New Delhi

Whilefor the last 20 years, Western governments have seen India as indispensable to the 21st-century order, they have not matched this with capital investment which has instead been flowing into China over the last 30 years and created a strategic adversary, according to an article published Lowy Institute, an Australian think tank.

The article highlights that India is not yet the anchor of an industrial alternative capable of balancing China. But it is the only country with the scale to become one.

The West is now trying to correct a compounded strategic error by relying on incremental corporate decisions. Companies are encouraged to adopt “China plus one”, but they face incentives that favour China which has better infrastructure such as power and ports, that rising industrial powers are still trying to build, the article written by Stephanie Campbell states.

“The policy failure is to mistake the accumulation of fragmented corporate decisions for strategic rebalancing. Governments now ask firms to bear the cost of reversing a concentration created by decades of collective investment and reinforced by Western policy,” the article observes. “PM Modi has spent more than a decade trying to convert India’s demographic and geopolitical scale into industrial power, with promising but uneven results. But India cannot become a second centre of industrial gravity through domestic reform alone,” the article further states.

It highlights that building a genuine alternative requires governments to alter the conditions under which private investment becomes commercially rational at scale, not to direct individual investments. While Vietnam, Mexico, Indonesia and others can absorb specific industries and create valuable redundancy, India is the only country that can provide an industrial alternative at continental scale.

The relevant choice is between a strategically autonomous India and continued industrial dependence on a strategic competitor. The West is demanding greater alignment from the country it needs to strengthen than it demanded from the adversary it allowed itself to depend upon,” the article observes.

It also highlights that although Australia cannot finance India’s industrial transformation, it can integrate critical minerals, energy and defence cooperation into a broader industrial strategy. India will remain strategically autonomous and – from the perspective of Western capitals – an imperfect partner. However, that imperfection is less dangerous than continued dependence on China.

Washington

Indiahas emerged as part of the Trump administration's evolving public diplomacy strategy as Washington shifts greater attention towards Asia while overhauling the way it communicates with overseas audiences, a senior US official told lawmakers.

Sarah Rogers, President Donald Trump's nominee to lead the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM), said Asia would be one of the agency's principal areas of focus as the United States responds to growing information campaigns by China and other authoritarian governments.

"Asia, huge focus," Rogers told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee while outlining her vision for the agency, which oversees Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia and other US-funded international broadcasters.

Explaining her public diplomacy outreach, Rogers said she had concentrated much of her engagement on countries where social media plays a significant role in public discourse.

"I've also tweeted a lot of content about Japan and some about India," she said, adding that these are among the countries "where Twitter is most popular."

Rogers said the agency should increasingly tailor its outreach to modern media consumption habits rather than relying primarily on traditional radio and television broadcasts.

"If confirmed," she said, USAGM would expand into "short-form video, diaspora group chats, podcasts and other timely forms of engagement," while maintaining conventional broadcasting where it remains effective.

She also argued that US international broadcasting should concentrate on countries where access to independent information remains restricted, identifying Asia, the Middle East, Iran, Afghanistan and Cuba among the agency's strategic priorities.

"My first priority will be to stabilise the agency, strengthen its leadership, modernise its operations, and restore research capacity so we can actually measure reach and viewership," Rogers said.

The comments come as the United States places growing emphasis on competing with China not only in trade, technology and defence but also in the information domain.