There is a growing sense that something is seriously amiss in India’s foreign policy. Yet, foreign policy debate is still tiptoeing around the big questions.There were three foundational assumptions that underlay Indian choices at the turn of this century. First, no great power in history had acquired such preponderance over its rivals as the US had by 2000. US primacy also meant there was no way to avoid hitching a ride with the US.Second, to make the arrangement mutually attractive, a common antagonist, China, was projected to help overcome decades of dissonance and suspicion that had divided Indians and Americans. The new discourse played on Indian ego and US greed. Washington would lift Delhi in the international pecking order, while India would generate business and arms sales for America. If everything unfolded as planned, India would become a prized Western sentinel in Asia, cementing US hegemony for the 21st century.Third, although the world economy had broadened by the early 2000s, the US was firmly at the helm in connecting the Global South to the G-7. Interdependence was a euphemism for a US-led geoeconomic order that would dominate innovation, supply chains and international trade.All three assumptions have been shattered in recent years. One, the US has not just lost its primacy, it has lost its ability to control major geopolitical events. Every roll of the dice in recent years to arrest its decline — the trade standoff with China, NATO’s confrontation with Russia, the clash against Iran — has produced a blowback that has further weakened it.Historically, the balance of power has always been ultimately revealed through major war. The present phase is no exception. The Ukraine and Iran wars have not just depleted NATO arsenals, they have exposed the doctrinal fragility of Western military power.Two, China has raced so far ahead that the rhetoric from two decades ago of an Indian ‘catch-up’ and ‘the 21st century rivalry’ appears absurd to any sober observer. The Chinese lead is not merely in aggregate economic terms but in the underlying policy institutions, human capital and technologies.And, most crucially of all, the commanding heights of the world economy are inexorably shifting towards the east. From manufacturing and high technologies to energy and natural resources, consumer demand, and financial capital, the greater Eurasian continent and its periphery have all the core requirements of sustaining a dynamic geoeconomic order without dependence on the Atlantic West. At no point in recent centuries was such a Eurasian-centred globalisation possible.But even as world events have upended the Indian foreign policy consensus, a network of gatekeepers is stubbornly impervious to change. The defenders of the failed policy erect a straw man to frighten policymakers from a thoughtful reassessment. China, they say, must remain the raison d’être of Indian policy planning even as US predatory actions seek to eviscerate the last vestiges of India’s strategic independence and authority in the subcontinent. Much has changed between 2005 — when the US pledged to help make India a “major power in the 21st century” — and 2026, when a US diplomat publicly warned that India would never be permitted to acquire the sinews of a great power. Pentagon official Elbridge Colby even had the cheek to imply that US strategic interests vis-à-vis China would not be held hostage to disputes within Asia.Must India be the only rigid actor amidst all these churnings and machinations around it? The search for a workable modus vivendi with China must acquire a bipartisan policy priority, not as an afterthought to merely prevent conflict in the Himalayas but as a means to diversify a dangerous dependence on the West. India needs to permanently discard the proxy role that it assumed during the unipolar moment and recover its regional power identity that allows for differences as well as shared responsibilities with China. The world is becoming multipolar. And such a future demands responsible Eurasian powers to safeguard world order and stability. It is in India’s vital interests to play such a role.India’s foreign policy debate can’t be stuck on an old framework, one that prides itself on managing the distance between Delhi and the great powers. There is no geopolitical room or surplus strength in any great power’s tent to underwrite India’s social, economic and security challenges. The Cold War is over. The post-Cold War era is over too. The transformation in world politics demands a new intellectual framework where sovereignty, regional interdependence, new geoeconomic networks of trade and investment, international public goods and order-building are placed at the front and centre of India’s foreign policy.To change course, Indian leaders need to look at the day after tomorrow.
Disclaimer: Views expressed above are the author’s own.
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