Why Bharat Matters Chapter 11: Performance, Profile, and the Global South

Posted on by user

Performance, Profile, and the Global South

The concurrence of India’s Chandrayaan-3 landing with the BRICS Summit in South Africa crystallized a salient feature of India’s contemporary statecraft: performance as diplomacy. The lunar touchdown did more than validate technological competence; it reframed the summit’s atmospherics and discourse. Leaders across the Global South claimed vicarious pride that one of their own had achieved a milestone long monopolized by a few, and the proceedings reflected that emotional and political resonance. In an arena often crowded by rhetoric, delivery at scale—literal, visible, and verifiable—created diplomatic capital that no communiqués alone could produce.

A few weeks later, the G20 Summit in New Delhi produced a unanimous and substantive outcome. The admission of the African Union as a permanent member—secured at India’s initiative—both broadened the forum’s representational legitimacy and institutionalized a key Global South demand within the premier platform for economic governance. This act of agenda-setting signaled more than convening capacity; it demonstrated an ability to build coalitions, reconcile diverse interests, and translate normative claims into durable institutional change.

The two outcomes gained additional credibility because they sat alongside India’s earlier performance in global health. During the pandemic, Vaccine Maitri brought health access to many smaller states otherwise marginalized in supply chains and diplomacy alike. The provision of an essential public good, under constraints and amid competing demands, seeded trust that now colors how India’s motives and capabilities are read. Taken together—space exploration, multilateral diplomacy, and pandemic assistance—these disparate domains converge on a simple proposition: performance, repeated across arenas, alters status.

A new, globally aware generation of Indians has placed this proposition under scrutiny, debating the extent to which India’s weight is now felt in world affairs. At one level, the answer is grounded in common sense: a vast landmass, a large and youthful population, and a deep civilizational memory ensure a persistent international imprint. Yet the present inflection point is not about potential alone; it is about how choices, policies, leadership, and delivery convert structural endowments into system-shaping influence. India has always occupied global mind-space; its growing vigor is expanding that space. The critical questions, therefore, are the reach of this revival and its implications for the evolving order—outcomes contingent on a conscious assertion of national identity and a coherent collective persona, backed by implementation.

A Civilizational Metaphor: Hanuman and Strategic Self-Realization

Popular discourse has long employed Hanuman as a metaphor for the virtues of devotion, perseverance, and strength. In the epic tradition, however, there is an instructive irony. As revealed by Agastya to Rama, Hanuman bears a curse from his youthful exuberance—disruptions that angered meditating sages—causing him to forget the full extent of his powers until a moment of dharma calls them forth. The latent capacity exists; memory and application are episodic until duty demands their return.

As the Ramayana unfolds, Hanuman’s responsibilities grow and his self-awareness expands with them. After Sita’s abduction, Sugriva organizes a search in four directions—Vinata to the east, Sushena to the west, and Shatabali to the north—and assigns Hanuman, alongside Angada, to the south, assessed as the most promising vector. When Angada falters, Hanuman’s exhortations sustain the mission, combining faith with persistence. The episode underscores a strategic sensibility: assess the field, choose a direction of greatest promise, and maintain morale through uncertainty.

Hanuman’s defining trial arrives when Lakshmana is grievously wounded and only the Vishalyakarani plant can revive him. Dispatched to Dronagiri, Hanuman confronts an information deficit—he cannot identify the correct herb in daylight. Rather than cede to error or paralysis, he lifts the mountain entire and conveys it back, enabling the more discerning monkey-chieftain Sushena to select the requisite plant. Determination substitutes for missing data; improvisation secures the outcome; collective capability is orchestrated toward a singular objective. The lesson is not mystical but methodical: when precision is unavailable and time is scarce, act at scale to preserve options, then refine through expertise.

From Myth to Method: Pragmatism, Perseverance, and Outcome Orientation

The Hanuman metaphor offers a civilizational grammar for India’s current foreign policy practice. It is not that the state discovers new strengths ex nihilo; it reclaims and organizes capacities that were diffused, underappreciated, or intermittently applied. The pattern of recent years—space achievement, multilateral agenda-setting, public-goods provision—Illustrates a feedback loop familiar from the epic: the more India accomplishes, the more it believes it can do, and the more ambitiously it frames the next task.

Three parallels are salient for strategic culture:

  • From forgetfulness to recall: Just as Hanuman’s power is latent until summoned by duty, India long underestimated the degree to which others depend on its choices. Delivery—rather than assertion—has become the instrument of recall, making influence legible to others and to itself.

  • Direction with resilience: Sugriva’s four-way search, with Hanuman and Angada tasked to the most promising axis, mirrors targeted diplomacy under uncertainty. Perseverance—sustaining partners’ confidence when fatigue sets in—has been critical in shepherding complex coalitions from BRICS chambers to the G20 plenary.

  • Outcome over process: The Dronagiri episode exemplifies a bias for results when time and information are constrained. Lifting the mountain is a metaphor for acting at scale to preserve decision space. Enabling Sushena’s discernment maps onto India’s habit of mobilizing diverse expertise—scientific, bureaucratic, diplomatic—to deliver precise outcomes after decisive commitment.

In each case, performance does not eclipse values; it operationalizes them. The ethos is not procedural maximalism but strategic sufficiency: deliver what matters, when it matters, to those who need it most.

Policy Implications for India’s External Posture

  • Performance reinforces credibility: Visible achievements create trust and bargaining power. Chandrayaan-3 and effective stewardship of the New Delhi G20 Summit furnished proof-of-capability, shaping the narrative within and beyond the Global South that India can both execute complex national missions and steward collective outcomes. Credibility generated through delivery widens the aperture for influence in norm-setting and crisis management.

  • Agenda-setting through inclusivity: The African Union’s admission as a permanent G20 member exemplifies the translation of representational claims into institutional form. By broadening the table, India aligned procedural justice with strategic interest—deepening voice for developing economies while enhancing the G20’s legitimacy and efficacy. Such moves position India to curate agendas that reflect shared priorities—debt, climate finance, health security—without sacrificing ambition.

