By Ramachandran Rajeev Kumar — 2026-05-13

Stop Watching Beijing. Start Building Bharat.

The American president lands in Beijing this week for the first such visit in nine years. The Indian commentariat is, by now, audibly holding its breath. Op-eds are running the same three sentences in different orders: India will lose its swing-state premium, India must hedge, India must signal. The think tanks have generated a small forest of position papers. Television panels are stacked deep.

The right response from New Delhi is to look away.

Not because what happens in Beijing this week does not matter. It does, at the margin. But because the entire premise of the Indian anxiety is wrong. The premise is that the US-China relationship has a long-term shape, that Washington and Beijing are negotiating toward some stable equilibrium, and that India must position itself for that equilibrium before it congeals. The premise is wrong because no such equilibrium is on offer. The relationship between the world's two largest economies is a structural oscillation. It has no fix. It will not have a fix in our lifetimes.

This week's drama, in other words, is exactly that. Drama. India's job is to stop watching the show and get back to the workshop.

The cycle, not the trajectory

Look at the last twenty-five years. Clinton engaged. Bush hedged. Obama pivoted. Trump hit tariffs in his first term. Biden continued the tariffs and added export controls on chips. Trump in his second term renegotiated everything, paused some of it, restored other parts, and is now flying to Beijing to attempt a wholesale reset. The chance that the next American president, whoever it is, will simply continue this reset is approximately zero. The chance that the Chinese system will allow itself to be locked into a posture that constrains its own ambitions is also approximately zero. Both sides have a structural interest in keeping the relationship in motion. Motion is leverage. Equilibrium is not.

Indian strategy that pins itself to the position of this oscillation in any given month is a strategy that whiplashes itself every eighteen months. It is the worst possible use of finite Indian planning bandwidth.

What the neighbourhood is telling us

The Chinese state broadcaster confirmed on 8 May that AVIC technical personnel were physically stationed at Pakistani operational bases during the four-day conflict last May. The admission was framed as a heroism story, with engineer Zhang Heng describing temperatures approaching fifty degrees Celsius and constant air-raid alerts. New Delhi's Ministry of External Affairs responded yesterday, on 12 May, with the language that nations should "reflect" on whether backing terrorist infrastructure affects their reputations.

The MEA statement is correct in substance and exactly right in volume. What is interesting is the layer underneath it. The AVIC admission tells us nothing that competent Indian analysts did not already infer in May 2025. It corroborates the obvious. The right Indian response to it is not surprise. It is the absence of surprise. The question worth asking is what we are doing with the eighteen months between then and the next conflict.

Move next door. Kathmandu is once again flashing eyes -- the political class testing how far Beijing's purse can be drawn into the next bilateral negotiation. Dhaka is drifting, as it has done in every cycle for forty years. Colombo continues its quiet auction. The Maldives makes whatever sound the current government's coalition arithmetic requires.

The pattern is the same in every capital. Indian goodwill spending -- the subsidised power, the discounted oil, the absorbed migration, the loan write-offs -- buys exactly one election cycle of friendly noise, and then the next government in the same capital re-runs the same shakedown. The return on every rupee of Indian appeasement spend in the neighbourhood is, in honest economic terms, close to zero.

That is not a moral judgment on the neighbours. It is a statement about incentives. A small state next to a large one will always extract maximum rent, because rent-extraction is the dominant strategy when bargaining power is asymmetric. India would do the same in their position. The question is not why they behave this way. The question is why India keeps paying for the same disappointing outcome.

The two levers India actually controls

Strip away the theatre and the budget item by budget item, and India has two levers worth pulling. Two. Not five. Not eight.

The first is maximum deterrence. The fourth S-400 unit arrived. The S-500 conversation is open. The indigenous tactical strike package proved itself in Sindoor. The submarine programme is climbing. The Tejas line is finally producing. The drone-and-counter-drone layer has matured faster than most outsiders expected. The need now is not new doctrine -- the need is to compress the timelines and double the lines. Every system that goes from prototype to deployable in three years instead of seven changes the calculation in Rawalpindi and Beijing more than any diplomatic note ever will.

The second is maximum innovation. Energy first, because the rupee, the trade balance, and the macro stability all run through the oil import bill. Civilian nuclear at civilisational scale. Solar manufacturing depth, not just installation. Storage. Grid. The next twenty-five gigawatts is not the achievement. The next two hundred and fifty gigawatts is. Education second, because no industrial policy survives an underqualified workforce. Technology third -- chips, AI, defence manufacturing, biotech, aerospace -- with the discipline to focus on three or four areas where India can credibly reach global rank, not the dilettantism of trying to do everything. Opportunity fourth -- housing, urban transit, broadband, female labour-force participation -- because deterrence and innovation are luxuries that a poor country cannot sustain.

These four are not new. What is new is the willingness to say out loud that they are the only items on the list, and that everything competing with them for budget needs to lose.

What gets defunded

The honest answer is the part that will hurt.

Vote-bank subsidies that buy electoral peace but produce zero productive capacity. Goodwill projects in foreign capitals that will be repudiated by the next government in those capitals. Theatre diplomacy -- the conferences, the summits, the joint statements that have a half-life of ninety days. Defence procurement padding. Public-sector enterprise life support for entities that the private sector could replace in a quarter. The thousand small cuts of state generosity that, in aggregate, leave the exchequer too thin to fund the two things that matter.

This is the politically hard part. It is also the only honest part. A country cannot tell its citizens to skip jewellery and foreign travel, as the Prime Minister did at the Hyderabad rally on 10 May, while the central bank quietly grows its gold reserves to one-sixth of the foreign exchange basket. Citizens are not stupid. They will accept asymmetric burden-sharing in a crisis, but only if the asymmetry is honestly disclosed and only if the upside is funded.

The next twenty-four months will be ugly. Say so.

The honest editorial line, in May 2026, is that the next twenty-four months will be economically difficult. Oil prices will stay elevated as long as the Iran picture remains unresolved. Foreign portfolio outflows will continue until valuations correct further. The rupee will be under pressure. The forex reserves, currently at 690.69 billion dollars after a 7.79 billion dollar weekly drawdown, will tested. Growth will moderate from the 6.9 percent the Reserve Bank is currently projecting.

This is not a cause for panic. It is a cause for clarity. Difficult years are the years when the country either makes the productive choices it has been deferring or doubles down on the unproductive ones because the productive ones are politically harder. The historical record is mixed. The 1991 reforms happened because the alternative was default. The post-Galwan defence acceleration happened because the alternative was a frozen line. Decisions made under pressure tend to be decisions that stick.

The century is built, not negotiated

There is a sentence that the foreign-policy establishment in Delhi does not enjoy hearing, and it is the right sentence to end on.

The Indian century, if it happens, will not be negotiated in Beijing or Washington. It will not be conferred by a G20 communique or a Quad declaration or a BRICS summit. It will not arrive because the American president decided, on this particular trip, to grant India a favourable position in his bargain with Xi Jinping.

The Indian century will be built. It will be built in Bengaluru's research labs, in the Hyderabad pharma corridor, in the Indore-Pithampur industrial cluster, in Chennai's automotive belt, in Surat's chemicals park, in the new semiconductor lines coming up in Gujarat and Karnataka. It will be built by Indian engineers, Indian capital, and Indian discipline. It will be built whether or not Trump and Xi find their off-ramp this week.

The job, then, is not to watch Beijing. The job is to build Bharat.

The author is the founder of nBookMedia and writes on national strategy, economic policy and the Indian growth story.