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May 9, 2025 13:55-17:56 - CSPAN
04:00:50
Johns Hopkins University Hosts India Conference
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Speaker Time Text
unidentified
Initially, when in 2004 they came out with NextGen, I think it was another 15 billion that kept growing as well.
And we're spending a billion dollars every year, which sounds crazy.
I mean, it sounds like pocket change.
You just throw around.
But I don't want to give the impression that those billions weren't helping or wasting.
Those billions are what kept the 50,000 flights a day.
We're going to leave this year to take you live to a series of discussions on relations between the U.S. and India.
You're watching live coverage on C-SPAN.
My name is Kunal Paul.
I'm the executive director of the Kupteklinski India Institute at Johns Hopkins University, and I'm on the organizing team.
Before we begin, I want to draw your attention to the screen.
There are a couple of QR codes that should appear on the screen on the next slide.
Right.
So right on top, on the top right, we encourage you to download the HUVA app.
This is an app through which the conference is organized.
It allows you to connect with fellow attendees, speakers, create networking groups, and do so much more.
To get the most out of the conference, we really recommend it.
And for a quick snapshot of our agenda, there's also an agenda QR code that we would like you to reference.
To begin our conference, I'd like to invite the founder of our India Institute and the driving force behind this initiative, Dr. Amita Gupta.
Dr. Gupta is the founder and faculty co-chair of the Kupteklinsky India Institute and the director of the Division of Infectious Diseases of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.
Her career has focused on advancing global health collaborations between the U.S. and India and creating a network that brings together policymakers, academics, and change makers, many of whom are in the room today.
So please join me in welcoming Dr. Amita Gupta to the stage.
Good afternoon, everyone.
What a pleasure.
I'm so thrilled to be here.
It's a dream come true, honestly.
And so I'd like to just acknowledge the incredible team that's helped to put this incredible event together, and I'll say more about them.
But it takes a village, honestly, to bring all of the amazing speakers, thought leaders.
We have student volunteers, we have faculty, we have staff.
And so I want to sort of acknowledge all of them before we begin.
I also want to say a few things about the fact that we're at a moment in time where there is a lot going on in the world.
There's a lot of uncertainty.
And it's obviously also a geopolitically intense time as well.
And so we must sort of take pause on that.
We know that there are people being impacted across the globe and just recently, obviously, in parts of South Asia.
And our thoughts are with everyone impacted, whether you're in one part of the world or another.
And even in our own country, we're facing new challenges.
So we're a group of people who've experienced a lot of challenges over time, and we always find a way to be resilient and find a way forward.
And I am really happy to have a platform like this, such as the India Institute, to be a place where we can come together and play a small role in crossing ideas, having dialogue, having meaningful stakeholders to come together and advance cooperation and partnerships to really tackle what will be many, many interesting ideas and issues through the next day and a half.
We've got an incredible lineup of speakers, over 80 people who have agreed to come and speak on panels and give keynotes over the next day and a half.
And we expect this to be really a rich and very rewarding set of conversations.
I wanted to say a special thanks to the speaker faculty chairs who helped to organize several of the panels.
A call out to Joshua White, Reena Agarwala, Gigi Gronwal, Nilanjan Chatterjee, Sarah Bennett, Praveen Krishna, Sri Deva Sarma, Sunil Solomon, Avani Prabakar, Sharag Parikh, Yusuf Yazdi, and Anita Sheth.
Each one of them are faculty champions who really helped us to convene the panels for the next day and a half.
So let's give them a quick round of applause.
We also have an incredible larger faculty steering committee that helps to really guide the India Institute, whose whole mission is to really create a superhighway for communication, collaboration, and coming up with bright, bold ideas for addressing a whole host of really interesting ideas and problems.
I also would be amiss if I didn't really take the time to thank the incredible committee who've literally been working day and night.
And you just heard from Kunal Paul, who's the executive director of the India Institute.
He, along with Natisha Besra, who's our country director in India here from Delhi, hopefully will join me on stage at some point.
Ira Pandir, who does our communications, Meghashi Sharma, who's a program manager, Sudhar Moeta Mohit, who also is helping Beth Romansky, who does education, Coulter Billings, Communication, Arjun Chetri Logistics, Beth Romansky, and Coulter Billings, and our many, many student volunteers.
So we have students from across the university, from pretty much every school represented, undergrad, graduate, arts and sciences, Carey Business School, engineering, medicine, public health, nursing, all coming together to really help volunteer their time today and tomorrow.
And I'm sure you met them when you checked in.
We also are very grateful for the Nexus Award.
So this is a wonderful award that the university has provided us to really facilitate these convenings.
And we were the recipient and one.
And in an incredible space, as you can see, this is the Bloomberg Center here in Washington, D.C., at the former Space of the New, and just a few blocks from the Capitol, as a place to really have incredible dialogue.
And so we're really thankful.
We also were thrilled that we co-convened this event with Indiaspora.
And you'll hear from the executive director, Sanjeev Joshupur, in just a moment.
We also have a special event partner, the America India Foundation, and we have several media partners, the South Asian Times, the American Bazaar, India Abroad, Dia TV, South Asian Herald, and believe it or not, we're actually going to be live on C-SPAN 1.
I have never been on C-SPAN 1, so I'm very excited to have us all be on C-SPAN 1.
So thank you, C-SPAN.
We have three main panel tracks: new challenges in healthcare and for non-communices, infectious diseases, and palliative care.
We have economic development and tech development, and then the global impact of women.
So these are some of our three main panel tracks.
And I always like to quote Gandhi because Gandhi said, the future depends on what we do in the present.
This conference and the partnerships are a testament to that.
So we now move to our first plenary panel.
The United States, as I mentioned, stand at a pivotal moment in history as two of the world's largest democracies.
Their collaboration spans research, business, policy, and global security, among many other things.
This session will explore how the relationship is evolving and what strategic priorities and opportunities lie ahead and how institutions, private enterprise, and civil society can deepen the critical partnership.
So I'd like to first welcome our session chair, sorry, Mr. Sanjeev Joshupura, who is the Executive Director of Indiaspora and a dear friend.
He's a seasoned voice in international affairs and the diaspora engagement.
Joining him are three very distinguished speakers.
We have Ambassador Arun Singh, who is the senior counselor at the Coen Group and the former Indian Ambassador to the United States.
Ms. Sumona Guha, who is a national security expert and former senior director for South Asia at the U.S. National Security Council.
And last but not least, Ms. Neha Biswal, Nisha Biswal, who's the former Deputy CEO at the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation and senior advisor at the Asia Group.
So please join me in welcoming our esteemed panelists and session chair to the stage.
Thank you, and we look forward to the discussion.
Hello.
Hello.
Yeah, great.
Thank you, Amita.
It's a pleasure and a privilege for Indiaspora to partner with Johns Hopkins University and the Gupta Linsky Institute for this inaugural US-India conference.
The response and the turnout has been just overwhelming, and it's been such a pleasure to work with Amita and Kunal and Nitishai and the entire team there.
I also feel about 10 feet tall right now because I'm sitting next to three eminent people who are such distinguished experts in their field.
And also, as I've gotten to engage with them and know them over the years, just wonderful people to interact with.
So it's a delight for me to be moderating this particular panel.
I know that their bios have already been kind of briefly read out by Amita, so I won't repeat that, but I'll get straight into the topics at hand, the topics for our conversation today.
And this panel obviously is about U.S.-India relations broadly writ.
Let me start by addressing something that's on all our minds, which is the conflict between India and Pakistan right now.
You know, there have been now put in the prism, viewed through the lens of the American lens.
There have been a lot of statements made by senior American officials about the conflict.
President Trump has made supportive statements towards India.
You know, Secretary Rubio has had numerous conversations with Dr. Jaishankar.
The Speaker of the House made some comments about the conflict as well.
But then I believe just yesterday, Vice President Vance said, and I quote, it's none of our business.
And so given the seemingly disparate comments from senior officials in the administration, I just want to pose a question to my distinguished panelists about how they view U.S. engagement or lack thereof in the current conflict.
Arun, I'll start with you and then we'll proceed to your left.
Thanks, Sajee.
So I think just trying to understand what's playing out, clearly the response from India is on account of a major terrorist incident that took place in Pahilgam.
And in the Indian assessment, as you know, Pakistan has been involved in sponsoring terrorism against India for more than four decades since the 1980s.
And you've had some major terrorist incidents from time to time.
There was the attack on the Indian Parliament on 13 December 2001, and then there was a mobilization of Indian forces after that.
There was an attack in Mumbai in 2008, which went on for four days.
Ten people had come across from Pakistan over the seas, and more than 160 people had been killed.
There was an attack in 2019 in Pulwama.
40 Indian soldiers had lost their lives.
And now an attack in Pelgam, when 26 civilians have been killed in that.
Now, globally, it has been signaled that there is zero tolerance for terrorism.
The U.S. reacted in a certain way after 9-11.
You are seeing the reaction in Israel after the attack in October 2023.
So there is a sense that there should be and there is zero tolerance for terrorism.
So I think the reaction is in response to that.
Now, as far as the international responses are concerned, I think as I see it now from outside the government and watching the comments coming out in India, is that the Indian expectation would be that people stand with India as it deals with the challenge of terrorism.
And that having been said, India would deal with the issues it faces on its own, based on its own strengths.
And India has opposed any third-party intervention on India's issues with any other country, particularly on India-Pakistan issues, and would like to handle it on its own.
So that's the broad Indian approach that we have.
Well, when speaking about the U.S. reaction, I'd just like to add that we've seen Secretary of State Marco Rubio reach out to both Indian External Affairs Minister Jai Shankar and the Pakistani Prime Minister to encourage direct dialogue between the two countries and encourage de-escalation.
And that's very consistent with the U.S. position in the past when these incidents have unfortunately taken place.
Sanjeev, thanks again for inviting me to this wonderful conference and also for the collaboration between Indiaspora and Johns Hopkins.
I think it's an important collaboration.
I guess the only thing I would add to what's been said, it's obviously a concerning situation anytime there is kinetic activity along the India-Pakistan front.
And the U.S. has long said that it supports the right of India to defend itself against terrorism.
But I think what perhaps the Vice President's comments can be taken in the context of is you have a president who kind of ran on the fact that he was going to keep the United States out of wars.
And this is an indication, I think, of saying that the United States is not getting kind of dragged into a conflict.
And it's kind of making that clear to the American public.
And at the same time, I think it has been long the contention of India that any issues between India and Pakistan need to be resolved bilaterally between the two countries and that it objects to international or third-party mediation.
And I think this was perhaps a shorthand way of indicating that the U.S. is not looking to go in and mediate between the two countries.
You know, as we were all discussing in the green room before we came out, we wanted to make sure that we address the elephant in the room but not let it suck the oxygen out of the room because this is a U.S.-India panel broadly written.
It's not about India-Pakistan, and there are so many multiple issues on which and areas of work on which the US and India talk to each other.
And we'll address several of those now in the remaining time of our panel and then perhaps open it up to the audience if we have time.
Let's talk about the other big elephant in the room right now, which is trade.
Again, probably everybody in this room knows about the trade dynamics between the US and India right now.
Active negotiations, lots of back and forth comments, most of which have been positive by and large from both sides.
It appears that India is doing more than what it has previously done to accommodate President Trump's demands on trade.
But India will have their own demands too.
And given the situation as it is right now, how do you see it playing out?
Is a trade accord imminent?
What will be broadly the terms of that kind of accord?
What sectors would be impacted?
Any thoughts about that, Arun?
So if you see the joint statement that was issued in February after the Indian Prime Minister visited the White House, the fourth foreign leader who had invited to the White House.
On trade, two things sort of I noticed.
One, that the two are committed to do a multi-sectoral free trade agreement and do the first tranche by the fall of this year.
Second, they are committed to taking the trade from the current level of $200 billion to $500 billion by 2030.
Now, following that, there has been intense engagement between the two sides on trade negotiations.
The Indian Commerce Minister was here.
After that, Assistant USTR was in India.
Then the Chief Indian Negotiator was here with a team of people.
There are detailed discussions on sectoral issues.
After that, from what I understand, they're committed to do both virtual and in-person discussions.
More ministerial-level meetings are likely soon.
You've seen the US Treasury Secretary say that India is among the countries with which the US will do the trade agreement among the first ones that it will be done.
President Trump has said that India is moving very fast on the trade negotiations.
Pete Navarro has said that India is moving at Trump speed on these negotiations.
So obviously, there is a determined effort by the two sides to see it done because, as you know, technically, President Trump should be going to India in the fall for a quad summit, which is scheduled to be held.
But there are no dates.
And it would be useful to have something done before that.
Linked to that is the fact that in the phase of globalization of trade and production, India feels it lost out.
Gained in services, lost out in manufacturing.
Manufacturing was sucked away by China, which now has 32% of global manufacturing and 18% of global GDP.
So the effort in India today, as I see it, is to plug into this phase of reordering of supply chains that is happening and take advantage of this restructuring so that manufacturing in India can gain and India can build new trading and economic partnerships.
So I think that's the effort.
And if you saw a couple of days ago, India and UK have finalized a free trade agreement, which is a major indication because that had been under negotiation for three years.
And now that they finalized it, and from the reports that have come out, UK on 99% of the tariff clients has really reduced the tariffs for imports from India.
They're talking of professional services, they're talking of mobility, they're talking of doing something very similar to what you have, the totalization agreement in the US.
So these are very, very forward-looking major breakthroughs that have happened.
It indicates that India is prepared to do trade agreements way beyond its approaches in the past.
I think that's a positive indicator for where the India-US trade discussions are headed.
The American attitude on trade is, I think, creating a large impetus among other countries to now forge agreements between each other.
And I guess the India-UK rapidity with which it got resolved and finalized is one example of that.
But as I move it to Sumona and then to Nisha, just a thought, you know, Arun was talking about supply chains.
I read recently that Google, as an example, which had moved a lot of its smartphone manufacturing from China to Vietnam, is now moving it from Vietnam to India.
And I guess that's one example of sort of the differential tariffs that the Trump administration is imposing on various countries.
But that also leads to a question, which is: if one thinks about China plus one, if one is a corporate CEO thinking about supply chain and thinking of a China plus one strategy, is India well placed to be the plus one in the China plus one?
Well, these are questions that I think U. S. industry is certainly contemplating and examining the possibilities.
And it's not just Google that has moved operations into India in recent years.
You have other major technology companies doing that.
But I think there might not be a one-size-fits-all.
I think we're in a period where both sides are ready to perhaps consider new questions, new incentives, new modes of cooperation, perhaps new investment incentives on the part of India, perhaps on the part of American industry, a willingness to look broader and do the negotiations needed.
And of course, all of this gets wrapped into the very robust conversation that is happening between the U.S. and India on technology cooperation in general.
We talked about the joint statement between Prime Minister Modi and President Trump in February.
That refers to a range of initiatives for technology cooperation that encompasses the supply chain question that you were thinking about.
That also encompasses several other issues related to cutting-edge technologies.
We can come back to that if you want.
But I do think that when you talk about supply chains, you now have a very serious and very high-level government-to-government discussion that sort of gives a green light, gives new impetus for industry to explore new modes of cooperation.
Nisha?
So I think what I would add to what Arun and Simona have already said on a China plus one, I think largely depends on what the global ecosystem and the U.S. tariff policy is.
If you're in a world where there's tariffs everywhere, then I think companies are going to double down on cost efficiency.
And right now, you can't really beat China on cost efficiency.
The extent to which you start having negotiated reductions and bilateral agreements, it creates opportunity for perhaps a shift in manufacturing.
The extent to which the US and India get a BTA negotiated and that India has concluded agreements with other major markets that allow it to have preferential access, India becomes much more attractive and the cost issue becomes more manageable.
So a lot of this companies are looking to see where things go before they make decisions about whether or not they're shifting supply chains.
Google, I think Apple has shifted iPhone manufacturing increasingly to India for the US market, right?
And I think you'll see those kinds of shifts.
But whole scale shifts are going to, you know, they take a lot of time, a lot of thought, a lot of planning.
Companies are starting to think about what their strategy is going to look like, and they are trying to predict what that landscape is going to look like.
And there's still not quite enough certainty about where the administration is going on its tariff policy, but they're starting to see glimmers as you see negotiations get underway.
And that will, I think, inform decisions about changes to supply chains.
Sumona, you talked about technology, so I do want to move the conversation in that direction.
But just before I do that, I do want to keep this very conversational and very informal.
So don't only let it necessarily be sort of me guiding and you responding.
If you have responses to each other, feel free to engage.
I'm sure that our friends in the audience would derive a lot of benefit from that.
But on technology, you know, under the Biden administration, there was ISET, which was a big announcement.
And it was an all-of-government initiative headed by the national security advisors on both sides of the equation involving various cabinet agencies and departments.
Now, of course, and I know there's going to be another panel about this later this afternoon about trust.
And the question I have for you is, is it just old wine and new bottle, ISET and trust?
My own reading of the situation, and I'd love your views on it, is that it's more than that.
If you look at the joint statement that was released by the two governments after Prime Minister Modi came to America recently, it seemed to expand on what trust seemed to expand on what ISET had set out to do.
Is that a reasonable assessment or do you have a different point of view?
So ISET, I think first we have to understand what ISET meant.
And at a time when the US was imposing technology restrictions in partnership with other countries, here was a signal that the national security advisors of the two countries were stating that on national security grounds, we believe we should partner in critical and emerging technologies.
So that was a very major political message.
And you are identifying artificial intelligence, quantum, cyber, 6G, biotech, semiconductors, defense, space, whole range of technologies that everybody acknowledged are completely going to transform the way we live, the way we work.
The other thought behind that was that through co-development of technology, you then lead to a framework of production sharing, some to be done in the US, some to be done in India, and then look at doing sectoral trade facilitation arrangements to deepen the trade partnership, especially if you want to take it to a level of about $300 billion.
Now, ISET itself was a big breakthrough from the past.
And again, it is the ISET framing and projection that led to six US companies announcing investments in India and semiconductors.
That led to US authorizing technology transfer, 80% technology transfer for G414 engines.
And the US said that that level of technology transfer they had not authorized for any other partner, including any NATO partner of the United States.
It was because of that that you saw cooperation in space that was not happening earlier.
Later this month, if all goes well, I understand an Indian astronaut will be launched into space on board SpaceX, going to International Space Station in partnership with NASA and doing joint research.
Again, very soon, NASA ISRO powerful synthetic aperture radar satellite, $1.5 billion satellite, is going to be launched.
