US Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau recently said the quiet part out loud, stating that the US will not let India develop like China. Landau’s remarks are honest about what the USA sees India as: a periphery country, needed to extract profits from by exploiting its low wages, decimating its environment, and plundering its resources. This is similar to how Britain, in 1947, used the sterling balances negotiations to restrict India’s industrial development. Though Britain owed India over £1 billion from World War II, Whitehall froze these funds. Britain leveraged “informational asymmetries while Indian sovereignties were in flux,” which ensured…