In the week since he staked his claim for a third term as India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi’s official account on X (formerly Twitter) has been replete with replies to congratulatory messages from dozens of global leaders—from Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky to U.S. President Joe Biden to Pakistan’s Shehbaz Sharif, and even the likes of Bill Gates and Elon Musk.
But one post in particular raised hackles in China and eyebrows everywhere else. Taiwan’s recently elected president, Lai Ching-te, was among the first to congratulate Modi last week in a message that touted “the fast-growing” Taiwan-India partnership. Modi responded by endorsing “closer ties” between the two governments as well as a “mutually beneficial economic and technological partnership.”
China, predictably, did not take it well. “China opposes all forms of official interactions between the Taiwan authorities and countries having diplomatic relations with China,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning told reporters, reiterating Beijing’s stance that “Taiwan is an inalienable part of the territory of the People’s Republic of China” and adding that “China has protested to India about this.”
Modi and Lai’s interaction didn’t take place in a vacuum. India and Taiwan have been inching closer in recent years, driven largely by technologies such as semiconductor chips and mobile device manufacturing.
Taiwan’s Powerchip Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp (PSMC) is building a chipmaking plant in partnership with the Indian conglomerate Tata in Modi’s home state of Gujarat, while Taiwanese manufacturing giant Foxconn—which assembles a big chunk of the world’s iPhones—has significantly expanded its manufacturing base in India. The two governments also signed an agreement in February to bring Indian migrant workers to Taiwan to ease the island’s long-standing labor shortage.
“Some of it is India’s own technological goals, and a recognition that Taiwan is one of the largest and most advanced economies in the world,” said Tanvi Madan, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. “It fits India’s search for like-minded partners, particularly in strategic technologies.”
Apple’s elevation of India as both a market and a manufacturing base has also played a key role, Madan added, given that the U.S. tech giant relies heavily on Taiwanese firms for components and assembly. “Apple is almost midwifing this business-to-business relationship,” she said.
On the other hand, Modi’s decision to publicly respond to Lai was unprecedented in many ways, and it was likely meant to send a subtle message to China, with whom India’s relations have dramatically frayed over the same period that its Taiwan links have deepened.
Military clashes at the India-China border in 2020—in which nearly two dozen soldiers were killed—unraveled the bonhomie that Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping built during their respective first terms in office. Both countries have been building up troops and infrastructure at the border since, and India’s retaliation also included banning TikTok and dozens of other Chinese apps. (Notably, Xi has not officially congratulated Modi on his victory yet—unlike after past elections.)
“That was the time when [India] realized that if China is not paying attention to our red lines, why do we have to pay attention to China’s red lines?” said Sana Hashmi—a fellow at a Taipei-based think tank called the Taiwan-Asia Exchange Foundation—who has previously worked with the Indian and Taiwanese foreign ministries. “Over the years, we have seen China give India ample reason to focus on Taiwan,” she added.
India, like the United States and many other countries, officially adheres to a “One China” policy that recognizes the government in Beijing as China’s sole global representative—though New Delhi has not publicly reiterated that stance for more than a decade. (Modi’s reply to Lai, notably, did not include any possible trigger words, such as “Taiwan” or “president.”)
Before India’s recent weekslong national elections, in which Modi won a third term in office, there were a few tentative signs of a possible India-China rapprochement. In a meeting at last year’s BRICS summit, Modi and Xi agreed to attempt a de-escalation of the border standoff, and China’s ambassador post in New Delhi, which had sat vacant for 18 months, was finally filled in May of this year.
But Modi’s response to Lai—as calibrated as it may have been—has likely made any further engagement incredibly unlikely if not totally impossible, according to Sushant Singh, a lecturer at Yale University and Foreign Policy contributor who previously served in the Indian Army. “It’s a very clear provocation, it’s outside the norm that we have seen being established,” Singh said. “It has the potential to scuttle any path towards normalcy that many of us were seeing after Modi’s reelection.”
The manner of that reelection, which culminated with Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party failing to secure a majority on its own and having to rely on smaller parties to form a coalition government, could also have played a role in the Indian prime minister’s decision to antagonize Beijing by publicly engaging Taiwan. “Many people believe that this was because Modi was being seen as a much weaker leader after the election results,” Singh said, adding that for Modi, the response to Lai “was also a way of conveying strength, conveying that he’s going to stand up to China, and he’s going to be as bold and tough as he was in Modi 2.0.”
China’s reaction so far has been largely bluster—and more muted bluster than its response to Washington’s congratulatory messages to Lai on his election earlier this year. And the India-China border is already as militarized as it can be without escalating into a full-blown armed conflict that neither country is likely to want.
Despite Modi’s seemingly diminished political mandate on the domestic front, India’s foreign policy is unlikely to change significantly, perhaps illustrated by the announcement on Monday that Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar will reprise his role in Modi’s new cabinet.
That foreign policy has also been marked by a closer India-U.S. relationship, defined in large part by a mutual concern over China’s rise. India has not publicly pledged to defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese invasion—as Washington has—and it is still unclear what role, if any, New Delhi would play in such an event. But there is a growing recognition that any such conflict would impact India’s national and regional security. India’s top military official last year reportedly ordered a study of possible scenarios for a China-Taiwan conflict and what actions India might take.
“I do think there’s a greater awareness, for a number of reasons, of the impact that a Taiwan contingency would have on India and the adverse implications,” said Madan, the Brookings fellow. “I’m assuming the next stage of that discussion would be … the spectrum of things India might be willing to do or not do.”
But India’s increasing engagement with Taiwan should also be seen on its own merit rather than solely through a U.S.-China lens, according to the Taiwan-Asia Exchange Foundation’s Hashmi. “China has played an important role, but I think the merit of engaging Taiwan is something that the [Modi government] has realized already,” she said. “What the differences with China have done is make the leadership less hesitant about talking about Taiwan.”
While Modi’s overtures to Taiwan may well be designed to provoke China, they may also be partly a function of his government’s foreign-policy doctrine of “multi-alignment,” in which India’s relationships are dictated more purely by its national interests than by external pressures or global rules-based order precedents. Modi’s message of thanks to Zelensky, for example, was followed by a similarly effusive post for Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“Modi has had this general attitude that ‘if I’m doing something with a country, why am I hiding it?’” Madan said, pointing out that he was the first Indian prime minister to visit both Israel and Palestine.
“I do think with China, he’d be a bit more careful, so I don’t think this would be just something of a lark. If you went to any China hand who’s calling for dialogue, they’ll probably tell you he shouldn’t have done this,” she added. “So it could be signaling, [or] it could just be Modi.”