Another Asia, next to that of Pax Sinica and that of the recognized Tigers. A power that exercises, with increasingly less subdued tones, a key role in all the crises that crush the world
What game is India-Bharat playing – in the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (QUAD) with the United States and in BRICS with Russia and China – with Prime Minister Modi, who first sees his friend Putin and then Zelensky, who smiles at Biden but buys oil and arms from Moscow? The America-led plural West will never fully understand India, its ahistoricity imbued with myths that are anchored in reality and perceived as such, its overflowing pantheon, its infinite otherness. But at least it should make an effort to study it. In the interest of its own survival as a community of values and destinies and a geopolitical entity, lest it be categorized as a geographical place: Europe at the extreme edge of Eurasia, the United States drowned in oceans it patrols less and less, on the defense of the Rio Grande. Because India is one of the worlds destined to populate our nearest future, in which runaway forwards, violent tears, crisis rifts, and long-term trajectories coexist. India is a laboratory where many of the alchemists of the future world are experimenting. Legions of political analysts and experts covering China would do well to look under the Himalayas. All the more so because its myriad contradictions are not hidden but exposed.
This doesn’t mean that India, a repository of wisdom and mirages, is unknown to the West. Far from it. Eternal India has always had a sometimes-irresistible charm: generations of young people have grown up reading Salgari and Kipling, throngs of intellectuals studying Freud, Schopenhauer, and Edward Morgan Forster, the famous author of A Passage to India: “India is not a promise, it’s a reminder.” And then the Beatles and Bollywood, sitar and transcendental meditation, Ayurvedic medicine and hatha yoga. We owe it at least the USB flash drive and the concept of zero, without which we wouldn’t have artificial intelligence. And India is taking advantage of this positive Western bias, realizing that today power and prestige are measured at face value: you matter for who you are. That’s why it adds arrow after arrow to her quiver. For example, it carelessly utilizes and capitalizes on soft power as a tool to project and achieve hegemony, something the closed-minded West no longer does.
But this India, much loved and much forgiven, unlike communist China, is built on a collective imagination, as seductive as it is stereotypical, now far removed from the reality of a country experiencing staggering economic and social growth while being frighteningly backward. A country that still has its feet in the 19th century – its hundreds of millions of farmers – but its head is already in the second half of the 21st century, with its global Indians.
If the West were to update its geopolitical maps, it would realize that Bharata’s strategic dharma of the 21st century is the deconstruction, under the curry sauce, of the world as we knew it from Bretton Woods to today, of the idea that the Washington Consensus is the only functional mode of government on a planet populated by eight billion inhabitants, two hundred states, three hundred international organizations, tens of thousands of NGOs, thousands of ethnic groups. India is as revisionist as China, it carries out its actions with the same determination, with the same sharp teeth, but it does so while smiling. In our latitudes, it was believed that the purpose of the new India was only to get rid of non-alignment, the son of Gandhian non-violence, which was no longer seen as a phantom proposition but as submission to a colonizing power.
If the West were to wake up, it would realize that another Asia is growing by leaps and bounds on the subcontinent, along with the Asia of the Chinese World and the power of the established Tigers, a force that is playing, with increasingly muted tones, a key role in all the crises that are crushing the world, from the war in Ukraine, to global warming, to inflation due to the cutting of food exports. Yet another Asia engaged in a frantic race for development with no adjectives, no brakes, that chokes its cities with smog, that produces one-fifth of the world’s plastic waste, more than Nigeria, Indonesia, China, and Russia combined, a total that could fill 604 Taj Mahals…
Prime Minister Modi’s “India First” – less robust than it was a year ago, due to a lack of electoral victory last spring that suggests its gradual depletion – represents a titan that is awakening from centuries of hibernation, as China did a generation ago with Deng. But with a sense of urgency heightened by long hibernation. A giant who doesn’t want to tie his hands, who doesn’t want to be categorized to one side or the other, no longer accepts lessons or fixed roles. Who maintains a balance between Washington, Moscow, and Beijing, convinced that in the long run it is they, not him, who will make a step in his direction. India is not in danger of falling into the fallacy of the Thucydides’ trap because it knows how to look far ahead.
The Indian state is being developed as a superpower, and this goal is to be achieved, according to government statements, by 2047, a century after independence. But it is more capable of making itself heard and respected on world tables than in the administration of its squabbling regional court, because, considering itself the sole legitimate heir to the British rule from whose ribs Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Myanmar were born, its attitude oscillates between condescension and hegemonic aims. Which does not go unnoticed in Beijing, which is eager to take advantage of this.
If the West were more careful, it would avoid using outdated metaphors, such as that of an elephant that has grown wings: ostriches, roosters, and peacocks also have wings, but they don’t fly. The Asian elephant, on the other hand, flies like a bumblebee: it seems impossible, but it’s true. India is the civilization-state that invented the game of chess, and it cannot be defeated by opinion polls, by soundbites, by creams on X social network. If its ruling class claims to be intent – amidst the thousands of smiles and hugs handed out at the G20 podium in New Delhi – on putting itself forward as the flag-bearer of what was defined during the Cold War as the Third World and today as the Global South, it should be taken seriously. If the thinktank offices are drawing geographical maps of an India-led Asian center, this is something to watch out for. They should not be dismissed as unattainable fantasies of grandeur: you can experience them when visiting the airports of Addis Ababa, Jakarta, or Dubai, traveling the roads of Namibia, approaching the uranium mines of Niger, among the skyscrapers of Johannesburg. Once you could see almost only Chinese, today not anymore: there is one Indian for every two of them, and those who were just humble laborers are now geologists, entrepreneurs, technicians. Perhaps, some could wonder where the West has gone wrong if its only representatives in the same lands are diplomats and tourists.
Had the West been paying attention, it would not have taken too long to criticize (and for a thousand reasons) Modi’s Hinduization project, which would prove to be not ephemeral but disastrous, if India wants to remain a unitary state. It would rather see that at stake in Mumbai, in Varanasi, in Chennai is the future of the concept of the people and the nation embodied in a multi-ethnic, multi-religious, and multi-lingual state; all that is also emerging on the horizon of societies in our latitudes. Should it be said this way? Stifling bureaucracy, rampant corruption, world-class schools and schools in endless suburbs, rural exodus and the gigantism of urban ghettos, the appalling distinctions between infoyes and infonots, the concentration of large industrial conglomerates allied with the state, the sirens of supremacism, the poisons of hyper-nationalist populism, the fear of what is different, of those who in Mumbai, as in Marseille, pray facing Mecca?
India is hastening a horizon that will soon affect us as well. That’s why we talked about the lab. But that’s not all: in India, “the world’s largest democracy,” where Modi has a hundred million followers only in homeopathic doses: can it be managed by limiting its perimeter exactly enough to suffice – and serve as an example – for the many countries of the Global South increasingly intolerant of Western repression?
In Asia, described in the May 2024 issue of Foreign Affairs as being in the agony of demographic collapse, India’s six hundred million centenarians are experiencing the same problem as their much smaller number of Western counterparts hibernating in the Old Continent’s demographic winter: the rubber wall of gerontocracy in power. But Indian centenarians are as dynamic and confident as ours are disillusioned and passive: the former are inclined to take charge of their future, while the latter have resigned. Their horizon is predominantly urban and marked by the reality and contradictions of the middle class, now numbering several hundred million members, which for thirty years has been the driving force behind the development of society, the comparison between the different souls of the country and the people, the connection with the global world.