Three Things India Must Do to Regain Global Relevance

For all the hype over the last decade, the reality is that India has become an irrelevant country on the global stage. As Galwan and Operation Sindoor show, the country cannot defend its borders or its citizens, much less provide security and stability to the region.

On security matters of global significance, such as Gaza or Ukraine, it has no clearly stated position and is not a significant party in any major coalition, far less a leader in something like the (now largely defunct) Non-Aligned Movement or the G77. It is pathetically grateful to receive last minute invitations to the G7, where it says nothing of significance, nor is expected to.

While the advertising for the G20 remains plastered across the country, there is no important institution where anybody heeds Indian talking points. The Quad remains neither fowl nor fish, SAARC is moribund, and BIMSTEC just a name. In BRICS and the SCO, India is largely seen as the ‘running dog of US imperialism.’ The idea that it could become a Permanent Member of the UN Security Council on par with the P5 countries is so laughable that even the Indian government no longer talks about it. 

Despite everything, the Indian economy is chugging along, although who it is chugging along for remains an open question. With no census since 2011, the statistics we are presented with boggle the mind. One will say, “We’re one of the most unequal countries in the world, and poverty has been all but eliminated!” and another that, “It takes decades for the richest 5% to own a house”.

The shape of the Indian economy and its impact on the populace is thoroughly enveloped by thick smog that lifts once in a while to show millions of desperate migrant workers far from home or thousands applying for the most menial government jobs. Most importantly, there is little in the way of pioneering innovation – things like the Green Revolution or the White Revolution (for all their long-term challenges).

Our successes are for the few, whether green energy – read: large solar plants which are, in effect, a way for huge corporate entities to grab power as they are the only ones for which the state facilitates the removal of local populations from their land – or green hydrogen, all we are doing is implementing what has already been innovated. 

Vivek Kaul has an excellent piece on the structural weaknesses that has led to the current moment in the Indian economy, and why, when Trump came to bluster and blow it all down with his ruinous tariff war against the world, we were left exposed. It is worth noting that these problems have been decades in the making, but that does not leave the current regime off the hook.

At some point it drank the Kool Aid – that the US was selling for its own purposes of India – of being the next great power, able to challenge China, and now – after a humiliating spectacle on the LoC – the prime minister is heading off to Beijing in the hope of some succour in a world that the US has wilfully turned upside down. It should be obvious that if Beijing does help, it will be on its own terms, not India’s. 

It would be easy to simply say, “I told you so.” Dozens of people have written hundreds of articles that India was becoming too dependent on the US, that it was hopelessly exposed to a global economy in which it was a minor actor, and that abandoning the neighbourhood for the illusion of ‘global leadership’ was a catastrophic choice.

There is no need to repeat those points. Instead, at this moment of crisis, India needs a clear pathway forward, working on its strengths (real ones, not the propaganda of an out-of-touch government past its expiry date), and focussing on the needs of its populace.

Three key issues

There are three issues on which the Indian government can and should show leadership. They involve its traditional strengths, its largest working population, and in creating an economy of the future. By focussing on these aspects, India has the opportunity to show leadership and build coalitions in both its neighbourhood as well as key countries.

While it is unlikely to offer a short-term answer to our current tariff problem, it may help lay the groundwork for future stability as well as help India become a part of a coalition that is able to face erratic actions together instead of being as isolated as it is right now.

The traditional strength that India has is its trained and educated population. Although far from ideal, simply by its size and the desire of its population for a better future for its children, India produces a vast pool of capable labour – both highly educated as well as deeply hardworking – that props up industries in developed countries as well as builds and maintains much of the Gulf countries.

Unable to provide enough jobs, India has largely coasted on the returns these provide as remittances to the economy while patting itself on its back when some person of Indian origin becomes a CEO somewhere. Despite some efforts at reaching out to the NRI community, India has played almost no role in the intensely political conversation around migration in much of the developed world.