There's an effort to bring the private sector in space from both India and the US together to do more work together.
So these are the kind of things that have happened.
So given that framing, when I look at trust, from my mind, and I'm sure Sumana will have a lot to add to that, from my mind, a couple of things emerged.
One, that now the new administration has ownership for that process and therefore they would be committed to advancing cooperation in many of these areas.
And as I understand it, there is a commitment to further intensify the technology partnership in these and related areas and also ease the processes related to allowing technology partnerships because the export control regulations in the US need to be addressed.
They can be very, very onerous for US partners.
So while technology partnership is encouraged, what do you do to deal with the regulations related to technology would be an important area.
In ISET, they had started the strategic trade dialogue, which had met and to see how to ease some of the processes, and that is something that needs to be done even more.
So I would say yes, trust is ICET plus.
That was my thinking as well, Sumona.
Thank you.
So I'll just add a little bit, picking up on a couple of the points that Arun made.
First, the fact when I said was conceived, it was announced in May 2022, launched by the respective national security advisors in January 2023.
But before that, I was in the Biden White House at the time.
It was not a foregone conclusion that it would be led by the National Security Advisors.
We thought about whether it could be run out of a department or agency.
We thought about the various topics that would fall under the dialogue and, most of all, the objective to really advance the technology partnership in multiple ways across multiple areas.
And so the decision was taken and the proposal was made to do it at the level of the national security advisors.
And I'm very pleased to see that that will continue in the Trump administration.
I think that signifies that leaders will pay attention to the technology partnership.
I think it will help activate our respective systems as needed to really achieve results.
And overall, I think it's a very positive development for the US-India relationship.
And Nisha, before you answer, this is for any of you on the technology topic, any thoughts about AI and LLMs being developed by the two countries or in cooperation between the two countries?
Go ahead, Nisha.
Yeah, I think that that's a really excellent question.
I was just in New Delhi recently at the Global Technology Summit that's hosted by Carnegie and MEA.
And a lot of conversation there about the impact of DeepSeek and the extent to which DeepSeek is being utilized increasingly by businesses across India and what are the implications of that.
And I think, you know, the challenge to both India and the United States is to what extent can U.S.-India collaboration create alternatives that are cost-effective and that are providing kind of the capabilities and the efficiencies that are necessary.
And some of the points that, you know, I thought were incredibly insightful that I heard around the conference.
You know, government has to be an enabler of technology and not necessarily always the regulator.
And in India, there is an over-regulation that inhibits innovation.
And particularly in the nascent stages, you really need to be in the what you can do to invest in, enable, and allow innovation to scale rapidly before you get your kind of, you know, hooks on what do we do to regulate against negative impacts or whatnot.
Because otherwise, innovation will never get off the ground.
Sanjeev, since you encourage us to be conversational, could I just make two points in response to what Nisha and Simona have said?
On Nisha's point, you know, when you go to Bangalore, you realize that there is deep integration between the tech ecosystem of Bengaluru and of Silicon Valley in artificial intelligence.
Core technologies so far are with U.S. companies, including the large language models.
But there is a tremendous amount of application development happening in India using those technologies.
And both sides gain from that.
And the U.S. companies have heard them say that by the work being done through applications on what they have done, they learn how to advance their technologies further, the problems that are there, the opportunities that are there.
So both are gaining from that.
So that's something that we have to keep in mind.
Second thing, based on what Simona said, is one of the things in the ISET framework, which is also continuing in trust, is it's not just a government-to-government initiative.
There's a deliberate effort to involve the private sector and academia in that process.
Because especially in the U.S., the technology is in the private sector, is at the level of universities.
So that partnership is critical.
And when the conversations were going on, and I'll cite just one example where it was felt that it would be critical.
If you just look at quantum technologies, from what one hears, even the universities don't know fully what to teach that would be relevant to industry.
And many of the leading U.S. companies are funding IITs in India to do teaching of quantum so that people are trained who would be available for them later as they expand their operations globally.
So this is a clear opportunity for conversation between industry on both sides and universities on both sides.
That how do you work together to develop syllabi that would be relevant to industry for use related to quantum technologies and that would deepen partnership between India and the US and quantum.
So I think that's the broad approach that there should be dialogue at level government, dialogue at the level of industry, academia and all three working together.
And since these are critical technologies, academia and business need clear signal from the governments that they are encouraging cooperation in this area and they would not clamp down on it down the line.
That goes to what Nisha was saying as well.
Indiaspora, where I work, recently held a global AI summit in the UAE, and we talked about AI collaboration between the UAE and India, UAE and United States, and to some extent trilaterally as well.
And it was quite clear that the UAE is going full steam ahead on AI as far as their own domestic regulations are concerned, but also in terms of their investments in the American AI market.
Now, of course, I do understand that India doesn't have a sovereign wealth fund and so forth like the UAE does.
So in India, the equation is a little different.
You can't necessarily announce tomorrow that you're going to invest $100 billion in Stargate, for example, kind of thing, which the UAE has done.
But I have no hesitation in revealing my biases where I say that I do hope that the cooperation between India and the United States on AI does deepen as we move forward, which I think, based on comments here, we do expect it will.
Sumona.
I think you can expect the cooperation to deepen.
I think you have seen high-level signals again coming out of the February visit by Prime Minister Modi and the statement that resulted from his visit with President Trump that the U.S. and India have agreed to work on an AI roadmap to really flesh out areas of cooperation, as Arun said, that involve, inherently involve the private sector and academia.
One question that the two sides are probably in conversation about, will need to be in conversation about, is the AI diffusion rule and how deeply, how far can the two sides go to make India a home for critical AI infrastructure?
I do want to turn the conversation to another topic that I think is extremely germane to where we are today, which is education.
And I know that we have limited time left, so after this, I'll try and open it up to the audience if I can.
But on education, you know, this conference itself is an example of U.S.-India collaboration on education, the Gupta Klinski Institute that I just mentioned when we started out.
There are so many universities in America that are at the moment trying to collaborate with educational institutions in India.
The reverse is also true, interest in the reverse direction.
Where do you see, given that in the past there has been skepticism about deepening cooperation in the education space, do you see education cooperation deepening at a level that is perhaps just below the IV leagues and the top-tier schools that are sort of household names all across India and America?
Any of you?
Yeah, you know, I think this is a real gem of an opportunity right now.
India should be thinking about the fact that if indeed there is going to be a rethinking, restructuring of education and the nexus between government and education in the United States, does that create an opportunity for India to become perhaps a magnet, a hub on higher education?
Can it draw investment?
I think U.S. universities are very interested in opportunities to maybe create satellite campuses, to create collaborations, to create some kinds of joint initiatives, joint ventures with India.
India is going to need to figure out again how it gets out of its own way in attracting that.
I think you're going to need to look at tax issues, you're going to look at regulatory issues, FICRA, all kinds of things in India that inhibit collaboration.
But if those can be moved aside, then as US universities grapple with perhaps cuts in funding, perhaps cuts in foreign student enrollment, they're looking at where they turn.
I think you're hearing Europeans, Australians, Canadians, and others vie for talent and investment on that front.
India has a real opportunity, but it needs to act fast and it needs to act decisively in terms of how it's going to deregulate some of these issues that have prevented education collaboration from taking off.
Given the perception of the visa problems here in the United States, is the United States even the only option for Indian universities to collaborate with?
You referenced Australia, England, other countries.
I mean, look, there's a real opportunity as we think about an innovation ecosystem to partner with U.S. universities that have been the backbone of the innovation ecosystem here in the United States.
Whether you're talking about the tech sector, you're talking about pharmaceutical and health care innovations, across the board.
How do you take collaborations with some of these institutions and perhaps change the geography?
Also, Sanjeev, in the new education policy that the Indian government has announced, now there is provision for foreign universities to set up campuses in India.
I think many of the universities are looking at that cautiously because it's new.
They're trying to make sure that the kind of regulatory challenge that may come up, they're in a position to navigate that.
But some universities, including from Australia, have announced that they're setting up campuses.
And I see reports saying some U.S. universities are also actively looking at that.
So let's see.
I think these conversations should continue, conversations between universities who are interested, the Indian Government, and work their way through this.
Fantastic.
How much time do we have left?
We have five minutes left.
Okay.
So can we open it up to the audience now?
Are there microphones for the audience that are roving mics?
Or I can provide mine as well.
I think Purnima.
There are two mics on either side up there.
Oh, there are mics upstairs, but I think Purnima will just provide you with mine quickly.
Identify yourself, please, and your affiliation, and then pose a question to any of the panelists.
Thank you, Sanjeev.
Purnima Vauria, founder and CEO of National U.S. India Chamber of Commerce, promoting trade between the United States and India.
My question is to the Ambassador.
Ambassador Run Singhji, we have known you for a while now.
You have channelized a lot of things, especially MBDA agency, where you invited them to the Embassy 100 MBEs, which is $1.3 trillion economy of U.S. My question is on the ports.
I'm very concerned about the ports being either stagnant or losing all their containers coming from China and other parts of the world.
Ports are affected almost out of if Los Angeles had about 42% of the port activity, it's coming down next week to 33%.
Almost 33% is minusing from there.
This is a concern even for the state of Washington.
It's a $21 billion opportunity with where it comes to port and maritime.
Across the board, whether it's Los Angeles, whether it's Washington State, where there are many ports, Port of Seattle, Port of Everett, all of these are being affected.
What do you think will India be able to take over this magnumous opportunity?
And how soon?
Thank you.
I haven't seen publicly any comment or thinking in India in terms of port activity in the US, although Indian companies have taken lease on ports outside India.
For example, Haifa port is currently being operated part of the Haifa port by an Indian company.
So that is certainly there.
But the focus in India more is in terms of infrastructure, including at ports in India itself.
And new connectivity projects are being looked at.
You would have heard about the India-Middle East-Europe corridor.
And there's a lot of attention being paid to that, to build connectivity from India to the Gulf, from Gulf on to Israel, and then from Israel to Europe.
So that is certainly getting a lot of attention.
So I think those are the things being focused upon.
Before we go to a second question, Arun, I'll sort of go forward on that IMEC piece that you just mentioned, the India-Middle East-Europe corridor.
I was speaking to a senior Indian diplomat just yesterday, and he was mentioning that because IMEC is a conceptual, although India and America are both strongly for it, it is still in a relatively conceptual stage, number one and number two, given the problems in the Middle East, there may be challenges about really expanding activity along the IMEC corridor for now.
Any thoughts?
So I'm sure others will come in, but from my perspective, I think it's gone beyond the conceptual.
There is a lot of work going on between enhancing connectivity between India and the Gulf.
Also between Israel and Europe.
And there's interest from Greece, there's interest from Italy, there's interest from France.
India has just opened a consulate in Marseille.
It's an IMEC envoy as well, the only country to have an IMEC envoy.
India has just opened a consular general in Marseille.
And guess who inaugurated the Consulate General?
The President of France and the Prime Minister of India.
So obviously it's significant.
So yes, there is a gap about the connectivity between Gulf and Israel.
And so that's what everybody is working on, how to take that forward.
But yes, and especially if India and EU do a free trade agreement, and India and UK have done one, if India and US would do a free trade agreement soon, then you are looking at far more movement of goods and you need routes, additional routes beyond what you have through the Red Sea and others.
So I do see huge opportunity.
Sorry.
Any other comments on that?
Okay.
Another question, please.
I see a question right here in the middle.
I think there are microphones somewhere in the, oh, there.
Oh, there's a gentleman already at the microphone.
So first you and then the gentleman here.
Wrap up.
One.
Oh, just one question.
I think the distinguished ambassador from India to the United States is here.
So we'll cut it short and have just one last question.
Sorry about that.
Yeah?
Please go ahead.
Sanjeev Narayan, Stanford University.
I've really enjoyed the Guptas Institute hosting of this event and the panel.
I had a question about this sort of tension between regulation and innovation.
Not all regulation stifles innovation.
Some may when it puts barriers.
But there's also regulations and say data privacy, security of participants, particularly for AI.
Could the panel discuss that from an India perspective?
What regulations could be put in place moving forwards which would facilitate and yet strengthen dynamic interchanges between the US and India?
I'm happy to start.
I mean, you make a great point.
Governments do need to be involved, and they do need to regulate, and they do need to prevent excesses that could harm their own populations.
But it's a very dynamic conversation, and I think the fact that the US and India are engaged at very both high levels from a political perspective, but also bringing in technical experts from across their respective governments to grapple with these issues.
The United States doesn't have all the answers, but the fact that it's in this deep conversation with a trusted partner like India will probably mean that they will end up seeing eye to eye as these issues get resolved.
With that, I think we'll end this panel.
And I don't, maybe it's time for you to say hello to a successor.
So please join me, friends, in giving the panel a very, very big hand.
Thank you so much to the panelists.
A few quick requests.
Could we have a photograph, please?
Our photographer will do one photo for the panel together.
Our photographer is here, so please.
Right here.
And then, great.
And then please also accept just a small token of thanks from our side.
It's our first time.
We're some kinks.
All right, please.
Another round of thanks for our panel.
Thank you very much.
All right.
As Sanjeev has previewed, we now have something very, very special in store, truly.
It's my great, great honor to invite to the stage someone who plays a pivotal role in shaping the India-U.S. relationship at the very, very highest level.
This is genuinely a very, very special occasion for us.
Ambassador Vinay Mohan Quatra serves as India's ambassador to the United States.
His distinguished diplomatic career includes key assignments across trade, foreign policy, and multilateral engagement.
We don't have enough time to cover his storied career and impact.
But at a time when global order is rapidly evolving, Ambassador Quattra's leadership is instrumental in strengthening one of the most consequential relationships and partnerships of our time between India and the United States.
So please join me in giving a very, very warm welcome to His Excellency Ambassador Vinek Watra and welcoming him to the stage.
Good afternoon.
Mishkar to all of you, distinguished dignitaries, guests, students.
members of the media, thank you so much for giving me this opportunity to speak to you this afternoon on the India-US defining partnership for the 21st century.
Before I do that, I would take this opportunity, take a moment to request all of who you are present here this afternoon to please observe just a moment of silence for the twenty-six innocent civilians who were brutally killed in terrorist attack in Pahelgam in India on 26th of April.
Just a moment of silence for me in their memory, please.
Thank you. Thank you very much.
It's indeed my immense pleasure to speak to you at this inaugural Hopkins India Conference.
India as a country has had a robust history of collaboration with this institution across multiple disciplines, medicine, of course, public health, engineering, data science.
The collaboration that various institutions in India have had with John Hopkins reflects our shared commitment and priority to address global challenges, combining the scholarship and excellence expertise of this institution with India's talent and scale.
India-US defining partnership for the 21st century is indeed a shared priority, but it is also one of the very few things on which there is a bipartisan consensus in the US, in Washington, among various stakeholders, particularly in the Congress.
So we are truly blessed that this relationship enjoys very strong bipartisan cross-the-board support.
I will not go into the history of India-US relationship.
I will only say that our relationship, what it is today, was not always like this.
The habits of cooperation that we have cultivated, particularly in the last decade or so, were not always so enduring.
And the last decade in this context has truly been transformative for our ties.
When my Prime Minister, Prime Minister Modi, first gave his address to the US Congress in 2014, he clearly said that two countries have overcome, I will quote, the hesitations of history.
And that's what I meant that in years gone by, our relationship was not of the kind that we enjoy today, that we nurture today.
We would always be, in a manner of speaking, having will be less trusting of each other, but of course, not in the not, I would say, since 2000 that the relationship began to take a different direction, more positive direction.
And my Prime Minister's first speech in the US Congress when it refers to overcoming the hesitations of history.
It essentially points to a period where the two countries, the administrations in the two countries, stakeholders in the two countries are able to level up with each other, speak to each other in very honest and frank terms, even if there would be times and subjects on which we might agree to disagree.
But that has made a very robust and strong foundation to build a truly, what we call, comprehensive strategic partnership.
Over the last 10 years, the more time we have spent with each other, the more we have understood each other.
The more we understood each other, the more we did together.
And the more we did, the more our partnership grew.
In a world of flux, which we are all experiencing around us, our two countries have forged a genuine, truly genuine, comprehensive strategic partnership.
Before I speak to some of the specific pillars of our partnership, which are providing impulse and impetus to our ties these days, I would take a moment to single out what at least are some of the key drivers of our partnership, what propels it forward.
I would say the first and foremost in that category would be the personal drive and momentum that is given to the relationship by the leadership of the two countries, by Prime Minister Modi and by Prime Minister Trump, President Trump.
Sorry, the two have to enjoy great friendship and we are very confident that the trajectory of ties will gain great momentum under the supervision, direction and leadership of my Prime Minister and President Trump.
In President Trump's second administration, Prime Minister Modi paid a very early visit to Washington within the first month of the Presidency assuming charge.
February 13, Prime Minister was here.
We moved in quickly to establish a very ambitious agenda of partnership, which spanned across several verticals.
And I would speak to some of those verticals as I go along.
But they include defense, technology, naturally trade and economic cooperation, counterterrorism, energy partnership, critical and emerging technologies,
enhancing what I would call strategic connectivity, both across the services sector but also across the infrastructure areas and in the process orienting our partnership in a manner that the agenda not only serves our two societies, our two economies, but is also heavily contributory to the regional and the global good.
Second key driver, in my opinion, is India's own economic trajectory.
This is important because in my view the growth trajectory of India will go in parallel with the deepening of the India-US partnership.
The kind of opportunities that we would expect R2 economies, R2 systems, cooperation between our two nations to throw up would be in many ways directly proportional on the one hand to the speech, the pace, the extent, the breadth, and the direction of India's economic growth.
India is today roughly at about 3.84 trillion.
Objective is to touch about 7.5, 8 trillion by the end of this decade.
As 4 trillion, we are, of course, a fraction of the US size of the economy.
Alongside this GDP growth jump from 3.8 to expected about 7.5 to 8 by the end of this decade, there is also strong growth in five or six specific sub-sectors, which is again directly related to the growth in the partnership.
So one of them is a capital growth, for example, naturally very essential for India's rapid growth.
Credit growth within our required for a strongly growing economy.
Consumption growth, which then drives, puts a very strong impetus to the domestic growth part of our GDP.
Industry, talent and services, in a way growing individually, but also growing as a composite, one feeding into the other.
Very strong agricultural sector.
Very robust digital and the innovation ecosystem.
But a digital and an innovation system that prioritizes value creation instead of wealth creation, precisely because one of the primary objectives of building a robust digital ecosystem and the innovation ecosystem is to be able to fulfill the governance needs of the population.
