India’s leaders claim they’re fighting for independence and peace. But behind the patriotic slogans and colorful summits lies a coordinated campaign of manipulation, extraction and strategic dominance, targeting America’s jobs, intellectual property – and even its defense systems.
At the heart of this campaign is the concept of “Atmanirbharata,” a Hindi term loosely translated as “self-reliance.” Yet, as revealed during the recent Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) Annual Business Summit, that term is being weaponized to justify India’s growing demands for unfettered access to U.S. military technology, defense partnerships and global trade advantages.
“Atmanirbharata is the only way,” said Air Chief Marshal A P Singh during the 2025 CII Summit in New Delhi. “We need to be future-ready. We need to act today and get into quick ‘Make in India’ programs, while ‘Design in India’ progresses in the near future.”
On its surface, it sounds like a patriotic call to strengthen India’s own capabilities. In reality, it’s a Trojan horse strategy that uses bilateral trade, U.S. partnerships and soft power diplomacy to siphon off American innovation and dominate key global industries by 2047, India’s self-declared deadline to become a global superpower.
Make in India? or Made from American tech?
India’s “Make in India” and “Design in India” campaigns are often pitched as economic opportunities for U.S. companies to tap into a rising market. But in practice, they’re structured to extract sensitive intellectual property, gain privileged access to U.S. defense systems and reverse-engineer foreign-developed platforms for Indian use and export.
Programs like “Indus X, a U.S.-India defense innovation bridge alongside deep integration with the Confederation of Indian Industry, have created pathways for India to solicit American technology, defense partnerships and dual-use research under the guise of cooperation.
These initiatives are not benign. They serve a deliberate national strategy: Gain access, localize production and convert American innovation into Indian-owned dominance.
According to the India’s Defence Industrial Sector Vision 2047 report by CII and prominent accounting firm KPMG, India is actively executing a 20-year plan to overtake the global defense market by fast-tracking international collaborations, joint ventures and licensing deals – especially with the United States. Their stated goal is to bypass decades of domestic R&D by pulling in advanced technology, building it on Indian soil and turning it into indigenous systems for both domestic use and export.
India’s Defense Acquisition Procedure (DAP) has facilitated foreign firms being lured into joint ventures and technology partnerships, only to see their innovations stripped, repackaged and rebranded under Beijing’s control. Despite the clear lessons from China’s tech-theft playbook, India has successfully repurposed the same tactics under the banner of “trusted partnership.”
Today, India leverages anti-China rhetoric to secure U.S. assistance in transferring technologies, securing capital investment and building the very infrastructure that will empower its digital dominance. Washington has already committed to enhancing India’s processing power, funding large-scale data center development and investing more than $2 million in joint R&D, all framed as a necessary counter to communist China.
But India’s goal is not simply collaboration or partnership. It’s technological capture.
The CII-KPMG report makes it clear: India cannot currently compete in high-end defense manufacturing due to gaps in R&D investment, talent retention and industrial infrastructure. So instead, the strategy is to build those capabilities on the backs of foreign innovation. And under India’s policies, all R&D that enters India stays in India, benefiting Indian state-backed firms, not American interests.
What U.S. policymakers must understand is that any bilateral agreement or defense cooperation with India is not a partnership of equals. It’s a calculated arrangement designed to transfer American brainpower and proprietary defense capabilities into a permanent Indian industrial advantage, one that ultimately undermines U.S. military edge, economic sovereignty and national security.
Counter to China today, India dominance tomorrow
India’s global influence campaign has always depended on one key resource: American trust. And nowhere is this more evident than in India’s defense and trade lobbying machine, powered by public relations, bilateral summits and cooperative rhetoric, while concealing a strategy of extraction, control and dominance.
At a CII Partnership Summit in 2024, Indian Minister of External Affairs Dr. S. Jaishankar admitted it:
“In an era of leveraging and weaponization, policymakers have to place national security filters when it comes to economic decisions, including those of investment.”