  • Public goods diplomacy: Vaccine Maitri demonstrated that equitable access during crises is not an abstraction but a policy choice. For many smaller states, the initiative was a first encounter with India as a reliable provider under stress. Public-goods provision strengthens bilateral ties, undergirds minilateral coalitions, and accumulates soft power that can be converted into strategic support at multilateral forums.

  • Strategic self-assertion: Civilizational self-awareness, when coupled with disciplined policy delivery, is an asset. A conscious assertion of national identity and a collective persona—confident yet solution-focused—helps align domestic constituencies with external objectives and communicates predictability to partners. This self-assertion should manifest not as rhetorical excess but as clarity of purpose, readiness to lead, and willingness to be judged by outcomes.

These implications point toward a distinctively Indian strategic culture—rooted in civilizational motifs yet rigorously practical—that treats credibility as cumulative, inclusivity as leverage, public goods as strategy, and identity as a source of coherence. In a shifting world order, such a posture enables India not merely to participate, but to shape.

Two Pathways and the Autonomy Question

India’s strategic relevance can follow two divergent pathways. One reprises a limited colonial-era role: a marketplace, a contested ground for others’ rivalries, a resource to be extracted, or a mere platform for external agendas. The other is transformative: an engine of the global economy, a hub of innovation, and a democracy that delivers. Realizing the latter demands societal determination, perseverance, and decisive choices that elevate performance over polarization. The momentum of the last decade makes this prospect credible, as governance reforms have widened opportunity even as elements of the old order emphasize insecurities and social divides.

These choices will be closely watched abroad—and influenced, if unattended. Cooperative partners and obstructive actors alike will seek to participate in, or even redirect, India’s domestic discourse to advance external interests. Strategic culture therefore requires a vigilant politics of autonomy: guarding against exogenous shaping of national prospects, recalling the historical lessons of dependency, and ensuring that India’s trajectory is decided within, not dictated from without. In contemporary practice, this entails both an outward openness to flows of capital, technology, and ideas, and an inward resilience of institutions, narratives, and social cohesion that resists capture and coercion.

Historical Centrality, Civilizational Scale, and Rebalancing

India’s centrality in global thought predates modern geopolitics. For centuries, the search for routes to India animated European exploration, inadvertently redirecting history toward the American continent. Once maritime access was secured, India became the fulcrum from which European power radiated across Asia. The nineteenth century fate of China, too, was shaped in no small measure by outcomes in India. The subcontinent’s independence then catalyzed a broader decolonization that laid foundations for the contemporary international order.

India matters today for reasons that run deeper than demography. Representing roughly a sixth of humanity, its successes and shortcomings are globally consequential. But numbers alone do not confer status; India’s salience stems as much from civilizational continuity—a society that survived historical ravages and retains a long view on world affairs—as from scale. But for Partition, India, and not China, would have been the largest society in living memory. Its exceptionalism is rooted in history, culture, heritage, and distinct mindsets that shape statecraft, including a preference for plural pathways to order rather than rigid uniformities.

The colonial era forced a harsh binary upon societies: assailant or victim, within an extractive hierarchy that suppressed autonomous development. The contemporary context, though imperfect, affords nations a chance to transcend that binary. Political influence now flows from comparative advantage, accumulated capabilities, resources, talent, location, national will, and leadership choices. Large countries have regained their natural salience, able to shape not only their own prospects but also those of others.

India’s rise is the product of a matrix—capabilities, resources, talent, geography, and leadership—coinciding with 75 years of independence and a global environment that both reopens opportunity and imposes responsibility. The core of ongoing global rebalancing has been the revival of long-suppressed civilizations—China, India, and peers in the Global South—that have leveraged inherited strengths through national renewal. Yet size alone does not guarantee development or political standing; India’s own past bears witness, even as smaller nations occasionally punch above their weight. The critical differentiator has been the pace and nature of development, foremost the enhancement of human resources.

Development as Strategy: Inclusive Human Capital and SDG Alignment

Since 2014, India has implemented national campaigns that treat inclusive development as statecraft. A holistic agenda has targeted health and immunization, narrowing gender gaps, expanding access and coverage in education, scaling skills and talent, easing the costs of doing business, and creating employment. This has strengthened capabilities at the base of the pyramid, expanded the domestic marketplace, and widened India’s imprint on the global workplace—consistent with a knowledge-economy profile that prioritizes human capital.

The Sustainable Development Goals have been integrated as operational targets of national policy. Despite the Covid disruption, post-2014 initiatives were deliberately aligned to the SDGs, notably:
– The Jan Dhan–Aadhaar–Mobile (JAM) trinity for financial inclusion and digital empowerment, dramatically widening formal financial access and enabling authenticated service delivery.
– Expanded health coverage and mass immunization, building preventive and protective capacity at scale.
– Beti Bachao Beti Padhao, improving girls’ survival and schooling as both a rights and growth agenda.
– Jal Jeevan Mission, moving toward household tap-water coverage as a public health and dignity imperative.
– Digital India, bringing the masses online and democratizing access to public goods and markets.
– Ujjwala, replacing firewood with cleaner cooking gas to improve health, productivity, and environmental outcomes.

These interventions address long-standing deficits in a lasting manner, advancing Agenda 2030 for a significant share of humanity and anchoring India’s claim to responsible rebalancing.

The democratic dimension is not incidental. India’s political choices helped democratize the very idea of democracy, showing that representative government need not be a prerogative of the developed world. Drawing on traditions of pluralism—unity expressed through diversity rather than uniformity—India constructed a modern democratic polity under austere economic conditions. Earlier external commentaries often cast Indian democracy as anomalous, at times recommending military rule for “less worthy” societies; Pakistan, for long, was preferred in some Western calculations. Over time, however, India’s democratic credentials have consolidated: electoral participation has risen, representation has broadened, debate remains vigorous, and power transfers are routinely validated. Crucially, unlike in some other polities, India’s election results are not doubted—an outcome that underwrites state legitimacy and strengthens negotiating capacity abroad.

