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Rarely have two major democracies descended into as ugly a diplomatic spat as the one now unfolding between Canada and India. With the traditionally friendly relationship already at its lowest point ever, both sides are now engaging in quiet diplomacy to arrest the downward spiral, using the United States, a Canadian ally and Indian partner, as the intermediary. But even if the current diplomatic ruckus eases, Canada’s tolerance of Sikh separatist activity on its territory will continue to bedevil bilateral ties.

The latest dispute began when Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau sensationally claimed that there were ‘credible allegations’ about a ‘potential link’ between India’s government and the fatal shooting in June of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Sikh separatist and Canadian citizen, on Canadian soil. India’s government fired back by demanding that Canada reduce its diplomatic staff in India, suspending new visas for Canadians, and accusing Canada of making ‘absurd’ accusations to divert attention from its status as ‘a safe haven for terrorists’.

Nijjar was hardly the only Sikh separatist living in Canada. In fact, the country has emerged as the global hub of the militant movement for ‘Khalistan’, or an independent Sikh homeland. The separatists constitute a small minority of the Sikh diaspora, concentrated in the Anglosphere, especially Canada. Sikhs living in India—who overwhelmingly report that they are proud to be Indian—do not support the separatist cause.

With British Columbia as their operational base, the separatists are waging a strident campaign glorifying political violence. For example, they have erected billboards advocating the killing of Indian diplomats (with photos), honoured jailed or killed terrorists as ‘martyrs’, built a parade float on which the assassination of Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was re-enacted, and staged attacks on Indian diplomatic missions in Canada. They have also held referendums on independence for Khalistan in Canada.

But, much to India’s frustration, Canada has been reluctant to take strong action to rein in Sikh separatism. Trudeau’s first official visit to India in 2018 turned into a disaster after it was revealed that a convicted Sikh terrorist who had spent years in a Canadian prison following the attempted assassination of a visiting Indian state cabinet minister had made it onto the Canadian guest list. At last month’s G20 summit in New Delhi, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi gave Trudeau a dressing-down for being soft on violent extremists.

It was against this tense backdrop that Trudeau made his allegations about Nijjar’s murder. When countries have linked foreign agents to a domestic death—for example, in 2010, when the Dubai police chief accused Mossad, Israel’s intelligence service, of killing a Hamas commander in a local luxury hotel—they have typically presented video, audio or forensic evidence. And they have mostly avoided blaming the government that the foreign agents represent.

Trudeau, by contrast, cast blame directly on the Indian government without presenting a scintilla of evidence. He says the allegations are based on credible intelligence, apparently from a Five Eyes partner country (Australia, New Zealand, the UK or the US), but refuses to declassify the information or share it with Indian authorities.

Trudeau apparently hasn’t provided ‘any facts’ even to Canadian opposition leader Pierre Poilievre, a member of the Privy Council. And, according to the premier of British Columbia, the province where the killing occurred, the intelligence briefing he received on the matter included only information ‘available to the public doing an internet search’.

Meanwhile, Canadian investigators haven’t made a single arrest in the case. This has left many wondering to what extent Canada’s powerful but unaccountable intelligence establishment controls the country’s foreign policy.

In any case, there’s no doubt that Sikh radicals wield real political influence in Canada, including as funders. Trudeau keeps his minority government afloat with the help of Jagmeet Singh, the New Democratic Party’s Sikh leader and a Khalistan sympathiser. According to a former foreign policy adviser to Trudeau’s government, action was not taken to choke off financing for the Khalistani militants because ‘Trudeau did not want to lose the Sikh vote’ to Singh.

Canada must wake up to the threat posed by its Sikh militants. Rising drug-trade profitability and easy gun availability in British Columbia have contributed to internecine infighting among Khalistan radicals in the province. The volatile combination of Sikh militancy, the drug trade and gangland killings has serious implications for Canadian security, but it is not only Canadians who are in danger.

