In the Crosshairs

 IT TAKES EXTRAORDINARY circumstances for two Great Power rivals to come together to target a future Great Power rival. The US and China both regard India as a rising threat to their G2 construct. Why allow an interloper like India, poor but a potential threat to the US-China duopoly, rise unimpeded?

Farsighted Chinese leaders have long considered India a hindrance to Beijing’s hegemony. As China grew into a global power in the 2000s, it watched with increasing concern India’s ambitions. India was already the world’s fifth-largest economy when it overtook Britain in 2021. India is today the world’s fourth-largest economy and by 2028, will be the third largest.

It is not a prospect the world’s second-largest economy relishes. Nor does America, the world’s largest economy. Both Washington and Beijing have deeper concerns as well about India’s burgeoning military and space technology.

Having largely dispensed with the threat of the Soviet Union in 1991 at the end of the Cold War, the US has now come to terms with sharing global hegemony with economic powerhouse China.

Since former US President Richard Nixon opened a conduit to an impoverished China in 1972, Washington had tried to weaken its Great Power rival the Soviet Union. The mission was accomplished within the next 20 years. Till 2010, the US was the unchallenged superpower—a G1 with no rival.

China’s spectacular economic, technological and military growth has altered the geopolitical script. China’s GDP tripled from $6.09 trillion in 2010 to $19.23 trillion in 2025, forcing the US to accept Beijing as part of the new G2.

US President Donald Trump has underscored America’s new policy of a “competitive geopolitical détente” with China. His “spheres of influence” argument allows China to dominate the Global South while the US focuses on the Americas, the Middle East and Western Europe.

Where does India fit in? Nowhere, for Washington and Beijing. India is an unwelcome guest at the G2 door. A G3 construct with India playing the balancing pivot unsettles both incumbent superpowers.

The paranoia is justified. China knows its population is shrinking and ageing rapidly. By 2100, according to projections by the United Nations, China’s population will halve to just over 700 million while India’s population will remain well over one billion.

This has set off alarm bells in Beijing. Using Pakistan to stall India’s rise, however, received a harsh reality check during Operation Sindoor.

China has now decided to do what it does best: pretend to ease tensions with India (Foreign Minister Wang Yi encouraged a pas de deux or ballet between the dragon and the elephant) while choking its supply chains comprising not only rare earth minerals but a swathe of electronic components and pharmaceutical APIs. The aim: slow India’s rise. Do not allow a future G3 to form.

Washington’s aims are more brutal. Under Trump, it has deliberately pivoted towards Pakistan, knowing that is a red flag for India. Trump has targeted India on tariffs (50 per cent), H-1B visas ($100,000) and sanctions on Chabahar port, India’s trade gateway to Eurasia.

Trump’s targeting of India is not subtle like Chinese President Xi Jinping’s. But Washington and China—who agree on little else—are in agreement that India’s rise must be stalled. While China worries about its looming demographic catastrophe, the US confronts the prospect of its declining global power.

Trump has unknowingly set in motion the erosion of American influence worldwide. Trump’s presidency will be over in a few short years but the toxic waste it will leave behind could fracture American society for decades.

For India, it is not unusual to be in the crosshairs of foreign powers. British colonialism was replaced by the superintendence of Western institutions, ranging from the World Bank and IMF to the UNSC.

But India has now crossed the rubicon. As a $10 trillion economy by 2035 and a rapidly growing military infrastructure, it has attracted global attention. From Washington and Beijing, the attention has come with veiled warnings. Do not rise above your station. The door to Great Power status is shut.

But, of course, it isn’t. A declining America and a shrinking China both know that. They keep India in their crosshairs. The target though has moved.