State Capacity That Delivers: Digital Governance and Welfare at Scale

Being a democracy is not enough if it does not deliver. Over the last decade, a passion for good governance, harnessing technology to purpose, has changed India’s socio-economic landscape at a scale that commands global attention—turning a democratic mandate into measurable outcomes.

During the pandemic, a national digital backbone enabled more than 800 million Indians to receive food support and half of them to receive money directly in their bank accounts. The magnitude—akin to simultaneously supporting the entire populations of Europe and the United States—was matched by precision, minimizing leakages traditionally associated with welfare. Direct benefit transfers (DBTs), authenticated through digital public infrastructure (DPI), translated intent into impact.

The scale of programmatic achievement can be grasped through comparative analogies:
– Jan Dhan is comparable to banking the United States and Mexico at one go.
– Saubhagya, the household electrification drive, approximates electrifying all of Russia.
– Ujjwala is akin to changing the cooking fuel for all of Germany.
– Awas Yojana’s affordable housing expansion resembles housing all of Japan.

Similar advances are evident in clean water access, broader health coverage, and farm support. India administered more than two billion vaccinations, demonstrating logistical and organizational capacity. Together, digitalization-led DBTs and mass service delivery democratized technology—empowering citizens as users, producers, and co-creators of public value. This DPI model—open, interoperable, and at scale—has emerged as a reference for good governance and efficient public delivery, with direct implications for state legitimacy, crisis response, and the credibility of deterrence and assurance in national security.

As performance has scaled, external perceptions have shifted. Developed countries that long viewed India as an underperformer increasingly recognize the efficacy of its reforms; this opens avenues for collaboration in health, finance, and digital governance. Developing countries see India’s experience as immediately applicable, especially because solutions validated at India’s scale are robust to the constraints they face. India thus serves as a laboratory, training ground, and field of demonstration: the “pharmacy of the world” during Covid; a source of digital skill and start-ups whose technologies influence private business outcomes as much as they improve public delivery.

From Demonstration to Engine: Innovation, Climate, Manufacturing, and Decentralized Globalization

On global challenges, notably climate action, India’s leapfrogging potential renders it an exemplar whose success can materially improve collective outcomes. The same is true of industrial policy: the rapid progress of Make in India across sectors validates the proposition that much more can be made with the world and for the world. Adding scale, scope, and competitiveness positions India as an additional engine of global growth—diversifying supply chains, lowering systemic risk, and reinforcing a more resilient multipolar order.

This trajectory supports a model of decentralized globalization: a networked world where capability is distributed, interdependence is balanced, and large civilizational democracies can deliver domestically while contributing internationally. India matters both as inspiration—proof that inclusive governance, technology, and human capital can move the development needle at population scale—and as a system-shaping actor that can underwrite growth, provide public goods, and stabilize regions.

Underpinning this promise is a caution germane to strategic culture. External interventions—in narratives, markets, and technologies—will attempt to steer domestic debates and choices. Guarding the discourse is therefore a national security task: protecting the integrity of data and platforms; ensuring policy sovereignty over critical technologies; resisting financial and information coercion; and maintaining social cohesion against divisive influence. If India leverages its civilizational strengths, demographic weight, digital public infrastructure, and policy reforms while remaining alert to such risks, it can complete the journey from playing field to decisive player—aligning domestic transformation with global responsibility in an era of rebalancing and multipolarity.

Translating Talent into Capability: Lessons and Direction

India’s rising self-confidence and the widening arc of its ambitions place a premium on converting human potential into reproducible national capabilities. This requires more than episodic successes; it demands mechanisms, institutions and practices that can systematically harness talent for economic, technological and diplomatic ends. Strategic culture, in this view, is less about declaratory posture and more about the state’s aptitude for capability-building—how India positions itself to matter in global production, embeds in resilient supply chains, and competes credibly in the international workplace.

The experience since 1991 offers a cautionary diagnosis. Liberalization lifted growth and profitability, but capability-building at scale lagged. Corporate successes and financialization often overshadowed the hard work of creating deep domestic supply chains, which in turn blunted employment generation even in periods of high growth. Reforms were frequently conceptualized as deregulatory relief for a narrow constituency, rather than as instruments to enlarge the nation’s productive frontier. In strategic terms, this meant that India’s talent was visible, but the institutional machinery to translate that talent into durable power—industrial, technological, and logistical—remained underdeveloped.

The corrective pathway is clear: a deliberate, state-enabled transformation that prizes scale, resilience, and diffusion of capability across sectors and regions. This is not a call for statism; it is a demand for public policy that is unapologetically capability-centric, aligning education, skilling, infrastructure and finance with strategic economic outcomes.

Building Capacity at Scale: Sectoral Push and Supply Chains

The contemporary shift is to reconstruct the human resources chain and push manufacturing and innovation in tandem—across legacy sectors such as chemicals and textiles and cutting-edge domains like electronic hardware, semiconductors and pharmaceuticals. The underlying strategic logic is twofold.

First, breadth plus depth. Established sectors provide scale, employment and supply-chain learning; advanced sectors supply technological complexity, productivity spillovers and global bargaining power. Stacked together, they turn latent talent into executed industrial capacity.

Second, resilience as strategy. Building domestic nodes and nearshore alternatives in critical value chains is not merely an economic preference; it is national risk management. India’s reformulation of industrial policy instruments—from production-linked incentives and logistics upgrades to standards regimes and design-linked incentives—reflects an attempt to bridge market coordination failures and nurture ecosystems rather than isolated firms.

Symbolism can be substantive. The manufacturing of Apple products in India signals more than contract assembly. It advertises process rigor, quality assurance, and the willingness of global leaders to diversify production to Indian locations. For India, the message inward is as important as the message outward: the country will matter to the degree it expands its role in global production and reliable supply chains, not simply as a consumer market or a provider of services.