So that gives a very broad base to it, both in terms of the development of digital platforms, but also in terms of building applications on them, which would actually be relevant not just for our society, but which would also open up a very strong template of partnership and cooperation with our global partners in this particular case, the United States.
The third driver in my view would be the shared interest and priorities of the two countries, both in terms of opportunities that we want to harness, but also in terms of a common understanding, both economic, but also strategic and geopolitical, that both countries face.
Fourth, and I think a very important set of drivers I would say combining together would be a very live bridge of people-to-people connect.
We have roughly 5 million odd Indian diaspora in the US, which forms a very strong, growing, vibrant, and a contributory bridge to the relationship, combining them with the values that both our countries share.
Value of democracy, value of freedom of speech, freedom of expression, and a genuine understanding of how diverse societies flourish and grow together.
There are, of course, other important drivers in propelling this relationship forward.
But I thought I will give a very foundational base of these four key drivers.
As you, in your own experience, map individual elements of the relationship, you will find each of those elements somewhere drawing a network connect to these four drivers in one way or another in a very purposeful and in a very substantive way.
Let me now turn to some of the key aspects of the India-US partnership.
I refer to the visit of Prime Minister Modi to Washington in February this year, wherein we crafted a very ambitious agenda for the relationship, which would be able to build on the foundations layers of the previous relationships that we have built across different administrations.
Each administration gives us a foundation on which we build a new foundation with the next administration, and then with the succeeding administrations, every such relationship base has served as a launching pad for the relationship to grow.
So, the first one on that I would pick up would be the defense and security cooperation.
This is one pillar of our cooperation that has truly matured over the years, particularly I would say over the last 20 to 25 years.
And it has today reached a point of very deep trust and strong reliability, which covers in its embed not just the trade of defense platform,
trading in defense platform, but also a very broad-based deepening of the institutional partnership between the armed forces and the armed systems of the two countries, whether that is joint exercises, logistic support, leading to greater interoperability of the two platforms that the two countries use, naturally intelligence sharing, defense industry ties, and of course, as I said, the trade.
In about 20-25 years ago, say around 2000, our trade was effectively negligible.
Defense trade between the two countries was negligible.
In the last about 20-25 years, our bilateral trade in defense alone has touched about $25 billion, giving a very strong base to partnership through defense procurement.
But as I said, defense cooperation is not just limited to buying and selling of the defense platform.
It also extends to a wide range of institutional cooperation, which is now slowly extending to one strong defense technology partnership, a fairly dynamic, fast-growing defense innovation cooperation.
Equally important, the area where the private sector of the two countries is now coming closer together to partner in the space of defense manufacturing, not just for the Indian market, but also the manufacturing units in India, serving as a supply chain link for the global supply chain value chains of the US large original equipment manufacturers.
So it's a fairly, you know, there is a certain comprehensive character to the defence cooperation that has emerged over a period of last twenty to twenty-five years.
During the visit of Prime Minister and following his meeting with President Trump in the Oval Room, the two countries also rolled out a defence cooperation framework and what we call Acronium Compact.
It stands for Catalyzing Opportunities for Military Partnership, Accelerated Commerce and Technology.
In a manner, this captures a sense of what I just detailed a little while ago.
Beyond defence, but impinging on both our countries' national security, is a very serious issue of terrorism.
In our case, in India's case, the issue of cross-border terrorism.
Our countries have built a strong system to fight terrorism, extremism, radicalization, drug trafficking, illegal migration, cybercrime, and more.
We truly value the cross-border counter-terrorism cooperation that India and US have.
We all witnessed in the recent horrific attacks, terrorist attacks in Pahlgam and its aftermath.
India has received overwhelming support from the United States.
President Trump was one of the, in fact, the first leader to speak to my Prime Minister after the Pahlgam attacks while my Prime Minister was still on his visit to Saudi Arabia.
He was the first leader to speak to him, to condemn the Pahelgam terror attacks, to offer full support of strong strength behind India, and of course to the condolences for the victims of the Pelgam attack.
We have also been overwhelmed by the strong bipartisan support that we have received from the Congress.
Senators, congressmen, in large numbers, and most proactively and most clearly have voiced their condemnation for these terrorist attacks and voiced support for India.
The incidents like the Pelgam incidents clearly point to the need for India-US partnership to stand up to the terrorism and clearly convey to the world that there would be zero tolerance for such terrorist attack and their backers and their supporters who kill innocent civilians, innocent tourists in this case in Pahelgam.
Two, our energy partnership.
This has also been one of the areas of very strong growth and expansion.
Value of energy trade has risen quite sharply.
Also, its dimensions have increased across the domain.
Again, just about a decade or so ago, our bilateral trade was energy trade was effectively close to zero, quite negligible.
Compared to that, today we stand at about $15 billion just in energy trade.
And again, an area of very rapid growth.
We are expecting this to increase by at least another $5 to $10 billion in coming years.
The question of energy from our perspective, which actually links in very well with our cooperation, is one relating to energy access, reliable energy access, affordable energy access, and two, relating to energy security.
And these two things, when you combine in terms of how they relate to India's large needs of India's fast-growing economy, this forms a base for our strong energy partnership, both in the conventional areas of energy such as oil and gas trade, but also in case of the new and emerging areas of energy partnership such as renewables, civil nuclear cooperation.
We are moving very rapidly to give practical shape to our cooperation in the civil nuclear space.
Third, during the Prime Minister's visit, we also launched the initiative which we call as TRUST, standing for transforming the relationship utilizing strategic technology.
Now this is a very crucial area and an emerging area of partnership between our two economies, between the technology ecosystems of the two countries.
And I would say to a very large extent between the scientific and research institutions between the two countries.
And the objective of this particular initiative is to focus on critical emerging technologies across five or six key areas.
So defense is one, artificial intelligence is another.
And artificial intelligence not just limited to our cooperation in trying to see if we can shape foundational language learning models together, but also to see whether we can cooperate on the practical aspects of AI, whether they relate to agentic AI, building agents for AI, or building application layers on the foundational layers,
which could be either relevant for the diverse economic ecosystem that India has, although it includes a lot of structured and unstructured data, but also to some of the domains particularly which lend itself to stronger use of artificial intelligence.
I would say, for example, a pharmaceuticals, auto sector.
Semiconductors has been a strong area of cooperation, I would say, in the last two to three years, considering that India has moved from pretty much having very incipient kind of semiconductor ecosystem to India now going into building the legacy node fabs of 28 nanometers and above,
and also building associated ecosystem for the semiconductor area, whether it's assembly test packaging, the memory space, or the design ecosystem that goes along in the semiconductor space.
Quantum, still mostly in the research space, biotechnology, energy that I mentioned, and a very robust dynamic cooperation in the field of space.
So TRUST initiative is a fitting indicator of how we see the future direction of this relationship, which will build on the existing domains of cooperation and lend itself, really lend itself to building a very strong and robust agenda in these areas in the years ahead in our bilateral partnership.
A related area, I would say, the fourth area part of Jinda, which we thrashed out, was to we launched what we call as innovation bridge, links not just to the defense and the security template of our cooperation, but also links to other areas of our economic cooperation.
And the central feature of this would be to build industry and academic partnership and link those partnership to investments, both private sector investments, but also government sector investments in the field of space, energy, and other emerging technologies that I just mentioned in trust initiatives.
So a lot of what we would do in innovation links and networks very neatly to whatever initiatives we design and take under the trust initiatives.
And this is one space where institutions like Hopkins with cutting-edge research can be among the most valuable partners that India seeks, that the institutions in India seek.
Beyond these key areas of our bilateral engagement, we are also a very strong partner in some of the regional settings.
The most important of them include Initiative Quad, again looking at both opportunities and the strategic challenges that we face.
I2U2, basically standing for India, Israel, US and UAE, and IMEC, India Middle East Economic Corridor.
Again, a domain of strategic connectivity bringing together multiple nations to build connectivity in a manner that not only promotes trade, business and economic cooperation, but also allows us to build a strategic pathway to a very stronger coming together of nations on this corridor and naturally the rest of the economic ecosystem that goes with it.
Sixth, I would say, put it as a last one, maybe penultimate one, links to one of the drivers which I mentioned earlier on, which is the people-to-people ties.
As I said, we have around 5 million strong Indian diaspora.
We have close to 350,000 Indian students in the United States.
And these form really live examples of the strong bond of friendship between our two countries.
But alongside, they are also a force multiplier in the relationship.
They are also, in a way, a guarantee and a resilient guarantee for our future partnerships.
The imprint of Indian diaspora is quite strong.
You know, CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, we all know some of the names, they are very popular.
Eminent researchers, medical professionals, I'm sure many of you are present here this afternoon.
Technocrats, the whole, you know, the whole strength of, I would say, the entrepreneurial spirit that the Indian diaspora brings, not just in the business segment, but also on the services sector, some of which I mentioned.
Innovation, which they drive, drive both, of course, in the respective professions that they follow in the US, but they also lend a very strong hand to the growth of the innovation ecosystem in India.
So that's, as I said, is a truly valuable proposition, but also in the process, framing solutions that are relevant for the rest of the world also.
This, I would say, in a way, forms a very compact set of five, six areas, which if you begin to flesh out, then evolve into a very large individual sets of specific cooperative activities that the two countries and the two systems are able to do.
Finally, and of course, I'm talking about trade at the end for a reason.
Our economic and trade ties have truly grown tremendously.
United States is today India's largest trading partner.
It's the largest capital partner.
It's the largest technology partner for India.
Our trade currently stands at close to $200 billion.
The talent pool that India has and the technology frontier technology lead that the US has, they complement each other really well.
And as our businesses, as our talent tap into these mutual strengths and combine it with robust two-way flows of technology and capital, these three triangulate to create really a very strong business-to-business cooperation realities, I would say.
Indian investments also in the US have grown considerably, close to 50 billion.
Given that India, as such, is a capital importing nation.
This is a considerably strong investment that the Indian companies have made in the US, generating close to half a million jobs.
And US investments in India are also commensurately very large with generating a large employment base in India.
Both sides are also working very intensely for an expeditious conclusion of a bilateral trade agreement, the first tranche of the bilateral trade agreement, with the objective to expand market access, cut tariffs, and open up the barriers, link up supply chains more tightly, with the whole objective that we can layer this to build the next take next steps,
take stronger steps to broadbase and build new economic relations between the two countries.
I think if you look at the overall technology, capital, robust economic ecosystems of the US, and you look at what India brings to the table, you will find that the two economies are highly complementary.
We are not in competitive economies, whether it is the services or the manufacturing sector.
And I think that provides a very strong value base for our long-term strategic partnership.
To wrap up, our relationship is bigger than its pieces.
It's a proof of what our two nations, diverse yet highly synergetic, comprehensive strategic partners, can achieve together.
As we pursue our own interest and strengthen our partnerships on region global fronts, we are in a position to do a world of good, not just for ourselves, our two countries, our two economies, our two societies, but also for the rest of the world.
I would like to thank the Institute, Hopkins, once again and wish this conference only the very best in your proceedings.
Thank you very much.
Thank you, Ambassador, for a very powerful reflection on the U.S.-India relationship and laying out the strategic pathways forward.
I'd like to invite on stage the founders of the Gupta Klinski India Institute, Mr. Rajgupta, Dr. Meeta Gupta, and our faculty co-chair, Sarah Bennett, to share a small token of appreciation from our side and a quick photograph.
We also have our chair for the advisory board, Alex Triantis, Dean Cary Business School.
I'd invite you to the stage as well.
We now turn our attention to the shifting currents of global geopolitics and India's growing influence on the world stage.
From Indo-Pacific to multilateral forums, from critical technology alliances to defense cooperation, India is playing an increasingly central role in shaping the global order.
This session will examine the strategic and diplomatic dimensions of this rise and how India's global positioning intersects with regional security, economic diplomacy, and greater power competition.
We are honored to have with us Mr. Sudhanand Dhume to chair this important panel.
Sudhanandhume is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a renowned columnist at the Wall Street Journal.
Mr. Dhume brings sharp analysis and deep contextual understanding of the South Asian politics and global affairs.
He's joined today by two leading thinkers in foreign policy and security, Ms. Lisa Curtis, Senior Fellow and Director of the Indo-Pacific Security Program at the Center for a New American Society, and Dr. Tanvi Madan, Senior Fellow in Foreign Policy at the Brookings Institution.
Lisa, I think you should be here.
Let's do this.
Oh, no, oh, that's it.
We look forward to this rich discussion.
Over to you, Sudhanand.
Thank you very much.
Can you hear me?
So, you know, when I first heard of the topic of this panel, geopolitics in flux, I was very happy because it's such a broad, expansive panel that you could get a topic title that you could just put virtually anything into it.
And then, of course, the tragic events of the last few weeks unfolded, and we have probably a much more sharply focused discussion than we would have if we'd had this discussion, say, a month ago.
So, we have two fantastic speakers over here.
Those of you who are familiar with the U.S.-India space are obviously familiar with both Lisa and with Tanvi.
I won't get into long bios, but it just suffice to say that Lisa has been involved with India and Pakistan from a U.S. government perspective for a long time.
This is not the first crisis that she's aware of.
She's been on the ground going back 25 years and longer.
And right now, she's with the Center for New American Security.
Tanvi, of course, is at the Brookings Institution.
You're aware of her writing.
You're aware of her book on U.S. India and China, and obviously her numerous television and other appearances.
So, the way we're going to do this today is that we're going to keep this conversational and then leave a little space at the end for your questions, and I'm sure you're going to have questions.
So, let me start with asking Lisa a question.
Lisa, if you had to just explain what has happened over the last few weeks to somebody who is waking up right now from a coma, how would you lay it out?
Okay.
Thank you, Sadhnan.
It's great to be here.
Well, the current India-Pakistan crisis or conflict, we've now entered the conflict stage, actually started on April 22nd with a horrific terrorist attack against civilian, mostly tourists.
26 people were killed, 25 Indian, one Nepali.
They were separated out and identified by religion.
They were targeting Hindus, and they were shot and killed in front of family members, in front of wives, children.
So it was an absolutely horrific scene in Pahalgam, Kashmir on that day.
So India has retaliated.
Exactly two weeks later, India retaliated against terrorist infrastructure inside Pakistan, both in Pakistani Kashmir, but also in the Punjab, which is very significant.
This is the heart of Pakistan where India retaliated.
It retaliated places like Bahalapur, which is the headquarters for the U.S.-designated terrorist group, Jaishi Muhammad.
It retaliated in Maridke, where you have the headquarters for Lashgari Taiba, also a U.S.-designated terrorist organization.
Now, Pakistan claimed that it shot down five Indian aircraft after this Indian retaliation.
We haven't heard from India on this.
We have heard from the French that at least one Rafael plane was shot down.
So I think we can assume that at least one, if not a few, Indian aircraft were shot down.
Many of us thought on Wednesday after the Indian retaliation, Pakistan's report that it had shot down Indian aircraft, that we had an opportunity to de-escalate the crisis and walk down the escalation ladder.
However, that's not what happened.
What we saw on Wednesday night was a lot of activity.
India claims that Pakistani missiles and drones attempted to hit many Indian military installations.
India responded with apparent drone strikes and other strikes against Pakistan's air defenses.
Thursday, I think it was a very unclear day.
I think we can say the fog of war has set in, where there's a lot of activity happening on both sides of the line of control as well as both sides of the border.
It's an alarming situation.
It's a very dangerous situation.
As Sadnan indicated, I have been through many India-Pakistan crises.
During the 1999 Cargill conflict, I was an analyst at the CIA.
During the 2001-2002 military build-up, I was at the State Department.
And during the 2019 Balakote crisis, I was at the National Security Council.
So I have seen how these things happen.
And, you know, once the crises start, it is really imperative that the United States is helping the two countries to back away from the brink of an all-out war.
It's extremely important.
I have watched the U.S. play this role.
It's always necessary.
And I think that in this crisis, it's no different.
That this is very important for the U.S. to be working the phones, talking to both sides, and talking them both off the cliff.
Danvi, how would you say the current crisis, in your view, looks different from previous iterations of India-Pakistan crises?
So I think there's a couple of things there, right?
I mean, on the one hand, you see it almost in the same path of the last couple of crises we've seen in 2016 and 2019.
But if you look at what we've seen in the crises before, I'm setting aside in 1999 because that didn't involve a terrorist attack that involved military personnel from Pakistan going over or attempting to go over across the border into India.
But in 2001-2, during the attack on the Indian parliament and 2008 with the Mumbai attacks, where terrorist groups based in Pakistan were involved, what you saw was a couple of things.
One on the kind of Indian side, but second on the kind of how the U.S. had also reflected how the U.S. used to handle those crises and their relationships, the U.S. relationship with India and Pakistan were quite different in at least a couple of ways then.
I think in those crises, what you saw is while India mobilized forces in 2001-2 for a considerable period of time on both sides, there were deployments.
What you saw is India show restraint, not kind of react or retaliate militarily.
Same thing in 2008.
Considerable amount of restraints shown by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, praised by international observers for it, now criticized in India for that restraint.
But nonetheless, especially just a few months before an election, not military retaliation.
And the reason he's often praised is that next year you saw India grow at 9-10%.
So that link with that there are larger things at play here for India as well.
But what you saw, I think, after that in 2016, and in both those cases, partly because the U.S. was involved in Afghanistan militarily, needed Pakistan in a different way, so Pakistan's utility for the U.S. was different.
You had the Bush administration counsel restraint on both sides, and there was a lot of shuttle diplomacy involved.
I think what you saw in 2016 and 2019 was different.
It wasn't that this was the first crisis in the Modi.
You walk them through what happened in 2016 and 2019 because everyone may not be aware of that.
Sure.
So, it wasn't the first terrorist attack on Indian personnel or Indian citizens during the new Modi government that had gotten into place in 2014.
There was another one in 2015.
But in 2016, what you ended up seeing is an attack on military personnel, Indian military personnel, Pakistani-based terrorist groups, took credit for it.
And you saw India conduct what it described as surgical strikes.
So, a few kind of soldiers who took action across the line of control that separates the Indian parts of Kashmir and the Pakistan parts.
What you saw in 2019, which is when you saw another attack on Indian personnel, is India strike with aircraft, not just across the line of control, but across the international border.
The other thing that you saw different in these two cases was the U.S. government not call for Indian restraint after the attack and not criticize those Indian strikes.
Both the Obama administration and the first Trump term Lisa was actively involved in the decision.