It has negotiated some trade agreements with countries like the UK, but as the producer of an enormously valuable resource – trained and willing labour – it offers no solution, no argument, on any of this. Given that migration is a massive issue for all of South Asia and much of Africa and South America, there is a leadership vacuum for billions of people, one comparable to the post-colonial world after World War II, where India carved out a challenging and impactful role.

This will not be easy, and it will require bravery, flexibility, and coalition building, things that India did just before and after Independence, and which it needs to do again.

At the same time, India has to focus on providing jobs within India, or to make those jobs more rewarding. The area to focus on has to be agriculture, which supports about half of our population. The idea that we could replicate the East Asian tigers and China, and transfer most of this labour into industrial productivity has been failing for a long time.

The reasons for this are complex and would require an essay, or several books, of its own to explain. But suffice to say, instead of trying to make agriculture merely a funnel towards corporate industry, it has to be accorded the attention that its impact on the economic security of hundreds of millions of Indians demands. Instead, it is treated as an embarrassment. No newspaper or television channel devotes even a dedicated reporter on the issue.

Prem Shankar Jha and Michael B. McElroy have written one recent book dealing with part of this, but almost nothing else exists in the public space. Whether one agrees or disagrees with their conclusions, the fact that they are almost alone in the field is a disgrace and a disaster.

This aspect naturally segues into the last, most ambitious, aspect of what India needs to deal with, and help create, which is an economy of the future. Instead of following beaten paths to dead ends, India needs to be a place which imagines an economy that is more robust and fair than the one we have.

Part of that answer lies in re-examining our agricultural policies. Some of it requires confronting the changing water cycles and plummeting water availability, which impacts everything from energy generation, to infrastructure, to social exclusion/inclusion and health. All of it requires admitting that the current systems of wealth creation are burning up the world.

Low-cost technologies that can be accessible to the median Indian population – which earns a sixth of the global average – are the ultimate bottom-of-the-pyramid opportunity, but only if India is ready and able to gestate them. China has done incredibly well by staking out the future with its EV, solar, and other technologies, and in doing so, is increasingly capturing the market in both developed and developing countries.

But that is only the tip of the iceberg. India is following in China’s wake, adopting solar and even electric three-wheelers, but it is not – as yet – inventing or even talking about anything new, which it developed here, for itself, for the world. 

The challenge is not money. We have billionaires aplenty in a very poor country, and none of them seem to be developing products designed for the majority of their fellow Indians, only for the very successful few. In the meanwhile, the government peddles the dream of India becoming a ‘developed country’ decades into the future.

The challenge we face is of imagination. Just as with Independence, we knew we could not go back, but the forward we pushed for was something imagined, a democratic country built together by all of us. The economy of the future, the India of the future, must be something as creative, not some derivative of the ‘developed countries’ whose economic and political systems are coming apart before our very eyes.

Anyway, if all we are doing is trying to catch up with others, why should anybody bother to listen or cooperate with us? They can also see the countries we are trying to imitate – in fact, there are more than 130 countries with a per capita GDP higher than ours, all of them would be better than us to partner with if that is the sum of our imagination. 

India has to dream bigger; it has to harness our strengths and take stances that benefit the largest parts of our system, and it has to do so while offering a better option of the future than is currently on display. It should surprise nobody that things that will benefit India in this regard – tackling migration, dealing with agriculture, building a climate-adaptive economy – are ones that are naturally beneficial to South Asia at large.

We have a natural way to work forward in the region by our very example of success – as we have done before – and to learn from the successes of our neighbours. In doing so, we lay the groundwork of partnerships that can span continents, where we are not such easy targets for any powerful country that wishes to break the rules of the system at the whims of a power-crazed leader. It is a pathway that can deliver us friends and allies that we desperately need, and who need us. The only question is whether our political class has the wherewithal to dream this big, and make the sacrifices needed to try and achieve some of it. 

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