The Global Footprint: Diaspora Scale and Mobility Partnerships

India’s human potential already has planetary reach. Approximately 32 million Indian nationals and persons of Indian origin live and work abroad, an imprint that speaks to both breadth and depth. About 4.5 million reside in the United States, disproportionately represented in technology and innovation ecosystems. Nearly 9 million—twice the US figure—live in the Gulf, integral to the functioning of those economies and to the remittance and energy linkages that bind the subcontinent to West Asia. Commonwealth societies—especially the United Kingdom, Canada, South Africa and Australia—account for another 5 million plus, a reminder of historical routes and contemporary openness. The spread encompasses large and small nations, near and distant geographies, long-standing communities and recent movements. Indians matter, in part, because they are truly global.

Globalization has amplified this dispersion, and a million-plus Indian students already studying abroad foreshadow a widening pipeline. Demographic headwinds in developed economies, coupled with rising skill thresholds, are producing a structural demand for talent that aligns with India’s improving quality of human resources. The resulting demand–supply fit is being formalized through mobility partnerships and mutual recognition arrangements.

Recent agreements with Portugal, Australia, Austria, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom, Italy and France illustrate this trend. They provide structured pathways for student flows, skilled workers, researchers and practitioners, often embedding safeguards, training commitments and return options. As these frameworks proliferate, India is becoming a larger factor in the global workplace—with implications for knowledge transfer, investment channels, and political influence in host societies. Strategically managed, mobility is not brain drain; it is capability circulation.

Protecting Indians Abroad: From Obligation to Operations

As India’s global presence expands and expectations of state performance rise, the obligation to safeguard citizens abroad has grown more exacting. In strategic culture terms, consular protection and crisis response are no longer peripheral; they are central expressions of state capacity and political will. Meeting this obligation requires both the build-up of national capabilities—surge logistics, civil–military coordination, air- and sea-lift assets, digital platforms, and consular networks—and the willingness to deploy them in high-risk environments, including with military support when necessary.

India’s diplomatic posture has evolved accordingly. Recent years have seen a pronounced readiness to conduct operations on foreign soil for citizens’ welfare. Operations Ajay, Kaveri and Ganga—bringing nationals back from Israel, Sudan and Ukraine respectively—demonstrated responsiveness across theaters and conflict types. The Vande Bharat Mission during the Covid-19 pandemic, arguably the largest such effort in peacetime, showcased logistical resolve and an ability to operate at scale over an extended period.

These missions sit alongside earlier and parallel responses to the Yemen conflict, the Nepal earthquake, violence in South Sudan and the fall of Kabul—diverse contingencies that tested planning assumptions and inter-agency coordination. Beyond evacuation, generous usage of funds to mitigate distress, stabilize communities and facilitate returns underscores a broader ethos: India intends not only to carry its share of responsibility for its own people but also to extend a helping hand where it can, reinforcing a reputation for reliability among partners and host states.

Comparative Posture and Strategic Implications for National Security

The frequency and reach of these undertakings mark a break with India’s own past and stand out even against the behavior of larger powers. They reveal an increasingly operational cast to Indian diplomacy—one that fuses consular protection, humanitarian assistance, logistics and strategic communication. This posture complements the capability-building agenda at home and the mobility partnerships abroad: it reassures the diaspora, enhances bargaining leverage with host governments, and signals that India is a net contributor to international stability.

The core thesis that ties these strands is straightforward. India’s significance—its weight in the international system—will be determined by its success in turning abundant talent into durable capabilities: institution-building that supports scale, supply chains that withstand shocks, sectoral upgrading that multiplies productivity, and mobility frameworks that connect Indian skills to global demand without hollowing out domestic capacity. A proactive state, willing to safeguard its citizens and invest resources in high-risk situations, completes the picture.

Practically, this translates into three reinforcing lines of effort. First, scaling manufacturing and anchoring India deeper into global production systems, with marquee examples such as Apple products serving as catalysts for broader ecosystem effects. Second, deepening talent partnerships with advanced economies to institutionalize pathways for students, researchers and skilled workers, thereby accelerating knowledge diffusion and investment flows. Third, executing decisive overseas operations when crises strike, affirming state credibility and strengthening the social contract with citizens at home and abroad.

In aggregate, these choices recast Indian strategic culture as capability-first and citizen-centric, where economic statecraft, talent mobility and consular activism are integral to national security. They move India from latent potential to manifest influence, answering in concrete terms why India matters in the contemporary global order.

Strategic Geography, Overlapping Peripheries, and the Rearticulation of Centrality

India’s peninsular form endows it with a conspicuous centrality to the Indian Ocean while its continental expanse places it at the hinge of Asia’s great subregions. This duality—maritime reach coupled with landward contiguity—renders India pivotal to any trans-Asia connectivity initiative linking Southeast Asia to the Gulf and, by extension, to the Eurasian landmass. Such centrality derives not only from power capabilities but also from geography itself. It places India at the heart of overlapping peripheries that it must manage with sensitivity, given the density of people-to-people ties, shared cultural practices, and economic interdependence with its immediate neighbours. Recasting this geography as a strategic asset requires a policy frame that transcends narrowly bounded regionalism and embraces multi-vector engagement—through connectivity, security cooperation, economic integration, cultural stewardship, and heritage diplomacy.

The expansion of India’s strategic horizons must be read against the historical shock of Partition, which severed overland access and compressed strategic bandwidth, diminishing reach into proximate regions where India historically enjoyed respect and influence. Policy today seeks to recalibrate this legacy by redefining extended neighbourhoods, reopening pathways to traditional spheres of interaction, and aligning geography with strategy in both continental and maritime theatres. Prosperity and stability generated by such rearticulation are not self-regarding; they can lift the larger subcontinent by lowering transaction costs, stabilizing peripheral economies, and embedding subregional supply chains.

Maritime Centrality and the Indo-Pacific Turn

The Indian Ocean is no longer a passive body of water; it is an active arena of maritime projection, logistics, and technological contestation. India’s ability to shape outcomes here—through sea-lane security, humanitarian assistance and disaster relief, maritime domain awareness, and defence partnerships—bears directly on its global stock. Participation in the wider Indo-Pacific adds a strategic multiplier, enabling partnerships that tie the western and eastern reaches of the oceanic commons to continental corridors. The implication for Indian strategic culture is clear: maritime presence is not a derivative of land power; it is a co-equal pillar that underwrites deterrence, economic resilience, and diplomatic leverage.

