By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

How New Delhi’s Grand Strategy Thwarts Its Grand Ambitions

Since the turn of the century, the United States has sought to help India rise as a great power. During George W. Bush’s presidency, Washington agreed to a major deal with New Delhi that offered support for India’s civilian nuclear program despite the country’s controversial development of nuclear weapons. Under the Obama administration, the United States and India began defense industrial cooperation that aimed to boost the latter’s military capabilities and help it project power. During President Donald Trump’s first term, the United States started sharing sensitive intelligence with India and made it eligible to receive advanced technologies previously reserved only for American allies; under President Joe Biden, Washington gave New Delhi sophisticated fighter jet engine technology. Each of these recent administrations deepened diplomatic, technological, and military cooperation with India, making good on Bush’s promise “to help India become a major world power in the twenty-first century.”

The rationale for this pledge was simple. Washington wanted to transcend the rancor of the Cold War era that had divided the two great democracies. With the demise of the Soviet Union, India and the United States no longer had reason to be on opposite sides. Furthermore, they were increasingly tied by deep people-to-people connections, as Indian immigrants played a larger role in shaping the American economy, and New Delhi’s post–Cold War economic reforms invited American firms and capital to Indian markets. Beneath these shifts lay a deeper geopolitical opportunity: Indian and U.S. officials recognized that they had many shared interests, including combating Islamist terrorism and, more importantly, addressing the dangers of a rising China while protecting the liberal international order. Washington correctly concluded that a stronger India would make for a stronger United States.

But India and the United States are not aligned on all issues. New Delhi does not want a world in which Washington is perpetually the sole superpower. Instead, it seeks a multipolar international system in which India would rank as a genuine great power. It aims to restrain not just China—the near-term challenge—but also any country that would aspire to singular, hegemonic dominance, including the United States.

India believes that multipolarity is the key to both global peace and its rise. It obsessively guards its strategic autonomy, eschewing formal alliances and maintaining ties with Western adversaries such as Iran and Russia, even as it has grown closer to the United States. This behavior is intended to help advance a multipolar international order. But it may not be effective or even realistic.

Although India has grown in economic strength over the last two decades, it is not growing fast enough to balance China, let alone the United States, even in the long term. It will become a great power, in terms of relative GDP, by midcentury, but not a superpower. In military terms, it is the most significant conventional power in South Asia, but here, too, its advantages over its local rival are not enormous: in fighting in May, Pakistan used Chinese-supplied defense systems to shoot down Indian aircraft. With China on one side and an adversarial Pakistan on the other, India must always fear the prospect of an unpalatable two-front war. Meanwhile, at home, the country is shedding one of its main sources of strength—its liberal democracy—by embracing Hindu nationalism. This evolution could undermine India’s rise by intensifying communal tensions and exacerbating problems with its neighbors, forcing it to redirect security resources inward to the detriment of outward power projection. The country’s illiberal pivot further undermines the rules-based international order that has served it so well.

India’s relative weakness, its yearning for multipolarity, and its illiberal trajectory mean that it will have less global influence than it desires even when it can justifiably consider itself a great power. Becoming the fourth (or possibly the third) largest economy in the world should herald a dramatic expansion of a country’s clout, but that will not be the case for India. Even by 2047—the centenary of its independence—it may still have to rely on foreign partners to ward off Chinese power. And because of its perennial discomfort with alliances, or even with close partnerships, securing external support could be challenging, especially as the United States grows more transactional in its foreign policy—and also if Washington comes to fear New Delhi as a competitor. In the coming decades, India will grow undeniably stronger but less able to wield that strength in meaningful ways, with less global sway.

 

Great Expectations

For most of the Cold War, India’s economic performance fell short of its inherent potential. Although the country overcame the stagnation that marked the century before its independence, it grew at just around 3.5 percent per year from 1950 to 1980, far less than many other developing countries. India’s average growth rates improved to about 5.5 percent during the 1980s, after the government began modest economic reforms. But the pace of growth remained lackluster compared with other Asian states.

