What India wants: global influence and freedom of choice

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s third successive term in office started in August on a subdued note when his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) failed to procure a third consecutive full majority and Modi had to form a coalition government with support from allied political parties. But that assessment of a constrained Modi with a limited mandate has now collapsed after the BJP managed to win a crucial state election in October at Haryana, where the growth-engine city of Gurugram (earlier Gurgaon), strewn with major offices of the likes of Samsung, Google, Microsoft, Cognizant, and IBM, is located.

This has brought back the business-as-usual mood in Modi’s government which is not shy of declaring its ambition of securing its ‘rightful place’ in the world. While Indian leaders have proclaimed the country’s importance in geopolitics ever since independence from British rule in 1947, with Modi there is a stark and significant difference. For most of the time after independence, India was an impoverished country with a mainly illiterate population. Modi, though, runs the fifth-largest economy in the world with around $700 billion in foreign exchange reserves, nuclear weapons, hypersonic missiles, the fourth strongest military, the biggest digital payments platform, and a declared intention of becoming the third-largest economy surpassing Japan and Germany, and behind only China and the United States by the turn of the century.

Read also: India’s decarbonization and its wider economic goals

The case for India’s inclusion into the United Nations Security Council, argues the Modi government, has never been stronger. In this worldview parts of the West are holding onto a world order which puts the West at the top of the pecking order and India still among ‘developing countries’. The country that has become a net provider of aid rather than a net recipient, which was its status for most of its independent history, no longer identifies as a country looking for assistance. It is increasingly keen on highlighting its own contributions to other countries from sending vaccines around the world, to supplying assistance, in both cash and kind, to countries like Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, and supplying its fintech especially in digital payments around the world.

Modi’s India is also keen to underline that it is no pushover. Despite considerable pressure from the US and others since the war started between Russia and Ukraine, India refused to break ties with Russia. Instead, it emphasized that doing so would lead to an increase in fuel prices which would be calamitic for its economy (as it was for neighbouring Bangladesh), and continued to buy and refine Russian oil. Moscow has been able to withstand pressure also because a large amount of the refined fuel was, in turn, bought by European states, which were, at the same time and in tandem with America, pushing India to stop buying Russian oil. India feels it should call out this kind of dichotomous pressure. As Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar is fond of restating when the question of ‘which side is India on’ comes up, India is on its own side.

When pushed aggressively on the Russia question, Indian officials point out that India does not expect Western assistance when it faces off China on its borders, and does not waste time pointing out that for all the talk of confronting authoritarian China, most of the West, and especially Europe is happy expanding business with the Middle Kingdom to their benefit. In the same manner, India argues that by sidelining Russia, an ‘all-weather friend’, it would only push Putin deeper into an embrace with Xi Jinping and India will be left facing the strategic combination of two major nuclear powers with strategic access to its borders. New Delhi also watches warily as Russia is blocked out of global payments systems like SWIFT and officials wonder if this sort of thing could be done to other countries which are not part of the Global North.

Modi’s argument is that his country is indeed a natural ally of the West, especially of America, considering India’s biggest strategic challenge is China at its doorstep, but this is not a zero-sum game. Its size and strategic position means that it must be free to talk to and work with everyone, and has no desire to be a vassal ally.

Modi’s India realizes that the pressure to overtly align with the West on contentious issues will grow as the country’s economy and military power grow. The recent conflict with Canada on the issue of shooters allegedly recruited by Indian intelligence to eliminate diaspora separatists from the Indian state of Punjab plotting the breakaway of an independent ‘Khalistan’ territory carved out of India, and threatening to kill Indian diplomats in Canada, has raised suspicions that some of the controversy is a payback for not completely aligning with the West on the war in Ukraine. The Indian government sees some of this pressure as containment strategies, and calls out what it sees as Western fear of another rising Asian billion-people strong economy which is not in ‘the Western camp’.

India feels that Western fears are unjustified. The country, with 22 official languages, nearly 80 per cent Hindus but also with more than 200 million Muslims, 30 million Christians and countless others, and a vaunted record of peaceful transition of power, is not going to become another one-party state like China. After all, Modi’s somewhat decreased mandate in his third term shows the reverse of declining democracy, say Indian officials. A former foreign secretary Kanwal Sibal recently told me in a conversation that the West should remember that India has no ‘hundred years of humiliation’ narrative like China. Modi and his government argue that the country’s rising nationalism is more decolonial rather than anti-West.

Read also: Nationalism with Indian characteristics: the politics of a cultural revival

It is not a surprise that India prefers to call the expanding BRICS grouping of countries ‘non-West’ rather than ‘anti-West’. It remains one of the world’s biggest purchasers of military material and ammunition from the West. Recently, even as India and US tussled over the Khalistan issue (as a member of the Punjab separatist movement allegedly plotted to kill and American citizen), India bought predator drones and other equipment worth $4 billion from the US.

The American economist C. Fred Bergsten once spoke of a world dominated by a ‘G2’ – America and China. India sees the future as a ‘G3’ – America, China, and India, and not necessarily in that order.