This article is the second in a series titled “India: The Next Five Years.” Conversations with subject experts, thought leaders, innovators, strategists, and diplomats will explore India’s foreign relations and its global outlook from 2024 to 2029.
India, the world’s fastest-growing economy, is also growing in its understanding of itself. As it does so, its “grand strategy”—the way it views its place in the world—is largely defined by China, experts say.
“China looms increasingly large in India’s strategic consciousness,” writes Dhruva Jaishankar in his recently released book, “Vishwa Shastra: India and the World.”
“Indeed, China’s rise is likely the primary factor influencing India’s grand strategy today.”
“Vishwa Shastra,” is a Sanskrit phrase that means “treatise on the world.” The book offers a consolidated, linear analysis of Indian foreign policy from ancient to modern times.
Jaishankar, who serves as executive director of the Washington-based Observer Research Foundation, told The Epoch Times in an exclusive interview that there are broadly five objectives to India’s “grand strategy.”
“Strengthening India at home, militarily and economically, is [the] number one priority. [Second is] ensuring a stable neighborhood, which has been a big challenge, but the neighborhood has always, again, been a first priority internationally,” Jaishankar said.
Maintaining a balance of power is India’s third priority. The fourth is to address legacy issues concerning India’s partition, which led to the formation of Pakistan and created larger regional consequences. The fifth is to advocate for India’s adequate participation in global rule-making institutions, he said.
These five objectives have largely defined India’s grand strategy since its independence in 1947. Today’s India has more opportunities and resources to achieve these objectives than it has ever had before, according to Jaishankar.
“India is less on the defensive than in the past. It has more resources than in the past. So that’s good in many respects. It has an ability to modernize. It has an ability to settle some of the issues in its periphery. It has the ability to bypass and isolate Pakistan and things like that.”
Articulating India’s Grand Strategy
Srikanth Kondapalli, dean of the School of International Studies at New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), told The Epoch Times that every major power has a grand strategy that defines its trajectory, looking out 20 to 25 years. Along with its planning for economic, technological, and military development, the grand strategy details a country’s national ethos.
An expert on China’s foreign and security policies, Kondapalli said how much of a nation’s grand strategy is disclosed depends upon the purpose ascribed to it by that nation.
“For example, the Americans have the [Quadrennial] Defense Review and national security strategy. … The Russians have a strategy like this. The UK has one. China also articulated it in terms of national rejuvenation by 2049, and they have several steps—from up to 2021 up to 2035,” said Kondapalli.
India’s grand strategy has rarely been explicitly articulated, and various authors have attempted to express the country’s vision. Jaishankar’s work attempts to define India’s global impact, exactly 25 years away from the mid-century world. The mid-century is also the timeframe of China’s grand strategy of national rejuvenation, sometimes dubbed “Global China 2049” or “China 2049.”
Kondapalli cited “India 2020,” a 1998 work by India’s former president, A.P.J. Abdul Kalam and Y. S. Rajan. The book outlined a strategy for a developed India looking at the first two decades of the new millennium.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has expressed Indian strategy as “Viksit Bharat 2047.” The phrase “Viksit Bharat,” which means “developed India,” conveys the Indian government’s vision to transform the country into a self-reliant and prosperous economy by 2047.
Kondapalli described the areas defined under Viksit Bharat 2027 as “soft areas of the grand strategy.”
Meanwhile, many of India’s security-related issues are kept guarded and undisclosed, he said. A number of the undisclosed areas concern China.
The Biggest Obstacle—China
Despite its possibilities, India faces many challenges to the achievement of its grand strategy. Looming large among them is China, which analysts define as a major challenge to India’s rise on the world stage.
Geography and history provide the context for the challenge from China. That’s according to Monish Tourangbam, director of the India-based Kalinga Institute of Indo-Pacific Studies.
“Since its inception in 1949, the Sino–Indian war of 1962 and its rise as a global power in the 21st century, communist China has influenced the conception and operationalization of India’s grand strategy,” Tourangbam told The Epoch Times.
Jaishankar said China challenges each of India’s grand strategy objectives.
“The biggest obstacle in each of these five objectives today, arguably, is China. So China is the biggest obstacle to India’s defense procurement, its technology policy, its trade policy, its industrial policy,” he said.
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