Under the premiership of Trudeau’s father, Pierre Trudeau, Canada’s reluctance to rein in or extradite Sikh extremists wanted in India for terrorism led to the 1985 twin bombings targeting Air India flights. One attack killed all 329 passengers, most of whom were of Indian origin, on a flight from Toronto; the other misfired, killing two baggage handlers at Tokyo’s Narita Airport. With Khalistani militants continuing to idolise Talwinder Singh Parmar—the terrorist that two separate Canadian inquiries identified as the mastermind behind the bombings—history is in danger of repeating itself.

By reopening old wounds, not least those created by the Air India attacks, Trudeau’s accusations have created a rare national consensus in fractious and highly polarised India. Many are calling for New Delhi to put sustained pressure on Ottawa to start cleaning up its act. But more bitterness and recriminations won’t restore the bilateral relationship. For that, both sides must use effective, cooperative diplomacy to address each other’s concerns.

Wargaming has returned to the fore as a tool for military planning. US think tanks are outcompeting each other in wargaming a Taiwan contingency, with their recommendations amplified by mainstream media. One recent war game even made congressional representatives act as US National Security Council members in a Taiwan contingency.

The potential benefits of wargaming are historically evident, even if their full impact is still debated. Many war games are essentially geared towards military scorecard comparisons and warfighting, with the objective of collecting information on the likely use of weapons systems within a set of strategic choices.

But such games tend to have limited engagement with the larger political context. The road to war is often left unexamined when games begin with the assumption that a political decision for war has already been made. The political objectives for the hypothesised military operation are assumed to be relatively fixed and unidimensional.

Understandably, perhaps, many games are geared towards making useful and timely interventions in the debates on the US’s warfighting capabilities and options in a Taiwan contingency.

India lags in wargaming and should develop a culture of strategic wargaming. But the type of war game that’s prominent in the West may have limited value for India, particularly in examining potential conflicts with China in the Himalayas.

For one thing, compared with other countries, India’s political system is characterised by ‘absent dialogues’, between civilians (politicians and bureaucrats) and the military, and between the government and its people. This, combined with limited access to information, make it difficult to build war games aimed at deducing likely outcomes of a conventional war between India and China or Pakistan.

In addition, Indian analysts generally don’t seriously consider an all-out war against China as an option. The unfavourably skewed military balance combined with geographic disadvantages imposes costs that are considered too prohibitive to accept. Political considerations, in part related to historical memory and self-identity, make the prospect of a defeat in any such war all the more unbearable.

Rather, India’s security challenges are usually conceived in terms of political crises surrounding military contingencies such as transgressions and military coercion by China. India’s cognitive energies are geared towards establishing conventional minimal deterrence vis-à-vis China, which also relies on appeals to China’s own broader strategic interests. In contrast, US strategic priorities pertain to coalition warfighting to deter rising Chinese assertiveness in the entire Indo-Pacific region.

But in understanding a potential conflict in the Himalayas, straightforward bean counting or even more nuanced assessments of military capabilities may miss important variables in decision-making and responses. Analyses of long-term trends are useful and indispensable guides but can suffer from inductivism and may ill-prepare us for strategic surprise—such as Chinese actions in May 2020. Well-designed war games have the potential to combine analysis and military empirics to uncover unthought-of pathways, drivers and contingencies.

The military balance should be understood in conjunction with the particular ways through which a crisis evolved towards war. Hence, an understanding of the nature of the crisis and its history and elite perceptions of political realities are indispensable for a fuller understanding of the architecture of the India–China flashpoint in the Himalayas. Crises occur primarily in the minds of human agents, which is why war games are a valuable tool to understand the contours of a future crisis as it looks in the minds of decision-makers.

The evolving crisis in the Himalayas poses tough questions for the Indian strategic community, which remains confused about Chinese objectives and strategy.

