Hindustan Times ST (Mumbai) - Live
Is this really India’s moment in the world?
In 2023, India is chairing the Group of 20 (G20). This has triggered talk of “India’s moment”. The slogan makes a satisfying conclusion to the recovery narrative from the Covid-19 crisis. It reaffirms the global significance of India’s supposed rise. A sceptic might question whether there is more to this than hype. After all, in dollar terms, India’s economy is still middle-sized, just larger than that of the United Kingdom (UK). When the going gets rough, the rupee slides along with its emerging market peers. The chair role at G20 has no real authority. The dominant global powers are China and the United States (US). Nothing has changed about that.
But grant for a moment that it was true, that this is, in fact, “India’s moment”. Does it not bring to mind the old saying, “Be careful what you wish for?” What, after all, are the circumstances that are pushing India to the centre stage?
The Ukraine war has drawn a lot of diplomatic attention to India, the putative head of a new non-aligned faction. Delegations from all sides have streamed to New Delhi. But is that a role to celebrate? Of course, every country has to pursue its own interests, but there is also a point where you have to reckon with the facts on the ground and honour the norms in which you too have a stake. Russia has repeatedly and outrageously violated international law. India’s abstentions in the United Nations do not make it look strong. It should not act as though it feared either losing its special relationship with Russia or being suborned by the US. It should vote on the merits of the case.
Meanwhile, the disruption caused to the world economy has ripped through the South Asian economy. India has proven relatively resilient, especially in comparison to Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Myanmar. But to think of this as a win is to indulge in zero-sum thinking. What would really benefit India is to be the commercial, financial, and industrial hub of a strong and dynamic region. The opposite is currently the case.
India has also emerged as a key player in Quad, but once again, what makes that diplomatic configuration so important is a dangerous stand-off between the US and China. It is a limited security partnership with no guarantees and no economic counterpart. It is far from obvious whether it really serves India’s interest to align too closely with it.
India is an acknowledged player in global public health. It was crucial to the global vaccine response to Covid-19. But that too was the result of a collective failure to contain a runaway pandemic. And when the call came in 2021, Delhi was torn between supplying its own needs and honouring the commitments it had made to the global vaccination programme. The Serum Institute — a global champion though it may be — could not meet both demands, at least initially.
India was bulking large at the Conference of the Parties (COP27) climate talks in Egypt, as it did in Glasgow in 2021. But once again, we have to ask why. The sobering truth is that India is vital to climate diplomacy because we are so close to exhausting the carbon budget that even developing countries have to be fully enrolled in the sustainable energy push. The familiar path to industrialisation fired by coal, oil and gas would promise collective ruin. And India cannot pretend that this is someone else’s problem. The heatwave and flooding of 2022 give notice of just how vulnerable the subcontinent is. It is not just the COP process that needs India. India desperately needs global cooperation to stave off the looming climate disaster.
Rather than a national triumph, the claim — that this is “India’s moment” — could almost seem like a sardonic joke that history is playing at the expense of what will soon be the world’s most populous country. India is huge, but it finds itself thrust into the centre of world affairs when it is still struggling to reach basic development objectives with regard to health, poverty alleviation, and education. In good years, its economy grows fast, but growth rates are not the same as actual prosperity, where India still lags behind not only rich countries such as China, but other developing countries such as Bangladesh and Vietnam.
Apart from its sheer bulk, what are the tools that India can deploy as a global power? Its margin for investment at home is slim enough, let alone abroad. Global crises give India the chance to gain leverage by balancing, but that is not the same as leadership, and it burns goodwill. Assume instead that Delhi settles for the role of a constructive facilitator. What is the stage on which it would act? The institutional fabric for multilateral cooperation is fraying. India has inherited the G20 chair, but at this point, with the US, China and Russia at odds, the real question is, what is the G20?
In truth, in the current conjuncture, chasing prominence on the world stage for its own sake can be counterproductive. A multipolar and divided world no longer offers the kind of arena in which the US and the erstwhile Soviet Union once strutted their stuff. The Americans still like to talk about being Number 1, but even they no longer know what this means. China has huge weight in world affairs, but it will never exercise the kind of global reach that the US or the erstwhile Soviet Union once did. The huge investment surge of the One Belt One Road initiative was never as strategic as was often imagined, especially in India. And it has now run its course. Beijing no doubt aims for regional sway and that matters for India, but its global ambition remains limited. It does not have forward positions in the Caribbean or the Arctic circle, as the Soviets once did.
Rather than the old game of Great Power competition, it makes far more sense to focus relentlessly on domestic development, investment, education, and building a sustainable future. In this regard, India’s renewable energy push, aiming to install 500 GW of non-fossil energy by 2030 is truly a way of taking a global lead. The fact that India received 10 times more offers to build solar-generating capacity this year than any other country is a great start. The new technologies of the renewable energy future offer India a chance to leapfrog the industrial models that it has so far failed effectively to compete in.
But technology and economic leadership matter little if they are not embedded in a broader social settlement that allows everyone, women and men, minorities and majorities, long-time residents and migrants, partisans of different parties and adherents of different cultural norms to coexist and flourish, if not in close or intimate proximity, then at least as members of a single political community. It is a lesson that is coming home too hard for America. It surely applies to India too.