But nonetheless, also after those strikes, our call for de-escalation once those strikes were complete.
I think what you're seeing that is different, there's a range of things that's different this time, including how the U.S. is approaching this currently.
But just on kind of what India's action has entailed, there are a couple of things different.
One, you saw after the terrorist attack, there was one, it was on civilians.
I think it's important to say those two crises previously were on military personnel.
This was on civilians.
This was, as Lisa pointed out, targeted by religion.
There were also people from, this is the worst civilian attack on Indian civilians since the Mumbai attacks in 2008.
And you also saw these were the victims from over a dozen Indian states, so national resonance even beyond Kashmir.
Just a couple of other points, just quickly, that make this moment different is you saw in this case in a group called the Resistance Front that India links with the terrorist, the designated terrorist group, Lashkar E-Taiba, first take credit and then kind of withdraw that claim.
In 2019, the group Jesh Mohammed took credit for it very quickly.
So what you've seen, I think that is one difference, which is why you've seen a number of statements, including from the U.S., not actually till recently, you've seen a number of international statements condemn the attacks, not criticize Indian strikes, but also not draw a direct line to Pakistan just yet.
I think some recent American statements have at least generally talked about Pakistani-based terrorist groups.
I think the second, and that's the last point I'll make, is that's different is it's clear in the Indian military retaliation, as Lisa pointed out, they didn't just wanted to go beyond just kind of what they did in 2019, which is attack some terrorist infrastructure.
We have their doubts about what was hit, et cetera.
I won't go into that.
But nonetheless, what you saw is many more locations targeted, explicitly saying it's terrorist-based infrastructure.
And secondly, the strikes in Punjab, which was different.
So, Lisa, as Tammy pointed out, there's been a kind of pattern shift in terms of how the U.S. acts, right?
So, 1999 onwards, basically, Pakistan would commit an atrocity and India would be advised restraint.
From 2016 onwards, it's been Pakistan commits an atrocity, India responds, and then the U.S. Council's restraint.
So, the point of council comes later.
But this time, we have a U.S. administration where the Vice President just said that, well, this is really not something for us to get involved in.
Of course, the Secretary of State has spoken with the Indian Foreign Minister and the Pakistani Prime Minister, and he's tweeted about it also.
We are at a moment in the U.S. where at least a significant number of supporters of the current administration feel that the U.S. has kind of been overinvolved, overextended in all the world's problems.
We don't have to be involved in everything.
How do you see that kind of mood, which you and I may not agree with, but that exists?
How do you see that affecting the current crisis potentially?
Well, I think that is how people are interpreting, particularly Vice President Vance's recent comments, that the U.S. can't control this.
We're not going to get deeply involved.
I think people are seeing that as perhaps this administration is not going to take the U.S. traditional role of getting involved, quietly talking to both sides, counseling restraint, trying to prevent a conflict that could potentially go nuclear.
And I think that would be a mistake.
I think that would be a grave error if indeed the U.S. was to take a sort of standback policy because this is a dangerous situation.
Any time that there's a conflict between two nuclear armed states that have gone to war in the past, there's been three major wars, one major border conflict between these two countries.
So I think it would be a mistake if that was the thinking.
But like you said, we've heard a different message from Secretary of State Rubio, who has been very clear that he's been on the phone.
He's been talking with the Indian Foreign Minister on several occasions.
He's talked with the Pakistani Prime Minister as well as the Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister in Pakistan.
And I think this is good.
I think it is the right thing to try to be providing ways that the two countries can find a face-saving way out and using that influence that the U.S. has.
It's great.
Saudi Arabia is involved.
I think the Iranian foreign minister has tried to get involved in these de-escalation efforts.
But when it comes down to it, the U.S., the most powerful country in the world, that's the most important country to be involved.
And I think there is still a role.
But I do think it's important for Secretary of State Rubio to also engage with Chief of Army Staff Asim Mounir.
Because at this point in the conflict, Pakistan has been de-escalating in the last 36, 48 hours.
And he is the one who is directing these military operations.
Escalating.
Yeah, I'm sorry, did I say de?
I meant escalating.
Pakistan has been escalating the crisis in the last 36 hours.
So it is the Chief of Army Staff, Asam Mounir, who is directing these military operations.
So I think it's important for Secretary of State Rubio to get on the phone with him.
In India, you have a civilian-led military, so it's fine to be engaging with the civilian leadership in India.
But in Pakistan, you've got to engage with the military leadership because they're the ones in control.
They're the ones that are driving the Pakistani response.
Dunbi, you know, over the years, we've kind of learned so much about different military chiefs in Pakistan.
I think one of the most interesting contrasts between India and Pakistan is that we kind of know virtually nothing about whoever becomes the chief of the Indian Army, whereas in Pakistan, the Army Chief is obviously the most important actor in that country.
But Asim Munir was a relatively unknown person when he rose to this position.
What's your best read of what he's like and what that means for this crisis?
You know, I will caveat this with I am not an expert on the Pakistani military.
There are several people and several good academics who have done great work on the Pakistani military.
There are people like Aisha Siddhika, who wrote a great piece in the Financial Times just recently on exactly that question, the domestic dynamics.
I will say, just kind of from the perspective of him and the crisis, I think what is he's in some ways the known unknown.
A person who is not like the, we know enough to know he's not like the previous Pakistani Army chief, General Bajwa, who was, and maybe Lisa has thoughts on that, was there during the previous crisis and did take that exit ramp, so to speak, that was presented then.
What we do know about, another thing we know about General Munir is that he is considered to be more aggressive, more of a true believer.
And also he's in a slightly different circumstance and context where you have seen the Pakistani military's reputation within Pakistan take some hits, in part because of the nature of their involvement in Pakistani politics, particularly the detention of former Prime Minister Imran Khan.
And you come at a context where either the pressure is, you see this as a time that you're feeling under pressure to do more to show that this is why the Pakistani military is relevant, still essential, still the reason that you need a big chunk of the Pakistani defense or the budget as a whole for the military.
Or you say see it as an opportunity to actually say, so it's not so much you're on the defensive, that you go on the offensive, saying this is an opportunity for me to actually show that the Pakistani military is actively involved and can defend its borders.
So I think the things we do know about General Munir is that he is different from his predecessor, and we don't know whether he's going to be willing to take the exit ramps that might present themselves.
He hasn't taken them thus far, and I feel like there have been at least a couple of other windows.
The other thing I'll just say is part of whether it was connected or not, but at least there was a coincidence that just before, just a few days before the April 22nd attack, which had these communal dimensions,
General Munir gave a pretty inflammatory speech, talking about not just Kashmir as Pakistan's regular vein, but talking about the Hindu-Muslim divide as being kind of really crucial and in some other inflammatory ways, which I won't repeat.
But nonetheless, so that, I think, forms the context as well of how he is potentially seen and what his belief system is.
Can I add one point on that?
Because I think Tambi is absolutely right that Asim Munir does seem to be more of a hawk on India than General Bajwa was.
But I will say that General Munir is very interested in improving the U.S.-Pakistan relationship.
He has shown a great deal of interest in having better relations with the United States.
And so this is a card that the U.S. can now play because there were tentative steps being made toward improving the relationship with Pakistan.
We saw President Trump in his address to Congress thank Pakistan for its help in extraditing one of the perpetrators in the August 26, 2021 attack in Kabul.
We know that Pakistan held a critical minerals conference a couple weeks ago.
A senior State Department official attended that.
So there were these tentative steps toward improving the relationship.
And I think that's something that now somebody like Secretary of State Rubio could hold out that, you know, look, there is room to improve this relationship.
But, you know, number one, you need to de-escalate this current crisis.
And number two, you need to make sure that terrorists are not operating freely on your territory.
So that actually partly answers my question, but I'm going to ask it in any case.
The way I see it, one of the reasons why it was relatively easy to de-escalate in 2019, a couple of reasons.
The first is that there were widely different claims on what exactly happened when India struck the terrorist camp in Balakot in Khyber Puktungkur province.
The Indian media claimed that India had killed large numbers of terrorists.
The international media and the Pakistani media basically said that India hit a tree.
Then you had the sort of tit-for-tat, and an Indian jet was down and a pilot was captured and the Pakistanis returned them.
But I think what happened was that the way the dynamic was in 2019 was that both countries could declare victory and in fact both countries did declare victory to their own people.
This situation is very different, right?
The Pakistanis have acknowledged that at least 31 people have been killed in Indian strikes.
The strikes, as Thanvi also mentioned and you mentioned, the political significance and the social and cultural significance of India, in fact, hitting places like Muridki and Bawalpur, which basically, let's face it, for decades, have existed under the patronage of the Pakistani army.
These are like absolutely some of the safest places in the world to be if you were a terrorist.
And the fact that the Indians have attacked these with missiles, it makes Asim Munir's domestic situation more precarious.
And I'll add to that the fact that I think the Indians want an off-ramp, and I think the Indians have wanted an off-ramp from the start.
If you see their statement after the first strikes, they were sort of basically trying to signal that we're done now.
We've retaliated.
We can end this right now.
But I don't think the Indians want this to end in terms where the Pakistanis could claim, as in 2019, that they had scored a victory too.
So given the complexity of this, you have at least one card that the U.S. has over here, which is that Pakistan wants to improve its ties with the U.S.
But if you were advising Secretary of State Rubio at this moment, what other cards would you be saying?
What else do you think could be done to prevent Pakistan from escalating further?
And it looks very likely to me at this moment that they will in fact escalate.
And then, Thanmi, if you could add to the same question, Lisa.
Well, I think, again, you have the terrorist problem in Pakistan.
You know, we should all be asking how, you know, in the year 2025, are U.S.-designated terrorist groups like Ashgari Taiba and Joshi Muhammad still around?
Why is LET leader Haz Mohamed Saeed still only under house arrest?
Why isn't he in a proper jail?
I think all of these questions need to be asked.
And Pakistan in the past has been on the gray list of the Financial Action Task Force for its support to these groups.
So that is another mechanism where action could be initiated.
Of course, there's the UN, where in 2019 the U.S. worked very hard to ensure that Jeshi Muhammad leader Masood Azhar was designated as a terrorist.
The U.S. had been pursuing that effort for a long time, but it had been blocked by China for many years.
So I think really making the point to Pakistan about the fact that it can no longer support these terrorist groups.
It's very telling that the strike in Baha'u'llah actually ended up killing terrorist Abdurraf Azhar, who is the brother of Masood Azhar.
And he was involved, Abdur Raf Azhar was involved in the brutal and heinous kidnapping and killing of the Wall Street Journal reporter Danny Pearl in 2002.
So it took 23 years, but finally justice was served for that terrorist act.
So the question has to be asked, why couldn't Pakistan take action against this brutal terrorist?
So this is a problem.
And I think this has to be dealt with.
Right now we're trying to get the two countries to step back from an all-out war.
But when the situation calms down, I think people are going to be asking questions about the terrorists who are still operating freely inside Pakistan.
Toddly, same question to you.
If you had a five-minute phone call with the Secretary of State or a five-minute meeting, what would you ask him to do?
So I'm going to answer this in a different way, because I think Lisa has covered, you know, things like the Financial Action Task Force.
The Pakistani military gets a good chunk of IMET, this international military training, education and training program.
They're both garrets and sticks that the U.S. has, but there's a different dimension.
And I will say, you know, when Lisa talked about the importance of the U.S. approach to this, in previous crises, both sides, in different ways, almost expect intervention to come in so that they don't go up a certain escalation ladder.
India doesn't like mediation.
Pakistan wants mediation.
But nonetheless, both almost expect and sometimes want some kind of intervention to help them take those, or at least to shine a light, so to speak, on where the exit ramps are or highlight them.
I think they can also help with narrative shaping in some ways, though both governments, I think, also have an ability to shape a narrative about what wins and losses are.
But I think there's a different dimension to this as well.
The U.S. is not the only actor here, or particularly one that if we're talking about who's going to shine a spotlight on the exit ramp for General Munir, there are other actors involved here.
Partners of Pakistan, like the Saudi, the Saudis, the Emiratis, the Qataris, the Chinese.
The British government has links with the Pakistani military as well.
And so part of it, and I'm sure Lisa did this when she was, is coordination with some of these actors.
Now, way back when, in 1999, 2008, there was U.S.-China coordination.
U.S.-China relations not in the same place.
But nonetheless, you can actually still have certain conversations because while the Chinese have been very supportive of the Pakistanis, tried to dissuade an Indian military strike, criticize the Indian military strike, their next statement after calling the Indian military strike regrettable, they're one of only two countries that have criticized India.
What they did say is, we cancel calm and restraint and are willing to work with others to coordinate.
Now, they are not quite an honest broker.
They are a party that is supplying one, but sometimes, but they also have leverage and do not want to see the situation.
Same with the Saudis in UAE and Qatar.
These countries earlier were seen as Pakistani partners, but they also today have an interest in India in a way in the Indian economy, in Indian kind of strategic ties, ties with India, where they are also a different view of this.
They have, again, had a similar statement about de-escalation, but not criticizing it.
So I think it is about bringing in these other countries and seeing what that kind of leverage.
Final thing I'll say is: you know, we talk about this as perhaps the potential for escalation is limitless.
I don't think that's necessarily true, right?
In the sense that these are both rational actors on both sides.
And one of the things that General Munir even will be, or at least people around him will be aware of, are certain kind of just resource limitations.
Pakistan doesn't have an endless supply of military equipment or spares or servicing for material.
You need, when you're fighting conflicts, you need to have an economy that can help you in stores of food and energy and those kind of things.
Sadani, you wrote a column recently in the journal, right, pointing out the capabilities gap, and maybe you want to say something about that.
Is just even whatever the conventional military balance, et cetera, there are some limits on kind of the ability, frankly, of both sides to some extent, but particularly of Pakistan without that support.
And if those countries that are expecting support from say to Pakistan, you need to de-escalate this, they will have to listen.
Yeah, I mean, I'll share a couple of very quick statistics from my column.
You know, India's population is about six times as large as Pakistan's, but India's economy is 11 times as large.
The Indian defense budget is about 86 billion.
The Pakistani defense budget is $10 billion.
One Indian company, Reliance Industries, has a market capitalization that is more than four times larger than the entire Pakistan Stock Exchange.
So the economic mismatch is massive, which actually is a good way.
Thanvi, let me stick with you and just to broaden this, right?
So all three of us were at this technology summit in Delhi a few weeks ago.
And this is, of course, before the massacre.
You know, left to itself, India has a lot going on, and there's a lot of other things that it's interested in.
It would like the Pakistan problem to just go away.
But that's just not how the world works.
But if you could just step back for a moment and put yourself in the shoes now of a decision maker in New Delhi.
You've got this problem.
You have the political pressure that arises to do something.
But you've also got the fact that India will be the third largest economy in the world in a few years.
It has very different stakes.
So how would you be looking at it if you're sort of looking at this as an Indian decision maker right now?
I mean, I think you've kind of provided the gist of it.
It's just one, and I think this is the reason you have seen Indian officials say repeatedly, we have a commitment to non-escalation unless the other side, if they respond, we will retaliate in the same domain as how they put it.
But part of it is for India, there's a kind of a negative and a positive aspect.
Well, positive is you have a lot other things going on.
You have an economy that's one of the fastest-growing major economies in the world.
You have partnerships that you want to deepen, both for strategic purposes, but also, as the previous panel discussed, for economic reasons.
You want to attract investment.
You don't want to be rehyphenated as part of the most dangerous place in the world again.
You want to say you're open for business.
India, the same a few hours, I think it was before the military strike signed a trade agreement with the UK.
They're in the middle of negotiating one with the US and with the European Union.
So wanting to stay on track, needing to have job-creating growth, skill a number of people, create about 8 million jobs a year, that's what India will be keeping an eye on.
You do not want to get derailed from that broader strategic objective.
That's the positive.
There's some other aspects.
India's got a China border that was in crisis in 2020.
They've redeployed, in fact, troops from the Pakistan border to the China border.
China being Pakistan's closest friend, it's not that they have not tended to militarily intervene in previous India-Pakistan, but they have been helpful to the Pakistanis at times.
At the very least, India has to think about that border.
Its military modernization, everything was directed about thinking about China as India's strategic rival.
But that, in India's mind, has always been linked to the China-Pakistan rivalry.
So, India does have to consider also the other thing, just on the you know, you're just talking about restraints.
India has a better defense industrial base than it used to.
It's producing more munitions at home.
It probably has more stores, partly because it's been thinking about a China crisis.
But at the end of the day, who have India's suppliers been?
It's been Israel, it's been Russia, it's even been Ukraine.
Let's just say those defense industrial bases are focused on other things right now.
So, even India has to think about these other things, and at the end of the day, wants to stay on track to where it was going, becoming a pole in the multipolar world, as they put it, or having an economy that's creating those 8 million jobs a year.
Lisa, keeping it broader than just the current crisis, if you could just give the audience a sense of the larger U.S.-India relationship, right, which you've worked on for so many years, not all of it was India-Pakistan crisis management.
Give us a sense of where India fits into the larger picture.
Yeah, well, I think from the United States perspective, this crisis is very unhelpful to the U.S. sort of broader Indo-Pacific strategy because part of that is developing the U.S.-India bilateral relationship,
strengthening that, seeing India play a larger role in the Indo-Pacific region, looking east, developing relationships in Southeast Asia, contributing to maritime security in the Indian Ocean region, but even in the broader Indo-Pacific region.
I think the U.S. really does see India playing an increasingly important geopolitical role throughout the Indo-Pacific region and as a counterweight to China.
And even though India's economy is not near the level of China's, the military's are very different in terms of military capabilities, but still, India does have very strong military capabilities.
I think it's rated the fourth most powerful military in the world by the Global Firepower Index.
And certainly, we want India to have those capabilities to stand up to China.
And looking at the India-China border crisis, it was helpful that India was able to hold the line and was very patient in terms of the deescalation of that crisis.
India insisted that it would not go back to normalizing ties with China until China returned to pre-May 2020 military positions.
And that's in fact what happened.
And they have been able to disengage from positions and sort of de-escalate that situation to some degree.
But I think that for the U.S., India is extremely important.
And the U.S. wants to build that strategic partnership not only for the sort of strategic, you know, military aspects, but also on the economy and technology.
You mentioned we were just at the Global Technology Summit, and it's clear that technology is going to be a key part of the growing U.S.-India relationship.
It was a major area of focus during the Biden administration through the ISET initiative, the initiative on critical and emerging technologies.
But I think we can see from Modi's visit to the White House to visit President Trump in February, the Trust Initiative, which is very similar to the ISET initiative.