In recent months, the US administration and strategic community have registered a greater interest in the stand-off between India and China in the Himalayas as an emerging flashpoint with global implications. The US is making a cognitive shift from supporting bilateral dialogue to resolve the crisis to assessing China’s continuing military build-up and coercion of India. But US decision-makers also struggle to understand what is driving the border conflict or how it could end.

Simulation exercises and wargaming would assist India and its partners to better anticipate strategic decisions and prepare responses to various pathways. A recent report recommends that Delhi and Washington ‘hold joint wargaming exercises to develop mutual understanding of the threat of a future India–China conflict and identify Indian capabilities gaps that can be filled before conflict breaks out’. Another thoughtful analysis recommends discussing escalation-driven crisis scenarios with Quad members to enable ‘red-teaming of India’s escalatory assumptions, as well as its proposed off-ramps, to support Delhi’s escalation-control efforts ahead of time’.

But cooperation in wargaming between India and its like-minded partners will require translation of differing strategic concerns to reflect India’s unique needs and approaches. Wargaming should be a flexible tool that emphasises scenarios that are principally political, but with strong military arbitration.

These war games should also emphasise scenario-building to help unpack the slow and winding road to a severe crisis and then, possibly, war. Given the political nature of the crisis, such exercises could face significant challenges when conducted at an official level, meaning that academic institutions and think tanks can play a valuable role.

With these objectives in mind, I, with the assistance of senior retired military officers, design war games for the Council for Strategic and Defense Research in New Delhi. These games have generated valuable insights by encouraging vigorous debate of interpretations and responses. Conditions are also created to allow for back-channel negotiations to assess likely dynamics between military developments and civil negotiations.

Also valuable are have been role-play-driven insights on possible Chinese perceptions of the larger border crisis as well as Beijing’s more immediate reasons for undertaking the May 2020 military operations. Intra-team negotiations can also be used to interrogate unspoken assumptions on each side.

It may seem surprising that a wargaming culture hasn’t taken off in India given its acute security challenges and strategic aspirations. As part of managing a rising China in its own backyard, India will have to reduce perception gaps that exist between it and its like-minded partners. Increasing engagement in jointly designed wargaming exercises that permit free thinking and force players to reckon with difficult choices is one way to do so.

This article was written as part of the Australia India Institute’s defence program undertaken with support from the Department of Defence. All views expressed in this article are those of the author only.

In March 1985, the Wall Street Journal showered India’s new prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi, with its highest praise. In an editorial titled ‘Rajiv Reagan’, the newspaper compared the 40-year-old Gandhi to ‘another famous tax cutter we know’, and declared that deregulation and tax cuts had triggered a ‘minor revolution’ in India.

Three months later, on the eve of Gandhi’s visit to the United States, Columbia University economist Jagdish Bhagwati was even more effusive. ‘Far more than China today, India is an economic miracle waiting to happen,’ he wrote in the New York Times. ‘And if the miracle is accomplished, the central figure will be the young prime minister.’ Bhagwati also praised the reduced tax rates and regulatory easing under Gandhi.

The early 1980s marked a pivotal historical moment, as China and India—the world’s most populous countries, with virtually identical per capita incomes—began liberalising and opening up their economies. Both countries elicited projections of ‘revolution’ and ‘miracle’. But while China grew rapidly on a strong foundation of human-capital development, India shortchanged that aspect of its growth. China became an economic superpower; projections of India as next are little more than hype.

The differences have been long in the making. In 1981, the World Bank contrasted China’s ‘outstandingly high’ life expectancy of 64 years to India’s 51 years. Chinese citizens, it noted, were better fed than their Indian counterparts. Moreover, China provided nearly universal health care, and its citizens—including women—enjoyed higher rates of primary education.

The World Bank report highlighted China’s remarkable strides towards gender equality during the Mao Zedong era. As Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn note in their 2009 book Half the sky, China (particularly its urban areas) became ‘one of the best places to grow up female’. Increased access to education and the higher female labour-force participation rate resulted in lower birth rates and improved child-rearing practices. Recognising China’s progress in developing human capital and empowering women, the World Bank made an unusually bold prediction: China would achieve a ‘tremendous increase’ in living standards ‘within a generation or so’.