In this maritime frame, the articulation of SAGAR (Security and Growth for All in the Region) in 2015 marked a doctrinal shift. It catalysed a sustained outreach to island and littoral states—Sri Lanka, Maldives, Mauritius, Seychelles, Comoros, Madagascar, among others—whose futures are closely intertwined with India’s. Capacity-building, coastal surveillance networks, white-shipping information exchanges, hydrography, and asset donations have been complemented by rapid-response mechanisms for natural disasters and pandemics. This architecture affirms a regional security compact built on public goods provision, rather than alliance exclusivity, and translates geographic proximity into diplomatic credibility.

Reclaiming Historical Spheres: East, West, and North

To the East, the move from Look East to Act East signalled an operational upgrade in India’s approach to Southeast Asia. Connectivity—physical, digital, energy, and institutional—has been foregrounded alongside security interests in the Bay of Bengal and the wider Indo-Pacific. The shift underscores that access to Southeast Asian markets and supply chains, maritime chokepoints, and regional norm-setting is integral to India’s growth and security. It also reflects a willingness to leverage historical familiarity—evident in centuries of civilizational exchange—to reduce contemporary political frictions.

To the West, an intensified outreach to the Gulf over the last eight years has moved beyond a transactional focus on energy and emigration. A full-spectrum approach now emphasises investment flows, advanced manufacturing and services integration, counter-terrorism and intelligence cooperation, maritime security, and legal-institutional scaffolding for trade and technology partnerships. Initiatives such as the India–UAE Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement and the proposal for the India–Middle East–Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC) point to a corridors-based strategy that can rebalance supply chains and reduce overdependence on contested chokepoints. If realised, IMEC could be a harbinger of new modalities of inter-regional integration linking Indian manufacturing and logistics nodes to Gulf and European markets through multimodal connectivity.

Northwards, a renewed Central Asia initiative recognises both cultural affinities and geopolitical realities. Engagement here is constrained primarily by connectivity impediments. Overcoming them—through ports and corridors to India’s west, air-freight and digital bridges, and targeted sectoral cooperation—can restore historical channels of commerce and ideas. Central Asia’s strategic location, energy resources, and role in Eurasian security dialogues make it indispensable to any serious continental strategy. India’s approach has accordingly emphasised regular summitry, security consultations, capacity-building, and carefully curated economic projects that can scale when connectivity catches up.

Culture, Heritage, and Religious Diplomacy as Instruments of Statecraft

As India sheds earlier political inhibitions that narrowed its horizons, cultural legacies have regained salience as strategic assets. Nowhere is this more visible than in Southeast Asia, where archaeological discoveries and conservation projects testify to a deep civilizational interweave. Work at My Son in Vietnam and long-standing conservation at Angkor Wat and Ta Prohm in Cambodia are emblematic of a policy that treats heritage cooperation not as ornamentation but as connective infrastructure of a different kind—one that stabilises relationships by anchoring them in shared memory. In Myanmar, conservation at Bagan after the 2016 earthquake demonstrated a nimble ability to combine cultural stewardship with humanitarian and technical assistance.

The resonance extends into East Asia. The cultural revival associated with Ayodhya strikes a natural chord in South Korea, where the legend of a queen from Ayodhya has long formed a strand of popular and elite memory. Such civilizational echoes, when handled with scholarship and sensitivity, thicken people-to-people ties and create constituencies for sustained engagement that outlast policy cycles.

To the West, the Gulf’s long-standing culture of trade and exchange with the subcontinent has been complemented by new symbolic and substantive gestures. The construction of a Hindu temple in Abu Dhabi, supported by Emirati authorities, is significant not merely as religious accommodation but as recognition of a time-honoured relationship with Indian society. Religious-cultural diplomacy of this sort can lower social transaction costs, facilitate diaspora integration, and create soft-power buffers that support hard-security cooperation.

Linkages to the Eurasian landmass are animated by the spread of Buddhism’s intellectual, spiritual, and aesthetic messages across centuries. Recent efforts—reviving scholarly networks, restoring sites, and promoting pilgrim circuits—aim to ensure that this heritage flowers again. The point is not nostalgia but the strategic use of shared civilizational capital to open doors in regions where great-power competition otherwise narrows diplomatic space.

From Metrics to Meaning: Integrated Statecraft and Global Rebalancing

The maturation of Indian foreign policy is visible in its shift from compartmentalised, transactional ties to full-spectrum relationships that integrate economics, security, connectivity, and culture. This integration is not an embellishment of strategy; it is strategy. Heritage conservation, archaeological collaboration, and religious symbolism are employed alongside trade agreements, naval exercises, and infrastructure financing to build resilient partnerships. Managing overlapping peripheries—replete with diaspora linkages, migratory flows, and cultural interdependence—demands precisely this multi-directional, multi-domain approach.

Global rebalancing will not be secured by power metrics alone. A durable re-ordering requires a cultural and intellectual resurrection that acknowledges why India matters to diverse regions: because of its unique contributions to civilizational heritage, its role as a connector across maritime and continental geographies, and its capacity to translate that inheritance into contemporary public goods. As India’s influence in the Indian Ocean and the Indo-Pacific expands, as its Gulf and Central Asian engagements deepen, and as its cultural diplomacy consolidates shared memory into shared interests, its global relevance will rise commensurately. In turn, India’s prosperity and progress can serve as a lifting tide for the wider subcontinent, stabilising its immediate peripheries while contributing to a more balanced international order.

THE WORLD AS A FAMILY

Historical Legitimacy and the Ethos of Service

India’s contemporary international profile draws strength from a long arc of global engagement that predates independence and reflects a civilizational ethic of Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam—the world as one family. The country’s contributions in both World Wars were not incidental footnotes but foundational experiences that forged a tradition of service and responsibility extending across theatres and continents.