It's kind of a rebranding of that ISET initiative.
But the U.S. is hoping to work with India on things like AI and semiconductors and the fact that India has such extraordinary talent in this field, in technology, engineering.
So there are many, many reasons why the U.S. is interested in building that strategic partnership with India.
And unfortunately, this current crisis situation that India and Pakistan are in takes India away from being able to move forward and focus on developing its economy and being engaged in the Indo-Pacific region in a broader way.
Because obviously, when you're in a crisis situation, nothing is more important than defending the country.
And so India is being forced to focus on the situation with Pakistan right now.
But that's just where we are.
So let me open it up and take a couple of quick questions.
Where do we have mics anywhere?
The lady in pink, please keep your question in front over here.
Do you have to go to a mic?
What's the system over here?
Do you have mics?
Mics.
Okay.
Okay, there's the person in blue.
Just one request.
Keep it short.
Keep it as a question.
If you start delivering a lecture, I'll cut you short.
Thank you.
Sure.
So what can India do to recognize Somaliland or Taiwan?
You know, Trump has been working with Somaliland on getting a port to get some recognition.
And also, India has about 142 embassies, but China has about 172.
What can India do actually help have more embassies, more foreign missions?
What's the geopolitical side on those two?
Okay, Tanmi, do you want to take that?
Sure.
I mean, just very quickly, there's been a lot written about kind of the Indian Foreign Service needing to expand.
But there are other ways.
It's not just quantity.
And I think you've seen some changes.
The batches of Foreign Service officers have increased.
There are other ways of doing this, bringing in more people through lateral entry.
I mean, embassies are different.
There have already been some open, for example, in the Baltics, some new embassies and other places in Latin America.
But at the end of the day, there's going to have to be some creativity.
Somebody like me, I'd be like, yes, in an ideal way, India needs to increase both its defense budget but also its diplomacy budget as it becomes a power that is operating many fields.
I'll just very quickly say these things, it's a chicken and egg thing, but even if you look at US history, the US didn't have all these things.
Once its interests grew, then you start building up the system.
So I think that will be very natural.
Just very quickly, I know nothing about Somaliland, I'm afraid.
I will say on India-Taiwan, I do not think you're going to see, and I don't think the US can get India to change its diplomatic position on kind of the status of Taiwan, what India has stopped doing long before the US, and now this Trump administration has started doing the similar thing, which is not reiterating its one China policy, but at the same time also deepening ties with Taiwan and pretty much across many domains.
And so I think what India is actually helping contribute to is letting Taiwan or making Taiwan feel less isolated.
You're seeing a lot of activity there that sometimes gets lost in terms of the question of recognition or not, but also this question of what India will do in a Taiwan Strait contingency.
There's a lot of interesting things happening on the economic, on the tech, on the people-to-people exchange side that's worth following.
Akriti.
Thanks, Sudanan and Lisa and Tanvi.
Great to see you.
So I'm going to ask a variation of the question that Sudhanan asked.
Sorry, I'm Akriti Vasdeva Kalyankar from the Stimson Center.
So in some ways, this India-Pakistan crisis is different from before because there are both kinetic and non-kinetic measures that have been employed which have short, medium and long-term implications.
So it's not just the sort of conventional tit-for-tat moves that are going on between India and Pakistan right now, but there's also India's holding in abeyance of the Indus Waters Treaty.
There are economic measures we consider in terms of restricting trade.
So it seems to be going in a direction which would consume Indian attention for a long period of time.
How does New Delhi resist that temptation or I guess withstand that pressure domestically to do more on the Pakistan side, but still, you know, we're in a panel about India's expanding role in the world stage.
How do you still focus on the broader region and your other relationships?
What do you are there lessons here from like South Korea, which has a neighbor that also it has problems with, but is able to do more on the defense side, is able to do more with other partners?
And let's keep the answers quick so then we can get into one more question.
Yeah, I think it's going to be difficult, no doubt, like you said.
But you raise an interesting point about South Korea.
And of course, the United States works very closely with South Korea to deal with the North Korea challenge.
Well, I wouldn't compare Pakistan to North Korea by any stretch.
But I would say that probably India is going to be talking with its partners more about the terrorism problem.
I think we're going to hear a lot more about terrorism, and that's going to become a part of the US-India relationship.
I mean, counterterrorism has always been there, but I think its prominence will go up.
And also in venues like the Quad.
I think India is going to make the counterterrorism issue much more prominent in those venues.
Is the lady over there?
Are you waiting for a question too?
Go ahead.
Hi, I'm Shalini from Johns Hopkins and I'm just curious that, like Sadhanan said, that India has a lot of problems to deal with on their own, and they would just want the Pakistan problem to just get rid of it.
I'm just curious that whenever a terror attack happens, while we see on one side geopolitically everybody condemning those attacks, we also see that there is a retaliation when it comes.
There are people, there are countries who are also saying, okay, act with restraint.
So when we talk about that ramp where we need to create the spotlight, what is the ramp countries are looking at?
Is this a permanent solution where you think countries should just come out, talk about condemn terrorism as a group?
Or are we only looking for temporary solutions where it's a tit for tat for some time and then again there is some peace and then again some war?
So what is the permanent solution in terms of a global challenge?
Do you have one minute to solve the global terrorism problem, Lisa?
Okay.
Well, I was thinking more about the India-Pakistan dispute.
And I think the most helpful role that maybe the United States ever played when you're talking about sort of the Kashmir issue is former President Clinton, following the 1999 Cargill conflict, he talked about needing to respect the sanctity of the line of control, essentially implying it's a de facto border.
And frankly, I think that's the only realistic solution to the problem.
You're not going to change borders through blood.
You know, in this day and age, it's just not going to happen.
So I think the quicker that both countries accept that and operate on that basis, the more opportunity there will be to move forward.
So that would be my response.
Want to add a sentence?
Just very quickly, two things.
One to Akati, major powers have to walk and chew gum at the same time.
And I think this is not about politics.
So I do think in the sense that I do think this Prime Minister can shape and affect the politics.
I don't think that's going to cause that pressure.
Second, very quickly on the question.
You can't escape geography.
This is something India has to deal with.
But I do think there's a fundamental problem here that's not just about, that's not just India's problem.
It's frankly the US's problem.
It's the UK's problem.
And it's the Pakistani's problem as well, which is till folks in Rawalpindi decide that you cannot have the state sponsor and harbor and finance terrorism, it will blow back not just against American citizens, Indian citizens, British citizens, but Pakistani citizens at the end of the day and prevent Pakistan itself from growing in a way it was growing sometimes faster than India.
And as Sadhanan has pointed out recently in his column, till as this thing is 2008, recently is 2008, Pakistan had a higher per capita GDP than India.
Today, even not just India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka are ahead of Pakistan.
So great book by Steve Cole called Directorate S, not actually about India, but about the US experience in Afghanistan after 9-11.
He makes this point much better than I do.
At the end of the day, if it is within, and I don't know that any of us can force Pakistan to make that decision, it has to be a Pakistani population asking their own intelligence services, what have they done for them lately in terms of their economy, rather than continuing to support these groups?
Well, on that note, I just want to thank our two wonderful speakers.
Thank you very much.
Thank you for the thorough analysis about the crisis that's currently unfolding between India and Pakistan and also setting it in the context of the global geopolitics.
We now turn to a timely and strategic conversation.
I know it's been a little too many panels back to back.
Maybe you can stand up, stretch a little.
In a minute, we'll have a panel here which will be talking about TRUST.
TRUST, which stands for Transforming the Relationship Utilizing Strategic Technology Between India and U.S.
This panel will dive into the opportunities and challenges facing the US-India technology partnership and how we can build a foundation of mutual trust to navigate today's rapidly shifting technological landscape.
We are privileged to have with us Professor Joshua White to chair this session.
He's the Professor of Practice of International Relations at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, SIAS, and a former senior director at the UN National Security Council.
Joining him, we have two exceptional voices shaping the future of U.S.-India tech diplomacy, Kriti Upadhyaya, founder of the Industri Council and a leader at C2C Advanced Systems, and Dhruva Jaya Shankar, Executive Director of Observer Research Foundation America.
Over to you, Josh.
Thank you.
It's great to be here in my home institution.
I didn't have to travel far, but it's terrific to have an India-focused event of this scale and depth.
And I'm privileged to have been working with GKII on this and a lot of other events.
I would also say that in a moment where there are many terrible things happening in this part of the world, in the world more broadly, it is reassuring to know that you can come to Johns Hopkins and get a chilled mango lase right out there in the lobby.
Don't go get one now if you haven't had one.
Stay for this panel, but it is there and it's delicious.
Really delightful to have two friends and very smart interlocutors to talk about the technology dimension of the U.S.-India relationship.
This has come up in at least a couple of the last panels and discussions today.
And there's so much material to mine.
And we have not only new material, but we have new acronyms to unpack.
This is one of the wonderful things about Washington.
Every time there's a new administration, there's a concerted planning cell that emerges to rebrand new acronyms.
So we'll be learning about that.
And then we'll be trying to delve into some of the key technology areas and discuss what the future might look like in these areas.
So I want to begin by asking Kriti if she could give us a bit of a lay of the land of this new US-India trust initiative.
Where does it fall on the family tree of technology initiatives that the US and India have had over the years?
And what kind of topics does it include in its current incarnation?
Thank you, Dr. White.
Always a pleasure to be here.
And I will answer your question, I promise.
But first, let's just think about this, right?
Like, 20 years back, there was nothing.
There's absolutely nothing.
Today, when we look at India's maritime tech infrastructure, we have PAIs, we have Globe Masters, PRIs and Globe Masters both.
India is the largest user outside of the United States.
Sonobuys, all the Sunubuis, all the Sonars, everything is American.
Just last week, even on the space maritime domain awareness front, we just started working with Hawkeye on the RF space, again, a startup, all-American.
How did we get here?
Well, a few years back, there was some alignment that started coming in.
This was back in the days of Atul Bihari Wachpai, when HTCG first started talking about that maybe there is something here within US and India, within this tech partnership.
They weren't very sure.
There was alignment.
It was very nebulous, but they went ahead with it.
And they kept building, right?
Various administrations, various governments.
It didn't matter.
We built on it.
We came to DTTI.
A lot of people will say it was a failure.
I don't think it was a failure because it propelled us forward.
Anything that propels you forward is not a failure.
And in DTTI, it was still sort of...
This is the Defense Technology Trade Initiative.
Yes.
Yes, sorry.
Sorry.
I'm the acronym buster here.
Sorry.
But in DTTI, we figured that now it wasn't just alignment.
we're now thinking about pilot projects.
We're thinking about how can we, it was still very government-led, but we were now starting to co-op companies.
Fast forward, ISAT, IndisX, same rationale.
But now we're moving from alignment, from prototypes, from pilots, to actual platforms.
And the realization that we're coming to is that let's do less.
So let the government do less.
In Indisx, we were like, we're the government.
These are the areas.
We're going to get you together, do the matchmaking.
Now you do you.
With trust, now we're going a bit deeper.
We're saying let's form the basis of this relationship.
Let's focus on compute, let's focus on AI, let's focus on Semicon.
And let's just lay the foundations and then let companies do what companies do best.
So three things really.
What is trust about?
Trust is about governments providing and enabling infrastructure.
Because that is the best that the governments can do.
Secondly, it's about dual-use technology.
Because gone are the days that innovation is happening in labs, DRDO or DARPA labs.
It's happening today in startups.
Gone are the days when technology or operational efficiency is being shaped in SCIFs.
It's being shaped in, I don't know, VWork, boardrooms.
So it's about making sure that technology is really flowing from the private sector and government is absorbing it.
And thirdly, and lastly, trust is about US and India doing what democracy is doing best.
This is not the Russian technology model that we followed back with medicine, defense, and so on, which is top-down, G2G.
I love the fact that G2G deals are coming down, right?
I love that.
It is about startups, tier two, tier three suppliers, all of these guys coming together and taking the US and India technology relationship forward.
So I'll end this.
What is trust?
What is in the name?
It's all the same.
What trust really is much like startup founders, our governments coming together, iterating, pivoting, coming up with fancy acronyms for the same thing to really propel us forward on this relationship.
It's a great backstory.
I want to ask if you could unpack for us a little bit, before we get into specific technology areas, some of the mutual logic of technology cooperation.
Some of it might seem natural.
Well, these are partner countries.
Of course they're going to cooperate on technology.
But what's in it for the United States?
And what's in it for India?
And where do they each see their best play here?
Right.
First of all, thank you, Josh, and thanks to Johns Hopkins and to the organizers for this.
It's a real privilege to be here.
You know, quickly ran through a kind of the brief and quick history of US-India tech collaboration, particularly on the defense side.
And I think a few things to keep in mind.
I think the, as she mentioned, this was in some ways a high, what we're seeing now is a sort of high-level engagement led by in the Prime Minister's office in India, by the National Security Council here.
So it really is top-down.
And then I think the second dimension she rightly pointed out is really private sector now led.
We're beyond the stage.
For India, a big challenge really, just to sort of dial back a little bit between the 1970s and 1990s in particular, was this idea that India was sort of behind this technological curtain.
And getting access to, you know, lowering the barriers for export control and things like that were ways from the U.S., which is one of the leading sources of innovation and technological innovation in the world, arguably the leading source of technological innovation.
That was really the big goal of a number of initiatives, starting really in the 1990s, but extending until relatively recently.
But I think we now, as she said, come into a new phase where we've moved away from kind of how do we lower the barriers to how do we actually push and incentivize collaboration, and this really will require the private sector.
But what's the logic behind it?
And I think that's a key question.
I think for India, it's a bit more obvious.
The U.S. is a technological leader in many areas that India has prioritized that it deems important both for national security and for economic growth and prosperity.
And sometimes at the intersection of those areas.
And this includes defense space, digital technologies, telecom, biotech, AI, quantum computing, clean and green technologies, just to mention a few, automation, just to mention a few areas.
But it's of course much more, much, much broader than that.
For the United States, I think there were two things.
And I think the Biden administration had a particular logic to it.
And it was really in the aftermath of, I mean, if you remember, the Biden administration came in during the height of the pandemic, the COVID pandemic.
And the question of supply chain security really was top of mind for people, for people like Jake Sullivan, Tara Chabra, people like that who at the White House who were leading some of the tech policy at OSTP and others.
So I think supply chain security was really top of mind.
How can we work with trusted partners to strengthen supply chains?
And there were real concerns because of US-China competition about the over-concentration of supply chains in China and manufacturing in generally.
So, supply chain security, decoupling, and the strategic logic were really what initially animated the Biden administration to, within a few months, really, it was quite quick of their coming in, upgrade the quad, and again, within a year or two, launch ICET, but really push the agenda on the U.S.-India tech partnership.
The Trump administration, I think, has a slightly different set of priorities, not entirely mutually exclusive, and sometimes a bit more technological focus on a few specific technologies, and I know we'll get into that.
But really, you know, AI and data centers, the computing power that is needed is going to be vast.
Obviously, a lot of it will be here, but they understand that having it in places like India will really help bring down the costs of computing.
Nuclear, civil nuclear is a second area, critical minerals, supply chains, another.
So, these are top of mind for the Trump administration, undersea cables.
I would say those are kind of four areas that really come to mind, and were all mentioned in the trust sort of the statement that kind of rebranded trust.
So, again, not entirely moving away, but I think a bit more focused on a few of these areas.
We're going to see less of an emphasis on clean and green energy under the Trump administration, not surprisingly.
But that, I think, explains the logic a little bit.
That's helpful, and I want to push you on one piece of this, which is if you're India and you are obviously in a position where you want to acquire advanced technologies, this makes sense.
But I want to push you on the United States logic a little bit.
On many of these key technology areas, the United States is at or near the technology frontier.
And in most of these areas, India is behind the technology frontier, sometimes a little bit, sometimes considerably.
So, if you're at the United States, explain a little more the driver of not just having a technology partnership, but having, you know, look at the Biden administration, you had the National Security Advisor spending an extraordinary amount of time with this partnership.
What is the short-term, long-term logic that you think was in play, and how much will that logic carry over into the present moment, this administration and beyond?
I think I should put it into one word, which is scale.
I mean, if you're going to do anything at scale, you have to involve India.
And actually, Kurt Campbell and Rush Doshi wrote something recently in Foreign Affairs, which basically makes that case, that if the U.S. can do, you know, the U.S. can compete on its own in various frontier technologies and do it well.
But if you're taking on China, which has four times your population, you're competing there, you need that scale.
And that's only going to come with, yes, you can add Europe, you can add Japan, Korea, other U.S. trusted allies, Australia, but to really work at scale and related to that cost.
And I've spoken to, you know, we all know people in various companies, and they say, look, I want to compete globally, and I have the best product, but the only way I can reduce my manufacturing costs is to manufacture some parts of it in India.
And again, at scale.
So I'd say it's really about scale and related to that cost.
Which is a great segue to the questions about AI broadly, because a lot of the AI game is a scale game, particularly with distributed requirements for computational power for compute.
And then the other piece of this, big piece of this has been thinking about AI models.
The AI dimension of the technology cooperation received a lot of prominence in the recent statement about this trust initiative.
Where do you see the low-hanging fruit or the potential for actual collaboration in both of these, in compute and then in models where the U.S. and China really have, I think, significant advantages?
And Kritti, you're welcome to reply as well in any order you guys prefer.
I'll just add to what Dhruva added.
I think another benefit for the US is just getting into some of these other markets, right?
Because both from a cost perspective, but also from a technology sensitivity perspective.
And I'll give you an example, right?
There are already US stuff is so expensive, especially on the tech space.
If you do it in India, it's cheaper, even for the US and in India, but also this is more relevant in third markets, right, where you really want to penetrate.
Secondly, there are areas like where technology is really controlled.
You can work with India to not only have cheaper versions, but also non-controlled versions.
There are companies like Anavia who are doing that.
So for example, they have a helidrone, which is ITAR, but then they also supply a non-ITAR one to Egypt.
And those sort of things can be made in places like India.
On AI, I think India is going to be the training ground for AI for making those models stronger.
And this is across the board, right?
Talking about LLMs, where you're going to get more diverse languages, talking about terrains, field data, right?
India is the best at high-altitude warfare.
It's all about autonomy today, right?
San Francisco, DC, it's all about autonomous systems.
If the US wants to learn, you know, train autonomous systems, those field data on high altitude is only going to come from India.
So when it comes to data training, India is going to be so important.
