It’s Time to Tie India to the West

India’s new enthusiasm for the global south—it just convened a special summit of developing nations and presides over the G-20 with a development-focused agenda this year—should not be mistaken for reduced interest in its quest to build stronger ties with the West. On the contrary, the centrality of the G-7 for India’s economic and geopolitical prospects is continuing to grow. For India, the West is the most important trading partner, the dominant source of capital and technology, and the major destination for the Indian diaspora. Cooperation with the G-7—comprising Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United States—is also critical for India to effectively deal with the increasing challenges from China. In fact, India’s dual orientations are converging: Both its gradual but inexorable alignment with the West and its renewed engagement with the global south are expressions of New Delhi’s repositioning against Beijing and its growing influence.

The West, too, has an interest in a stronger India that can counter growing Chinese and Russian diplomatic, economic, and military influence among developing countries. Washington’s recent offer of a range of technologies to India—including jet engines—underlines the Biden administration’s desire to strengthen ties with New Delhi despite Indian ambivalence on Russia’s war in Ukraine. The United States is also eager to incorporate India into a new network of global supply chains with trusted partners.

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Integrating India—soon to be the world’s third-largest economy—into the G-7 process is therefore the logical next step for the West. After all, the G-7 is no longer just a forum for major industrialized countries to align economic policies, as it was in the past. In recent years, it has increasingly taken on the character of a bloc of leading democracies cooperating on global security and other important issues, including more effective competition with China and Russia.

India’s long history as a leader of the Non-Aligned Movement has given rise to fears—or hopes, depending on whom one asks—that New Delhi is returning to its old habit of mobilizing the global south against the global north. But there are few indications that this is the case. At the Voice of Global South Summit convened by New Delhi in January, for example, there was little anti-Western rhetoric.

India’s dual orientations are converging: Both its inexorable alignment with the West and its renewed engagement with the global south are expressions of New Delhi’s repositioning against Beijing.

For now, India’s immediate objective for its outreach isn’t geostrategic—it’s more about reconnecting with a global constituency. New Delhi had built up much goodwill across the global south during the Cold War but has somewhat neglected these regions in recent decades. As India focused on finding its place in great-power relations commensurate with its growing economic heft, on reconnecting with its neighborhood, and on joining Asian regional institutions, engagement with the rest of the global south fell low among India’s priorities.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in particular, got flak at home for ignoring India’s old partners in the Non-Aligned Movement. But Modi’s interest in the global south picked up in recent years. The devastating impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the developing world, as well as the effect of Russia’s war in Ukraine on global food and energy security, lent some urgency to—and provided a window of opportunity for—India’s reengagement with the global south. In part, this push has been enabled by India’s growing economy over the last three decades, which has given New Delhi more ways to aid (and invest in) poor countries. This year, India’s presidency of the G-20 is a major diplomatic opportunity to build on this engagement.

That said, geopolitics is never far behind. India’s growing concerns about an assertive China have convinced the Modi government not to simply cede a large part of the developing world to Beijing. Although India does not yet have the resources that a richer China brings into play, New Delhi could fill at least part of the vacuum left by the West in the global south. But it’s difficult to see India have much more than a small impact acting alone. If India were to partner more closely with the West, on the other hand, it could offer much stiffer competition to China—a geopolitical priority for both India and the West.

India is not the only major power outside the trans-Atlantic West worried about China’s deep penetration of the global south. Japan, too, has woken up to the danger. In a major speech during his visit to the United States in January, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida called on fellow G-7 leaders to do more to engage the global south—and show more humility when they do so. Kishida also warned of the consequences if developed nations continued to neglect the global south: “Even if we walk on a path which we believe to be right, if the global south, holding integral places in the international arena, turn their back, we will find ourselves in the minority and unable to resolve mounting policy issues.”

Japan’s expanding geopolitical profile and newly muscular security policies have raised the value of Tokyo as a partner for New Delhi. Japan, as the only Asian voice in the G-7, can also help bring greater nuance to Western policies and move the group closer to India on regional issues. Kishida has been particularly concerned about the West’s inability to convince large parts of the global south of the dangers of Russian aggression against Ukraine—a topic on which India’s silence is largely a relic of Soviet-Indian cooperation. Japan, like India, also has no interest in seeing China as part of the global south.

In the last few years, Japan and India have sought to work together in the Indian Ocean region to counter China’s expanding regional influence. India’s participation in the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue—known as the Quad—along with Japan, Australia, and the United States, is also driven by growing security concerns about China. At the bilateral level, too, India’s economic and security cooperation is increasingly oriented toward Western countries.

It is no surprise, then, that New Delhi has no desire to frame its outreach to the global south in adversarial terms with the West. Indian External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar has often talked about India as a south-western power—rooted in the global south with “very strong bonding” to Western and West-aligned countries.

This brings us to the growing engagement between India and the G-7 in the last few years. While India was only occasionally invited to G-7 summits (or G-8 summits before Russia’s expulsion from the group) since 2000, it has become a regular attendee in recent years. It participated as a special guest at the 2019 summit in Biarritz, France, the 2021 summit in Cornwall, England, and the 2022 summit in Bavaria, Germany. This May, Modi is expected to attend the group’s next summit in Hiroshima, Japan.

Beyond the regular participation of India, there has been some discussion about expanding the G-7 to include a few additional countries outside the geographic West—without including Russia and China, as in the G-20. Currently, Japan is the only member outside Europe and North America. One proposal has been to turn the G-7 into the “Democracy Ten” (D-10) with the addition of Australia, India, and South Korea. But the idea did not gain much traction when it was last proposed during the Cornwall summit.

The proposal deserves another look. Strengthening the G-7 while keeping its democratic geopolitical orientation deserves more intensive discussion. Drawing New Delhi away from Moscow and enabling it to compete with Beijing have long been U.S. objectives. This should be a goal for the G-7 as well.

Tying India, especially, more strongly to the G-7 by including it in the group would also lend the West greater influence and legitimacy with the global south. India is the key to breaking the old East-West and North-South divides that shaped so many of the debates and conflicts of the 20th century.

This article appears in the Spring 2023 print issue of Foreign Policy magazine. Subscribe now to support our journalism.