Calculations, Culture and Clarity

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Calculations, Culture and Clarity

Strategic plurality under stress

An earlier articulation of India’s external posture argued for a multi-vector strategy: simultaneous engagement with the United States, management of China, cultivation of Europe, reassurance of Russia, activation of Japan, drawing in neighbours, extending the periphery, and enlarging traditional constituencies of support. The subsequent years have validated the logic but revealed uneven execution. Some vectors advanced smoothly; others became more complicated, not least because the international environment was reshaped in quick succession by the Covid-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine, and renewed fighting in West Asia. The system has grown markedly tougher, and India has felt global pressures directly.

The most consequential shift in India’s strategic calculus has been the altered Chinese posture on the border, which has demanded robust military deployments and a recalibration of cooperative avenues. This test has unfolded alongside a determined leadership and a supportive society, enabling India to navigate turbulence and sustain growth. Strategic culture in rising powers typically puts a premium on stability; the realist lesson is that ascent must be planned for amid unpredictability, not in spite of it.

Strategy in such conditions cannot rely on institutional muscle memory alone. Structural frameworks and past experience still matter, but India must fully recognize ongoing processes that are reshaping current realities, including shifts in power both between and within states. In practice, that means revalidating core principles while adapting instruments, sequencing, and partnerships to a world where the drivers of security and gain are changing.

Five structuring phenomena: from globalization to competitive games

Five phenomena have dominated international relations over the past quarter-century, each shaping Indian foreign policy individually and cumulatively.

  • Globalization remains the most fundamental trend and is set to intensify; yet its earlier model—predicated on deep, geographically concentrated interdependencies—is under mounting challenge. The last two decades have produced a rebalancing in relative weight among players in the world order, initially economic and increasingly political and cultural. That rebalancing is generating a more pronounced multipolarity as new consequential powers separate out to join the post-1945 incumbents. Outcomes will hinge on how state combinations come together and with what agendas.

  • Technology has become a game-changer to a greater degree than before. Its penetration into daily routines and essential infrastructure has enlarged the capacity to weaponize normal activities, needs, and resources. Policymakers must increasingly think in terms of “techades”—decades defined by rapid technological cycles and their governance—in order to remain contemporary.

  • The perennial “games nations play” continue unabated. Competitive politics among individual countries and in constellations—alliances, coalitions, and issue-based groupings—shape outcomes, creating both opportunities and friction. For India, integrating these competitive dynamics into planning is indispensable.

These phenomena interact. A more contested globalization is pushing states to correct unacceptable concentrations in economy and technology; that correction reinforces rebalancing and accentuates multipolarity; and the technology-security nexus amplifies the gamesmanship around standards, supply chains, and data. India must prepare for a re-globalization that diffuses risk, pluralizes flows, and reduces single points of failure, using the opportunity to strengthen comprehensive national power—economic, technological, military, and socio-cultural—while acknowledging both change and continuity in world politics.

Power shifts, domestic politics, and the United States

Much of today’s strategic recalculation centers on the United States. Its dominance is clearly less than in the past. While its role has evolved—often exercised in a more off-shore manner—its capabilities and influence remain significant. The challenge for partners is to read correctly the scope and duration of American investments across regions relative to the growing presence and activism of other major powers, especially China.

Domestic political polarization has become a material factor in diplomacy. In the United States, sharper internal divides affect continuity of policy, the tenor of alliances, and the politics of trade and technology. In China, domestic changes—centralization of decision-making, evolving economic priorities, and shifts in elite consensus—also compel external actors to recalibrate. Such internal dynamics alter negotiating ranges, timelines, and risk tolerance, and thus must be integrated into India’s assessments and hedging strategies.

Indo-Pacific centrality and India’s operational choices

The geopolitical center of gravity is shifting from the traditional theatres of West Asia and Europe toward the Indo-Pacific. Even distant actors now articulate Indo-Pacific approaches. The Ukraine conflict and its energy reverberations have not diluted this structural shift; if anything, they have underscored the interdependence between European security and Indo-Pacific stability.

These trends have resonated in Indian policy, prompting intensive strategizing and tactical fine-tuning. Domestic policy choices that secured a post-pandemic recovery—fiscal prudence, targeted welfare, supply-side reforms, and accelerated digitalization—underpinned India’s Covid diplomacy, enabling vaccine partnerships and humanitarian outreach that built political capital.

