Is India a Rising Economic and Military Power

The narrative of India as a rising power is largely shaped by the United States viewing India as a counter weight to China says Sandeep Bhardwaj

(Image: courtesy Wikimedia Commons.)

By Sandeep Bhardwaj*

The repeated assertion that India is on its way to becoming a great power has become a cliché. The media is saturated with triumphalist narratives of India’s growing influence and status in the world. A vast majority of policymakers, academics, and analysts across the globe use the term “rising power” to describe India. The claim has wide policy implications, especially in a world anticipating major shifts in the balance of power in the coming decades.

While India’s economic and military growth in the last three decades is indisputable, it is difficult to say if it is growing fast enough to catch up with the great powers. For instance, between 2009 and 2019, India’s gross domestic product (GDP) as a percentage of the United States' GDP only grew from 9% to 13%. During the same period, the economic gap between India and China widened. India’s GDP as a percentage of China’s GDP fell to 20% from 26%. This is not surprising given that India has managed an average annual GDP growth rate of 6.2% since 1991, while China has grown at 9% since its economic reforms in 1978.

Like all geopolitical narratives, proclaiming India to be a “rising power” is shaped by the ideological and material interests of those making the claim. The narrative was not constructed by New Delhi alone. We have to also examine how the United States came to accept and champion this narrative.

India has always been a strategically prominent nation, thanks to its geographic location and enormous population. It maintains a huge military – at least in terms of size of its army, though the quality of its defense equipment is questionable. It acquired latent nuclear capability in 1974. It has boasted one of the 15 largest economies in the world since the 1970s.

The end of the Cold War, between the U.S. and Soviet Union, shoved South Asia to the margins of global geopolitics, bringing India’s significance in American thinking to its nadir in the 1990s. President Bill Clinton’s administration mostly kept nuclear proliferation and India-Pakistan tensions as the focus of its South Asia policy. India was “neither rich enough to bribe, powerful enough to bully, nor principled enough to inspire” other states, declared a 1997 article in Foreign Affairs magazine.

The shift came when the neoconservative ideology swept into power with President George W. Bush’s administration in 2001. The neocons wanted to revise Washington’s approach to India because of two factors: China and the importance the US gave to democracy.

One of the central tenets of the neoconservative ideology was that the global American hegemony, achieved after the fall of the Soviet Union, was of immense value to both the US and the world. Accordingly, the primary goal of the American grand strategy had to be to preserve its preeminence by forestalling the rise of any great power rival. China, with its booming economy, became a central concern for the neocons by the late 1990s. Whereas the Clinton administration sought a friendly relationship with Beijing, hoping that economic liberalization would induce political reforms in China, the neocons believed that Sino-US competition for the control of the international system was inevitable as Chinese power grew.

Conservative think tanks in the U.S., including Cato Institute, Heritage Foundation, and Hoover Institution, urged an India policy reset, as a potential counterweight to China. in 2002, for instance, in a Hoover Institution report, Lloyd Richardson, a Ronald Reagan-era State Department official, argued that the US should aid India’s rise to power because “a strong India raises the price of China’s military build-up and expansionist policies in Asia.” Richardson noted, a “strong India would…send the message that democracy in a developing country is not incompatible with rapid growth and wealth.”

These ideas percolated to Bush’s foreign policy team, whose approach to India was built on a two-way logic. The Bush administration saw India as a “rising power”, and therefore sought to position it as a counterweight to China. At the same time, the administration needed such a power in Asia to counterbalance China. It served Washington’s strategic and ideological interests to be bullish on India. US officials also believed that according greater respect to a status-hungry New Delhi was an easy way to score points with it.

Remarkably, the new policy gained momentum in Washington at a time when India’s rise appeared to be stumbling. The 1999 Kargil War and the 2001–02 stand-off, between India and Pakistan, suggested that New Delhi was still too mired in the morass of subcontinental rivalry to play a global role. Also, between 1997 and 2003, Indian economic growth slowed to 5.2% annually, from 6.75% during the previous five years. The case for a rising India did not appear at its strongest.

Nevertheless, the Bush administration vigorously pursued a new India policy, with the 2005 Indo-US nuclear deal as its centerpiece. While it is often claimed that the deal was first proposed by Indian officials, the idea was circulating in neocon circles long before. The Cato Institute, for instance, had suggested several policy options for Washington to recognize “India’s world power status,” the most radical of which was for the US “to unconditionally accept India’s nuclear status.”

