Hoover Institution Convenes Gathering to Discuss How India Will Navigate Its Rise

Hoover Institution (Stanford, CA) - Is modern India a rising power in search of a clear vision of what it wants to be to the world? Or is it solidly assured of its own place in world affairs but lacking the capacity to properly execute its vision?

That's the question a group of Hoover and Stanford scholars entertained at a public discussion held on November 20.

Hoover Institution senior fellows Philip Zelikow and Sumit Ganguly joined Arzan Tarapore of Stanford's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies to explore this topic, in support of a new book Ganguly coedited, The Oxford Handbook of Indian Politics.

Zelikow opened by describing how foreign policy concerns of the United States around India have exponentially grown throughout his career. Recalling his early career as a diplomat in the mid-1980s, Zelikow said the State Department's interest in India then lacked dynamism.

"Basically, what you needed to know about India was the India-Pakistan dispute, what was touchy, foreign aid, the politics of foreign aid, and what India said it needed," Zelikow said. "Beyond that, you didn't need to know a lot."

Since then, India has rapidly grown its economic and security position within the global community and is on the cusp of becoming a major world power, with 1.4 million citizens in its armed forces, a blue-water navy (a maritime force that can operate globally in the open ocean), and GDP of nearly $3.9 trillion this year.

Zelikow described India's position today by comparing it to milestones of a student entering adulthood or graduating from a PhD program: "India is a state of great importance to the world, but what is it going to be when it grows up?" he asked. "India is in a postdoctoral fellowship. What is its ultimate career track going to be?"

On this subject, both Zelikow and Ganguly explained that Indian leaders are still deciding what that career track will look like.

"[India's] being courted by the world, and it doesn't know what kind of world order it wants," Ganguly said.

But Tarapore, the third participant in the main discussion, pushed back on that notion, arguing that "India has a vision of its place in the world, but what it lacks is the wherewithal to execute that vision."

From a national security perspective, Tarapore said, the primary concern of India's defense establishment has shifted in recent years from its nuclear-tipped rivalry with neighbor Pakistan, with which it has fought four major wars since Independence in 1947, to challenges posed by China, including territorial disputes along the Himalayan borderlands.

Tensions with China reached a climax from 2020 to 2022 when Indian and Chinese soldiers engaged in violent and ultimately fatal clashes in remote areas of the Himalayas. This conflict with China pulled Indian political and military leaders into a position of "verging on paranoia of protecting Indian borders at the expense of force projection across the region," Tarapore said.

For instance, after the Sino-Indian skirmish, India halted most of its expensive naval modernization programs.

But the United States and the democratic states of the Indo-Pacific region need India to grow into a state that can project force around the region, as a part of building a coalition of democracies to deter China.

"The US, Japan, and Australia all have an interest in India being more active across the Indo-Pacific, but it's only going to be active in the region if it feels its borders are secure," Tarapore said.

Public link

Please use the above public link if you want to share this noodl on another website.