Sumit Ganguly : India's Democracy under strain, and a “fraught” US relationship
New Zealand's ties with India have been warming this year, from the FTA's progress through Parliament to high-level visits. But according to one of the most experienced US-based watchers of Indian politics, the country India has spent two decades cultivating as its most important strategic partner seems to be drifting away.
Sumit Ganguly, a distinguished fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution, describes India-US relations in blunt terms: "It's fraught. It's a deeply fraught moment." The diplomatic architecture built since the Clinton administration, reinforced by the 2008 US-India nuclear deal and sustained on a bipartisan basis since, has come under real strain under Trump, he says. Trade disputes are part of it, but the deeper rupture followed a 2025 terrorist attack in Kashmir's Pahalgam resort and the India-Pakistan crisis that followed. Trump claimed credit for ending that conflict; India insisted it was resolved bilaterally. "Trump really took umbrage at that," Ganguly says, tying the episode to the president's "relentless quest" for a Nobel Peace Prize.
The consequences go beyond a bruised ego in Washington, he argues: US-India counterterrorism cooperation has effectively stalled, as expertise inside US intelligence agencies is "abandoned or simply dismantled."
A hedging strategy
New Delhi's response has been to hedge. Ganguly points to a roughly 15 percent jump in India's defence budget, now around US$85 billion, as evidence of a country recalibrating its assumptions about both the US and China. Border tensions dating to 2020 clashes along the Line of Actual Control remain unresolved, he says, dismissing recent warmth between Xi Jinping and Narendra Modi at the BRICS summit: "Sweet words butter no parsnips." he says.
India is also threading a line between Washington, Moscow and Beijing: avoiding confrontation with China while guarding against it, and leaning on Russia out of necessity, with nearly 60 percent of its military hardware Soviet or Russian in origin.
India still buys around 35-40% of its crude oil from Russia, having ramped up purchases sharply since 2022 to take advantage of war-discounted prices (before the invasion it was under 1%). Washington sees these commercial relationships as helping to fund Moscow's war effort and last year imposed stiff tariffs on India, hoping to force New Delhi’s hand.
Nahendra Modi hosts Donald Trump during his visit to India in 2020
Those tariffs have now been largely lifted, but Washington continues to press New Delhi on Russian crude during ongoing trade talks. Last month President Trump signed new legislation authorising tariffs of up to 100% on countries buying Russian energy, explicitly targeting India as one of the top five importers.
As for China, its economic leverage over India is harder to escape than the geopolitics might suggest. Bilateral trade has hit an all-time high above US$100 billion, but as Ganguly points out, the relationship is "highly asymmetric": India exports raw materials, while importing Chinese consumer goods and critical components - including, awkwardly, solar panels. A push to build domestic rare earth supply chains in India remains "mostly aspirational," he says.
Democracy "at best electoral"
Domestically, Ganguly is unsparing about the trajectory of Indian democracy. "At best, India today can be considered to be an electoral democracy" where elections remain reasonably free and fair, but where civil liberties are under sustained pressure, dissent is being squelched, and the press has grown "cowed, if not supine." Asked whether the trend is worsening, his answer is direct: "It's getting steadily worse, with no sign of any improvement."
He's similarly wary of India's proposed Uniform Civil Code, a policy applying uniform personal law regardless of religion. Ganguly supports the principle, but not its backers: "It is a subterfuge. It is largely a device to browbeat the Muslim community."
He also traces the history between Indira Gandhi's centralisation of power, driven by fears of secessionism, and Nahendra Modi's push to curb the authority of India's states. "It's ironic, because they belong to two vastly different political parties," he says, though both "certainly share an instinct for the mechanics of power.”
Pakistan, Kashmir, and a fraying deterrent
Ganguly, a long-time scholar of the India-Pakistan rivalry, says recent fighting has left him newly uneasy about deterrence between the two nuclear-armed states. Indian Air Force strikes hit facilities near Pakistan's nuclear command centre during the first strikes into Pakistan proper since 1971, while Pakistan's air force, aided by China, showed markedly improved capability, shooting down several Indian aircraft.
On how Kashmir might resolve, he's pessimistic, ruling out mediation outright: "Mediation is a word that is anathema in New Delhi." The literature on rivalries offers three endings, he says : capitulation, a decisive war, or internal political change inside Pakistan.
Neighbourhood frictions, and where NZ fits in
Relations with smaller neighbours are uneven too. Bangladesh ties have grown "quite fragile" since the toppling of Sheikh Hasina and the rise of a government with a history of anti-Indian sentiment, while Nepal has legitimate grievances over India's past blockades and its slow response to recent devastating floods. “ These are opportunities China, of course, has exploited... quite deftly." he says.
For New Zealand, Ganguly says India's outreach is genuine, if modest. Wellington fits a broader Indian strategy of diversifying partnerships beyond the US-centric approach of past decades, and a push for trade deals as global commerce regionalises. New Delhi is watching the Pacific more closely, wary of China repeating the inroads it made in Australia, even if "India simply does not have the same sinews of power that the PRC does." Underlying it, he adds, is a fear of "American abandonment" which is playing out in the Pacific and at home in India alike.
Watch the "cockroaches"
Asked which under-the-radar India story will matter most over the next year, Ganguly didn't point to Pakistan, China or Washington. Instead, he selected a domestic protest movement. It began with an offhand remark from the bench by India's Chief Justice, dismissing unemployed youth protesting their circumstances as "cockroaches." A recent graduate just back from a degree in Boston responded online: What if all the cockroaches got together? The result was a national student movement, whose organisers now call themselves, pointedly, the "Cockroach Janata Party."
The backlash was serious enough to force Modi's education minister out of office, denting the prime minister's "sense of invincibility," Ganguly says. The protests have cooled since their summer peak, but "it'll be well worth watching how that movement evolves". It's a domestic pressure point that may prove more consequential than any of India's external entanglements.
Prof Ganguly also spoke to the Asia Insight Podcast during his recent trip to New Zealand
Asia Media Centre