This wasn’t just economic realism, it was a warning: India doesn’t view foreign investment as partnership. It views it as a strategic weapon, a tool to capture technology, rebrand it under “Make in India” and convert American innovation into Indian geopolitical power.
Yet, while India quietly screens every deal through a sovereignty-first lens, it sells itself to U.S. policymakers as a “trusted partner,” a counterweight to China and a democratic ally. That framing, now repeated by think tanks, foreign policy elites and bipartisan lawmakers, is India’s most effective lobbying tool. It deflects scrutiny and unlocks everything from defense co-production to semiconductor investment to bilateral technology agreements.
As noted in a recent Eurasia Review analysis, India’s growing closeness with the United States is already reshaping the geopolitical balance of Asia, particularly its relationship with China. Joint military exercises, arms transfers and intelligence sharing between India and the U.S. have emboldened India to take a more aggressive stance on the Chinese border. That’s not just strategic cooperation, It’s India using the China card to gain access to top-tier U.S. defense capabilities and next-gen technologies.
The real danger? While India plays up its role as an ally against Beijing, it refuses to align fully with U.S. interests. India maintains strong ties with Russia. It rejects military alliances. It has no intention of submitting to Western oversight. What it wants is American capital, American defense tech and American trust, but without American accountability.
This is not a partnership of equals. It is a calculated lobbying campaign, fueled by CII, formalized through policies and legitimized by Washington’s desperate need to “counter China.”
And in that vacuum of trust, India is rapidly positioning itself, not as a supporting power, but as the next global leader.
India’s self-identified gaps reveal dangerous contradictions and a strategic bid to overtake America in defense tech
While India aggressively markets itself as a global supplier of STEM talent and a future “trusted” defense partner, the country’s own defense industrial roadmap reveals a very different reality, one that should alarm U.S. policymakers and expose the myth of mutual benefit in the U.S.-India tech and defense cooperation.
In the India’s Defence Industrial Sector Vision 2047 report, Indian leaders outline nine major structural weaknesses that stand in the way of their goal to dominate global defense exports by 2047. Among them:
* Inadequate R&D investment: India admits it cannot compete with global leaders due to insufficient funding and marginal private sector participation.
* Lack of a long-term vision: The country remains overly focused on equipment manufacturing rather than next-generation technologies.
* Severe talent shortages: Despite the global narrative of India being the “world’s engineering talent pool,” the report confesses India is unable to retain or upskill talent for high-value defense tech fields like microelectronics, advanced materials and semiconductors.
* Fragmented innovation ecosystem: India acknowledges that its academic, industrial and government partnerships are disjointed and uncompetitive.
* Infrastructure and regulatory bottlenecks: The report calls India’s testing, certification and policy environment outdated, slow and incompatible with modern defense innovation cycles.
These contradictions destroy the illusion that bilateral collaboration with India is an asset to the United States. How can a country lacking internal innovation, skilled talent and regulatory readiness be considered a reliable strategic defense partner?
Worse still, as the document consistently reveals, India’s true long-term objective is to replace U.S. and Western dominance in defense exports. The report explicitly states that India intends to leapfrog past decades of R&D by leveraging foreign joint ventures and technology transfer deals. It proposes using U.S. firms as shortcuts to power, milking American capital and defense know-how to fast-track its own global position.
But the most dangerous section of the report is India’s vision to lead in non-kinetic warfare. This includes dominance in artificial intelligence, quantum computing, data analytics and cybersecurity – emerging battlefields that India claims will soon be more influential than tanks or missiles. India plans to define the doctrines and technologies behind future combat, while harnessing its diaspora, think tanks and corporate alliances to build dominance in these arenas.
Trump’s trust gamble: a partnership or a handover?
Despite India’s internal defense ambitions and consistent placement on the United States Trade Representative (USTR) Priority Watch List, India has been allowed to bypass its own R&D and capture foreign technology. And throughout the Biden presidency, and even into the Trump era, America’s strategic and industrial alignment with New Delhi has only accelerated.