In 1991, Indian Prime Minister Narasimha Rao and his finance minister, Manmohan Singh, took an ax to the country’s controlled economy, dismantling the so-called License Raj, which had stifled India’s economic growth through excessive regulations, production controls, and closed domestic markets. As a result, the economy finally began to pick up in the mid-1990s. Since then, India’s GDP has grown at about 6.5 percent annually—a remarkably long and unprecedented period of sustained growth. India has consequently been able to lift millions of people out of poverty and rejoin the international economy as an important engine of global growth. It is one of the main reasons why the United States sees India as an important partner and a potential counterweight to China.

But no matter how impressive India’s more recent performance has been, the country has fallen short of China’s reform-era achievements. Since Beijing opened up its economy in the late 1970s, Chinese GDP has grown at close to nine percent annually, reaching double digits 15 times between 1979 and 2023, according to World Bank data. The same figures show that, by contrast, India has never chalked up double-digit GDP growth. As a result, China’s economy went from being roughly the same size as India’s in 1980 to almost five times its size today.

Beijing has also used its wealth to become far more influential than New Delhi. It has built a larger, more sophisticated military. It has more deeply integrated itself into the Indo-Pacific region in ways that enhance its economic heft and provide it with enormous—sometimes choking—political influence. This helps explain why New Delhi, despite its often confident rhetoric, is skittish about confronting Beijing unless pressed, even when it is backed by Washington.

Indians, of course, are not happy about this disadvantage. Many of the country’s officials hope that, in the years ahead, they will match their northern neighbor. The Chinese economy, after all, has slowed considerably over the last decade: China is now growing at between four and five percent annually on average, behind India’s pace. The Chinese economy is buffeted by multiple challenges that could keep growth rates down, such as a real estate crisis, high local debt, and increasing constraints on its market access to the West. Most importantly, it faces significant demographic headwinds. After years of slow growth, China’s population declined for the first time in 2022, and it continues to age rapidly. The country’s diminishing workforce further imperils its longer-term economic prospects and, by extension, its power. India, meanwhile, still has a growing population, despite declining fertility rates. It will possess a large cohort of working-age adults for some time to come.

But China’s slowdown does not guarantee that India will catch up. Based on current trends, the Indian economy is unlikely to match its Chinese counterpart before the middle of the century, if at all. To become a genuine peer of China, India would need to grow consistently at eight percent per year over the next 25 years while China grows at a glacial two percent. This is unlikely to happen. India has not developed a significant manufacturing sector (and probably will not because it lacks the requisite comparative advantage), clings to excessive protectionism that impedes exports, and invests too little in research and development. It lags in overall technological proficiency, despite having many excellent technology companies. It has not yet invested sufficiently in improving its large human capital.

India will therefore likely grow at an annual rate of six percent over the next two decades, its average annual rate during the last decade, based on World Bank data through 2023. If that happens, and China grows at just two percent per year, on average, New Delhi’s standing vis-à-vis Beijing would certainly improve: by midcentury, India’s GDP would be a little more than half that of China. But China could still achieve average annual GDP growth higher than two percent in the coming decades. For all its challenges, China still has enormous economic advantages relative to India, including a literate, skilled, and comparatively healthy population; greater technological proficiency; and larger capital stocks. It has made substantial investments in critical technologies—such as artificial intelligence, robotics, energy storage, and information and communications—which could improve growth despite its demographic constraints. If China grows even a little faster, say at three percent annually, it could end up with an economy that is closer to three times as large as India’s, even if India grows at six percent.

Long-range projections of economic growth are admittedly difficult to make. Yet if past is prelude, India will become a great power by the middle of this century, but it will be the weakest of a quartet that includes China, the United States, and the European Union. It will not be on par with China. And it will certainly not be on par with the United States.