Now, three areas, and I'm glad Dhruva mentioned compute, and that's why the supercomputers that US gave to India were so critical.
Compute power is going to be very, very critical.
Data sensors are going to be critical.
I see a lot of Indian companies without taking names, including big conglomerates, are investing in the US on data centers.
I think there is a need for US and India to think about joint data centers, secure data centers.
Secondly, energy.
And that's why I was so happy when just last time when Prime Minister Modi was here, we started talking about the small nuclear reactors and so on, because that energy, reliable, cheap energy is going to be very critical for AI.
And then finally, I think this is something that is a little bit boring, so we don't give it as much thought.
We don't want to work on it.
But it is so critical.
We've had dialogues and so on, but what we really need to work on is ethics and morality, deciding the rules of the game.
Because we want to do it before people who don't think like us start doing that.
So I think AI is overall a huge opportunity for India, for US and India cooperation.
But there are two things that I'm fearful about.
One is that, and we saw a little bit of this happening when the whole ChatGPT and India AI, I'm not sure what it's called, and DeepSeek, all of this started happening.
When we're thinking about AI, especially amongst friends, we shouldn't be in an AI race.
We shouldn't think about who is going to build faster.
We should think who is going to build, how can we build together, how can we build sustainably, how can we build for the future, and how can we build in an ethical manner.
So I think that's one thing that we don't want to get into an AI race on stupid things.
Secondly, I think the fearful part is that are we really thinking about those rules of the games for AI, just for industry at large, but also perhaps even more so in some of these wondrous areas like defense and autonomy.
I would say on AI, just again, the US has an incredible AI ecosystem.
It's a very exciting time.
It's a very exciting field.
But there are certain ingredients that are needed.
And everyone focuses on a couple.
And there are a couple more that I think now people are thinking about a bit more.
One is obviously the hardware side, which is where India is perhaps lacking the most.
And now you've seen some very big investments made just in the past few years start to come online on the hardware side.
The second is the data that Chrissy spoke about, which is vast amounts of data in India.
So the US also has that.
But I think there are two other dimensions.
One is talent, right?
And at every level, you need that talent.
And a lot of it is coming from India.
There was a great study done by the Carnegie Endowment a few years ago, so it's a bit dated already, on where some of the top AI talent was coming from.
And India is really top tier, it is the second largest source of that.
It's certainly easily in the top three with the US and China.
So a lot of there is going to be a kind of competition for that talent.
And I'd say the fourth is actually kind of some of the natural resources that need.
We underestimate, I think, land, energy, water, the critical minerals.
And so again, everyone's now sort of realizing estimating what this will cost if you're going to increase the hardware side.
So that's why a country like Singapore or Taiwan will have its limitations, right?
They can have some of the best talent, but they're still going to be constrained.
So I think India brings some bits of all of that to the table, but I would stress not the data correctly, India will be a big source of user data, but also the talent piece, I think, is worth pointing out.
And I want to follow up and ask about the semiconductor dimension of this, because India announced not long ago, a semiconductor mission, a lot of its semiconductor ambitions.
And I mean, let's be honest, there were and are a lot of skeptics.
And I think some of the things that we all hear from the skeptics are that, look, this is a prestige play more than a sort of well-thought-through effort at building into a comparative advantage.
India doesn't have existing sort of supporting ecosystem for this sort of precision manufacturing.
And India wants to start at sort of logic chips rather than things that would allow it to move up the sort of semiconductor value chain, et cetera, et cetera.
What have you seen since the time that India launched this effort that makes you optimistic?
And what have you seen that makes you think, well, this could happen, but this could be a long slog?
Yeah, you know, I think a lot of those things that people hear, I think of people who haven't really looked at that in any detail.
And I'll tell you why I'm mostly optimistic about it.
I think this, one, it's a very serious priority.
And it's not just about prestige.
If even we project forward business as usual approaches, India is going to be importing more in semiconductors than it is in oil.
So it's going to be hugely expensive.
So at some level, given the scale of the market, it will have to start manufacturing semiconductors at home, just given the scale.
So this idea that it's just like, I've had this discussion even in India, they're like, we're still providing basic services, semiconductors, they think of it as this expensive thing, but it's so integral to people's day-to-day lives.
Everyone has a mobile handset in their pocket.
They depend upon that for almost every aspect of their life.
So semiconductors are going to be integral for any kind of society going forward.
And the fact that India is unable to manufacture it is going to, if it continues, would be a major hindrance.
Second, there's been enormous financial outlay.
I mean, I've just run some numbers, and this is already about a year old.
India spent almost $50 billion on tech broadly, in terms of public funding.
I mean, we're talking, this is like Chips and Science Act level.
I mean, If you think of it proportionate to the Indian economy, this is massive, right?
And this is funding that's already been spent.
A big chunk of that, not all of it, has gone towards the semiconductor mission through a variety of different schemes.
Now, where is India going with this?
In the past, there have been at least two attempts at developing a semiconductor infrastructure: one in the 1980s, one in the early 2000s, that didn't really go anywhere.
And the best India could do was a sort of 180-nanometer fab in Chandigarh, which had its own problems.
So that's kind of where India was before the semiconductor missions started.
In the intervening period, what we have seen is sort of at three levels, and this is like in some ways the full supply chain.
Indian companies are already pretty well integrated into on the design side.
And pretty much every semiconductor company has some exposure to using Indian talent, from NVIDIA to you name them, to different degrees, obviously.
So I think on that front, there have been some major investments, including with the help of the U.S.
So LAM, for example, has invested in training, training 60,000 people in India in the semiconductor field.
So that's been one major investment announced in 2023.
Applied Materials has also put up an engineering center there.
The second is the FAB, which is the hardest part.
Some people thought of it as just a cherry on the top, but it's actually important.
And there has been now investment in the necessary infrastructure for FABs in Gujarat at scale.
So the idea is to create a cluster, because we found that places that's what works.
And creating the infrastructure for actually four times what is the current capacity, four or five times.
This includes land, water, electricity, dedicated electricity, transport.
So the key.
There's one major fab under being constructed now.
It is a Taiwanese company PSMC in collaboration with the Tata's.
But there's scope now for much more.
The third bit, which is again an easier entry point, is the advanced testing and packaging side.
And they're both in Gujarat with at least two facilities coming up, one other one in Assam, there might be one in UP as well.
There are a number of areas where that is coming up.
So Micron and Tata, for example, have a joint venture in that space in Gujarat.
So at every level, you're seeing now the investments being made.
This is the start.
This is not the end.
But this is going to cut down India's, the FAB is going to produce 28 nanometer chips.
So I mean, it's bringing it down.
We're bringing it down from 180 to 28 nanometer.
We're not yet, we're not talking three nanometer, what China and Taiwan are doing.
But even the US is struggling with that.
As we've seen, we've seen some success on the US side.
But this is the pathway forward.
But these serious investments have already been made.
They've already found buyers for it.
So this is serious.
The question is: can this be the start of something, or for a variety of reasons, this will really require private investment to pick up to take this further?
Kiriti, I want to ask you about some defense topics, which could be hours-long discussion.
But there are many things that India wants to make for itself, right?
It has many defense needs.
We've seen that over the last few days.
But if you could help us think about some of the things that India could make that others might want, where there would be a U.S.-India nexus to the production or to developing things together.
Where do we stand in that story of doing things together or doing things, you know, India producing, designing things that could have a market here either as part of larger systems or buying off the shelf?
Love to answer that question.
I think there's so much.
And so let's start with, I'll touch on both software and military on the manufacturing side.
You know, the whole defense military industrial complex has really changed a lot in the past decade or so.
And one of the major shifts that has happened has really helped India.
Unfortunately, India hasn't necessarily capitalized on it as much.
So one major shift is that earlier defense was mostly hardware.
Today, you'd have like 60, 70% hardware, rest with software.
Today it's been flipped.
The hardware, the cots are not as critical or as big as part of the whole suite of offering as the software is.
And our software is something that India is really good at.
And US and India together are really good at.
Because even if you think in terms of just the talent piece that Dhruva was mentioning, US itself, I think, has around 8,000, sorry, China has about 8,000 engineers.
US and India together have like about over 15,000 engineers.
So the software part is really where I think there's a lot that US and India can do.
And I'll give you an example, a personal example from this.
I think this is something where we can really replicate even the IT and pharma model in defense services.
And this is also an area where India gets technology and Indian firms really learn a lot.
So our company C2CI, we provide OSI maritime software services.
What it does is it lowers their costs.
It gives us an ability to add to that NATO infrastructure.
And in the process, our engineers, their learning curve has been absolutely phenomenal.
Software services is a great area where US and India I think can work together.
On the military side too, if you're thinking about on the manufacturing side too, I think there are various areas within manufacturing, composites and so on, smelting, within the defense infrastructure where India is doing a lot of work.
Platforms, I think in terms of platforms, India is still getting there, but I think software services, integration, that's really where I would start working right now.
But platforms, I think it'll still take some time.
Do you want to add anything to that?
Just a couple of things.
I think all correct, I think the software component and the value add is going to be higher going forward.
But I think people, you know, when you look at the macro picture of US-India defense cooperation, I think people miss the component manufacturing now that's taking place in India.
That it's quite significant.
And the other thing is what I call MRO possibilities.
So for maintenance, repair and overhaul.
I always forget the R.
But basically servicing of military equipment, we're now seeing more American vendors looking to service in India for a variety of reasons.
It makes sense from a cost perspective.
So that's actually the primary reason, not a strategic play.
But also the location, right?
So it's cheaper sometimes for say US or Allied forces than the Indo-Pacific to go to India rather than fly it back to the US.
So I think these are some areas where we're going to see the defense relationship move in some more interesting ways.
I'll just add to it, sorry.
One more thing I failed to mention on the semiconductor side.
There was a recent agreement between General Atomics and a company called Third Eye Technologies in India.
And what's interesting about it is it's a deal to manufacture military-grade chips for the US military.
So just to combine sort of the defense line that we were talking about and the semiconductor design, we're moving some really interesting and exciting areas that were just unthinkable even 10 years ago.
I'll just add to that.
Before you do, we're going to take a couple questions in our last few minutes.
If you have a question, go to one of those microphones if they're up there.
And we'll have time for a couple of short questions that should be questions, not statements.
Please.
Yeah, I was just adding to Dhruva's point that there is a lot of components going out of India, and many people will be surprised right now.
India's largest defense export is actually to the United States.
All of these are small components, carts, and supply chain parts.
Any questions from the audience?
If not, as the moderator, of course, have a default question.
There's one right here.
You can stand, speak clearly.
I'll repeat your question for everyone who can't hear.
Because it will be a short, focused question, I know.
Yes, I can promise you that.
Given that India has always been, in terms of the value chain, at the lower end, because we've heard again about the costs being low and the volumes being there, the question is, is there a roadmap between the United States and India to take in particularly the very strategic fields of AI and quantum and others, where the cutting edge is there with the United States, but India is way behind.
But in terms of the intelligence, where does the roadmap take you?
Does it go to some level of parity in terms of value add, a value add?
Or does India always remain as a sort of complementary low-end partner?
So there's a question about the roadmap in advanced technologies for sort of the comparative contribution of the United States and India if there's to be actual partnership.
There isn't a single roadmap, and I'll tell you why.
It's because the US and India don't have a single technology strategy.
I mean, forget about the other country.
That's not how the U.S. or India functions.
I think what we've seen with ISET and now TRUST is a clear listing of what are the priority areas where both sides identify complementarity.
So the closest thing I would point you to for a roadmap is the last few ISET and TRUST under the new administration of trust statement.
But what does it look like?
I would say, again, it really depends also on the technology.
The most mature progress or the most advanced progress has been made on semiconductors, 5G, 6G, defense, space, and a little bit on biotech.
And in each of these areas, both sides have identified where is this what we can add value to, this is what we want, and this is what we want, and we have some complementarity.
So, for example, on the semiconductor piece that I was talking about, the US companies that came in were because they had certain comparative advantages, and India needed that, and they were able to work out.
But there are other areas where there isn't, on FABs, both the US and India are now struggling to sort of reach out at different stages of development, but they're both trying to court TSMC at the same time.
So that's not an area where there are those natural complementarities.
Space is another good example, I think, where some very good natural complementarities that have been identified.
Actually, it's going to be exciting.
Two things are going to happen in the next few months on the space front.
One is we'll have the first manned manned space going up into space for the first time in 40 years for the first time on a US spacecraft, a US rocket.
And the training has been in the US.
It's been NASA training under the Artemis program.
A second thing that's going to happen, I think, in June of this year is you'll have the first, the most expensive Earth observation satellite ever launched by the US and India jointly, ISRO and NASA.
So again, I would hesitate to say it's always that India is low end and the US is at the cutting edge, but I think they've both been able to identify in certain key technologies, some more than others, where there are those natural complementarities to pursue both their common agenda forward.
Lastly, just say a few areas where that hasn't happened yet.
I think AI is one area that hasn't happened.
Because, again, the US doesn't really have an AI policy.
India doesn't, it's been a bit more difficult.
The applications are so vast that there's not been, it's not been quantum is also very difficult.
There has been some, there have been two initiatives, quantum US and Day Quantum initiatives.
But the fact is, a lot of the technology is not yet that commercially viable.
So I'd say, again, those are the success cases.
I would say AI, quantum.
From India's point of view, one area which hasn't been explored sufficiently is DPI, digital public infrastructure.
India is very keen on internationalizing it more.
For the US and most US companies, they don't really yet appreciate the value add of it.
So I would say, again, there are some areas where it hasn't worked out as well.
May I add, I don't think there needs to be an absolute complementarity every time, right?
So what we're doing, for example, in the defense spaces, we're focusing on maritime domain awareness and high-altitude warfare.
Now, what India brings to the table there is operational efficiency.
So the U.S. can bring the tech.
India can still bring its strengths, which don't necessarily have to be in the tech space, right?
U.S. generals are upthinking about A280 systems, how to fight them.
Indians know them, fight them every day, and those systems were built to be used against India.
So I think an equal relationship doesn't have to be that only just technology complementarity.
We're doing a lot of work and we're bringing our strengths in different ways.
I think one of the broader themes, Kriti, that you mentioned that's relevant to this question as we wrap here is that there are specific collaborations in specific areas.
There are ambitions together in specific areas.
But Kriti, you talked about norms.
And I think one of the things that is behind both what the Biden team did and what the Trump team is doing is trying to enmesh both countries into similar technology ecosystems, similar ways of approaching technologies, similar kinds of collaboration.
And that's more relevant in some areas than others, on autonomous weapons.
The U.S. doesn't even really know what it thinks.
These are conversations that are very early.
But in other areas, on 5G and on other questions, the U.S. does have a defined view.
And coming to convergence about the norms, about the standards, on a lot of digital technologies, this is becoming very significant to see U.S.-India convergence on this.
And so I think both of you highlighted this in some ways in your own remarks on sectors and on ambitions.
We are out of time, which is good only because there are so many other great topics to address.
So if you would please join me in thanking our terrific panelists here.
All right.
We'll do a quick time, Zachary.
We are currently running about 30 minutes late.
So we will have a keynote which I can't wait to introduce to all of you, followed by another panel.
And then we'll break for a short refreshments break for about 15 minutes and then reconvene at 6 for our next two panels.
So just a little more patience from our side because it's an honor to introduce our next speaker, Mr. Yogendra Yadav, a public intellectual, political thinker, and long-time advocate for democratic rights and ecological justice.
In 2012, he was among the founders of Ahmadni Party and went on to establish Swaraj India.
He was involved in the movement against the Citizenship Amendment Act, which was in the apex committee that guided the farmers' protest in 22 in 2020-21 and walked from Kanyakumari to Kashmir with the Bharat Joro Yatra.
He's currently the national convener for the Bharat Joro Abhiyan.
Mr. Yadav is here to ask a thought-provoking question to this audience: What kind of India do we seek?
Mr. Yadav invites us to look beyond the narrow metrics of GDP and industrial growth and towards a vision of India rooted in ecological wisdom, cultural resilience, and participatory democracy.
He asks us to imagine a future where dignity and sustainability take precedence over speed and scale.
With that introduction, let's please give a big round of applause to Mr. Yogendriyadam.
Thanks for the kind introduction, and thanks to the John Hopkins India Conference for this opportunity to speak on something that I don't normally get to speak about as a political activist.
as a political activist working for the opposition in India.
I must underline that very clearly.
I mostly get to speak about things of the day and how to strategize, how to think of resistance.
And I welcome this opportunity to take up to talk a bit about what is deep politics.
What I'm speaking today is also politics, but a bit away from here and now, a deeper politics that must guide our political action.
My point today is a simple question to the reigning deity of our times, or may I call it the reigning superstition of our times.
We call it modernity.
And the superstition is this: that the present or the past of global north, developed world, advanced capitalist societies, call it by any name.
The superstition is that the past or present of these societies gives us a glimpse, gives us an image of the future of the rest of the world.
This superstition guides so much of what we call expert knowledge, of what we call wisdom, of the plans, of everything that is embedded in our thinking.
And a political activist like me thinks that there is something fundamentally wrong with this way of thinking about it.
And hence my question.
I question it and I call it a superstition for the simple reason that actually if you look at the world with unblinkered eyes, if we look at history, this has never been the case.
As a matter of fact, it has never been the case that societies that we call modern advanced that they led the same life.
Every historical study tells us that each of these countries which we today put under the bucket of global north had a very, very distinct trajectory.
To assume that all of them had one single path which everyone else is likely to or condemned to repeat is based on a simple false assumption.
It is also false because what we are trying to emulate is not the biography of these societies of the global north.
It is the autobiography which is presented to us and which we have accepted as the truth.
Trying to live someone else's life is bad.
Trying to live someone's autobiography is worse because that actually never happens.
This is what we are trying to do in the name of what we call development, what we call modernity.
So it hasn't been the case.
It will never be the case simply because modernity has an inbuilt tendency, a structural tendency, structural imperative to diversify.
It is the because different elements of what we call modernity unfold themselves in distinct sequences, therefore the life of modern societies is bound to manifest itself in multiple paths.
And finally, I call it superstition because there is it is impossible for me to imagine that this life can be replicated anywhere else in the world.
Every time I come from India to the US, I look at the number of cars, I look at air conditioners, I look at the large houses.
I do not resent that.
Don't get me wrong, I don't envy.
I don't envy people with very large houses.
I do wonder if those houses and those cars and this much of fuel can actually ever be made available to seven billion people who live on this earth.