On Ukraine, India’s political posture has balanced immediate imperatives of energy and food security with the broader dynamics of Eurasia. It has avoided securitizing interdependence to the point of self-harm, while signaling support for dialogue and adherence to international law. Concurrently, India intensified cooperation with Europe—trade, technology, connectivity—while maintaining traditional ties with Russia. Harmonizing these directions was not easy; the stress test nonetheless demonstrated the viability of calibrated multi-alignment.

On China, India combined deterrent deployments on the border with conscious constraints on cooperation. This approach kept channels open where interests converged, without normalizing abnormality on the frontier. With the Quad partners, India managed smooth transitions across successive administrations with differing emphases, while taking timely decisions to upgrade the Quad’s agenda and institutional rhythm. It also invested in new minilaterals—the I2U2 linking India, Israel, the UAE, and the United States—and in emergent connectivity proposals such as the India–Middle East–Europe Corridor. Together, these reflected a preference for flexible, purpose-driven coalitions that aggregate capacity without entangling commitments.

As the North–South divide deepened, India convened the Voice of the Global South Summit at the start of its G20 presidency, amplifying developing-world perspectives on debt, food and energy security, climate finance, and digital public goods. As multipolarity unfolded, India broadened its engagement to keep pace, extending the neighbourhood concept into the Indian Ocean and West Asia, and deepening ties in Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia.

Technology, de-risking, and the new political economy of security

The drivers of national choices have changed profoundly. Power was once appraised primarily through military and aggregate economic metrics, and opportunities were predicated on inter-state partnerships of a traditional kind. Recent experience has added new parameters for evaluating security and gains.

  • De-risking the global economy has become a principal preoccupation. Market economies and democratic polities are prioritizing resilient and reliable supply chains capable of withstanding shocks—pandemic, conflict, sanctions, cyber disruption, or natural disasters. For India, this translates into trusted manufacturing and services ecosystems, diversified inputs, standards leadership, and logistics corridors that embed reliability.

  • In the digital domain, trust and transparency are now paramount. Norms for data flows, cross-border cloud architectures, critical software and hardware supply chains, and secure 5G/6G ecosystems are shaping collaboration. India’s experience with digital public infrastructure offers a template for trusted scale, but interoperability and governance choices are strategically consequential.

  • A more decentralized world economy is increasingly viewed as the viable remedy to contemporary anxieties. Sentiments against concentration—of technology nodes, rare-earths processing, semiconductor fabrication, or platform dominance—are intensifying as tech wars gather momentum. India’s policy response has coupled production-linked incentives, standards development, and export controls compliance with coalition-building in critical technologies.

  • Interdependence, by itself, is no longer assumed to assure peace and security. The weaponization of finance, energy, and data ecosystems has underscored that interdependence must be designed—with redundancy, transparency, and trusted dispute resolution—to be stabilizing. Risk management is thus a core diplomatic function, not merely a corporate one.

These imperatives require a renewed synthesis of economic and security statecraft. For India, the task is to use re-globalization to embed itself in diversified, high-trust networks; to move up value chains; and to reinforce comprehensive national power. Doing so entails regulatory agility at home, credible delivery abroad, and strategic patience in building coalitions that can endure political cycles.

Re-globalization and trusted collaborations

Re-globalization in an open-ended techade will rely on trusted collaborations that are unfamiliar to many actors: minilateral compacts, standards coalitions, joint R&D security arrangements, and interoperable digital public goods. For India, success lies in blending calculations, culture, and clarity.

  • Calculations: prioritizing sectors and geographies where India’s capabilities and needs align with partners’ de-risking agendas—semiconductors, green hydrogen, critical minerals, pharmaceuticals, digital identity and payments, resilient maritime logistics.

  • Culture: leveraging India’s civilizational comfort with plurality and its diplomatic habit of balancing to convene across divides—East and West, North and South—without diluting core interests.

  • Clarity: recognizing limits as well as opportunities; reading a less dominant yet still consequential United States; mapping China’s external behavior against its domestic imperatives; and institutionalizing policy so that domestic polarization elsewhere does not derail India’s long-term pathways.