 

The Indian Way

If New Delhi wants to constrain Beijing, it will therefore need Washington. None of the other Indo-Pacific powers, not even Australia or Japan, will be strong enough by 2050 to compensate for the United States. The EU might have the collective economic and military capacity to do so, but its members are not threatened by China in the same way that the Indo-Pacific states are. New Delhi and Washington then will—indeed, must—continue cooperating in the years ahead.

But those hoping for a boundless friendship will be disappointed. Despite its weaknesses, India will not settle for any alliance with the United States, and there will be limits on their partnership. That is because India does not want to be part of any collective defense arrangements. Instead, it will zealously guard its non-allied status.

India’s desire to avoid formal coalitions is partly the product of its colonial past. The country’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, pledged that India would never become a “camp follower” of any great power, given that it had spent centuries suffering under British rule. But the country’s attitude is equally motivated by the conviction that a rising power must never do anything in the interim to compromise the freedom of action it will enjoy once it has ascended. Indian policymakers fear that accepting the constraints that come with alliances, particularly in coalitions that include more powerful states, would not only lead to the country’s subordination but also limit its ability to maneuver between the various geopolitical divisions in the international system. At heart, New Delhi has realist inclinations: it does not trust other states to act out of anything other than self-interest. It assumes that it will receive external support only if the donor benefits appropriately. To the degree that the United States and others have an interest in balancing Chinese power, India expects their support without having to make any onerous compromises to secure such assistance.

With this assessment of the world in mind, New Delhi will keep trying to push the international order toward multipolarity even if that is not what Washington wants. Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee articulated this ambition in 2004, when he declared, “India does not believe that unipolarity is a state of equilibrium in today’s world.” India, he insisted, would work to build a “cooperative, multipolar world which accommodates the legitimate aspirations and interests of all its component poles.” Indian leaders across the political spectrum share this vision, believing that multipolarity is the natural state of the world, that the international system is entering a state of multipolarity, or that multipolarity is needed for global peace because it ensures that no single country can impose its will on others.

Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar argues in his 2020 book, The India Way: Strategies for an Uncertain World, that New Delhi should advance its “national interests by identifying and exploiting opportunities created by global contradictions” to reap the most benefits from as many ties as possible.” A unipolar order undermines this strategy because it denies New Delhi the opportunity to play one pole against another. A bipolar order is more favorable; throughout the Cold War, for example, India played the Soviet Union against the United States to benefit itself. But multipolarity is best. After all, a multipolar world would have many more cleavages and affinities that India could use to its advantage.

In practice, this means that India pursues eclectic partnerships with individual countries and groupings of countries, even if some of those partners have strikingly anti-American agendas. New Delhi often serves as a moderating force in these forums, to the benefit of the United States. But sometimes, even as India has deepened its ties with the United States bilaterally, it acts to constrain U.S. power in the larger global arena. India has, for instance, pushed back against the United States on issues such as climate policy, trade preferences, data sovereignty, e-commerce rules, and global governance. Even in the realm of high politics, India has opposed U.S. sanctions on friendly third countries, championed the so-called global South in its campaign against Western domination, and preserved its traditional ties with countries such as Iran and Russia, despite the latter’s appalling war in Ukraine. India has even sought to maintain stable relations with China, cooperating whenever possible, to preserve a modicum of peace across their shared border. Unlike Washington, New Delhi cannot tolerate violent oscillations in its bilateral relationship with Beijing and, depending on the future trajectory of U.S. policy, may edge closer to China as circumstances demand.

So far, however, these Indian efforts have done little to make the world any more multipolar than it was. If economic trends continue, genuine multipolarity will remain elusive as China and the United States will be in a class by themselves by the middle of the century. The world, then, will be bipolar. And should that happen, India may find itself in an uncomfortable position. It will frustrate Washington by remaining ensconced in non-Western forums, such as the BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, only to find that Beijing has more influence in those groups and among many non-Western countries than does New Delhi. Thus far, India has escaped this dilemma because successive U.S. presidential administrations have deliberately overlooked these dalliances. But a more jaundiced government, like the one currently led by Trump, might be tempted to penalize India for this behavior. For example, New Delhi’s effort to conduct some of its bilateral trades in local currencies rather than the U.S. dollar, although intended to immunize India against U.S. sanctions on third countries, could provoke a nationalist U.S. administration to limit cooperation with India.

