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Despite being wooed by the US as part of its Asia strategy, Prime Minister Narendra Modi knows India has some options and that it doesn’t need to make an unconditional commitment to the US’s foreign policy, Historian Niall Ferguson told India Today TV.
In an exclusive conversation with Kalli Purie, Vice-Chairperson and Executive Editor-in-Chief, India Today Group and Rahul Kanwal, India Today News Director, Niall Ferguson said while India has become closer to the US in recent years, the relationship is “highly contingent on the scenario”.
“I don’t imagine India doing an awful lot if there’s a conflict over Taiwan. Because India’s conflict with China is much closer to home. There are economic reasons why India and China are at odds. I don’t think one should regard this as an alliance in which, whatever happens, India will stand next to the United States. This isn’t NATO in the way that it is in Europe,” Ferguson said.
“Moreover, if you look at the fact that Mr Modi is an enthusiastic participant in the BRICS summit, there’s a sense in which he’d quite like to keep his options open. And that, I think, is the reality of India’s situation. It’s being wooed by the United States. But Narendra Modi knows that India has some options and that it doesn’t need to make an unconditional commitment to American foreign policy,” he added.
Ferguson was speaking to India Today TV on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum summit in Davos. When asked what he thinks about India’s growth story, Ferguson said something has fundamentally changed about India.
“I will predict here and now on this show that China’s growth rate is going down to low single digits in the coming decade. That won’t be true for India. So I go back to my earlier prediction. India is going to overtake in terms of growth rate,” Ferguson said.
“I remember, not long after 2008, predicting that it would be a bit like the fable of the tortoise and the hare. China then was the hare. India looked like the tortoise. And I said, looking at the demographics, it will turn out to be the tortoise India that wins this race. Well, here we are in 2024. Everybody talks about China’s slowdown, China’s deflation, and an Indian economic miracle. There’s no getting away from the fact that something has fundamentally changed. The India that I first got to know 20 years ago has begun to vanish. That India is being replaced by a new, extraordinarily dynamic India,” Ferguson said.
Ferguson credited India for breaking the old perception about its stagnate infrastructure growth, which the country has strikingly transformed now.
“The other remarkable thing is that FinTech, which is something that seemed a very remote thing 20 years ago when you would pay for things with some pretty mangled banknotes. We now have India having leapt forward in FinTech with a national system of payments that is the envy of many countries in the Western world. So these are transformations that I don’t remember anybody imagining 20 years ago,” he said.
Ferguson further said that India could hold the future of the century as it has many advantages. “India is still a free society with a pretty free press and elections. China has nothing like that. It’s a one-party state with the old centralised Communist Party model. That’s another reason why I was an optimist about India 10, 12, 15 years ago. And I remain an optimist,” he said.
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