One of the defining themes of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s rule since 2014 has been the campaign to “decolonize” the Indian mind. For his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), rooted in India’s nativist tradition, it has been a long-standing goal to purge the deep linguistic, cultural, and intellectual inheritance from British rule and Western influence. Modi has been vigorous in pursuing this goal.
Yet the eagerness at home to discard the British Indian legacy has been accompanied by an impressive and successful push to transform relations with the Anglo-Saxon world: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
One of the defining themes of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s rule since 2014 has been the campaign to “decolonize” the Indian mind. For his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), rooted in India’s nativist tradition, it has been a long-standing goal to purge the deep linguistic, cultural, and intellectual inheritance from British rule and Western influence. Modi has been vigorous in pursuing this goal.
Yet the eagerness at home to discard the British Indian legacy has been accompanied by an impressive and successful push to transform relations with the Anglo-Saxon world: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
In doing so, the BJP has flipped the liberal script of postcolonial India. While the Modi government—together with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the Hindu nationalist movement of which the BJP is the political vehicle—rails against the English language and the wider colonial inheritance, the late Prime Minister Manmohan Singh praised English and the British institutions for their contributions to modern India’s rise in a 2005 Oxford lecture.
It was not the kind of speech that many of Singh’s colleagues in the Indian National Congress party, which has a long political tradition of posturing against the West, would have made. In public, India’s liberal left elite has always bristled at the politics and economic system of the “imperialist” Anglosphere. But it also celebrated English arts and letters. Many continue to flaunt recognition in the Anglosphere as the ultimate mark of success.
The BJP has inverted the formula: As its decolonization agenda at home seeks to cut the remaining cultural ties, the government is growing the political and economic partnerships with the English-speaking world. Beneath both the right and left postures, though, India’s middle classes have voted with their feet in their uninhibited embrace of the Anglo-Saxons. The English-speaking world has been the principal destination of their external engagement; they have seized every opportunity to study, work, and settle there.
The largest concentrations of overseas Indians outside the Persian Gulf are in the Anglosphere. They have thrived professionally and scaled political heights in their adopted homelands. The political classes of the Hindu right and the liberal left continue to send their children to the top universities of the Anglosphere. This might look and be hypocritical. But it also represents the enduring bonds between postcolonial India and the English-speaking world, whose long-suppressed economic and geopolitical synergies are now coming back into play.
The tension between ideological resentment against the Anglosphere and the pursuit of good relations with it has run through Modi’s rule since 2014. In his Independence Day address from the Red Fort in Delhi in August 2022, Modi promised to remove every trace of the “colonial mindset.” He has pared back the government’s use of English and, even though his own native language is Gujarati, has actively promoted Hindi—long at the top of the Hindutva agenda. His government has increasingly replaced “India” with the native “Bharat” in official communication.
The campaign has moved beyond renaming roads, monuments, and laws dating from the colonial era and is now moving toward reforming the armed forces, which are steeped in traditions dating back to the early years of the British Raj. In June, the Indian Army issued a new manual of dress regulations that strip away what it calls the residual vestiges of colonial rule—for example, by introducing indigenous ceremonial dress such as the closed-neck bandi jacket.
Part of the campaign is a necessary modernization. Some of it is pure political posturing—such as the removal of the bust of Edwin Lutyens, the architect of imperial New Delhi, from the presidential palace, one of Lutyens’s major works.
Yet Modi has also been at the forefront of reimagining the relationship with the Anglosphere. Addressing the U.S. Congress in June 2016, he declared that India had overcome “the hesitations of history” in engaging the United States. This was not an empty flourish: After coming to power, Modi pushed a reluctant Indian bureaucracy and political class to seize the emerging opportunities with Washington. He has since managed to stabilize the relationship through the turbulence of President Donald Trump’s second term. This has not been easy amid the relentless accusations by Rahul Gandhi, the leader of the opposition Congress party, that Modi has surrendered to Trump.