In the First World War, more than a million Indians served in Europe, the Mediterranean, West Asia, and Africa. Archival images—bicycle troops at the Somme, turbaned soldiers entering Jerusalem through the Jaffa Gate—symbolize a far-reaching presence that was insufficiently acknowledged in subsequent national narratives. In part, this under-recognition owed more to domestic political sensibilities and post-colonial mindsets than to any absence of substance in India’s engagement with the world. A deliberate rebalancing of historical memory has unfolded in recent years. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s tributes at memorials such as Neuve-Chapelle and Haifa catalysed broader national awareness, prompting initiatives to document and commemorate the trails of Indian campaigns abroad.

The Second World War saw as many as two-and-a-half million Indians take up arms. Their contributions were complex and multidirectional: the British Indian Army played a decisive role from North Africa to Southeast Asia, while the Indian National Army under Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose mobilized the cause of freedom in parallel with a global conflict. India was also a logistical fulcrum in sustaining allied war efforts—keeping China supplied over the Himalayan “Hump” and facilitating the Persian corridor to Russia. The presence of an Indian military contingent in the Red Square parade in June 2020 was an explicit reminder of India’s role in eventual victory and post-war stabilisation—from East and Southeast Asia to West Asia and Europe.

This historical service ethos laid the groundwork for India’s leadership in UN Peacekeeping Operations, where Indian troops and police have stood out for professionalism and sacrifice. Over time, this has evolved into a broader first-responder capability in regional crises—whether evacuation of civilians from conflict zones, humanitarian assistance and disaster relief, or stabilization support to neighbours—foregrounding a capacity to address global needs without coercion or political conditionality. The through-line from wartime service to peacetime responsibility provides a moral and strategic foundation for India’s contemporary claim that “India matters.”

Assertive Pragmatism and Strategic Autonomy

India’s geopolitical behaviour over the last decade reflects an assertive pragmatism anchored in core security interests and an unapologetic pursuit of national goals. The credibility of this posture rests on matching diplomatic positions with operational capability. In counter-terrorism, the doctrine of zero tolerance acquired practical content through cross-border responses after Uri (2016) and the air strikes on Balakot (2019). On the northern border, when confronted with Chinese coercion, India counter-deployed and sustained a significant military posture despite the operational complications of the Covid pandemic. Such actions signal that a rising India will continuously push the envelope to expand its strategic space while maintaining steadfast adherence to territorial integrity and sovereignty.

This realism is accompanied by a nuanced internationalism. India’s participation in the Quad has enhanced its standing without constraining strategic autonomy. Its stance on the Ukraine conflict—eschewing bloc politics, underscoring the imperatives of energy security, highlighting food inflation and supply-chain disruptions—resonates strongly with the Global South. By speaking to the lived realities of developing nations, India projects confidence, independence, and a determination to balance principle with pragmatism in a fragmented order.

The world system is habituated to states pursuing national interest—even competitors accept this logic. What matters is the manner in which such interests are advanced. India seeks to align hard-security imperatives with a broader normative frame that privileges rules, consultation, and non-zero-sum outcomes.

Strategic Outreach and the Reanimation of Diplomacy

Since 2014, an intensified tempo of high-level diplomacy has reanimated relationships long neglected. A prime ministerial visit to the UAE after three decades, the first-ever to Bahrain (2019), and renewed engagements with Turkmenistan and Kyrgyzstan after two decades marked a purposeful outreach to West and Central Asia. Australia waited 28 years for a prime ministerial visit, and immediate neighbours such as Sri Lanka and Nepal saw the restoration of sustained, bilateral prime ministerial attention after significant gaps. This activism has not been episodic. It is supported by systemic linkages across the economic, security, technological, cultural, and diaspora domains, enabling a more coherent projection of interests and a stronger voice at multilateral gatherings from the UN to the G20.

India’s distinctive model—modernity blended with tradition, pluralism joined to nationalism, domestic democracy coupled with international consultation—has deepened its credibility as a non-coercive, problem-solving partner. A more assured India is also more expressive: by embracing its heritage rather than sidestepping it, India is better positioned to bridge modernity and tradition, and to convert erstwhile historical dilemmas into contemporary strengths. This authenticity helps overcome residual colonial-era stereotypes that cast India as a “poor cousin.” As achievements accumulate and are communicated with greater confidence, the world registers the singularity of a civilizational state rediscovering its voice on its own terms.

Neighbourhood First: Structural Regionalism and Calibrated Presence

The immediate neighbourhood remains the most exacting test of India’s strategic culture. Proximity amplifies expectations, magnifies missteps, and invites external competition. States in South Asia naturally look to India in moments of crisis—natural or man-made, political or economic—given dense interdependence and historical intimacy. The policy challenge lies in calibrating presence: doing too much can appear intrusive; doing too little risks perceptions of indifference, weakness, or the ceding of space to competitive powers. Outcomes are invariably shaped by partner politics and shifting contexts.

A durable response is to transcend day-to-day fluctuations and build structural regionalism through non-reciprocal, generous, and patient policies centred on connectivity, commerce, and contacts. This approach links societies through hard infrastructure (roads, rail, ports, cross-border energy grids), soft facilitators (trade facilitation, standards, digital payments), and political comfort (predictable support and respectful consultation). India’s decisive backing for Sri Lanka during its economic crisis—timely financing, essential supplies, and policy support—illustrates the willingness to “go the extra mile” when regional stability is at stake. Sustainable regionalism requires that the largest actor bear disproportionate burdens; in the Subcontinent, only India can credibly play that role while balancing partner sensitivities and managing competing external influences.

Stewarding the Global South: Development Partnerships and Multilateral Voice

India’s political stature and economic capacity now draw expectations far beyond South Asia. Having championed decolonization and the rights of developing nations since independence, India faces a contemporary agenda defined by complex structural issues. The Covid-19 pandemic exposed barriers to vaccine accessibility and affordability. Climate action remains fraught because developed countries have persistently evaded finance and technology-transfer commitments. Non-tariff barriers and protectionism—often couched in non-trade considerations—have lengthened the list of challenges confronting developing economies.