On Feb. 13, 2025, President Donald Trump hosted Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Washington for what the White House hailed as a deepening of the “U.S.-India Comprehensive Global Strategic Partnership,” an alliance, they claimed, “anchored in mutual trust, shared interests, goodwill and robust engagement of their citizens.”
This meeting marked the launch of the U.S.-India COMPACT initiative (Catalyzing Opportunities for Military Partnership, Accelerated Commerce & Technology) as well as the U.S.-India TRUST initiative (Transforming the Relationship Utilizing Strategic Technology), both of which were framed as transformative, future-focused collaborations.
But behind the diplomatic language and pledges of “shared values,” the agenda amounted to one-sided exposure of U.S. defense and technological assets to an Indian system that is designed to nationalize, indigenize and commercialize those very inputs.
A new defense partnership framework was announced, including expanded co-production deals for Javelin missiles and Stryker vehicles in India, U.S. tech transfers for AI-enabled maritime systems and procurement terms for Indian manufacturing of P-8I military aircraft.
The White House press release championed India as a “Major Defense Partner” with Strategic Trade Authorization-1 (STA-1) status, setting the stage for ITAR (International Traffic in Arms Regulations) streamlining and reciprocal defense procurement agreements, many of which will directly enable India’s indigenization of U.S.-originated systems.
Even more troubling, the TRUST initiative aims to embed U.S. AI infrastructure inside India, accelerating India’s ability to dominate not only kinetic but non-kinetic warfare domains AI, quantum, undersea systems and space.
Despite glaring structural gaps in India’s domestic innovation ecosystem, as outlined in its own Defense Vision 2047 report, the U.S. is now betting big on an Indian system that does not reciprocate U.S. openness, nor protect American intellectual property.
This is not a trust-based partnership. It is a one-way transfer system. India has codified through DAP 2020 and CII’s strategy architecture a framework that absorbs foreign IP, enforces localization and rebrands imported technologies under the nation’s “Make in India” directive.
The result? America is supplying the engine for India’s rise, while fueling a strategic competitor under the illusion of alliance.
To be clear: “TRUST” without safeguards is surrender. And the more the U.S. hands over its defense backbone, innovation infrastructure and dual-use technologies under this banner, the more it accelerates India’s rise as a replacement power, not a partner.
India’s U.S.-powered rise: America’s innovation and security risk
India’s demand for access isn’t matched by reciprocal transparency, market access or fair labor standards. Its markets remain closed. Its IP laws are weak. And its history of tech misuse is well-documented.
The end result?
* U.S. taxpayer-funded R&D ends up in foreign hands.
* American jobs are outsourced or displaced by “Indian joint ventures.”
* America’s military edge erodes under the guise of friendly cooperation.
And while India claims it’s fighting for “Atmanirbharata,” what it’s really demanding is a free pass into America’s economic, technological and military engine without guardrails.
“Atmanirbharata” is not self-reliance. It’s strategic dependency masked as partnership, and America is paying the price. Within India’s policy of “self-reliance” lies a paradox that should alarm U.S. policymakers and citizens alike: The very strategy India claims will lead to national independence is, in fact, heavily dependent on foreign innovation, foreign capital, and most critically, American defense and technology transfers.
The consequences for the United States are profound. U.S. taxpayer-funded R&D is being funneled into foreign systems. American defense jobs are increasingly tied to offshore production. Critical military technologies, once safeguarded as pillars of U.S. superiority, are now subject to localization requirements that strip away control and oversight. And all of this is happening under the false premise of partnership with a nation that maintains deep ties with adversarial states, rejects military alliances and routinely circumvents reciprocal trade practices.
Unless decisive safeguards are implemented, the U.S. risks becoming the architect of its own technological eclipse, handing over the blueprints of supremacy to a foreign power that has made it clear: Its goal is not partnership, but preeminence.
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