Or do we need to colonize a few more earths, a few more planets for that, just as a certain kind of colonialism has made this world to be what it is today.
So it never happened, it will never happen, it should never be tried.
That's why I call it superstition.
Therefore, to my mind, there is just no other option except to think on our feet.
Thinking is one thing which should never be sublet.
Contract farming, many other things should be farmed out.
Thinking is something which should normally not be farmed out.
So we have to ask some big questions of our own.
What does our future look like?
What should it look like if we could shape it?
What kind of India do we want to seek?
Can we dream of something beyond the stale dream of a modern, developed superpower with the cutting-edge technology and X trillion dollar economy?
I'm picking phrases which are used in my parliament, phrases used by my Prime Minister.
And when I see my Prime Minister say, our dream is to become a developed country, I cringe.
After 70 years, I mean, I understand if in 70 years you cannot change the reality, but if in 70 years you cannot change your dream, that's something that's awful.
Can we dream of something beyond a mirage that we have been chasing breathless and mindlessly?
Is another world possible?
That's a question I invite you to think.
And instead of thinking about in abstraction, allow me to spend five minutes on thinking on one concrete issue, namely that of Indian agriculture, something that I have been associated with.
I'm not a farmer, I wouldn't claim to be one.
I've been involved in farmers' movement and in that famous farmers' protest that took place in India.
For 13 months, the national capital was surrounded by 100,000 farmers.
I had the honor to be on the apex committee of that protest.
So it is from those kinds of experiences that I draw and ask a question.
The question is about the future of Indian farming.
The fact is that Indian agriculture was in no good shape even before that great protest of the farmers.
Indian agriculture faces an economic, ecological, and existential crisis.
Indian agriculture desperately needs a reform.
It is at a dead end.
But reforms not of the kind that have been thrust upon the farmers, we need reforms of the kind the farmers need and want.
So every Indian wants Indian agriculture to reform.
Every politician wants Indian agriculture to reform.
No one is willing to entertain the suspicion that farmers may have some sense of what they wish to reform about.
Everyone thinks that I need to tell farmers about how they need to reform.
So let's think about how Indian agriculture could be reformed, the way farmers need it and the farmers want it.
Farmers are indeed open to learning and change provided they see the benefits.
The future of Indian farming cannot be the past of European or North American farmers.
The dominant language in the Indian policy establishment is, you know, you want to help the farmers.
And as someone put it crassly, the best way to help the farmers is to help them cease to be farmers.
This is the dominant understanding that defines much of Indian planning.
Help the farmers quit farming.
That's the best way to help them.
We must give up on the false dream of extending green revolution paradigm to the entire country.
So these are the dominant fantasies of our policy establishment.
That one day India will have only 5% people who would do farming as it happens in Europe or in America.
One day we would have corporations that will take over agriculture of India and that will, you know, production will go up, India would be a developed nation.
Part of those fantasies is that we would extend what is called green revolution to the rest of the country.
Replicating high-input, water-guzzling, chemical-intensive agriculture throughout the country is both impossible and undesirable.
Small farm size is here to stay.
Average holding in India is less than one hectare.
Agriculture and allied activities will continue to engage about two-fifths of our workforce.
Currently, they engage about half of our workforce.
Since no alternative avenues of employment are around the corner, what most policy analysts forget is that there is no urban industry growing urban industry waiting to absorb the people who would leave farming.
There's nothing of that kind.
It's only unemployment and urban slums that are waiting for farmers who leave their villages.
Most Indian farmers don't have much capital to invest.
Canal-based irrigation cannot be extended to the entire rain-fed agriculture.
Future solutions for India must be based on these real-life conditions.
At the same time, we cannot simply go back to traditional agriculture that never faced the challenge of producing adequate and nutritious food for 1.4 billion people with an average lifespan of 70 years.
We have inherited a rich knowledge base of agricultural practices, but it needs to be filtered and adapted through modern science.
Markets, including international food markets, are here to stay.
And so is the need to keep food inexpensive for the large segments of poor outside the farming sector.
Hence, the state must step in to create infrastructure for production and storage, to subsidize farmers in order to keep food affordable, and to regulate domestic and international markets.
So neither of these two things.
One is to replicate the journey of Europe and America in Indian agriculture, or to go back to our golden era of traditional Indian agriculture.
None of these are options.
And my simple point is modernity is all about looking ahead, creating something specific to your need.
What made European modernity at a certain moment such a great achievement of human history was that it refused to look back, it refused to look aside.
It was willing to think of absolutely new solutions to situations which were unprecedented in human history.
What Indian agriculture faces is something similar, an unprecedented situation for which we have to come up with new solutions.
Therefore, the future of Indian agriculture lies in following an Indian path designed for our agroecological conditions, our limited resources with very little capital, and contemporary needs.
This involves pursuing three goals simultaneously.
I call this economics.
What we need is economics.
There is ecology in it, there is normativity in it, and X is the economics, the smart rational economics part of it.
We need to combine all the three things: making agriculture economically viable for the farmers, shifting to ecological agriculture that is sustainable for the farmers and for the consumers, and ensuring social justice for marginal sections of the farming and non-farming communities.
All these three objectives need to be pursued simultaneously if we have to think hard about Indian agriculture.
First, the challenge of ensuring income security to the farmers.
A key reform here would involve legal entitlement to minimum support price.
I would not bore you with the technicality of it, but the idea involves the state stepping in to ensure, to give a legal guarantee of a floor-fair price.
This is what the farmers have been demanding.
This does not require the government to purchase all the crops.
What we need is a deft combination of expended procurement, intelligently designed deficit payment systems, timely and selective market interventions, and tweaking of international trade policies, which is very critical in the light of what's going to happen in the next two or three months, because India is going to sign a trade agreement with the US where the interests of the farmers of India could be bartered away.
And that's a major challenge there.
Farm activists have insisted that agriculture markets need multiple reforms.
We need more local markets, more players in the existing Mandis, reduction in taxes, improvement in the warehouse receipt systems, and direct access to farmers to the consumers.
The political pressure generated by farmers' movement must translate into a higher government spending on agriculture.
That's the bit about ensuring higher incomes to the farmers.
The Government of India about ten years ago promised doubling of income of farmers with great announcement, enormous publicity, just that only this government can bring about.
And every Indian farmer was assured that within six years your income would be doubled.
For six years, I heard nothing except doubling of income.
And the day that six years was over, I heard nothing about it at all, not even an explanation to say this much was achieved and this much is meant to be achieved.
So income increase is one.
Second is the issue of social justice.
We need to attend to the issue of social justice that have been languishing.
While fragmentation of land has ruled out large-scale land distribution of the kind imagined in the 1950s, there is still scope to offer homestead land and parcels of uncultivated land to the landless families, while confirming the pattas once given to Dalit farmers.
Adivasi farmers need the Forest Rights Act 2006 to be implemented, which gave the indigenous people some right to some tried over forest land while securing remunerative prices for their minor forest produce.
While women farmers need co-ownership, the priority for tenant farmers is some kind of identification paper that entitles them to all benefits of government schemes without threatening the landowners of dispossession.
Marginal farmers need a huge national effort to create and incentivize cooperatives so that they secure cheaper inputs and better market prices.
All these are about ways to have a more just space in agriculture for those who truly cultivate.
By some estimates, 70% of the labor that goes into Indian agriculture is done by women.
And it's only men like me that you see espousing the cause of the farmers.
The third issue is that of ecological sustainability.
This issue cannot be postponed anymore with the end of the green revolution and the onset of the challenge of climate change.
We simply cannot persist with a model of agriculture that leads to depletion of water, degradation of soil, indebtedness of farmers, and toxic food for the consumers.
Everyone is losing out in this particular game.
We must shift to low-cost, low-external input approaches that can yield sufficient, affordable, nutritious, and non-toxic food for everyone.
That would require crop diversification by drawing upon already existing knowledge of the appropriate crop selection based on diversity and integrated farming, mixed cropping and crop rotation.
Instead of depending on chemical fertilizers, we must shift to creating a microclimate for soil regeneration.
Plant protection and pest management must shift away from synthetic pesticides.
Irrigation needs to move away from mega dams and flood irrigation to small projects, check dams, and focus on essential and efficient use of water and moisture.
Seed selection must shift to locally suitable and farmer-controlled varieties.
This is just to give you a glimpse of the kind of alternative that I've been talking about.
An alternative that we need to think about in every single sector with some kind of depth, creating our own unique Desi modernity based on our conditions, our constraints, our resources.
And this is not just about India.
I guess this applies to everyone.
And I guess that's exactly what countries that call themselves modern and developed today did 200 years ago, 300 years ago.
You might ask: are all these really alternatives to modern development?
Can they take on the challenge of scale and survive in the face of giant corporations and globalized market economy?
Does the practice of majority-based democracy leave any room for concerns of future generations and nature?
These are valid questions.
But you must also ask another valid question to counterweight that.
Can we really ever hope to offer to every Indian the lifestyle available to everyone in the global north?
Is this model worth replicating?
Can we afford to go on with the destruction of nature, lives, and livelihoods, which is what we have done.
Once we recognize the unbearable weight of these questions, weight of questions of how we have gone about destruction in the name of development, a quest for alternatives does not remain an obsession of a mad minority.
Once we realize that alternatives are not about going back to our past, but about imagining and shaping our future, this becomes a collective search.
How do we make these radical alternatives feasible?
What is the roadmap of transition from where we are to where we wish to go?
Someone has to begin thinking about these questions.
Someone has to risk being called mad and think of alternatives before we are left with nothing to think about.
Thank you.
And just in case someone wants to get back or respond to the things that we do, my email ID is whatever you imagine it to be, which is yogend.yadav at gmail.com.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you so much, Yoginda Yadav.
please accept this small token from our side.
Please keep it going for Mr. Yoginder Yadha for that powerful thought-provoking keynote.
We now transition into a conversation that builds on this very theme and tries to reimagine our economic future through the lens of inclusion, care, and dignity.
In a world grappling with inequality, informalization, and ecological limits, this session will explore bold, people-centered alternatives to conventional development models.
As session chair, we're honored to have Dr. Reena Garwala, Professor of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University, to chair the session.
Joining her are three absolutely extraordinary leaders who've championed inclusive economic development from the ground up and the top down.
We have Reema Nanavati, Director of the Self-Employed Women's Association of India, better known as Ewa.
Please, she's a real legend in the field, so please.
We have Kathy Feingold, International Director at AFL CIO and Deputy President of the International Trade Union Confederation.
And we have Dr. Vijendra Rao, lead economist at the World Bank's Development Research Group.
Thank you.
We will look forward to a great session.
Thank you so much and welcome to our final opening plenary.
It's really my honor and pleasure to introduce it today.
We're going to continue on the theme of alternatives and move our gaze from geopolitics to inclusive development on the ground.
So, as we all know, us academics have spent years, decades since the 1950s working with development institutions and government bodies on reducing poverty and improving or growing our economies.
And despite the strides we have made in healthcare and technology and income, we've also had many, many failures.
We still see basic malnutrition and thirst.
We still see an expansion or a gap between the rich and the poor.
And we're still depleting our environment.
So, it's not surprising that our development efforts are being so heavily critiqued by both the left and the right today.
And clearly, we need a development model that is an alternative to the one we have been using all these years.
And on this panel today, we're going to speak about one such alternative called the economy of nurturance.
Broadly speaking, the economy of nurturance turns our attention away from focusing only on income poverty or GDP growth to also looking at connections and co-relationships within families, across society, and with our environment.
And the economy of nurturance highlights sort of four specific areas of nurturance.
First is nurturing our daily life, that is healthcare, shelter, food.
Second is nurturing our earth.
Third is nurturing the human mind through knowledge.
And fourth is nurturing investments and finances to nurture the next generation.
And perhaps most importantly, the economy of nurturance is not some idealistic fantasy or some esoteric academic theory.
It's actually something that has been in operation, growing and evolving in India since 1972, when Ila Bhatt first articulated the concept and founded a collective action organization called the Self-Employed Women's Association, or SEWA.
And SEWA, which we will hear much more about in just a moment, is a remarkable and empowered union of three million women workers who have been practicing the economy of nurturance for over fifty years.
SEWA is also an organization that is very dear to my heart because I worked there just after college 30 years ago, and it's something that really did change my life.
SEWA really taught me everything I know.
Reema Ben was my first boss.
And SEWA has a lot to teach all of us who care about development and our collective futures.
So with that, I want to turn it over to our speakers.
Each of our speakers are going to speak for about eight to ten minutes and then we'll turn it over to a question and discussion format.
So our first speaker is Reema Nanavati.
Thank you.
Namasi, good evening.
I've lost track of time.
But I speak here on behalf of our 3.2 million members, all women workers in the informal economy in our country, where 93% of the workforce is in the informal sector.
And therefore, at SEWA, we believe that we are the mainstream.
It's the 7% formal sector which needs to partner with the 93% of the informal sector.
But I think, as Reena Ben today also mentioned, that why there is the need for this alternative model or economic model of development.
And I think this entire concept has emerged or is questioned by the poor women workers, the members of SEWA, who are economically very active and yet remain excluded by the direction in which today's civilization is moving towards greater violence, greater inequities, towards an economy based on the erosion of natural resources.
We also know that today worldwide progress is measured as growth in GDP, growth or how modern science and technology has evolved and how the production systems have evolved and how the lifestyle is progressing in the countries.
The world encourages us to be exploitative in growth.
But progress is the mode of conduct that leads man to the path of his duty.
As Gandhiji said, the economic, social, and political systems should move for better relationships and build collective strength at the community level.
This has resulted in threefold crisis which our members have been experiencing as I speak now today: rising poverty despite abundance, rise of intolerance, hatred and violence, and environmental catastrophe.
I would really request all of you that please join towards the end of the panel in praying for the villagers in our country who are at the border, who are really facing the wrath of all the attack that's going on between the two neighboring countries.
But I would just come back to again why the new economic or the alternative economic model is needed.
And I think the result is also that finance has become an instrument of growth.
We had been hearing in the earlier panels on the industrial development, on the bilateral trade agreements, you know, on defense, on AI.
And I was feeling, oh my God, where are we going?
You know, where are the people in all this that we are discussing?
Today, finance has become an independent structure, detached from the real world.
Money is a tool to make more money and more money.
All tools must serve the humanity and not the other way, which we are experiencing right now.
I may sound very different to the economists and to the industrialists and to the business people sitting here.
But therefore, I think the need for building an economy of nurturance, which is a transformative idea rooted in five decades of experience of the leadership of women workers in the informal economy, 3.2 million SEWA members.
It challenges the mainstream economic paradigm.
Just let me know if I'm overshooting my time.
And an alternative path which is centered around care, sustainability, and equity.
As Reena Ben also mentioned, that according to Ila Bhatt, building an economy of nurturance is about how women at individual, family, and community level play an important role in creating a collective capital with potential of sustaining meaningful growth.
Therefore, I think the model prioritizes caring and sharing or acquiring and accumulating, optimizing over maximizing, sustainability, both all social, ecological and financial over short-term profit, service and cooperation over competition.
It recognizes that we already possess the resources, the technology and institutions to end poverty and reduce inequality, emphasizes using these to benefit all species and not just humans alone.
The model works on women's leadership in finance, particularly grassroots finance, like cooperative banks, the self-help groups in countries like India and in other countries, as they embody nurturing traits in financial behavior, trust, responsibility, mutual support.
The model also links integrated financial services, so it's savings, credit, insurance, pension, and financial literacy, to meet both livelihood and life needs, health, education, and emergencies that may come up.
It also promotes decentralized democratic systems.
Women are not just only beneficiaries, but owners, managers, and users of the financial institutions.
And this leads to creating collective capital and community-oriented economic base.
I think our five decades of experience has brought about several such examples which have gone to scale.
SEWA Bank, which is our first ever cooperative, it's a cooperative bank governed by the Federal Bank of India.
Likewise, we have an agribusiness initiative which connects around 254,000 small and marginal farmers.
And where no farmer should go hungry, why does a farmer remain hungry?
And very often, what the farmers grow, they do not eat, and what they eat, they do not grow.
But Rudy tries to break this by building local decentralized supply chains.
We have women-owned energy initiatives.
We have women-owned data centers as well.
So, I think this is what building an economy of nurturance, which is an alternative economic model.
And I think when the world is going through a turmoil where we see a lot of enmity and hatred, it's time that we all come together to discuss this alternative economic model.
Thank you. Thanks so much.
What an honor to be here on this panel.
Thank you, Reema Ben, for anchoring us in this economy of nurturance.
So, I represent the 50 million unionized workers here in the United States, as well as the 200 million union workers around the world.
Proud to have SEWA as one of our affiliates, who's always pushing us to include these issues in our conversation and our analysis.
So, I cannot think of a better moment here in this country to be talking about the economy of nurturance.
We are at a time of rupture since World War II.
We have the rupture due to technology, due to climate, demographics.
There's a whole list of reasons why we're in this moment of rupture.
And for a lot of us, there's been a lot of turmoil in this country, as you were mentioning, Reema Ben.
But out of turmoil, I think comes opportunity to think about transformation.
And so, I want to really focus on what is the work that we need to do right now to think about transforming our economic model, which obviously has not been working for workers.
And so, I wanted to think about how do I translate this really important economy of nurturance into the work that the labor movement is doing.
And so, a little bit about how I've been thinking about it.
First of all, the labor movement always thinks about economic models as answering the questions: does it improve the lives of working people?
Yes or no?
And that is often not a question that is asked by economists.
And is it good for the environment?
Yes or no?
And again, these seem like really basic questions, but when you center those questions, you start looking for different answers.
And you center it in exactly the workers that we heard Reema Ben talk about or the workers here in the United States.
And we know that when we talk about economic models, it's not random, right?
It is about concrete policy decisions to get us to this different economic model.
We often just take economics for granted that it just is, and we don't have any power to shape it, but we can be very intentional about shaping it.
So, let us see this as a time to be transformative, not thinking about rebuilding, because I think here in D.C. we've had a lot of debates about how do we rebuild.
Very binary, if not this model, we go back to this old model.
But we have an opportunity to be transformative.
And so, I want to center unions, because I'm assuming many people probably don't know the role of unions in this conversation.
And we really see unions as being on the front lines of democracy.
It's actually often the first place people experience democracy.
They go to work, either things are good in their workplace or not.
They decide they'd like to change their situation in the workplace, and they think, well, one person alone can't really just change and say, hey, I work better.
I deserve a better salary or better working conditions.
It's about the first time they think collective action is what I need to work with my colleagues in the workplace, vote for a leader, and that's democracy.
