Comment by Riaz Haq 6 hours ago

A new Indian foreign policy consensus is emerging. That India isn’t a great power yet
After exuberance, India must now not only take difficult and costly steps toward industrialisation, but also convert growth into geo-economic leverage and military modernisation.
Sidharth Raimedhi


https://youtu.be/SgRKrybkJZs?si=SBh0i2Ir_3xHKolh

https://theprint.in/opinion/indian-foreign-policy-consensus-great-p...


After exuberance, India must now not only take difficult and costly steps toward industrialisation, but also convert growth into geo-economic leverage and military modernisation.


A new consensus in Indian foreign and strategic policy thinking has emerged over the past year. It holds that, despite various proclamations, India is not yet a great power, and that its status as a rising power should not be taken for granted either.

Accordingly, India should focus on costly reforms to establish the long-term foundations of power, rather than limiting its policy options to short-term diplomatic or strategic moves. If anything, these priorities require greater restraint and caution in foreign policy, rather than expansion or overt great-power assertion.

Whereas the evolving foreign policy consensus in the US has, understandably, hogged much of the attention in recent months, what is more easily missed is a parallel shift in India’s own broad policy framework, toward what can be termed ‘post-exuberance realism’. As a country’s foreign policy environment becomes more contested and multi-dimensional, it is only logical that its strategic culture adapts accordingly. The shift, therefore, is unsurprising.

The external drivers of post-exuberance realism

As argued earlier, shifts in key equations among the great powers, and in their respective equations with Delhi, have left India occupying a much diminished geopolitical sweet spot from which to bargain. As External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar has argued, changes in the global order have made India’s relationships with the system’s major powers — China, Russia, and the US — far more challenging and complex than they were in 2019. Indeed, 2025 proved to be a sobering year for Indian foreign policy. It saw China’s ‘DeepSeek’ moment and a growing appreciation in India of Beijing’s breakneck ascent toward superpower status. In particular, China demonstrated its ability to threaten industrial supply chains in the US, as well as key sectors of the Indian economy, through its still-evolving and coercive rare-earth export control licensing regime.

The year also saw Washington brusquely abandon India-US strategic convergence and pivot toward a softer reconciliation with China, driven by economic rationale but carrying strong strategic implications for Asia’s future. Trump’s trade war against India further exposed New Delhi’s limited stock of deployable geo-economic leverage vis-à-vis both China and the US. As external bottlenecks have hardened, India has been forced to finally confront internal constraints, evident in recent efforts to boost domestic demand and push labour law reforms.

Meanwhile, India was also confronted with the extent of the maturation of the China-Pakistan strategic and defence relationship in May last year, during Operation Sindoor — something that had faded from public consciousness since 2019-20. China’s continued infrastructure development along the LAC, combined with its growing economic leverage over India, has enabled Beijing to underwrite trilateral cooperation with Afghanistan and Bangladesh, with Pakistan on its side in both cases. The emergence of Turkey as a military ally and defence supplier to several states in the Indian Ocean region has not escaped attention either. Together, these developments necessitate a sober reckoning with the structural weaknesses in India’s armaments policy, as well as a measure of military restraint in the short term. India’s Chief of Defence Staff, General Anil Chauhan, appeared to allude to this last week when he emphasised the need to avoid “attritional warfare” amid increasing geopolitical uncertainty.

Comment by Riaz Haq 2 hours ago

India Is the 3rd Largest Economy, So Why Does It Still Feel Weak? | The Quint

https://youtu.be/jx7JP0oU57A?si=rFanZkyQ0fanv1zx

India just posted a stunning 8.2% GDP growth number. At the same time, the rupee slid sharply and interest rates were cut.
Economists argued. Politicians celebrated. Twitter exploded.
But here’s the uncomfortable question: do these numbers actually reflect economic strength?
This video breaks down why GDP, the number we obsess over the most, is a deeply imperfect measure. It’s an estimate, not a hard fact. It can rise even when real lives don’t improve. And it often distracts us from what actually matters.
Instead of debating whether GDP is ‘real’ or ‘cooked’, this conversation looks at something more tangible: economic muscle. Not slogans. Not rankings. Real capacity.
Things like:
– How much countries invest in AI infrastructure
– Industrial automation and robots
– Data centres and ports
– Steel production
– Stock markets and global companies
When India is compared not to the US or China, but to its real peers — Japan, Germany, the UK, and South Korea — a more honest picture emerges.
India is clearly entering the game. In some areas, it’s doing impressively well. In others, it’s still far behind. And simply overtaking countries in GDP size doesn’t automatically make India stronger, richer, or more resilient.
This video isn’t about optimism or pessimism.
It’s about realism.

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Christopher Clary
@clary_co
I've tried to think a bit about the meaning of Modi's Naya Bharat branding effort and wound up with some overlapping conclusions with Dhume. Here is an excerpt from a forthcoming academic article, entitled "Hindu Nationalism, Akhand Bharat, and Foreign Perceptions of India."

https://x.com/clary_co/status/2012345251781099817?s=20

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Sadanand Dhume
@dhume
Over more than a decade, India has cultivated a self-congratulatory tone in foreign policy—basically the opposite of hide your strength, bide your time—but a series of brutal reality checks over the past year has exposed the limits of Indian economic, technological, and military power.
Shouting $4T economy at the top of your lungs every five minutes means little when you face a hostile $20T economy at your doorstep, and a $30T superpower with only one question: What have you done for me lately?
Personally, I doubt that the hubris can be dialed down. It has become too deeply entwined with domestic politics. Nobody is going to win an election by saying, “actually, you know what, nobody sees us as Vishwaguru. India is a middle power in a rough neighborhood, and in some ways less secure than it was three decades ago.”

https://x.com/dhume/status/2012171714872918154?s=20

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