Rather than tax cuts or economic liberalisation, the World Bank report focused on a historical fact recently emphasised by Brown University economist Oded Galor. Since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, every instance of economic progress—the crux of which is sustained productivity growth—has been associated with investments in human capital and higher female workforce participation.

To be sure, market liberalisation greatly helped Chinese and Indian growth. But China built its successful development strategy on the twin pillars of human capital and gender equality, areas in which India has lagged far behind.

Even after it became more market-oriented, China invested impressively in its people, outpacing India in raising education and health standards to levels necessary for an internationally competitive workforce. The World Bank’s 2020 Human Capital Index—which measures countries’ education and health outcomes on a scale of 0 to 1—gave India a score of 0.49, below Nepal and Kenya, both poorer countries. China scored 0.65, similar to the much richer (in per capita terms) Chile and Slovakia.

While China’s female labour-force participation rate has decreased to roughly 62% from around 80% in 1990, India’s has fallen over the same period from 32% to around 25%. Especially in urban areas, violence against women has deterred Indian women from entering the workforce.

Together, superior human capital and greater gender equality have enabled much higher Chinese total factor productivity growth, the most comprehensive measure of resource-use efficiency. Assuming that the two economies were equally productive in 1953 (roughly when they embarked on their modernisation efforts), China became over 50% more productive by the late 1980s. Today, China’s productivity is nearly double that of India. While 45% of Indian workers are still in the highly unproductive agriculture sector, China has graduated even from simple, labour-intensive manufacturing to emerge, for example, as a dominant force in global car markets, especially in electric vehicles.

China is also better prepared for future opportunities. Seven Chinese universities are ranked among the world’s top 100, with Tsinghua and Peking among the top 20. Tsinghua is considered the world’s leading university for computer science, while Peking is ranked ninth. Likewise, nine Chinese universities are among the top 50 globally in mathematics. By contrast, no Indian university, including the celebrated Indian Institutes of Technology, is ranked among the world’s top 100.

Chinese scientists have made significant strides in boosting the quantity and quality of their research, particularly in fields such as chemistry, engineering and materials science, and could soon take the lead in artificial intelligence.

Since the mid-1980s, Indian and other international observers have predicted that the authoritarian Chinese hare would eventually falter and the democratic Indian tortoise would win the race. Recent events—China’s harsh zero-Covid restrictions, rising youth unemployment and the adverse repercussions of the Chinese authorities’ ham-handed efforts to rein in the country’s overgrown real-estate sector and large tech companies—seem to support this view.

But while China, with its deep well of human capital and greater gender equality, stands poised at the frontiers of both the old and the new economies, Indian leaders and their international counterparts tout an ahistorical ability to leapfrog over a fragile human foundation with shiny digital and physical infrastructure. China has a plausible path through its current muddle. India, by contrast, risks falling into blind alleys of unfounded optimism.

No bilateral relationship has deepened and strengthened more rapidly over the past two decades than the one between the United States and India. In fact, Narendra Modi’s upcoming visit to the US will be his eighth as India’s prime minister, and his second since US President Joe Biden took office. The US has at least as much to gain from the growing closeness as India does.

India recently overtook China in population size, and although its economy remains smaller, it is growing faster. Indeed, India is now the world’s fastest-growing major economy—its GDP has already surpassed that of the United Kingdom and is on track to overtake that of Germany. India thus represents a major export market for the US, including for weapons.

But commercial opportunities are just the beginning. In an era of sharpening geopolitical competition, the US is seeking partners to help it counter the growing influence—and assertiveness—of China (and its increasingly close ally Russia). India is an obvious partner for its fellow democracies in the West, though what it really represents is a critical ‘swing state’ in the struggle to shape the future of the Indo-Pacific and the world order more broadly. The US cannot afford for it to swing towards the emerging Russia–China alliance.

