India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi brought up the Ukraine conflict in his speech to the U.S. Congress June 22, only to repeat that India wants to bring about an end to the war through diplomacy. China’s Foreign Ministry has not felt the need to respond to Modi’s reference to “the free and open Indo-Pacific” and the value of the Quad grouping. RT has only run one fairly complicated opinion column by its South Asia editor, an Indian. Although all U.S. and British media focus on several defense-related agreements made, the purpose of the Biden Administration’s great shows of love throughout this visit appears to be the dream of using India’s industrial-technology capabilities and the higher quality of its workforce—particularly in information technology—to make up for American difficulties in competing with China’s much higher productivity and “full-set” industry, even in the semiconductor industry. But there is no prospect of a U.S.-India free-trade agreement, and apparently none was discussed.
Modi remarked: “When I first visited the U.S. [in 2016] as Prime Minister, India was the tenth-largest economy in the world. Today, India is the fifth-largest economy. And, India will be the third-largest economy soon. We are not only growing bigger but we are also growing faster. When India grows, the whole world grows. After all, we are one-sixth of the world’s population! In the last century, when India won its freedom, it inspired many other countries to free themselves from colonial rule. In this century, when India sets benchmarks in growth, it will inspire many other countries to do the same….
“We are focusing on infrastructure development. We have given nearly 40 million homes to provide shelter to over 150 million people. That is nearly six times the population of Australia! We run a national health insurance program that ensures free medical treatment for about 500 million people. That is greater than the population of South America! We took banking to the unbanked with the world’s largest financial inclusion drive. Nearly 500 million people benefited. This is close to the population of North America! We have worked on building Digital India. Today, there are more than 850 million smartphones and internet users in the country. This is more than the population of Europe! We protected our people with 2.2 billion doses of made in India COVID vaccines, and that, too, free of cost!”
The Prime Minister might have added that the major “big tech” U.S. companies employ half or more of their workforces in India, and that thousands of smaller Indian companies are contractors for these and other IT multinationals.
Regarding defense cooperation, Modi put it in the context of IT and space cooperation: “When India and the U.S. work together on semiconductors and critical minerals, it helps the world in making supply chains more diverse, resilient and reliable…. We were strangers in defense cooperation at the turn of the century. Now, the United States has become one of our most important defense partners. Today India and the U.S. are working together, in space and in the seas, in science and in semiconductors, in start-ups and sustainability, in tech and in trade, in farming and finance, in art and artificial intelligence, in energy and education, in healthcare and humanitarian efforts.”