Modi’s Anglo-Saxon outreach has not been limited to the United States. Australia has been a major priority for Modi, and he surely appreciated the rockstar reception given to him during his visit to Australia in early July. From Melbourne, Modi traveled to Auckland, the first visit by an Indian premier to New Zealand in 40 years. New Zealand Prime Minister Christopher Luxon, in a gesture of respect, was at the airport to welcome Modi. Luxon has pushed for a fast ratification of the free trade agreement that Wellington signed with New Delhi in April.
On July 15, the India-U.K. free trade agreement, the most comprehensive trade pact that New Delhi has ever concluded, came into force. This was the product of unprecedented Indian political investment in the traditionally prickly ties with London. In addition, Canadian and Indian negotiators concluded their third round of trade talks in Ottawa earlier this month. Prime Minister Mark Carney hopes that an agreement will be ready to sign when Modi travels to Ottawa late this year.
Meanwhile, a top U.S. official has said that there is just 1 percent of work left to sort out before an interim India-U.S. trade agreement is finalized. The United States is India’s most important trading partner, with total trade in goods and services now close to $250 billion. Modi and Trump want to push it to $500 billion by the end of this decade.
While the Indian foreign-policy community talks a great deal about “multialignment,” New Delhi’s deepest and fastest-growing engagement today is with the so-called Anglosphere. The irony is hard to miss: At the precise moment when India’s domestic discourse is deliberately infused with anti-colonial themes, the Indian state is drawing closer to the successor states of the British Empire than at any point since independence.
In retrospect, though, the estrangement between India and the Anglo-Saxon powers was a historical anomaly born of a specific context—the messy decolonization and partition of the subcontinent, the Anglo-U.S. tilt to Pakistan, and the Indian tilt to socialism and the Soviet Union. The tensions between states did not stop the blossoming relationship between elites. Former Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s nonalignment did not come in the way of his decision to keep India in the British Commonwealth, and the English-speaking Indian middle class remained a living bridge to the Anglosphere even at the height of the Cold War.
The 1991 economic reforms created the context for rediscovering that synergy. After a failed decades-long quest for economic integration with China and Asia, India has turned to its natural Anglo-Saxon partners. India, which began its free trade quest with the Asian nations, walked out of the negotiations for the Asia-wide free trade agreement, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, in 2019. Since then, India’s trade diplomacy has been laser-focused on the West, including not only the Anglosphere but also the European Union and European free trade area.
Undergirding the new commercial dynamic is the successful Indian diaspora in the Anglo-Saxon world. A recent British prime minister and U.S. vice president of Indian descent were mere reflections of the rise of the Indian diaspora in the world of Anglo-Saxon politics. This is matched by the unmissable rise of Indians in the world of academia, media, and business.
Is Modi a break from the nativist tradition on the Indian right? On the face of it, Modi is not alone in mending India’s ties with the Anglosphere—remarkably, even the RSS is starting to do so. Unlike India’s globally embedded liberal left, the RSS and BJP have had little exposure to international political networks, and they are now trying to change that. From an initial focus on activating the Indian diaspora, they are now looking to develop wider ties in the English-speaking world, including the cultivation of local elites. RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat is expected in the United States and Canada later this year to intensify the engagement with the Anglosphere.
All this does not mean that India’s relationship with the Anglosphere has become problem-free. Diaspora politics in the Anglosphere will continue to create friction in India’s ties, thanks to the interactive dynamic whereby domestic political contentions in India become issues in the diaspora, drawing in host countries’ political classes and governments. One sign that things might go more smoothly came on July 7, when U.S. and Canadian authorities filed coordinated charges against several dozen members of India-based crime syndicates, including some in relation to the assassination of Sikh activist Hardeep Singh Nijjar in 2023. The action was underpinned by intelligence cooperation with Indian agencies; helpfully, the indictment does not allege any Indian state role in ordering the murder.
As a large civilization emerging from colonialism and partition, India was perhaps destined to turn away from the Anglosphere after independence. But the inherent logic of cooperation was impossible to ignore forever. India could not embrace the English-speaking world as a recipient of the latter’s rules and conditions, but India’s lingering anti-imperialist rhetoric may eventually be subsumed by a new bargain rooted in shared interests between sovereign equals. Surely a rising and self-assured India can find a new and mutually beneficial modus vivendi with the Anglosphere.