Consider America’s quest to bolster supply-chain resilience through so-called friend-shoring. As Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has explained, India is among the ‘trusted trading partners’ with which the US is ‘proactively deepening economic integration’ as it attempts to diversify its trade ‘away from countries that present geopolitical and security risks’ to its supply chain.

India is also integral to maintaining peace and stability in the Indo-Pacific. Its military standoff with China—now entering its 38th month—is a case in point. By refusing to back down, India is openly challenging Chinese expansionism, while making it more difficult for China to make a move on Taiwan. Biden hasn’t commented on the confrontation, but he is certainly paying attention. It’s telling that both Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan visited New Delhi this month.

Already, India holds more military exercises with the US than any other power, and as of 2020, it had signed all four of the ‘foundational’ agreements that the US maintains with all its allies. This means that the two countries, among other things, provide reciprocal access to each other’s military facilities and share geospatial data from airborne and satellite sensors. Meanwhile, India’s involvement in the Quad—along with the US, Australia and Japan—has lent the grouping much-needed strategic heft.

Fortifying the strategic relationship with India is one of the rare issues eliciting bipartisan consensus in the US. The latest invitation to Modi to address the US Congress—he is the first Indian leader to do so twice—came from Democratic and Republican leaders alike.

Nonetheless, plenty of sceptics in the West believe that US efforts to cement strategic ties with India will disappoint. For example, one commentator recently declared that India will never be an ally of the US, and another argued that treating India as a key partner won’t help the US in its geopolitical competition with China.

A key concern is India’s commitment to retaining its strategic independence. While India has rarely mentioned non-alignment since Modi came to power, in practice, it has been multi-aligned. As it has deepened its partnerships with democratic powers, it has also maintained its traditionally close relationship with Russia.

But India’s relationships with the US and Russia seem to be moving in opposite directions. India is building a broad and multifaceted partnership with the US—covering everything from cooperation on human spaceflight to the construction of resilient semiconductor supply chains—whereas its relationship with Russia now seems limited almost exclusively to defence and energy.

Nonetheless, India isn’t prepared to shun Russia, as the West has since the invasion of Ukraine, not least because India still views Russia as a valuable counterweight to China. In India’s view, China and Russia are not natural allies at all, but natural competitors that have been forced together by US policy. A Sino-Russian strategic axis serves neither India’s nor America’s interests, yet, much to India’s frustration, the US appears to have little interest in rethinking its policy.

This isn’t the only area where India believes that US policy undermines Indian security interests. India also takes issue with America’s insistence on maintaining severe sanctions on Myanmar and Iran, while coddling Pakistan, where mass arrests, disappearances and torture have become the norm. The US is now threatening visa sanctions against officials of Bangladesh’s secular government—which is locked in a battle against Islamist forces—if it believes they are undermining elections that are due early next year.

The US is not accustomed to being challenged by its partners. Its traditional, Cold War–style alliances position the US as the ‘hub’ and its allies as the ‘spokes’. But that will never work with India. As the White House’s Asia policy tzar, Kurt Campbell, has acknowledged, ‘India has a unique strategic character’ and ‘a desire to be an independent, powerful state’. Far from a US client, India ‘will be another great power’.

Campbell is right. But that doesn’t mean that the sceptics are also right. While a traditional treaty-based alliance with India wouldn’t work, the kind of soft alliance the US is pursuing, which requires no pact but does include, as Campbell also underlined, ‘people-to-people ties’ and cooperation on ‘technology and the like’, can benefit both sides.

The US and India are united by shared strategic interests, not least in maintaining a rules-based Indo-Pacific free of coercion. As long as China remains on its current course, so will the Indo-American relationship.

An Australian official once told me that Australians struggle to think beyond the American-led Anglosphere and alliance.

