A reset of global geopolitics is on the cards as India and China’s belief in a multipolar narrative was emphasised in one of the most consequential meetings of the year that took place in Tianjin. Narendra Modi and Xi Jinping may have shaken hands in customary fashion but that itself may have carried a message to the United States that two of the five leading economies of the world are reassessing their relationship with Washington even as they promise to improve their own ties while aiming to be good friends and good neighbours.
America, which is in the grip of an authoritarian, power-hungry President who has been using tariffs to shake up the world order, has pushed India into “derisking” from the United States in the face of irritating and impossible demands from Donald Trump. His egomaniacal pursuit of the Nobel Peace Prize has not only placed trade talks out on a limb but also threatens to bring about a fundamental change in ties built up over the last two decades when India was seen as a friendly counterbalance to China’s rise.
Shaken by the fear that Trump’s US could well be the principal destabilising force for the world order as it existed before 2025, the Indian elephant danced the tango with the Chinese dragon after casting away some of the historical distrust on border issues and a growing trade deficit. With the US virtually singling out the country with part tariff and part sanction amounting to a crushing 50 per cent-plus, India has agreed with China to look at the relationship from a strategic and long-term perspective rather than just as a band-aid antidote to Trump’s tantrums.
Stung by the slanderous arrogance of Trump’s close loyalists, of whom one had the temerity to dub India as Russia’s “laundromat” for sustaining the war on Ukraine, which he termed as “Modi’s war”, India may have found comforting Xi Jinping’s words to join China at this juncture for the sake of peace and prosperity, not only in Asia but also around a multipolar world in which there would be more democracy in international relations and less hectoring from the West.
As the world is going towards a transformation, as Xi describes it, there might be logic to the two most populous nations coming together and, perhaps, trade with each other more for the needs of the 2.8 billion people who make up nearly 40 per cent of the world’s population. As prominent voices of the Global South, they also owe a responsibility to look at diversifying trade while striving to promote a world less dominated by the US.
On the way to the eastern port city in China, Prime Minister Modi enjoyed a red-carpet welcome in Japan where most of a bilateral meeting with the Japanese PM Shigeru Ishiba had to do with economic security in critical sectors like semiconductors, rare earth minerals, pharmaceuticals and information and communication technologies. In the prevailing scenario of a massive global churning in trade, PM Modi’s observation on what levels a melding of Japanese technology and Indian IT talent can take the nations must have seemed particularly sanguine.
Japan’s pledge to bring into India $68 billion of private investment over 10 years is a big takeaway from the stop in Tokyo while a ride in a “Shinkansen” suggested this could be a teaser for what Indians might soon be able to enjoy in high-speed rail connectivity. Sharing of a 10-year roadmap prioritising cooperation in eight areas was symbolic of great success in India’s early steps to ease the pressure of a rupture in ties with our largest trading partner, the United States.