Even if India avoids such retaliation, the country should be wary of multipolarity for other reasons. In a genuinely multipolar system, New Delhi would benefit less from the collective goods the United States supplies, such as protecting the sea lanes in the Indian Ocean. To compensate, India would have to bear larger financial and security burdens than it has been willing to thus far. It might also fail to balance against Beijing, should the other two great powers (the United States and the EU) decide to leave India—the weakest in the mix—to fend for itself. Under multipolarity, India could end up worse off than it is under American unipolarity or than it might be under U.S.-Chinese bipolarity. As a result, India’s current approach—seeking continued American support for itself while promoting a multipolar system that would limit Washington’s power—is both counterproductive and unwise.

 

Tyranny of the Majority

India’s qualities as a great power will not just be characterized by its approach to other states. They will also be defined by its internal politics. And here, the country is experiencing a profound—and dangerous—shift.

For decades, India has been a spectacular democratic success. Since winning independence in 1947, the country has had 18 national elections. The average voter turnout across these contests has been 60 percent, and turnout has increased with time. More pertinently, Indian citizens have enjoyed universal adult franchise from the very beginning, irrespective of their gender, caste, or economic status. They have also enjoyed vital fundamental rights to freedom, equality, and religion, enforceable via judicial action. The government did suspend these rights from 1975 to 1977, when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi infamously declared an “emergency” that let her rule as a dictator and imprison her opponents. But the Indian people resisted her authoritarianism and threw her out of office when she called an election in the hope of ratifying her dictatorship.

What made Indian democracy especially remarkable, however, is that it thrived in conditions in which democracy typically fails. Political science research has shown that democratic success is strongly correlated with a country’s level of per capita income. Most Third World states, for example, that were born as democracies lapsed into dictatorships or became autocratic shortly after independence. But not India. Despite being poor, India’s democracy thrived as its leaders managed the country’s political fortunes through open competition.

The country’s success at staying democratic is attributable, in part, to its constitution. This document has multiple provisions guaranteeing respect for all people. To guard against the tyranny of the majority, for example, India defined citizenship entirely by the principle of jus soli—place of birth—rather than by ascriptive markers such as religion, wealth, or race. It also offered minorities meaningful legal protections, including the right to manage their religious and charitable institutions, beyond the broader freedom offered to all citizens to freely profess, practice, and propagate their religion. The country also created a federal system in which multiple linguistic groups, for instance, were afforded their own states in order to protect the country’s cultural diversity. India’s constitution set deliberate limits on executive power both by empowering the legislature and the judiciary at the federal and provincial levels to serve as checks and balances and by creating space for civil society wherein citizens could tangibly express their freedoms of speech, assembly, and association, among others.

Trump and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the White House, Washington, D.C., February 2025

This is what made India’s political system not merely democratic but also fundamentally liberal. As Nehru put it, the country’s founders sought “to create a just society by employing just means.” They believed, and proved, that a poor country could zealously protect individual rights and reject authoritarianism’s promise of faster economic growth.

But now, India is distancing itself from these origins. Unlike the India of the Cold War, which remained robustly liberal even when underperforming economically, India today, despite being more economically successful, has been markedly tainted by illiberalism and authoritarianism. Its long tradition of secular politics is now eclipsed by Hindu nationalism, whose proponents believe India to be the land of Hindus and that its religious minorities are, at best, second-class citizens. This ideology, called Hindutva, was repudiated and marginalized by the country’s founders. But it never disappeared, and since the 1990s it has been resurrected in Indian politics, winning power for the first time late in that decade through its incarnation in the Bharatiya Janata Party and then more decisively from 2014 onward, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi swept into office. This ascendance has precipitated policies that have alienated India’s almost 200 million Muslims and nearly 30 million Christians. Along the way, the BJP has attempted to reabsorb previously alienated lower-caste Hindus to create a unified Hindu voting bloc that, collectively, numbers almost one billion people even as Hindu nationalists have sought to promote the idea that many of India’s other minority faiths—notably Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism—are Hinduism in disguise. All this is part of the larger belief that only adherents belonging to religious traditions that arose in the Indian subcontinent are authentically Indian.