There might have been some hyperbole in that remark. But certainly the struggle we have in properly understanding our burgeoning relationship with India—and India as a country—suggests that official was on to something.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Sydney this week demonstrates that Australia and India are committed to one another, despite history working against us.

From the 1960s until 2014, the two countries had at best sporadic engagement.

It’s significant that Modi continued with the visit despite the cancellation of the Sydney Quad summit after US President Joe Biden was unable to travel, which then led to Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida also pulling out.

It should not be forgotten that Modi’s trusted foreign minister, S. Jaishankar, has been to Australia three times in the past year.

This demonstrates the importance that India places on Australia—in terms of the political relationship, regional strategic alignment and the large diaspora of citizens and residents with Indian heritage. The decades in which the US has been our dominant strategic partner have shaped Australia to the point that we tend to see everything through that prism.

That helps to explain the predictable reactions we have seen to Modi’s visit: in particular, looking for inconsistencies between the two countries in terms of values, with critics pointing to human rights issues and arguing that New Delhi won’t provide military support if Beijing and Washington are heading towards a conflict, say over Taiwan.

The fact that both Australia and India are democracies is a very solid foundation for a good strategic relationship. But it should not be turned into more than that. India has its own interests, as does Australia. India, especially through the diplomacy of its foreign minister, is nothing less than open about that. India is never going to be an ally in the way the US is—but it doesn’t need to be in order to be a vital partner.

It’s not a mistake to point out that Australia and India share some values but not others. It is a mistake, however, to act like we need our partners to be identical or isolate ourselves. The test is not whether a partner is a democracy without flaws.

Rather, the test for our partnership is our commitment to a common set of strategic interests in the Indo-Pacific, to be addressed by a dual-track approach, involving offering our region viable, practical options for security and prosperity while constraining the most malicious activities of Beijing across territorial encroachment, technological oppression and foreign influence.

‘We have very different histories, of course,’ Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said this week when asked about India’s relationship with Russia. ‘India has been a leader of the Non-Aligned Movement for such a long period of time. But India is a great supporter of peace and security and stability in our region.’

And in this regard India has the heft in population and influence in the region. Evidence of this can be seen in Modi’s invitation to the G7 in Japan and his visit to Papua New Guinea before coming to Australia, where he met with 14 Pacific leaders under India’s Forum for India–Pacific Islands Cooperation. Notably, PNG Prime Minister James Marape referred to Modi as ‘the leader of the global south’.

In his statement after meeting Modi on Wednesday and in his media interviews, Albanese sensibly didn’t overstate shared values—despite getting a barrage of questions in interviews about Indian democracy and New Delhi’s relationship with Moscow. Indeed, in his statement issued on Wednesday morning he mentioned neither democracy nor values.

Albanese and Modi’s meeting on Wednesday yielded mainly practical areas of cooperation: trade and investment, migration, green hydrogen, a new consulate and so forth.

But the overwhelming benefit of the partnership is that Australia doesn’t want a region dominated by one power. It wants an inclusive region, in which power is shared and aggression and coercion are deterred. And it understands that it has to work with others, including India and Southeast Asian countries.

The strength and maturity of the relationship is reflected in the fact that the two countries can discuss their individual and collective interests, which includes open discussion of the tensions in the relationship. Indeed one of the biggest changes in the past few years is that the differences can be discussed. The relationship is now that intimate and joins a short list of countries in that category for Australia, including the US, the UK and Japan.

So, where does the relationship go from here? Defence cooperation and trade are moving at a very strong pace, as is work through the Quad grouping with Japan and the US. The visit going ahead despite everything else around it being upended shows that the Australian and Indian governments are clear-eyed about what they need individually and collectively.

The challenge for Australian foreign policy is to get more creative and find a proper place for a country like India that is not politically or culturally as resonant as the US is for Australians, and is not in our immediate region, which is Southeast Asia and the Pacific—but is still a clear strategic partner in the pursuit of this vision for the region.