Despite its own constraints, India demonstrated solidarity through Vaccine Maitri at a time of significant domestic stress, underscoring a willingness to share capacity in the service of collective welfare. The effort formed part of a wider South–South cooperation agenda that has, over the last decade, deepened into practical development partnerships aligned with the priorities of Africa, Latin America, and Asia. These partnerships encompass power plants and transmission lines, dams and water systems, public buildings and housing, rail and road links, agricultural processing facilities, and IT centres. They are complemented by extensive training and exchanges of experience, creating additional options and leverage for the Global South in global negotiations.

During its G20 presidency, India convened the Voice of the Global South Summit to ascertain the views of 125 nations—an exercise in empathetic listening that reinforced emotional and political connect. By placing the rise of Africa and the sustainable growth of least developed countries at the centre of deliberations, India aligned its strategic interests with a broader rebalancing of global governance. The conviction that “India matters” rests, in no small part, on the belief held by many developing states that India stands with them as they navigate a world still marked by hierarchies entrenched over two centuries of colonialism.

A Distinctive Model of Partnership: Non-Coercive, Law-Adhering, and Self-Reliance Oriented

India’s development partnerships are differentiated by responsiveness to partner-defined priorities and a consistent emphasis on self-reliance rather than extraction. The ten guiding principles articulated in Kampala in 2018 set out a framework for engagement—respect for sovereignty, transparency, local capacity-building, and mutual benefit—that rejects coercive conditionalities and debt practices. Since 2014, lines of credit and grant assistance have been extended across a spectrum of national and community-level projects, with sustained efforts to share best practices and train human resources.

This model reflects India’s domestic ethos. Inherent pluralism underpins unity in diversity at home; democratic habits shape external consultations abroad. Adherence to law and a rules-based order is coupled with restraint in the use of power. As India’s capabilities expand, external expectations that it emulate earlier great-power behaviour misunderstand its strategic DNA. Rather than replicate coercive or one-sided approaches, India seeks to highlight its distinctive qualities—civilizational authenticity, consultative democratic practice, and non-zero-sum problem-solving—to chart a path that is modern yet rooted, national yet international, and ambitious yet mindful of the larger family of nations.

Global Rebalancing and India’s Centrality

The redistribution of power visible since the 2008 global financial crisis has accelerated a broader rebalancing of the international system. India has been both a beneficiary and a driver of this shift. The elevation of the G20—superseding the G7’s agenda-setting primacy after 2008—symbolizes the diffusion of influence to large emerging economies, within which India has become an agenda-setter rather than a rule-taker. Its economic scale-up, trade and investment flows, technology capabilities, market share in critical sectors, and thought leadership on climate change, terrorism, illicit financial flows and taxation, and pandemic governance all reinforce this role.

India’s influence is also visible in crisis management and norm entrepreneurship. On the consequences of the Ukraine conflict, New Delhi articulated a balanced position that reaffirms sovereignty and territorial integrity while insisting that diplomacy, energy security, food availability, and fertilizer access for the Global South be addressed in tandem. In its maritime environs since 2014, India has repeatedly acted as a first responder—evacuating civilians from Yemen, delivering HADR to Nepal, Mozambique, Madagascar, and Tonga, and mounting oceanic relief operations after cyclones and tsunamis. The dispatch of “Operation Dost” teams to Türkiye and Syria after the 2023 earthquake underscored that this willingness to shoulder responsibility extends even beyond the Indian Ocean littorals. These practices, together with India’s convening power on issues such as black money and fair taxation (for example, BEPS and transparency debates), demonstrate a polity capable of shaping outcomes, not merely commenting on them.

Strategic Autonomy, Multi-Vectorism, and the Rules-Based Order

India’s ascent has been anchored in strategic autonomy understood not as equidistance, but as the maximization of freedom of choice. This has entailed independent assessments, strategic distancing where needed, vocal articulation of core interests, and targeted cooperation in specific theatres to leverage convergences with partners. A multi-vector approach—deepening ties with the United States, Europe, Japan, Australia, and the Gulf while sustaining legacy linkages with Russia and expanding equities across ASEAN, Africa, and Latin America—bridges contradictions across a wide spectrum of interests.

In practice, partnerships are tailored to problems. India rejects vetoes on its choices, as pressures mounted against the Quad made clear; it does not hedge for hedging’s sake. Instead, the compass of national interest guides decisions, free from ideological reservations or hidden agendas. As multiple power centres emerge—especially among “middle-plus” states with regional dominance—India’s centrality to an Asian and global multipolarity makes flexible, pragmatic coalitions a core instrument of policy.

This strategic posture is complemented by a principled stance on international law and the rules-based order. In the South China Sea, India supports freedom of navigation and overflight and unimpeded commerce, grounded in principles reflected in UNCLOS 1982, and has urged all parties to respect the legal regime governing seas and oceans. New Delhi’s credibility rests on example as well: it accepted the 2014 tribunal award settling its maritime boundary with Bangladesh, aligning state conduct with the letter and spirit of international law. At the same time, India recognizes that strict textualism can be gamed through semantics. It therefore advocates a rules-based order that complements law with norms and practices, deterring the erosion of underlying principles by legalistic manipulation.

Connectivity, Sovereignty, and Regional Statecraft

India has articulated objective criteria for connectivity that distinguish responsible initiatives from opaque or debt-inducing models. Projects should align with recognized international norms; uphold good governance, rule of law, openness, transparency, and equality; be financially responsible; avoid unsustainable debt; balance ecological and environmental protection; transparently assess costs; ensure local ownership; and respect sovereignty and territorial integrity. This framework informs India’s evaluation of transcontinental proposals and its own initiatives—whether supply-chain resilient corridors in the Indo-Pacific, the India–Middle East–Europe Economic Corridor announced during its G20 presidency, or subregional projects under BBIN and BIMSTEC. It is a sovereignty-aware, development-first lens that prizes sustainability and consent over opacity and coercion.

