No tailwinds for India: US and China are squeezing India’s rise

MSN | Sreemoy Talukdar

India’s rise faces five structural headwinds that China’s ascent did not, Sreemoy Talukdar contends, with Washington and Beijing posing the most immediate tests on the road to 2047. Crude prices are touching $117 a barrel, he writes, while the RBI works to keep the rupee afloat. Tariff walls and automation, he says, now deny India the path China took.

He cites 2025 tariffs of 50 per cent on Indian goods, a temporary six-month waiver for Chabahar and Trump’s warmer ties with Pakistan. The trade deal is still in limbo. Beijing is the biggest challenge, he argues: it announced export controls on tunnel-boring machines on October 19 and proposed controls on 12 advanced solar photovoltaic manufacturing technologies. On October 22, the ITBP chief said face-offs continued in Arunachal Pradesh. India is widening its network of partners while keeping channels open to Beijing and Moscow, a trapeze act he calls difficult.

Comment

Sreemoy Talukdar’s contrast between China’s easy ascent and India’s hard one rests on a selective reading of the 1990s. The United States and the European Community imposed arms embargoes on China after the Tiananmen crackdown in 1989, and the EU’s remains in force. Access to Western capital and technology followed negotiation, culminating in WTO accession in 2001. Treating openness as the default condition of the era overlooks how contested that access was.

The land-border point survives precedent with a qualification, since China did carry a hostile frontier. Soviet and Chinese troops fought on Zhenbao Island in March 1969, and Moscow kept heavy forces on the border for years. That pressure eased after Mikhail Gorbachev’s visit to Beijing in May 1989; India’s LAC and LoC fronts have seen no comparable settlement.

The author’s firmer evidence is narrower and newer: Herrenknecht, the German maker, tied 2024 delivery delays to customs clearances for machines built inside China. Beijing’s export controls on tunnel-boring machines, announced on 19 October, could slow India’s border infrastructure in a way no 1990s comparison captures. The Herrenknecht case suggests that buying from a German supplier does not remove that exposure.

Strategic Question for Discussion

What happens to India’s border infrastructure timetable if Beijing’s 19 October controls on tunnel-boring machines reach machines sold under German brands such as Herrenknecht?

The pattern suggests delays would appear first in projects that need imported tunnelling machines, since the Herrenknecht case already points to Chinese production behind a German name. How far they spread would depend on how much of India’s border programme relies on such equipment, a figure the source does not give. My assessment is that the exposure is real but uneven, with the first signs likely in customs clearances, as in the 2024 Herrenknecht delays.

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