This attack on the secular ideals of the Indian constitution has also been accompanied by rising authoritarianism. This drift has not manifested through rewriting the constitution itself, although some have voiced the idea of replacing it entirely. Instead, the change has occurred through the deliberate erosion of fundamental norms related to belonging and through the weaponization of once-neutral institutions. Harking back to the emergency, Modi’s government has deputized the tax authorities and other instruments of law to intimidate India’s opposition parties, civil society, regulatory institutions, and some opposition-ruled states.

Yet Indian democracy is not dead. The country still has competitive elections, and there are faint signs that it could liberalize again. The BJP lost its outright majority in parliament during the last national elections, and it now has to govern in a coalition. It has, in fact, never won a popular vote majority; it secured parliamentary majorities thanks to the country’s first-past-the-post electoral system. Despite the party’s best efforts, Hindutva does not appear to enjoy the allegiance of most Indian voters. The opposition still governs a third of India’s states. Indian liberals are beleaguered, but they continue to resist the Hindutva tide. And occasionally, the judiciary and other adjudicating bodies still push back on the executive’s overreach. The question of whether India will be an illiberal great power thus remains open.

But if the country’s politics do not revert, it will have serious consequences for the world. India would cease to be an exemplar of liberal democracy at a time when the world desperately needs one. It would not enhance the liberal international order, which promises both peaceful politics and economic prosperity and which has come under growing assault. In fact, if both India and the United States end up being persistently illiberal democracies, the postwar order—which has served both countries well, despite their current complaints to the contrary—would be severely damaged. Persistent illiberalism in both erstwhile liberal democracies would strengthen similar political forces in other countries. In a speech in New Delhi in 2015, President Barack Obama presciently declared, “If America shows itself as an example of its diversity and yet the capacity to live together and work together in common effort, in common purpose; if India, as massive as it is, with so much diversity, so many differences is able to continually affirm its democracy, that is an example for every other country on Earth.” Today, both the United States and India seem intent on failing this test.

An illiberal India is also likely to be less powerful. The BJP’s policies have polarized India along ideological and religious lines, and the unresolved issues about how India’s changing demography is to be represented in parliament threaten to exacerbate regional and linguistic divisions. This makes India look increasingly like the highly divided United States. Polarization has been bad enough for Americans, hobbling their institutions and fueling democratic decay. But it will be even worse for India, where the state and society are much weaker. Polarization, for example, could intensify the armed rebellions against New Delhi that have long been underway, creating opportunities for outside powers to sow chaos within India’s borders. Those conflicts could also spill over into India’s neighborhood, as the ideological animus against Muslims exacerbates tensions with both Bangladesh and Pakistan. Polarization would also increase India’s internal security burdens, consuming resources that New Delhi needs to project influence abroad. And even if polarization does not create more internal troubles, it will undermine New Delhi’s efforts to mobilize its population in accumulating national power.

 

Power Failure

The combination of moderate economic growth, the persistent quest for partnerships with all states but privileged relationships with none, and growing illiberalism within the country make for an India whose global influence will fall short of its increasing material strength. Although India will become the third or fourth largest economy globally, its lagging development indicators imply that its relatively large population will neither enjoy the standard of living nor contribute proportionately to the production of national power that its counterparts do in China, the United States, and Europe. Even as its economy grows inarguably larger, India will still face tremendous challenges of deprivation and grievance that could threaten the country’s social stability and national power.