The organizing principle is straightforward: prepare for a world of many centers, dense but redesigned interdependence, and accelerated technological churn. India’s multi-directional engagement, calibrated risk posture, and investment in trusted networks position it to adapt to and benefit from these structural shifts, even as it contributes to shaping them.

SAGA OF A RISING POWER

Chapter 1

Navigating Volatility: Convergence Without Conflation

The current international environment is defined by volatility, system-level contestation, and unpredictable spillovers. Strategy in such a milieu must both mitigate risk and navigate change, recognizing that a long-anticipated global transformation is underway. India’s external approach has therefore combined purposeful convergence with like-minded partners—on technology standards, resilient supply chains, critical and emerging technologies, maritime security, and development finance—while maintaining a distinct identity rooted in civilizational self-confidence. This is not alignment in the classical sense but a calibrated intersection of interests that preserves room for autonomous decision-making.

Domestic transformation has enlarged India’s capacity to set terms of engagement. Fiscal consolidation and infrastructure build-out, digital public goods at population scale, energy transitions with an emphasis on affordability and access, and an expanding innovation ecosystem allow India to put forward credible proposals to a widening spectrum of partners in the Global South and North alike. As the most populous country and the world’s fifth-largest economy, India’s G20 presidency offered a particularly salient demonstration of agenda-setting power: it reoriented deliberations towards growth and development amid geopolitical headwinds. In this interaction between a changing India and a dynamic world, leadership quality becomes decisive—internally to orchestrate whole-of-government execution, and externally to choreograph coalitions. What follows evaluates global trends through this lens and situates India’s prospects within an ongoing, and characteristically argumentative, national debate.

From Constraint to Convergence: The Emergence of “New India”

Historically, major powers have reshaped international orders after wars, revolutions, or economic leaps, drawing on new capabilities and distinctive ideas. India’s early diplomacy, by contrast, was circumscribed by limited material capabilities—a cumulative legacy of slow socio-economic and technological progress—and by an under-projection of a major civilization that was still consolidating a modern state. Unlike peers that translated growth spurts into rapid geopolitical influence, India’s trajectory has been staggered.

That pattern is now breaking. Politics, economics, demography, culture, and ideas are converging in mutually reinforcing ways. A demographic dividend is aligning with investment in connectivity and logistics; decentralized welfare delivery is complemented by centralized digital platforms; strategic autonomy is buttressed by defense indigenization and diversified energy partnerships; cultural outreach is synchronizing with technology diplomacy. Together, these broad-based changes constitute the New India: more capable, more confident, and more credible abroad.

The Mandala Clarifies: Strategic Space and Diplomatic Reach

In the last decade India’s strategic space has expanded markedly. The mandala of Indian diplomacy—invoking Kautilya’s layered concentric circles of engagement—has taken clearer form:

  • Neighbourhood First has deepened connectivity, security cooperation, and economic integration with immediate neighbours, prioritizing crisis response, infrastructure, and development partnerships.
  • Extended neighbourhoods have advanced in all directions: westward into West Asia and Africa; eastward across ASEAN into the Pacific; northward into Central Asia; and across the oceans to Latin America and the Caribbean. The Indo-Pacific vision links these theatres around maritime security, resilient supply chains, and trust-based technology.
  • Global footprints are widening through new missions, development partnerships, lines of credit, trilateral formats, and minilateral groupings. Engagements with multiple major power centres—the United States, the European Union, Russia, and key Asian and Middle Eastern countries—have intensified, even as friction among them introduces complicating variables that India must continuously manage.

Public Goods and First Response: Proof of Concept

India’s Vaccine Maitri reaffirmed long-standing credentials as a champion of the South by delivering vaccines at scale under difficult conditions, complementing generic pharmaceuticals and healthcare capacity-building. India’s first-responder role has likewise become consistent and visible through evacuations and humanitarian missions—Operation Kaveri (Sudan), Operation Ganga (Ukraine), Operation Devi Shakti (Afghanistan), and Operation Ajay (Israel)—conveying the expectation that Indian citizens abroad can rely on their state in crises. This hard-edged consular assurance has been paired with the soft power arc that began with globalizing yoga and now extends to promoting Sri Anna (millets), emblematic of sustainable diets and resilient agriculture. The cumulative effect is a reputation for delivering public goods—tangible and normative—that merits stock-taking in terms of the difference India has made and why that matters to a disrupted world.

