India, Obedient Giant?

When you look at India, you are always overcome with a feeling of giddiness. Think about the elections that have been going on since mid-April: 986 million voters – the equivalent of the combined populations of the USA, the European Union, and Russia – who will vote at more than one million polling stations over six weeks. That is, the largest electoral event in the history of mankind. Which is still being done in the traditional way despite India Stack, a program that gives life to a single software platform designed to bring the buffalo country and villages into the digital age, one of the most advanced in the world. The numbers “weigh in”: there will be 470 million women and nearly 200 million voters in their twenties, a tenth of whom will be voting for the first time.

How did the country get to the polls? Divided. More politically than economically. In fact, the vehicle of the Indian economy has now entered turbo mode: not only did it record the highest GDP growth in the world last year and is on track to achieve 8 percent growth this year, but there are more and more domestic Silicon Valleys, and a quarter of all those entering the world of work in 2024 will be Indian, as the famous demographic dividend. But there is no shortage of shades of light in the economy: India’s growth is dominated by “relational capitalism,” which is dear to Prime Minister Modi, who has an eye, or rather two, on “global Indians” who enrich themselves through the still strong protectionism of the domestic market, with Ambani and Adanis, Asia’s richest billionaires, standing out. However, they are not alone, given that India creates more millionaires than China, second only to the USA.

Moreover, according to the World Inequality Lab, headed by economist Piketty, wage and social inequality is higher than under “British rule”: in 2022, the richest 1 percent of the population owned 40 percent of the nation’s wealth. Further, development has to be paid for by increasing pollution: India today resembles China in the dark ages, being the third most polluted country in the world; Delhi is on the same rank among the capitals, while more than 90 percent of the population breathes unhealthy air. However, the population, “the average Indian,” firmly believes in the “Indian dream,” moves to the city or its huge slums and sends their children to study at the Indian Institute of Technology. And they are not wrong, as the assets the country possesses are numerous and similar: 500 million speak English, and many of them are fluent in “globalization”; it is the youngest country in the world, sharing a record with several African nations but with very different development prospects; it is the only country that can afford to compete openly with the West in terms of cultural influence.

No, it is not the economy that is destabilizing India’s trajectory towards world power status. Rather, it is the political aspect that remains divisive in the country and represents a source of concern for observers. Not because there is any doubt that Narendra Modi will be reappointed Prime Minister for the third time by his party, the BJP, which is destined to win, if not win with an overwhelming majority, the House renewal election, Lok Sabha. As for the election consultation climate, Modi, in power since 2014, has changed the face of India into a country striving for modernity, albeit with the aforementioned prices. The election result will capture the era and allow us to test the extent of the actual consensus he is gaining with the acceleration to which he is subjecting his compatriots. The challenges are many, and many are still open: modernization versus tradition, secularism versus confessionalism, renewal versus protectionism. Modi’s agenda is clear: focus on Hindu revival to unite nationalism and faith and achieve economic and social modernization, while marginalizing the Muslim “minority” that were considered heirs to the great Moghul dynasty, which conquered northern India and British colonialism in the 15th century. “India for Indians,” or, in popular belief, Hindus: a laboratory of religious national-populism that goes hand in hand with technological modernization. Within, not behind, comes the danger of a clash of civilizations in a mosaic nation where, if it is true that 80 percent are Hindu, then minorities, starting with the Muslim – 200 million in India, the world’s third “Islamic” country after Indonesia and Pakistan – are scattered across the subcontinent. No new “partition” is possible because it risks re-igniting the latent fuse of religious extremism that has so often exploded in the past, contrary to the Western myth of India as a “soft country.” A decisive experiment in coexistence in light of the much larger war between Israel and Hamas, certainly in terms of size, but perhaps also in terms of political-strategic prospects. Religious tensions run deeper than purely political ones, although measures of imprisonment on corruption charges against some opposition leaders during the election campaign caused alarm among observers – even the U.S. State Department did so. Let’s start with the one concerning Arvid Kejriwal, leader of the Aam Aadani Party, “the common man party” that governs the capital city of Delhi and has a majority in Punjab. A significant figure in the panorama of the weak and fractured coalition of opposition parties led by the Gandhi dynasty Congress, under the acronym I.N.D.I.A.

Foreign policy remains in the background in the electoral struggle, and the echoes of rumbling tanks in Donbass and Gaza are blurred into Mumbai or Varanasi, which is also a sign of a gradual departure from the canons of “Washington Consensus.” Modi and his India intend to keep their hands free in a world that is non-polar rather than multilateral. Last year’s G20 meeting in India demonstrated this. Modi may be light years away from Nehru, but he has not forgotten the lesson of the latter, the then head of the interim government, who in 1945 wrote to Menon, who had been appointed ambassador to the UN, giving him the following instructions: “We are friends with everyone, but we should not align ourselves neither with Washington, nor with Moscow.” India was a non-aligned country even before it became independent. Western chanceries should have been under no illusions.

Speaking of the West, it would have been right if it had focused better on the Indian trajectory and abandoned its myopic glasses. India comes from far away and intends to go far: it is a country to be reckoned with. It is neither a backup of China nor a counterbalance to it. There may be surprises. For example, to note that at the stage of the retreat of liberal democracy in a world of obfuscation of values established at Bretton Woods, “the festival of democracy” in India, with its hybrid implications and exotic accents to our ears, it could represent a dress model suitable for wearing in 88 percent of the non-Western world. A much needed surprise…