In recent years, accusations of democratic backsliding in both countries have further diminished the idea of shared democratic beliefs. In India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has been accused of systematically eroding the country’s democracy. Observers have raised concerns about India’s religious majoritarianism, constraints on press freedom, weakening of judicial independence, and use of state power against civil society organizations. Freedom House now rates the country as “partly free.” Both the first Trump administration and the Biden administration made it clear that such criticisms of India were less important than a strong U.S.-India relationship. Today, the second Trump administration has itself been accused of challenging electoral integrity, degrading domestic institutional norms, and deprioritizing democratic values abroad. And President Donald Trump’s instrumental use of tariffs and economic leverage is now considered a more decisive factor in the relationship than democracy, whether as foreground or background.
The democracy question has been reduced to a bilateral irritant: the United States lecturing India about its domestic politics or even ignoring the issue entirely, or each side accusing the other of blatant hypocrisy. This framing misses something important: democratic values matter to the relationship as a shared structural challenge that extends well beyond either country’s borders. In a world where the liberal international order is fraying, it matters where the two countries genuinely converge or diverge on liberal principles—not just within their own political systems but in the global arena.
The following Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) memos by experts in three countries, part of a larger CFR project assessing India’s approach to the international order in different issue areas, reframe the question of democratic values. Rather than asking how democratic each country is at home, they ask where and how India engages with democratizing norms in the liberal international order—and what that engagement means for the U.S.-India relationship. Each piece examines a different dimension of that order.
Taken together, these pieces suggest that a productive way to assess U.S.-India convergence is not to keep grading each country’s democratic report card, but to examine where both are willing to champion democratic norms in the international system, and where their visions of a just global order fundamentally differ. That is where the real stakes of the relationship lie.