The ability to matter abroad begins at home. Improvements in governance quality, capability development, and progress on longstanding vulnerabilities—such as the political and administrative reorganization and intensified development effort in Jammu & Kashmir—have enhanced India’s credibility. In its immediate periphery, New Delhi seeks stronger structural linkages in trade, energy, digital public goods, and connectivity that expand strategic space. Policy combines attractive cooperation with clear signaling of the costs of alienation, aiming to foster an integrated regional environment that works to the advantage of all but especially stabilizes the position of the largest player.

Extended neighbourhoods—from the Indo-Pacific in the east to the Gulf and Africa in the west—require sustained, bespoke policies comparable in intensity to those for immediate neighbours. The Act East policy, SAGAR (Security and Growth for All in the Region), the Indo-Pacific Oceans Initiative, and robust engagements with GCC states, Africa (including the India–Africa Forum Summit process), and the island states of the Indian and Pacific Oceans are illustrations. Globally, working with all major powers—without exclusivism—maximizes strategic advantage.

To scale engagement efficiently in a world of finite diplomatic bandwidth, India has multiplied group interfaces with regional and thematic blocs: ASEAN as a collective, the European Union, Eurasian groupings, the African Union and subregional organizations, the GCC, Pacific Islands (FIPIC), the Caribbean (CARICOM), and the Nordic states. These are complemented by plurilateral formats—Quad, I2U2, BRICS, among others—that diversify platforms for influence and policy coordination. By breaking out of boxes designed by competitors and pursuing 360-degree engagement, India has widened its options and amplified its voice.

Operating in a Transitional World: Leadership, Narrative, and National Purpose

The international system is in fundamental transition. A messy and still-unfolding multipolarity is overlaid by bipolar frictions, while narratives are shaped by a wider array of actors, from major powers to networked middle states and private platforms. This environment compels India to pursue multiple, at times seemingly contradictory, approaches simultaneously. The foundational goal is to promote greater multipolarity and stronger rebalancing. Progress is faster when others perceive India’s rise as complementary to their interests; prudence and self-confidence are needed to harness that calculus while steadfastly resisting intimidation and pressure.

Rising powers are tested—not just for intent but for capacity and steadiness. Leadership quality and performance on the ground are differentiators. India’s trajectory, therefore, cannot be treated as preordained. It faces domestic doubters and vested interests, including those who may cloak resistance in the language of political correctness or invoke an asserted global consensus to constrain sovereign choice. At stake is also the continuity of a civilizational narrative; efforts to sever the contemporary state from its history, traditions, and culture are part of the contest over policy legitimacy. Success thus depends on national unity and collective purpose—ambition and strategy backed by initiative, perseverance, and energy; a leadership and populace prepared to embrace opportunity through steady, focused effort.

To whom India matters, and why, follows from this interplay of capability and conduct. For larger states shaping the global transition, India is a growing factor in their strategic arithmetic. Competitors—who once assumed persistent Indian limitations—have reassessed both trajectory and capacity. Neighbours increasingly recognize the benefits and comfort of proximity to a generous, often non-reciprocal, development partner. The rest of the Global South sees an even greater upside in an India that can articulate and advance their interests with credibility and weight. The international community engages New Delhi with greater enthusiasm and expectation; even critics must take seriously an India that refuses to bend to ideological bullying or be deflected from its chosen course.

India’s Contemporary Profile and Global Agenda-Setting

Among large economies, India’s recovery has been robust. Now the world’s fifth-largest economy and widely projected to be the third by the end of the decade, it reflects a polity that has, over the last decade, shown the will to take tough decisions and undertake serious reforms—from formalization and digitization to infrastructure expansion and regulatory simplification. The policy orientation is human-centric: building inclusive safety nets while deploying digital public goods (Aadhaar, UPI, CoWIN, and the broader India Stack) to democratize access and reduce transaction costs; and pursuing green growth through initiatives such as the International Solar Alliance, the Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure, and ambitious renewable targets.

India stayed the course during the Covid-19 storm—stabilizing supply chains domestically and extending help abroad through medical supplies and vaccines—while, on national security, standing its ground firmly when challenged and articulating zero tolerance for terrorism. The state’s capacity to safeguard its diaspora—evacuations from Yemen, Ukraine (Operation Ganga), Sudan (Operation Kaveri), and mass repatriations during the pandemic—has become integral to its external profile.

New Delhi has increasingly shaped the global agenda and influenced outcomes. Its G20 presidency delivered consensus in a polarized environment, while the Voice of the Global South Summit demonstrated that others trust India to present their case. Across climate finance, resilient supply chains, digital cooperation, pandemic preparedness, maritime law, and counter-terrorism, India has acted as a consensus-builder and a voice of reason. This is an India of ideas and initiatives, channeling the creativity and innovation of its youth into domestic transformation and international leadership.

Civilizational Identity and the Outlook as Bharat

India’s rise is framed as a civilizational state regaining its place in the comity of nations. It has sought to encourage partnerships not by demanding deference but by assuming responsibilities, making contributions, and delivering accomplishments consistent with its ethos. Democratic values, a plural society, and an open economic outlook resonate globally. Policymaking is increasingly grounded in societal realities, drawing on deep experience in managing diversity and complexity.

This orientation addresses long-standing challenges: leaving no one behind, democratizing technology, and embedding sustainability in growth. Achievements in space (from Mars Orbiter to Chandrayaan-3 and solar missions), health (vaccine production and platforms), start-ups and digital entrepreneurship, and sports have fueled renewed pride—especially among the young—accompanied by a sharper awareness of heritage and of India’s value-added to global progress.

The outlook is of a society on the move with a long-term perspective on its own prospects and the world’s. New Delhi is prepared to set contemporary terms of engagement rooted in an intrinsically international outlook and the age-old conviction of the world as one family. The proposition that India matters because it is Bharat links modern statecraft to civilizational continuity, positing that enduring identity and values will guide and legitimize an expanding role in shaping global norms, institutions, and outcomes.