India, after the postwar world order

What will be the global role of India, that is Bharat, after the breakdown of the postwar world order, led by the USA since 1945?

To answer this question we need to reimagine the history of the post-1945 world. We need to take off our American glasses, and obsessions with Western geopolitical news, and look at world history from a different perspective.

Joya Chatterji helps us change our perspective in her brilliant, Shadows at Noon: the South Asian Twentieth Century (2024), winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History and shortlisted for the Cundill History Prize. In Western public discourse, the signposts of recent history are defined by the American Century. You get a different view from South Asia, home to one-sixth of the human population and source of a diaspora that exceeds the population of many countries. Joya Chatterji writes:

“You will find its turning points are rather different from those of the ‘American century’. The partition was a catastrophe of such magnitude that it is still difficult for me to comprehend how the rest of the world - even Britain - knew so little about it. The joys of independence and the agonies of partition make 1947, rather than 1945, a key milestone in South Asian history. The second partition in 1971, and the bloody birth of Bangladesh, is another. Popular protest against British rule, horrific famines, strikes, assassinations and military coups played intermittent but powerful notes. Communal violence - whether against Ahmediya, Shia, Sikh, Christian, Sunni, ‘Bihari’ or any other minorities - has had potent rhythms beaten on its dholak drums. The demolition of the Babri Mosque in 1992 represents a more critical watershed for the region than the events of 9/11.”¹

I will return to Chatterji’s reframing of the narrative next year, but it is part of an Indian Turn in geopolitics, the realisation of the significance of India and South Asia in world politics, history and culture. It is reflected in talk of India as a ‘civilization state’. It is expressed in Dr S Jaishankar’s insight, in The India Way, that the most critical bilateral relationship in the world is not, as American Century traditionalists believe, between the USA and Europe or the USA and China; it is between the two most populous countries on earth, India and China.

Awareness of India’s civilizational, diplomatic and economic gifts to the world are also growing, and so changing China-centred views of Asia. In The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World (2024), William Dalrymple wrote:

“The Golden Road aims to highlight India’s often forgotten position as a crucial economic fulcrum, and civilisational engine, at the heart of the ancient and early medieval worlds and as one of the main motors of global trade and cultural transmission in early world history, fully on a par with and equal to China.” (p. 8)

Reading Chatterji and Dalrymple’s books with me next year will deepen your understanding of India’s emerging role in the world, as, I argue, one of five great powers. But today I want to focus on some common themes in geopolitical discussion of the role of India in a changing world.

Speculation on this role has proliferated in recent years due to changes in that world. India became the most populous nation on Earth in 2024. It landed on the Moon in 2023, the same year in which it successfully chaired the G20. Its assertive diplomacy changed the world’s response to the Ukraine conflict in 2022. The USA has even crafted its geopolitical strategy to contain China around India in its so-called Indo-Pacific strategy.

Most Western mainstream and independent discussions of India’s changing role in the world are, however, ignorant and suspicious of India. The Anglo-American powers especially waver between flattery and hectoring abuse. They express ambivalence and nervousness. For example, the USA Council on Foreign Relations sought to make India at home in the New American Century, while keeping India securely under the protection of the American Raj.

“As the United States welcomes and supports India's rise, Americans should better understand Indians' ambitions for themselves and for their role in the Indo-Pacific and on the world stage—ambitions that are still debated within India.”

Alyssa Ayres, Council on Foreign Relations

Gaslighting Indian democracy is a common tactic of the liberal West. In early 2024 the British thinktank Chatham House flooded the zone with anxious concerns for the future of Indian democracy, as part of a swarm of thinktank reports to influence India’s election. Chatham House whispered in Western ears doubts about India’s rise as an “increasingly prominent geopolitical and economic actor” amid “concerns about democratic backsliding.” Chatham House gaslit India’s “status as the world’s largest democracy”, its “claim to leadership of the Global South”, and its commitment to ‘strategic autonomy’ – a concept that Chatham House chose to put in scare quotes.

Former Australian diplomat Peter Varghese (an Australian-Indian born in Kenya) praises India’s greatest achievement: “to build a secular liberal democracy.” But he passes over the diversity and achievements that Chatterji and Dalrymple document. It is as if the British Raj can only celebrate its good son as the projection of his most cherished identity, British liberal democracy. This kind of history forgets sectarian, imperial and oligarchic secrets. Bharat, Hinduism and the statecraft of the Mahabharatha do not enter this Western pleading to join the Atlantic worldview. It generates strangely coy history. Varghese writes:

At its midnight hour birth, many wondered how a nation of such extraordinary diversity could remain united. Its choice of democracy is all the more extraordinary when you consider how widespread poverty and illiteracy were in 1947.

Varghese, India and the world: An Australian perspective (2022)

Varghese hints at the dark secrets that Chatterji narrates. That midnight birth occurred against the violent resistance of the British Empire that crashed to earth in World War Two. The birth included the death of a million persons through that Empire’s botched Partition of India and Pakistan. Democracy was forged in the Cold War, led by the old British and new American Empires. The golden Western years of the 1950s and 1960s saw India’s share of world trade reduce, while through NATO the European Empires clung on and grew. Democracy itself collapsed in the 1970s emergencies of Indira Gandhi, so lightly passed over by Varghese. India saw war with China and Pakistan, and tension with the USA for its support of both at different times. But the Soviet Union and Russia remained a steady friend. India stood with its friend in 2022.