If India’s continuing growth also remains tied largely to domestic market expansion but not international integration—as China’s has been, in striking contrast—its ability to grow faster will inevitably be constrained. Equally, India will lose the opportunity to influence the choices of countries in its wider neighborhood. Scholars have often argued that the minimum characteristic of a great power is the ability to decisively shape outcomes in the region beyond its immediate frontiers. India today, unfortunately, fails this test in both East Asia and the Middle East, and the situation will probably not change dramatically in the decades ahead, given the likely activities of China and the United States in these regions. The imperatives of tying India’s economic fortunes more closely to the transformations occurring in these regions are therefore incontestable, especially because India already faces strong impediments to translating its natural dominance within South Asia into lasting local hegemony.

Because even if India grows at a rate of six percent over the next two decades or so, it will be eclipsed by China in Asia. India will need to rely on external balancing, that is, cooperating comprehensively with foreign powers to keep China at bay. The best candidate here remains the United States because it will probably still be the most powerful country in the international system in the coming decades, no matter its domestic dysfunction.

Working at a garment factory in Tiruppur, India, April 2025

New Delhi and Washington have made important strides together toward balancing Chinese power in recent years, but India’s diffidence about a tight partnership with the United States frustrates this outcome. The economic ties between the two are not as strong as they could be given the countries’ natural complementarities. But the biggest constraint is India’s preoccupation with promoting multipolarity through multi-alignment, which presumes that India will become a meaningful peer of China, the United States, and Europe sometime soon and, consequently, will be able to balance China on its own.

Not only is this prospect nowhere in sight, but it also prevents the crafting of a genuine cooperative defense against China. This deficiency would be tolerable if India could expand its military capabilities sufficiently to neutralize the Chinese threat independently and to assist other Indo-Pacific states threatened by China. For the foreseeable future, India will find it hard to achieve either objective. Given the current and likely future gap in GDP with China, India will struggle to compete with its northern neighbor when it comes to defense modernization. Beijing’s military capabilities already surpass India’s, and given its lower defense burden—the ratio of military expenditures to GDP—China could expand its defense spending with fewer penalties to its economic growth compared with India, while further widening its military superiority.

India’s reluctance to partner more closely with the United States in building cooperative defense, however understandable, thus makes balancing against China difficult. Even worse, the Indian ambition of promoting multipolarity puts it at odds with the United States on many issues of international order at a time when working with Washington should be the more pressing priority. India should not delude itself that it can contain China on its own, which it cannot, while calling for a multipolar world in which the United States has a reduced role.

The United States has tolerated these Indian behaviors in the past in part because both countries were largely liberal democracies. As both proceed down the path of illiberalism, however, they will no longer be tied by shared values. Transactional habits may come to dominate the relationship, and Washington could demand more of New Delhi as the price of partnership. Trump’s approach to India in his second term has already signaled such an evolution. Indeed, India’s inability to match China in the future, as well as its commitment to multipolarity, which is fundamentally at odds with American interests, will be deeply inconvenient for the United States. India, it seems, will partner with the United States on some things involving China, but it is unlikely to partner with Washington in every significant arena—even when it comes to Beijing.

If New Delhi cannot effectively balance Beijing in Asia, Washington will invariably wonder how many resources and how much faith it should invest in India. A liberal United States might continue to support a liberal India because helping it would be inherently worthwhile (provided that the costs were not prohibitive and New Delhi’s success still served some American interests). But if either India or the United States remains illiberal, there will be no ideological reason for the latter to help the former.

To be sure, a narrower U.S.-Indian relationship centered on interests, not values, will not be a disaster for either country. But it would represent shrunken ambitions. The transformation of the bilateral ties between the two countries after the Cold War was once conceived as a way to help improve and uphold the liberal international order. Now, that relationship could be largely limited to trying to constrain a common competitor, China. And if so, neither India nor the United States nor the world at large will be the better for it.

 

 

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