Method in the Mandate: Vision, Architecture, and Reading Between the Lines

Serious foreign policy begins with a clinical reading of the landscape: specifying risks and benefits, calibrating commitments, and sequencing initiatives. It is guided by a national vision, an organizing architecture, and clear objectives. In India’s political culture, these are not always codified in a single document; instead, their outlines emerge through practice, institutional redesign, and policy signals. Analysts can discern this architecture by examining problem definitions (e.g., supply chain concentration, debt vulnerabilities), process innovations (e.g., digital platforms for development finance, structured minilaterals), and solution templates (e.g., de-risking rather than decoupling, multi-alignment rather than bloc affiliation). The method invites the reader to read between the lines, recognizing intentionality in policy evolution even when it is not overtly programmatic.

The G20 as Navigational Guide in a Polarized Era

India’s G20 presidency offers a diagnostic and prescriptive guide to current world politics. By relentlessly spotlighting the Global South’s priorities—growth, debt relief, climate finance, sustainable development, and digital public infrastructure—it helped re-anchor the forum to its founding mandate of economic cooperation. India defined actionable priorities and advanced collective solutions while managing two cross-cutting challenges: East–West polarization and the North–South development divide. Rather than treating them as mutually reinforcing obstacles, the presidency used each to mitigate the other—building North–South consensus around development deliverables even as it managed East–West disagreements through flexible drafting and issue sequencing.

Diplomatically, a firm posture on process mattered. Innovations such as documenting interim outcomes, deploying paragraph-wise consensus, and using issue-specific tracks enabled progress without allowing any single disagreement to derail the whole. A standout initiative was facilitating the African Union’s permanent membership in the G20, which corrected an institutional gap and solidified the larger narrative of inclusivity and rebalancing.

Stakeholder Diplomacy: Making Spoilsporting Costly

A key takeaway from the Delhi Summit was counterintuitive: the more ambitious the agenda—provided it is anchored in widely shared priorities—the harder it becomes for spoilers to prevail. By nurturing crucial bilateral and minilateral relationships over time, India ensured that all participants had stakes in the presidency’s success, making obstruction strategically and reputationally costly. The presidency also showcased the India way: a mode of diplomacy that blends precision in negotiation with cultural projection and popular participation. The staging of heritage, the use of language and symbolism, and the engagement of subnational actors and citizens created a broader constituency for the outcomes and a deeper legitimacy for the process.

Two Responsibilities, One Cultural Grounding

A rising India bears twin communicative responsibilities. Externally, it must share its strategic thinking with a world increasingly attentive to India’s ascent: how it judges risk, prioritizes development, and sequences capability build-up. Internally, it must equip citizens with an accurate understanding of global developments so that domestic debates, democratic choices, and resource allocations reflect the real opportunities and constraints. Both tasks are culturally anchored. India’s family-like approach to the world, its pluralistic and consultative societal ethos, and its democratic habits shape how it frames problems, conducts debates, and reaches decisions. Positions are ultimately grounded in core values and ethics even as they adapt to shifting contexts.

Epics as Strategic Texts: Lessons Beyond Borders

National sagas are repositories of distilled wisdom, beliefs, and habits, especially valuable to societies whose cultures endured historical pressures. Great tales cross borders and time, spreading influence and providing heuristics for policy in turbulent eras. Epic episodes offer templates, analogies, and reinforcement of self-belief that can guide strategic action under uncertainty. In India’s canon, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata occupy special relevance. The Mahabharata is often linked to statecraft and diplomacy given its complex portrayal of power, alliances, and ethical ambiguity. The Ramayana, by contrast, centers on purity of thought and nobility of conduct. In a modern framing, the former maps to realpolitik, the latter to the construction of norms and rules.

Because stable international orders cannot rest on unrestrained competition alone, the pursuit, establishment, and upholding of standards is essential—arguably more so amid the fraying of regimes and institutions today. The Ramayana thus offers an instructive lens for thinking about what it takes to build and sustain a rules-based order: legitimacy, trust, procedural fairness, and consistent enforcement.

