Choices for India

Manish Tewari

In early 2019, US General David Petraeus and S. Jaishankar, now India’s External Affairs Minister but then as a private citizen (he was then President Global Corporate Affairs for the Tata Group of Companies), appeared together on a panel. The former U.S. Central Command Commander and Director of the Central Intelligence Agency asserted that China was ‘the defining issue of our age’ and, seemingly in frustration, added that countries such as India ‘have to decide’. Asked if India could indeed take a stand and choose a side, Jaishankar retorted, ‘India should take a stand and should take a side—our side.

This talk has been a tad difficult to walk after becoming the country’s External Affairs Minister in May 2019, qua China given the prolonged border stand-off with the country, which despite the partial disengagement in some sectors in October 2024 still remain the unknown. What exactly are the terms of disengagement across a potpourri of tactical arrangements straddling the LAC still remains ambiguous. Whether the pre-April 2020 position has been restored on the LAC, which was the professed objective of the Government of India, still remains a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.

The rather pugnacious behaviour of President Trump following the kinetic actions by India between 7 and 10 May 2025, post the Pahalgam terror attack and the over-the-top rhetoric of the likes of Peter Navarro trying to arm-twist India over tariffs, naturally makes India wanting to hedge its bets by pivoting towards China and Russia as ostensibly as were the optics of the recently concluded SCO summit in Tianjin in China held on 31 August and 1 September 2025.

However, a knee-jerk swing of the pendulum is not a well-thought-through policy prescription notwithstanding the current stresses and strains in the US-India relationship. Russ