In July 2026, the South Asia Research Bulletin (南亚研究通讯, a widely read research newsletter on South Asian affairs) published a comprehensive review by Mao Keji and Mao Yaxin, tracing the full trajectory of Modi's economic policy toward China since he took office in 2014. The tone of the review is neither bearish nor bullish — it reads more like a systematic retrospective, laying ten years of contradictions, reversals, and self-defeat squarely on the table.
Wanting It All, All at Once — The Four Contradictory Priorities of the Modi Government
The review's first observation is brutal in its brevity: every rupture in the Modi government's China economic policy originates precisely in Modi's innermost circle.
"Wanting this and wanting that, and wanting both of the other two as well" — these four "wantings" are not a verdict but a description. The Indian government has never managed to settle the priority order between economic development and national security. Economic rationality follows one logic, geopolitics follows another, and Modi's decision-making style tends to push both logics to their limits simultaneously. The result is that policy is forever at war with itself — left hand fighting right hand.
A case in point is the restrictions on Chinese investment imposed after 2020. India shut the door on Chinese capital in the name of national security, yet over the same period China–India bilateral trade did not fall — it rose. In fiscal year 2023–24, bilateral trade surpassed US$136 billion, and China overtook the United States to become India's largest trading partner. Restrict investment while leaving trade untouched — the loophole is so gaping that even India's own economists can hardly bear to look at it. But policymakers have chosen to look away, because "restricting Chinese capital" plays well in domestic politics; as for the economic consequences, that is a problem for the next term.
This split is not an inadvertent lapse — it is a deliberate double standard. Hardline rhetoric against China and the genuine need for economic growth are kept in two drawers that never communicate. When slogans are needed, the political drawer is opened; when growth is needed, the economic drawer. That the two drawers contradict each other — well, they simply forgot to close the gap between them.
Reaping What Was Sown — The Cost of Miscalculation
The review's second observation exposes the dark side of the timeline.
The overlap of the pandemic, Trump's first term, and the noisy ascendancy of the "Indo-Pacific Strategy" under Biden led India to overestimate its own capabilities and standing. In that atmosphere, a refrain became fashionable in New Delhi: "We can replace China without relying on China" — India could simultaneously be America's strategic anchor in Asia, the biggest beneficiary of global supply chains relocating away from China, and the leader of the developing-world bloc. Stacked together, these three imagined roles gave India a serious illusion about its own bargaining power.
Then Trump came back.
The way Trump cast India aside was barely disguised — tariffs, immigration policy, relatively friendly gestures toward Pakistan. By the time New Delhi registered what had happened, it had already let the best window of cooperation slip through its fingers. Over these ten years, China completed an industrial upgrade in new energy, electric vehicles, and semiconductors, while India spent the same decade locking itself out of the process — watching its neighbor walk the road to the end.
The South Asia Research Bulletin adds one line in the review that deserves to be singled out: "Objectively, this has also profoundly educated us — when we talk about win-win outcomes, we should not overestimate their strategic wisdom, and we must never underestimate their stubborn anti-China stance." This is not gloating; it is calm, after-the-fact reflection.
The Vegetable-Garden Logic — A Nearly Childish Set of Strategic Expectations
The review's third observation may be the most surprising — India's policy establishment and business circles harbor a set of expectations toward China that borders on the childish.
Ever since Trump began pressuring India, a large cohort of Indian scholars and research institutions has begun advocating what amounts to "learning from China's strengths in order to check China": bring in Chinese technology, capital, and talent wholesale — with the ultimate aim of defeating China. The logic chain itself does not sound unreasonable until you notice its hidden premise: China is supposed to operate according to India's needs. When India wants to cooperate, China should open up its technology; when India wants to compete, China should step aside.
The South Asia Research Bulletin's exact words are: "The China that India expects is just a vegetable garden."
This is not a joke — it is the mainstream expectation in India's think-tank circles today. And the fact that this expectation can become mainstream reveals a deep problem in India's understanding of China: there is no basic shared framework acknowledging that China, too, is a strategic actor with interests and red lines of its own. In this sense, India's China policy suffers not only from contradictions at the execution level, but also from wishful thinking at the cognitive level.
The core contradiction of the Modi government's China economic policy is this: the logic of security and the logic of economics have never been integrated into a single operating framework. The result is policy emerging from multiple doors at once, contradicting itself — restricting Chinese capital while depending on Chinese goods, sending confrontational signals to China while expecting technological cooperation. This is not a miscalculation but a structural split: India's decision-making system permits two mutually contradictory narratives to run simultaneously, and the cost is paid jointly by economic efficiency and strategic coherence.