What makes a country a major power? Is it purely a question of hard power, or are more intangible factors involved? Is this status something a nation can claim unilaterally, or is the recognition and acceptance of other such powers the key to one’s arrival in the club?
These are questions Prof TV Paul explores with respect to India’s decades-long quest for major power status. Paul, a leading thinker and writer on both the broader power shifts that define the international order and on India specifically, is well placed to do so.
Dr Paul is a distinguished James McGill Professor whose body of scholarly work focuses on the need to understand peaceful change as an urgent necessity. His book sheds important light on India’s significance as the “swing power” that can mitigate China’s aggressive rise in the Indo-Pacific region. To this end, he espouses the use of both soft power and hard power resources.
Joseph Nye Jr coined soft power as one’s ability to get what one wants through attraction rather than coercion. The book elaborates on India’s soft power strengths, stating that its cultural and civilisational depth lend it a favourable reception — for example, yoga, Bollywood, spirituality, inclusiveness, tolerance — but its caste system and religious divisiveness are its countervailing factors. The economic growth rate is said to be a major marker of hard power and the complementing hard tools are indigenous military strength, nuclear potential, space applications and technological advances, while poverty, inequality and corruption are its downsides.
India’s evolution as a global power over the last half-century can be tracked as a parade of key political leaders, per this book’s subtitle — from Jawaharlal Nehru to Narendra Modi — as well as via a perpetual churn of competing tensions: between its colonial legacy and its nationalist sinews; between its timeless faith traditions and its status as a tech giant; between its legacy as the world’s biggest democracy and the domestic and international pressures of creeping authoritarianism. This book explores the ways in which those and other themes have defined India’s place in the global order.
There were supposedly two pivotal moments for India post-World War II when the status hierarchy was institutionalised, and on both occasions, India is said to have missed the boat, the author contends. The first was in 1945 when India was still a British colony and the second was in 1968 when India opposed the unequal Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). However, the true perceptual shift about India is said to have happened since its economic liberalisation in 1991, a trigger for India’s acceptance as a rising power.
In The Unfinished Quest, Paul begins by defining “major power” status as encapsulating four hard power issues: military capability, economic prowess, technological/knowledge capability and demography; and six soft power issues – normative position, leadership in international institutions, culture, state capacity, strategy/diplomacy and effective national leadership.
Certainly, major power status is not unrealistic. India is the world’s most populous country and the fifth-largest economy (projected by some to be the second largest by mid-century). It is the heir to one (or, indeed, several) of the world’s great civilizations. It is a major player in engineering, pharmaceuticals and IT, and one of only five countries to have landed a craft on the moon. That English remains India’s second national language, the language of business and government, and the language in which university courses are taught is both an asset to the country’s status as a global player and a key factor in the virtual borderlessness between Silicon Valley and Bangalore.
The book informs us of the importance of dependency relationships for status hierarchy, and the lack of it causing status depreciation. It draws attention to how India’s insufficient economic integration with the South Asian countries — evident in trade comprising less than 5 per cent of its global trade and low investment levels—has created a vacuum that China has effectively filled. Such a lapse, the author underscores, could be deleterious to regional hegemonic status as smaller states in the region get manoeuvring space to play one against the other.
The coverage of the India-Pakistan rivalry in the backdrop of the Cold War seems like an analogous game of chess, with India’s status often checkmated by the big powers. The US strategy to prop up Pakistan to counter Russia, particularly during the tenures of President Reagan and President Carter, is said to have emboldened Pakistan to develop nuclear capability to neutralise India. The simplistic assessment that the Kashmir conflict is being partially driven by status and identity concerns exposes the author’s feeble understanding of the painful Partition with all its serious security implications for India.
The book explains how India has astutely leveraged international status symbols, such as its G20 presidency, membership in regional forums like the Quad and the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity, and strong bilateral relations, to advance its interests and enhance its global profile. Its ongoing strategic partnership with Russia gives it a bridge- builder role. In Africa, too, India could do a lot more, given the strong presence of its diaspora, and champion the interests of the Global South with concrete advances and collective actions in collaboration with the West. However, the author’s assertion that the West needs India to counter an assertive China in the Indo-Pacific region appears to contradict his reasoning that the US-China rivalry can diminish India’s status.
Geopolitically, Paul gives India mixed marks on how it has handled its evolution among world powers. After years of chafing at the West’s foreign policy formulation of “Indo/Pak”, which counterintuitively and unproductively lumped the two nuclear rivals together, Delhi has succeeded in getting the great powers to lay that construct to rest and to see India as the key player and Pakistan as a troublesome regional spoiler – though the end of the Cold War and of the West’s involvement in Afghanistan had much to do with Washington’s re-assessment of Islamabad.
The book dwells on India’s weaknesses and what needs to be done to play a leadership role globally. The author believes that bridging material gaps should be a top priority, from which flows the need to address staggering inequalities, especially income, gender, regional, and rural. His advocacy supports inclusive development policies that can translate into parallel improvements in domestic living standards and the creation of world-class infrastructure through a reoriented, futuristic bureaucracy. However, his constructive criticism fails to take into account India’s decadal progress during which about 250 million people were lifted out of multidimensional poverty, as recognised by the UN. India’s progress was a silver lining in the otherwise gloomy scenario surrounding the Sustainable Development Goals. Further, he reinforces the importance of promoting multicultural, multiethnic, and secular credentials to earn respect for Hindu values. The necessity of liberal education is key to changing attitudes, he observes.
India’s democratic system, despite its flaws, is attractive for trade, investment and economic partnerships. The author supposes that more democracy, not less, is the way forward for India’s peaceful ascent to a high-status nation, challenging the dominant narrative that war is the way to great power status. If India gets its act right through leadership foresight and collective resolve, Dr Paul believes, India will hold a vital place in the world order.
Overall, this book provides a comprehensive overview and essential analysis of India’s quest to achieve major power status. Paul comes to the view that India’s achievements are significant, but he finds that it is held back by an inability to overcome the impulses of its past. For all of its progress on the tangible, hard aspects of power, the decisive factor is India’s inability to tame the intangibles.