The ‘poverty and illiteracy in 1947’ sprang from 200 years of looting and oppression by the British. The poverty would persist a long time, even till today. It was not, as Varghese hints, only India’s late acceptance of the Western embrace, that enabled India to turn the corner. But turn the corner, it did.

Wealth, power, and culture grew, especially from the 1990s. India’s economy surpassed Britain years ago, but not its per capita wealth, even if India has not developed as successfully as China.

From 2014 its politics also changed. India had a long history of weak coalition governments. The dynastic family of the Congress Party had dominated its leadership, more like a princely kingdom than a liberal democracy. Nehru and the Gandhi family have ruled India and Congress for decades. In 2014, Narendra Modi set Bharat on a different course set by a majority government and the so-called ‘Hindu nationalist’ BJP. Varghese, like many leaders across the West, is uncomfortable with this deviation from the British heritage of secular liberal oligarchy.

This Western discomfort with the historical realities of India impairs their vision of how India might reshape the world, as the tides of globalisation begin to flow again from Eurasia. Rather than just listen to Western lectures on what India might be when it grows up, we should listen to the voices of Indians. What do they say about how India might shape its role after the post-1947 world order?

I have written previously - in “How India sees the multipolar world clearly” - about how the Indian External Affairs Minister, Dr S. Jaishankar has written compelling books on how the Indian elite see the reemergence of the world’s natural multipolarity. Let us examine one other influential voice in Indian diplomacy.

In September 2024, Ambassador Satish Chandra wrote “India’s role in the world today.” Chandra was a career diplomat and was India’s Permanent Representative to the UN in Geneva and High Commissioner to Pakistan (among India’s most sensitive diplomatic posts).

He grounded his vision in the cultural values of Indian civilization.

“India’s civilisational values and ethos, in which the current leadership is firmly rooted, make it the quintessential status quo state with no extra territorial ambitions, one of the most tolerant ones as it regards all religions as equal, and one intrinsically predisposed to promoting international wellbeing as it regards the world as one family. Thus by its very nature, apart from being a nonthreatening nation, India seeks friendly ties with all countries and is committed to working for the common good the world over. The vision of oneness of the entire universe which inspires India is not limited just to mankind but to all sentient beings and non sentient things. The latter is of great importance as it holds the key to sustainable development which is the need of the hour if we are to avoid the apocalypse which stalks us by way of climate change.”

Ambassador Satish Chandra, “India’s role in the world today” 2024

This idea is common among the Indian elite; however challenging it is for crusading Western minds, habituated to their global leadership. It is expressed in Dr S Jaishankar’s books The India Way and Why Bharat Matters. It is the basis for Ambassador Chandra’s prediction that

“Indian foreign policy will continue to be infused with the same energy, proactive approach, and confidence, which have characterised it in the last decade.

Ambassador Satish Chandra, “India’s role in the world today” 2024

These civilizational values connect to the vast Indian diaspora around the world, and are expressed by Indians themselves in their vibrant media, so much less sclerotic than Western mainstream media. They are the basis of India’s vast reservoir of soft power around the world.

The Ambassador expects that

“India will be the much needed force for peace in our fractious world as it has no territorial ambitions, favours dialogue over coercion, and wants to be a developed state by 2047 which requires peace and stability.”

I share this confidence, although with the scepticism that the forces of peace must grow stronger in the world to counter America’s nihilism and endless wars. But that confidence also emerges from the many-sided diplomacy that India pursues, as Dr Jaishankar says, India seeks to:

“engage America, manage China, cultivate Europe, reassure Russia, bring Japan into play, draw neighbours in, extend the neighbourhood, and expand traditional constituencies of support”

Jaishankar, The India Way (2021)

India’s role in bringing peace to its neighbourhood, and resolving conflicts with Pakistan, China, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh will grow over time. It has the world’s third largest army. It will become again a crucial anchor for the security of Eurasia, ultimately without either the British or the American garrisons. Its leadership of the Global South will in time secure a seat in a reconfigured United Nations Security Council. Historical justice will be served if India replaces the declining island Britain in the inner cabinet of the world.

India may even play a crucial role, in partnership and competition with China, in achieving both climate action and climate justice, by changes to renewable energy and by negotiating a better resourcing of climate action than the poor Western deal that India just opposed.

“India will increasingly be a shaper rather than an abstainer and will not accept a veto on its policy options.”

Chandra, “India’s role in the world today” 2024

In 2025 I will explore India’s history and future as part of my series rethinking the major powers of the world with history. I will learn from the histories written by William Dalrymple, Joya Chatterji, and Dr S Jaishankar.

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1. Joya Chatterji, Shadows at Noon: the South Asian Twentieth Century (2024), p. xviii