"Onomastic controversy rarely makes headlines. This week saw an exception. India, the host nation for the weekend’s Group of 20 summit, sent out invitations to dine with Indian head of state Droupadi Murmu under the unfamiliar title “President of Bharat”—the Hindi moniker for the subcontinental republic.
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Before the British departure, India had never existed as any kind of nation-state; rather, it had always been imperial. Whatever unity it had came through individual polities’ allegiance to a sovereign crown without reference to each other. The end of this model of sovereignty in preference for a national parliamentary republic—which, despite its federal nature, still posits a single national polity—was a constitutional sea-change.
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Unsurprisingly, India’s dominant concerns are those of a still new nation: strengthening its state, fighting off challenges to state power, and controlling territory. These are internal affairs; external adventures, expansive or “liberal,” are the luxury of mature nations.

Indian state capacity remains on largely pre-modern footing.
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India is still engaged in the most basic level of state consolidation, securing its territory. East-central India continues to be home to a decades-old insurgency carried on by the Naxalites, a confederation of far-left splinters from the Communist Party of India. In 2019, the Indian parliament amended the constitution to bring an end to regional autonomy in Muslim-majority Jammu and Kashmir, a province claimed by the neighboring Pakistan. The pacification of Kashmir has been accompanied by lockdowns, curfews, and a media blackout—and, because of that final bit, who knows what else—although you would hardly know from the Western press. (An amusing exercise when reading the news: Replace every instance of “Xinjiang” with “Kashmir” and think about India and China’s relative standing with the American public.)
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The simple matter of it is this. India is constrained by internal economic and political dynamics from becoming the Asian sidekick to an American world policeman, even were its ruling class inclined to embark on our crusades. This has borne out at practically every juncture in Indo-American relations, from the Nehru government’s friendly relations with the Soviet Union to Indira Gandhi’s war on foreign capital to the Modi government’s blithe disregard for sanctions on Russia.

Friendship is an equivocal and impermanent concept in international relations. India is a more equivocal friend than perhaps Americans are used to; unlike most European countries, which must bow and scrape to retain their hiding-places under America’s nuclear skirt, India has an independent nuclear deterrent. It may cooperate when convenient—e.g., using the Global War on Terror as a nice bit of cover for increasing state capacity and doing down Pakistan—but is hardly a reliable ally for a difficult task of uncertain reward. As always, the best dictum in the Indo-Pacific, as in every other theater, is America First, and, perhaps, America Alone."

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/otto-von-bharat/