic of an internal development that is independent from them.” Samir Amin, “A Note on the Concept of Delinking,” Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 10, no. 3 (Winter 1987): 442.
64. ↩ Samir Amin, “What Maoism Has Contributed,” MR Online, September 21, 2006.
65. ↩ The post-revolutionary Chinese social formation is, however, neither capitalist nor socialist. The Chinese government has been steering the capitalist process in the economy, ensuring that financial globalization does not get the upper hand, but it has not dismantled the global labor arbitrage model of capital accumulation. I find it difficult to figure out the direction in which China is going, capitalist or socialist.
66. ↩ For some of the facts in this and the previous paragraph, see Christian Wirth, “Securing the Seas, Securing the State: The Inside/Outside of ‘Indo-Pacific’ Geopolitics,” Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus 19(3), no. 4 (February 2021), org.
67. ↩ Regarding this dynamic situation, given the thoroughgoing opacity that encircles government and private business decision-making and actions, there are things that I do not know, and there are things that I will never know. This is even more the case now that there is no longer a WikiLeaks to make available to the public classified diplomatic cables sent to the U.S. State Department by its embassies, consulates, and diplomatic missions abroad. Moreover, as a part of the public, I too am exposed to the vast state-of-the-art simulator of disinformation advancing capitalist/imperialist military, political, and economic/financial goals, which programs what I am made to see, read, and think. I keep wondering how this might inevitably be corrupting my consciousness—but I am on a journey of learning and reflection.