The Bush administration also lobbied the international nuclear institutions – the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Board of Governors and the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) – to accept India as a nuclear state, which amounted to a multilateral recognition of India’s rising status. In 2006. the administration congratulated itself after the nuclear deal by declaring that “India now is poised to shoulder global obligations in cooperation with the United States in a way befitting a major power.”

(Image: courtesy Wikimedia Commons.)

A flurry of writings followed with some variation of the title India as an Emerging Power, many written by major Indian foreign policy experts based in the West, including Sumit Ganguly (2003), Baldev Raj Nayar and T.V. Paul (2003), Ashley Tellis (2005), and Prasenjit Basu, Brahma Chellaney, Parag Khanna, and Sunil Khilnani (2005). Much of the writing was directed towards American policymakers, making a case for closer India-US relationship.

Wall Street also joined the fray with the publication of Goldman Sachs reports on BRICs, which argued that Brazil, Russia, India, and China should be offered a greater say in global economic governance as rapidly emerging economies. A 2003 Goldman report predicted Indian GDP would reach $5.44 trillion in 2025; it is currently $3.88 trillion.

American boosterism for India became pervasive. In 2004, Foreign Policy magazine and the New York Times predicted that Indian economic growth could overtake China. The columnist Thomas Friedman suggested that India should replace France on the United Nations Security Council.

Meanwhile, in India, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led government staked a claim to being a Rising Power. “If someone were to ask me of our biggest accomplishment in the last five years, I would say that today every Indian thinks that he can stand somewhat taller than before,” Deputy Prime Minister L.K. Advani declared in Parliament. During the 2004 elections, BJP launched the India Shining campaign to persuade voters of the country’s rising economic prosperity and enhanced global reputation.

In contrast to the rosy projections by the BJP government, the political opposition pointed to the fundamental contradiction of India’s rising power aspirations: while the country could boast of a growing economy and an enormous military, it was also mired in widespread poverty, rising unemployment, growing fiscal deficit, low per-capita GDP, abysmal human development indices, and elevated Hindu Muslim communal tensions. These internal challenges of India were – and remain to this day – a foil to the “rising power” narrative.

The BJP was ousted from power in 2004, but the narrative of rising India outlasted the BJP government. The Indian economy grew at more than 8% between 2003–04 and 2010–11, before slowing down again. The new Congress Party led government alliance embraced the task of building Brand India with even greater gusto. In 2006, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh dubbed India “the next global superpower.”

Notably, New Delhi’s narrative of rising India differed from Washington’s version in three key ways. First, it was not linked with China. New Delhi did not particularly see itself as a challenger or competitor to Beijing. Second, the Indian narrative was focused on economic growth rather than military power or diplomatic influence. Finally, India was largely uninterested in using its “rising power” status to assume a greater role in managing the international order, belying the expectations of the Bush White House. The only key piece of business India pursued on this front was lobbying for a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, which was an old demand of the Indian government.

In recent years, the gap between American and Indian versions of the story of India’s emergence has narrowed because of several factors. The Indian government – under both BJP and Congress – has proved eager to leverage American boosterism for its own political, diplomatic, and economic purposes.

The early 2000s American boosterism, that helped crystallize the narrative of rising India, also left a legacy. India’s role as a “rising power” today is inextricably linked to its role as a counterweight to China in the foreign affairs discourse. American commentators chide India for not acting as a responsible power for inadequately confronting China or failing to align itself more closely with the US.

The central premise of the neoconservative thesis that India’s rise will inevitably lead to a confrontation with China still holds considerable sway in Washington. Although Sino-Indian relations are marred by some thorny issues, permanent antagonism between the two is not inevitable, despite what the narrative insists.

American boosterism is valuable to India. Indeed, New Delhi’s claim to “rising power” status would carry little weight in the world without endorsement from Washington. However, it is also important to recognize that the US narrative of India’s rise is informed by its own ideological, geopolitical, or commercial interests.

The narrative changes as American priorities change. Now that the Donald Trump White House is turning US foreign policy more capricious and self-centered, the belief that India is a “rising power” is likely to be affected in unpredictable ways.

Sandeep Bhardwaj is a Singapore-based independent researcher on South Asia. He earned a PhD from Ashoka University, Delhi, and a MS from the University of Chicago.

This is an abridged version of an article published in India Forum. Published with permission.