In the short time I was in India, the EU and US concluded trade agreements. Does India’s hard-won independence still shape how it deals with American power — especially when foreign companies expect to write the tax rules?
Standing in Karamsad, Sardar Patel’s village, it becomes easier to understand why India often appears stubborn to foreign observers. What looks like delay, friction, or resistance in modern trade negotiations is better understood as something deeper: institutional memory.
India’s independence was not merely a transfer of power. It was a conscious rejection of a system in which foreign interests wrote the rules, extracted value, and dictated terms. That experience left a permanent imprint on India’s political culture. It explains why, even today, India is willing to align militarily with the United States, cooperate strategically in the Indo-Pacific, and yet dig in its heels when foreign corporations expect exemptions, special tax treatment, or regulatory deference.
This distinction often confuses Washington.
From an American perspective, economic integration is the logical extension of strategic partnership. If two countries share security interests, why should trade, taxation, and regulation not follow the same logic? But this reasoning misunderstands how India thinks about sovereignty. For India, military partnership does not imply economic subordination. The two are deliberately kept separate.
Sardar Patel understood that independence would be hollow without fiscal and administrative control. His integration of the princely states was not an exercise in romantic nationalism, but a hard-headed assertion that sovereignty must be indivisible. There could be no semi-autonomous fiefdoms, no external powers with privileged access, no parallel authorities operating beyond democratic accountability. A state that cannot tax uniformly, regulate consistently, or assert legal authority is not a state at all.
That lesson did not disappear in 1947. It migrated into India’s institutions.
When American technology companies challenge India’s tax rules, data localisation requirements, or digital regulation, the Indian response is rarely just about revenue. It is about precedent. Allowing foreign firms to write or bypass tax rules revives an old anxiety: the return of economic influence without political accountability. To Indian policymakers, that is not globalisation; it is regression.
This is where US–India relations periodically sour.
Washington sees India as an indispensable strategic partner against China and is often frustrated when economic negotiations stall. India sees Washington as a powerful friend whose corporations sometimes behave like uninvited governors. The friction arises not because India is anti-American, but because it is anti-exceptionalism. The idea that foreign companies should enjoy special treatment because of their country of origin cuts against the very logic of the Indian Republic.
British observers should find this familiar. The East India Company was, after all, a commercial enterprise that slowly acquired sovereign privileges. India’s suspicion of foreign corporate power is not paranoia; it is institutional trauma. We’ve read their playbook. We’ve lived it.
This is also why India’s approach differs from that of the UK. Britain, secure in long-established institutions, often treats economic rules as technocratic matters. India treats them as constitutional. Where Britain may see tax disputes as negotiable irritants, India sees them as tests of autonomy.
Critics argue this slows growth, deters investment, and complicates partnerships. There is truth in this. India sometimes pays an economic price for its caution. But the alternative — rapid integration on terms written elsewhere — carries a political cost India is unwilling to bear.
What Karamsad reminds us is that Indian nationalism was never about symbolism alone. It was about control of the state’s levers: taxation, law, territory, and administration. Patel’s realism ensured that independence was not merely proclaimed, but enforced.
In a multipolar world, this legacy may turn out to be an advantage. India is not a client state. It does not trade loyalty for concessions. It partners, but on terms it believes preserve dignity and institutional sovereignty. That posture earns respect, even when it frustrates.
For Britain and the United States, the lesson is not that India is difficult. It is that India’s memory is long. Deals that ignore that memory will stall. Deals that respect it will endure.
India’s independence still shapes how it deals with power today — not out of nostalgia, but out of constitutional instinct. Karamsad is not just history. It is policy.