It's the first time many people in our country vote.
So unions are really the entree for many people to experience real grassroots democracy, and I think that's very important.
Given this experience with democracy, they're usually on the front lines of shaping the economics of their workplace.
What kind of wages?
What kind of social protection?
How will technology be integrated?
We have some great examples of negotiations between unions and employers about how technology gets implemented.
So unions are often the first place people experience shaping economic and social policies in real time that really impact their lives.
So unions play a critical role in really thinking about what is the economic model we need today that's fit for purpose, that can address the incredible challenges we're facing, huge inequalities, and technology that is changing very quickly, displacing, replacing workers.
What is it that we need?
The other really important issue that unions represent is they're self-sustaining.
So they can express their opinions as they would like.
They can talk about alternative economics without fear of retribution.
And I think that's a really important point compared to other organizations.
They are self-sustaining, and so they can talk about what is a transformative economic model that works for working people.
I want to talk a little bit about what it might look like to have that economy of nurturance that you're talking about for working people.
The first thing is we would definitely agree with you, Reema Ben, about the need for increasing investment in the care economy, in the green economy, and in infrastructure.
And that is not a priority that we're hearing debated around the world anymore.
We're actually hearing about a growing agenda of deregulation.
We just hosted the International Monetary Fund and World Bank meetings.
The main agenda item was growth and deregulation.
And a return, some people were talking about austerity, which usually means cutting these kinds of important investments in the care economy and the green transition.
The global labor movement has done research that shows just investing an extra 1% of GDP in the care economy over five years would yield an average GDP increase of more than 11%, as well as a 6.3% increase in total employment levels.
We know what different investments would look like.
So let me look at how I might translate this economy of nurturance into a real-time agenda for the labor movement.
So pillar one, you talk about a nurturing daily life.
Working people, everyone, all communities need health care, need food, need shelter.
So what would we ask for in our agenda?
Full employment and living wages for all workers.
That needs to be a policy target of economies and countries.
We need to expand policy interventions aiming to employment guarantee programs.
And we need to foster the care economy.
We need labor rights, trade union freedoms.
I was just talking about if you can't organize and speak out about what's happening in your workplace that affects you directly, your economic situation, then we can't really change that economic situation.
So you need to have your fundamental rights.
And we need universal social protection.
We need health care.
And I know we have some innovative parametric insurance type of expansive thinking about what kind of social protection do we need that's fit for purpose.
Pillar two, you talk about nurturing the earth, Reema Ben.
Well, the labor movement would talk about climate justice and just transition policies.
We need to reform energy and transport sectors through state-led green investments.
We need to tax polluters and the ultra-rich.
So we really need to focus on this clean energy transition that is just, that puts workers, governments, and employers at the table to negotiate these issues.
The third pillar, nurturing human minds through tech and knowledge.
We need technological governance and AI for people, not for profit.
AI and technology can support working people.
We have seen it integrated in a way that helps working people and the environment, but it's about policy choices, and we need to make those policy choices.
And in nurturing the human mind, I think a lot about the right to a public education that gives you both the analytical and vocational skills you need to live a life of dignity.
And lastly, the one I think about a lot, which was pillar four: nurturing investments in finances to nurture the next generation.
We're stuck in a model of short-termism.
We think about today.
We only think about what will I gain?
What can I earn?
But we need to think about future generations.
So what is the labor movement thinking about in terms of our economic policies that get to this last pillar?
Tax justice and fair share economics.
We need to close tax loopholes, impose a global minimum corporate tax.
We need progressive, not regressive, taxation.
We need to re-regulate finance for the real economy.
We need debt relief.
Countries are saying they're not able to invest in the social protection, in healthcare, in education, and in the clean energy transition because they're stuck financing their debt.
So we need immediate debt relief and economic sovereignty.
We need trade rules and equitable development.
There's a lot we could unpack there about trades.
And we need democratic multilateralism and global solidarity.
We need to rethink what is the multilateralism that we need that's fit for purpose, that brings us together, that will allow us to move this kind of transformative economic model.
So I see a lot of ways that the labor movement can build this transformative model, and we look forward to working with all of you to get there.
Thank you.
Let me first say where I come from.
I'm a PhD in economics.
I work at the World Bank's Research Department.
I've done for 26 years.
So what I want to sort of talk about is to draw on the economy of nurturance on the Sabre model and ask how we can make that work in the real world.
What does it teach us about how we do policy?
And the first thing I want to say is that people like me, people like us, people who work in large universities, work in large multilateral donor agencies, we should recognize ourselves as part of the problem in the following sense.
When we do policy and we do research for policy, think about it very carefully, but ultimately many of us, whatever may be motivating us inside and why we might have entered this profession in the first place rather than becoming investment bankers or something, we're entering a model of career, we're entering a career track.
If you're a tenure track assistant professor in some university in a social science department, you have to publish in the top journals.
You have to be smarter than everybody else.
If you're in the policy world, you have to be smarter than everybody else.
Of course, in the world of social media, be more visible than everybody else.
You have to appear smart, talk smart.
In fact, you have to show that you're smart.
That is the nature of the game.
That then gets translated into policy, where whatever your political persuasion, your smartness is what then determines what the current administration is going to implement.
Do you see what I'm saying?
You're manipulating the levers of government because your smartness is telling you how to change the world.
Everybody wants to be a change maker.
When you want to be a changemaker of that kind, you reach that point via three paradigms of policymaking.
The neoliberal paradigm, which means governments stay out.
The neo-Keynesian paradigm, which says manipulate taxation, manipulate monetary policy, manipulate expenditures in ways that make people better off.
And we'll tell you, as because we are so smart in the Harvard Economics Department or the Hopkins School of Public Policy at SAIS or the World Bank's Research Department, what you need to do to make the world better off, and government will follow that.
Or the third, the last 15 years, it's what I will call the new paternalistic model.
Nudge them because we know better than them what is good for them.
So we will run behavioral experiments and shove them in certain ways so they will be better off even though they don't know that they're better off.
Or we run randomized control trials borrowing from public health on things that should not be randomized.
What is the end result of all of that?
The people we are supposed to be helping, our so-called beneficiaries, have no voice in all of this.
They are having things done to them rather than having control over their own lives.
So the economy of nurturance to me is about what in this world of policymaking, in the real world, I don't care what your political persuasion is.
In fact, I would argue that the rise of authoritarianism in the world, the reduction in support for democracy around the world is because of this form of policymaking.
People have things done to them rather than people participating in things that affect their own lives.
How do we then create a system where ordinary human beings, whoever they may be, including you and me, have a say, a greater say in things that affect our lives?
And that comes to a very conservative principle, the principle of subsidiarity.
Power over policy should be allocated in such a way so that you give as much power as possible to the level at which it makes the most sense to do so.
In other words, education should be decentralized.
Management of health clinics should be decentralized to the local level.
People should be participating actively in things that they actually know something about.
I don't mean that, you know, a local member of a village should be running a vaccination campaign.
No, you public health folks are very good at that.
That should be left to you, to the central government, to the federal government.
But certainly, in asking, has somebody been vaccinated or not, that kind of local knowledge has to be decentralized.
Why is it that, why is that such an obvious principle not universal, not accepted as something that you should do?
And in fact, organizations like SEWA are seen as boutique, are seen as cute.
Oh, they do that kind of work.
They're Gandhians.
That's okay.
Now, interestingly, SEWA is actually an exception.
The SEVA model was nurtured within Indian notions, within Desi notions of what it is to be a community, what it is to deal with collective action, and has had a huge impact.
Beyond SEVA, you could argue that the National Rural Livelihoods Mission, which now affects 100 million women all over India, is inspired deeply by SEVA.
So, SEVA's impact has been way beyond its 3.2 million.
It's across the country through the NRLM.
The 17th Amendment to the Indian Constitution is an extraordinary document that gives constitutional power to the simple idea that every Indian villager should have a village council that they can see eye to eye and work with.
They should have access to deliberative spaces, village meetings on a regular basis so they can directly confront their elected officials and have a say over basic things like who gets a scholarship in my village, who gets access to a poverty benefit in my village, because otherwise, let me digress a bit on poverty.
Poverty is generally determined.
My colleagues do this all the time at the World Bank through what's called a proxy mints test.
If you make less than X amount of money a day, you're poor, and we will give you benefits.
And that has been a dollar a day, has been going up and down.
Makes no sense because you go to villages and we've documented this.
People say that lots of people who seem to be above the dollar a day line, in fact, desperately poor.
And a lot of people who seem desperately poor on that dollar a day thing don't deserve this money at all.
Discuss with the local community who deserves, who's deserving of that particular benefit, and question whether that metric makes sense.
Bring power of local knowledge to bear in making policy better.
Have people participate in what they do.
It's a simple idea of what Ella or Ostrom called co-production, which we all know about.
Yet, why is this not a dominant paradigm?
Why is the only dominant paradigm, the RCTIZA, by the way, I run RCTs myself, so I'm not going to say that it's a, I don't have anything against the technique.
It's like being against linear regression, no.
But how it is applied, the culture around the dominance, the idea that now because of this RCT world, only policies that donor agencies should be doing are simple and should be scalable.
Why can't SEWA be scalable?
We've shown it to the NRLM.
It's gone from 3.2 million to 100 million.
10 crores.
It's documented.
I mean, we have the data.
We set up the MI system.
They have all the data.
It requires co-production with a spirit of learning by doing, a spirit of self-criticality, a spirit of humility, not knowing that you know the answers, but co-producing the answers with the folks you're trying to help.
So they are part of that process.
Not to think that because I went to Hopkins or Harvard or University of Pennsylvania, where I went, we're somehow smarter than everybody else.
That to me is a more reflexive form of policymaking.
Reflexive is a sociological word which I love.
The idea that we are not better than you, we are not, maybe more powerful than you, but we're going to use our power to create an economy of nurturance, to create an economy where everybody participates in making them better off, while not telling you to take care of defense and foreign policy and trade.
We'll look at the implications of trade on you and bring those ideas in.
It's a division of labor.
It's a division of power.
It's an allocation of power according to where it fits the best.
That's how you scale up the economy of nurturance.
And in fact, it's been shown to have been done by successive Indian governments.
Yet it is somehow seen as not one of the standard paradigms, but something separate, something boutique, something cute.
The lefties do it.
I ain't no lefty.
I want it to be done.
So, for God's sake, let's rethink how we do policy.
If you are, I'm sure many of you are students at Hopkins and Science or Public Health, look at SEWA and learn from it about how you can bring those ideas into your own lives in all the training you have, or the wonderful training you have, and how do you make your research more reflexive so that it's not something you just do to publish papers and make your professors happy, but to actually directly benefit people and have them give them a say in how the research is done and what they do with the research, not just to publish in a journal.
Thank you.
Okay, so I'm going to ask a couple of questions and then I'd love to open the floor if anyone has any questions to come to the mics.
So, my first question is actually for Reema Ben.
Since you've been operating the economy of nurturance for all these years, can you just elaborate for us a little bit more on what it means to build it from the ground up?
What are the key challenges we have to be forewarned about?
And how should we begin?
Sure, and I think I really liked what Kathy, you said, and Biju, what you also said.
And so, this is a model which has really come about.
It's not a conceptual model, but I think it's grown out of our five decades of experience.
And I think the fundamentals, as Reena Ben, you just asked, are that the focus is on care, sustainability, and equity.
It is a bottom-up, decentralized model where we have member-based organizations.
And when I say member-based, these are the members just don't remain workers or producers, but they are the owners and managers and users of the organizations.
The value measured is in well-being, resilience, and collective growth.
And I think it is protective of nature, people, and future generations.
And I think the best part of it is the feminine traits which are prioritized, which is empathy and collaboration.
As Biji, you were saying that we believe in co-creation, in consensus building.
And I think what we all need to really understand is that it needs investment of time and resources.
This economy of nurturance, if we really are thinking about it, a process where organizing is the key.
The message that I bring from our members is that poverty is also a form of violence with the consent of the society.
And if we really want to remove poverty, why there is a need for this model?
Because so many years and yet poverty persists and it is in fact growing.
And therefore, the need for such an alternative development model which is needed.
And where I think we co-create policies, we try to, and that's where organizing plays a big role.
And organizing is a process.
And I think organizing is also one of the surest ways to fight poverty.
So that's what I think the message is.
Fantastic.
Yes, I want to second the point that Uma Ben and Kathy have made about the power of organizing and how fundamental it is to transformation and to development and is often left out of so-called policy discussions.
But turning to you, Kathy, since you have, you mentioned this question of scale and because of your global expertise, how would we create a financial system at the national levels or at the global level that could support an economy of nurturance?
And if you could maybe say, would it look different in the U.S. versus India, or are we trying to create some kind of a transnational financial system?
Thanks so much.
So wow, we need a lot more time to talk about a new financial architecture, which definitely is needed.
I don't think we have a system that's fit for purpose for the current moment.
But I do think it's a bottom-up, right?
So I think it goes back to some of the questions I said that we need to center in any conversation or policymaking.
Is it going to help the incense roller in Omnibad?
Yes or no?
The policy that I am thinking about.
Is it going to improve someone's life or is it going to improve someone's PhD prospects, right?
I mean, we just basically had, and I think we want to make sure that that question is centered and the environmental question that's centered.
And then we need to totally recreate the metrics by which we measure progress and what is considered growth.
This problem of GDP is a common metric will never get us to the economy of nurturance because it's measuring, it fails to capture how economic growth is distributed.
We really need to talk about power relations here, and that's why organizing is so important.
You cannot change power imbalances without having collective power that pushes back.
And that is what's fundamental, and that's what SEWA has done.
And the GDP doesn't look at improvements in workers' wages or conditions or how they're living, that important first pillar.
It fails to capture information about the well-being of workers.
Are they healthy?
How is climate impacting their health?
I know there's people here that are working on that issue.
So we need a totally different metric upon which our financial system is resting.
Right now, as you well know, Vijayu, and you were just explaining, it's resting on a whole other set of principles and individual interests.
Sometimes it's just personal interests.
It's not about the bottom-up.
So I would say we need a different framework.
And we're about to have the debate here in our own country about what are our priorities, right?
We have budget discussions here.
And at the global level, as there's a whole challenge to the current multilateral system, again, many people are grieving all the kind of insecurity and instability that we're feeling.
And instead, I think we should be having more of these conversations about how we can take advantage of this moment to really ground ourselves in bottom-up different approaches and have a wellness, a well-being, a nurturance metric that really measures progress and drives investments.
Fantastic.
So underlying what I think is so interesting is underlying these question-oriented sort of approaches to development is in many ways a moral framework, a sort of moral reorientation towards connectivity, towards peace, towards security.
But yet we're living in this world, as all of us have heard over and over again today, that is the opposite, right?
It's insecure, it's polarized, and it is violent.
And so, Biju, I wondered if you could tell us a bit about how do we create this reflexive approach or the economy of nurturance in this current climate?
And specifically, are there institutions that you actually do have hope in?
Forget the academic institutions, forget the development institutions, forget government, forget private sector.
So, is it religious organizations?
Of course we have unions, but what are the institutions that can actually lead a new moral framework?
Thanks for the question.
I think let's stick with India.
We have the 73rd Amendment in the Indian Constitution, which gives us a model about how we can create decentralized government that is a hybrid system of electoral and deliberative democracy and participatory democracy.
And it's treated as the stepchild of everything else.
No IS officer wants to be in charge of the Panchayati Raj Ministry in any state.
It's considered a low-level position.
That's mad.
It's a vehicle for tremendous sort of nurturing this kind of economy of nurturance.
The NRLM, as I said, you know, how do we bring these magnificent women's groups, 100 million women, into political power?
How do you make that happen?
That's another, you know, something that can be truly transformative.
But the third thing, and I think this is the power of technology.
Let me explain the following sense.
We think of technology as being part of the surveillance capitalism.
We're getting sucked out of everything, which is true.
But if we're going to start understanding well-being in a holistic way, what could be better instead of doing bugging the heck out of everybody your two-hour surveys of how much rice you had last week and then calculating from that the poverty line, why can't we just have conversations with people about how you're doing as friends do, and have that interactive conversation with tens of thousands of people.
It's possible.
And then take all of that data, which is data at the end, and from there create a metric of well-being that is multi-dimensional, reflexive, and reflective of the bottom.
Technology, in fact, we're working on something that will let you do that right now.
Okay, I know that time is not on our side.
So I do just want to, before we thank this incredible panel and all our incredible speakers, I do want to just, in conclusion, invite you to come and see a beautiful and multimedia exhibit that has been traveling across the country and then is actually on its way to travel internationally.
And we have the amazing opportunity to have it here with us at Hopkins on the eighth and ninth floor today and tomorrow.
And the exhibit is entitled Hum Sub Ek.
We are one.
The exhibit was made by SEWA members as well as Harvard students.
And it chronicles exactly how an economy of nurturance enabled SEWA members to handle the 2019 COVID pandemic.
Dr. Satchit Balsari, who's Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine at Harvard University, and Hiteshri Das is here with us, who's at Harvard University's School of Design.
And Bobby McCormick might be here, but they are the architects of this presentation, this exhibit.
They're going to be holding tours throughout the conference of the exhibit.
The first tour is just after this plenary.
So please grab a cup of tea, come up to the eighth floor, and please see this beautiful exhibit and witness in picture and through the words of SEWA members how an economy of nurturance has carried millions and millions of people through crises such as the COVID pandemic.
So please join me in thanking this incredible group of speakers and I hope you're in yes.
Sorry, we always end with a song and since this is an India summit as well, so this is a song which comes from our members and I'll sing it in our Hindi language.
I'm sure who don't follow Hindi would also follow this song.
Hamahong, come me up.
Hamahong, come me up.
Hamahong, come me up, bekudin.
Oh, my name he's hunge, come me up, thank you so much.
Thank you, thank you.
Please keep it going for this incredible panel.
Thank you.
Please accept just some small tokens of appreciation from our side.
Ladies and gentlemen, we will take a very short break, and we will reconvene at 6.15 p.m. in our breakout rooms.
So very quickly, on the 8th floor in room 8:20, we have two health-focused panels.
The first focuses on India's cancer challenge, the second on raising the bar in primary health care.
On the ninth floor, in 9:40, we have panels on global food systems and policy actions for India, U.S. collaborations, and climate and health.
Please feel free to refer to the agenda.
Please get sufficiently caffeinated in a short break, and we'll see you with renewed vigor and energy on the 8th or 9th floor.
See you soon.
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