The Ramayana’s Ethical Complexity and Strategic Content

While popularly rendered as a clear-cut struggle between good and evil, the Ramayana possesses dense ethical layers that exceed many other epics. It is celebrated across Asia through festivals, performing arts, and vernacular retellings, underlining its transnational cultural capital. Within its familiar template lie strategic dilemmas with contemporary resonance: the leveraging of goodwill to build alliances, the making and keeping of commitments, the engineering of coalitions, and the exercise of choice under constraint. Apparent certainties often conceal crucial backstories—of reputation, reciprocity, and proportionality—that illuminate decision-making under pressure.

At its heart, the Ramayana narrates a divine force taking human incarnation—Rama—to cleanse the world of evil while modelling personal virtue and public ethics. His rule, idealized as Ram Rajya, becomes a metaphor for a rules-based order: predictable, fair, and responsive. The storyline begins with capability building: cultivation of martial skill, moral authority, and social capital that together forge a formidable reputation. A series of tests are met with dexterity and restraint, strengthening the base for the culminating challenge. The bond with his half-brother Lakshmana provides unity of purpose and reliable counsel; the affection and loyalty of Bharata and Shatrughna broaden the circle of trust. Political intrigue intrudes when Kaikeyi invokes boons promised by Dasaratha, triggering Rama’s exile at the cusp of coronation. The pivotal break with order—Sita’s abduction by Ravana during exile—creates a mission and defines the stakes.

Campaign and Conduct: Operational Lessons for Statecraft

The campaign to rescue Sita mixes diplomacy, intelligence, alliance-building, and combat—strategems that have entered folklore for their ingenuity. The decisive battle spans ten days, with reversals and anxieties before success. Hanuman’s multifaceted role is central: as devotee (motivated by duty), emissary (credibly communicating intent), resource person (providing reconnaissance and logistics), and adviser (shaping operational choices). The narrative surfaces enduring lessons:

  • Reliable friends multiply power: trust built before crisis pays disproportionate dividends when stakes rise.
  • Coalition-building is hard: aligning interests, clarifying end states, and allocating burdens require sustained negotiation and credible assurances.
  • Open-ended commitments are dangerous: boundaries and exit strategies preserve legitimacy and prevent mission creep.
  • Strategic complacency invites risk: adversaries adapt; so must strategy, doctrine, and preparedness.
  • Effective diplomacy shapes the battlefield: persuasion, deterrence, and signalling reduce costs and expand options.
  • Informationized warfare matters: intelligence, surveillance, communication, and narrative control are as decisive as kinetic prowess in determining outcomes.

These lessons map neatly onto contemporary statecraft: partnerships as capacity multipliers; minilaterals as agile coalitions; clearly scoped interventions; continuous modernization; diplomacy as force shaping; and data, networks, and perception as critical infrastructure.

Principle and Interest: Ethics Under Real-World Conditions

Rama’s arc can be read as that of a rising power harmonizing particular interests with a commitment to delivering global good. Repeated tests spur strategic creativity within a principled frame. Many decisions are relatively unambiguous in a deontological sense; others, however, involve ethically fraught trade-offs. The intervention in the conflict between the monkey-kings Vali and Sugriva is emblematic: a choice aimed at restoring order and securing an ally, but one that challenges orthodox assumptions about means and fairness. The episode invites reflection on proportionality, precedent, and the legitimacy of action in service of higher-order stability—issues that recur in debates on preventive action, alliance politics, and regime enforcement today.

Values as Capability: Bharat as Foundation

International life rarely presents black-and-white choices. Grasping the complexity of decision-making—where competing goods and necessary evils collide—is essential to understanding international relations. A major rising power must therefore combine accurate landscape analysis and the capacity to act with confidence in its own values and beliefs. For India, that confidence is grounded in the totality of its culture, heritage, and traditions. The proposition that India can only rise when it is truly Bharat captures the idea that cultural moorings are not a constraint on strategy but a source of coherence, legitimacy, and endurance in policy.

(For continuity of thought, see S. Jaishankar, The India Way: Strategies for an Uncertain World, HarperCollins India, 2020.)