A Daoist Reappraisal of India–US Relations and India's Role in the Global South: Harmony, Paradox, and the Politics of Cooperation

Abstract

This paper re-examines the evolving architecture of India–US relations between 2014 and 2026 alongside India's intensified claim to leadership of the Global South, asking whether these two roles constitute a coherent foreign policy or a latent contradiction. Departing from conventional accounts that treat cooperation and contradiction as mutually exclusive conditions, the study deploys a Daoist analytical lens—drawing on yin-yang dialectics, the principle of wu wei (non-forcing action), and the ideal of harmony without uniformity (he er bu tong)—to argue that India's dual posture is best understood as a politics of managed paradox rather than unresolved inconsistency. Employing a mixed-method design that combines content and discourse analysis of official documents and elite political texts with quantitative analysis of bilateral trade flows, defense cooperation indicators, and United Nations General Assembly voting data, the paper advances three arguments. First, the post-2014 transformation of the India–US partnership is structural rather than incremental, anchored in foundational defense agreements, the iCET and COMPACT technology frameworks, and bilateral trade exceeding USD 132 billion in FY 2024-25. Second, India's Global South leadership, exemplified by the Voice of the Global South Summits and the consensual New Delhi Declaration, has elevated its normative standing but remains under-institutionalized. Third, the frictions between the two roles, most acute in UN voting patterns and India's positions on the Russia–Ukraine and Israel–Hamas conflicts, function not as anomalies but as the yin-yang complementarities of a single strategy the paper reconceptualizes as pragmatic balancing: issue-based alignment, structural compartmentalization, and discursive bilingualism, now read as expressions of Daoist harmony in difference. The paper concludes with policy recommendations and reflects on the value of non-Western philosophical resources for theorizing the foreign policies of rising powers.