Beyond Realism: India’s Chance to Bend History, Not Bow to It

A subtle fatalism has settled over India’s strategic conversation. The new India-US trade deal – with its tariff cuts for Indian exports from punishing levels to 18%, in exchange for India’s market-opening on industrial goods, select agricultural products, and commitments to buy hundreds of billions in US energy and technology – is being framed as the inevitable price of asymmetry. The strong dictate terms; the weak adapt gracefully. Power is a ledger of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and military might, and diplomacy its obedient accountant.

This polished realism is seductive, but it is also profoundly incomplete. It mistakes a snapshot for the story. It confuses today’s imbalance for tomorrow’s destiny. Worst of all, it strips nations of the agency to rewrite their own trajectory.

History offers a sharper lesson. Japan in the 1950s, South Korea in the 1960s, and China in the 1980s entered the global economy as clear underdogs. None negotiated from parity. Yet each turned weakness into leverage: trading market access for technology transfer, alignment for industrial depth, short-term concessions for long-term capacity. They did not accept unequal outcomes as fate; they engineered escapes from them. Had they internalised the counsel now directed at India – that asymmetry excuses asymmetry – their ascents would have stalled at the starting line. Realism without ambition is resignation in scholarly dress.

India in 2026 is no longer a peripheral supplicant. It is a central pivot: the world’s most populous nation, a fast-growing consumer market, a vital node in Indo-Pacific supply chains, a trusted partner in democratic coalitions, and home to one of the largest skilled workforces on earth. These are not ornaments; they are instruments. Modern power flows through networks as much as through size. India’s position – large enough to disrupt, independent enough to choose, credible enough to attract – gives it real cards to play.

The current deal reflects genuine power differentials. The United States, wielding a $30-trillion economy and tariff leverage in a fragmenting world order, extracted significant concessions: tariff reductions on US industrial and select agricultural goods, removal of digital services taxes, and alignment on energy security (including reduced reliance on Russian oil). India secured tariff relief on key export sectors – textiles, leather, chemicals, machinery – and protection for sensitive agriculture. But the bargain is asymmetrical, as most such deals are when one side holds overwhelming leverage.

The deeper question is not whether the terms could have been more equal today, but whether India can extract asymmetric gains tomorrow. That requires shifting from defensive negotiation to developmental statecraft.

Three priorities stand out. First, make trade an explicit ladder for technological sovereignty: insist on binding commitments for joint R&D, skills transfer, and local manufacturing in high-value sectors like semiconductors, renewables, and biotech as a condition for further market access. Second, sequence liberalisation ruthlessly – protect or subsidise vulnerable sectors (small farmers, MSMEs) while aggressively building export-competitive clusters in labour-intensive goods that can absorb the demographic dividend. Third, end the opacity that surrounds these agreements. A democracy cannot ask its citizens to trust executive judgment alone when livelihoods, food security, and public health hang in the balance. Full disclosure of terms, modeled on parliamentary scrutiny in other major democracies, would build legitimacy and sharpen negotiators’ mandate.

China’s rise remains the clearest mirror India has yet to face squarely. Beijing did not win dominance in manufacturing, EVs, batteries, and critical minerals through wealth alone. It did so through purposeful strategy: staged market entry, mandatory technology transfer, and disciplined sequencing of reforms. India has hesitated to study this playbook, preferring lectures on hierarchy over lessons in leverage. That reluctance has already cost decades.

Why does the passive-realist mindset endure? It is emotionally convenient. It excuses leaders from bold choices, analysts from creative thinking, and citizens from demanding more. It naturalises inferiority instead of treating it as a challenge to overcome.

Power is not inherited; it is constructed – through institutional resilience, industrial depth, educational excellence, technological mastery, and strategic patience. Every great power was once weak in these dimensions. Diplomacy’s true purpose is not to reflect the current map of power but to redraw it.

India stands at a civilisational fork. It can learn to live elegantly within hierarchies, or it can use every negotiation as a step toward parity. The first path offers stability; the second offers greatness.

Realism urges us to see power clearly. History urges us to build it relentlessly. The cost of choosing the former is borne not in abstract geopolitics, but in the lives of farmers priced out of markets, workers denied industrial jobs, and families whose life chances remain capped by inherited constraint. A nation that asks its weakest to shoulder the shocks of global asymmetry while its elites harvest the gains is not realistic; it is unjust.

India still has time to choose transformation over accommodation – to negotiate not as a petitioner, but as an architect of the emerging order. The question is no longer what power allows. It is what imagination demands.

Satish Jha is a journalist, co-founder of Hindi national daily Jansatta for the Indian Express Group, formerly Editor of newsweekly Dinamaan of The Times of India Group, an education advocate, and longtime observer of India’s global role. The views expressed here are his own.

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