In his 2025 Independence Day speech, Prime Minister Narendra Modi embedded economic reforms into India’s security infrastructure
Image Source: x.com/narendramodi
There’s nothing like a good threat to spur a nation into action. And if there are three looming threats, they can accelerate the convergence of diverse interests, turn them into existential issues, and deliver India’s grand strategy.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s 12th consecutive Independence Day speech does exactly that. It squarely engages with the three threats India faces today—geopolitical, terroristic, and economic. For a peace-loving, rule-following, and fast-growing nation, all these three qualities—packaged as ‘values’ of the West—are today being seen as weaknesses. From the China-Pakistan nexus around war to the US-EU pretensions and double standards around Russian energy, power has intoxicated democracies and authoritarian regimes alike. Countries like India need to recalibrate.
By hyphenating terrorists with their supporters, Modi has established a new normal in India-Pakistan relations. “Those who nurture and harbour terrorism, and those who empower terrorists, will no longer be seen as separate,” the Prime Minister said in his speech. He went a step further and articulated a zero-tolerance policy for nuclear threats, the most recent of which came from the Chief of the Army Staff of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, Field Marshal Syed Asim Munir Ahmed Shah. The prospect of nuclear contestation in the subcontinent was raised on US soil, right under the nose of US President Donald J. Trump.
By hyphenating terrorists with their supporters, Modi has established a new normal in India-Pakistan relations.
Neither terrorism nor nuclear threats will succeed, Modi stated, contextualising his statement with the recent war victory through Operation Sindoor. Modi highlighted the religious leanings of the Pahalgam terrorists, noting they targeted individuals based on their religion. “Our courageous soldiers punished the enemies beyond anything they could have imagined,” he said. “The devastation in Pakistan has been so huge that every day brings new revelations and fresh information.” India’s tolerance for both threats—Pakistani terrorists and Pakistani nuclear posturing—is over, he declared. “Bharat has now decided—blood and water will not flow together,” he said, standing firmly behind the end of the Indus Waters Treaty.
Further, he announced the expansion of India’s security shield to include “strategic as well as civilian areas” such as hospitals, railways, and centres of faith, through the Sudarshan Chakra mission. This will be done through a two-pronged strategy: domestic defence research and manufacturing, and preparation for future attacks following modern warfare readiness. Security has evolved from being merely an instrument of protection; it now integrates economics, and we are perhaps on the path to merging economic security with national security.
Modi also announced the establishment of a High-Power Demography Mission to address the demographic “crisis looming over Bharat” from across borders. Without mentioning Pakistan or Bangladesh, he stated that “these intrusions are part of a deliberate conspiracy” to alter the demography of India. Among other issues, infiltrators are snatching the livelihoods of India’s youth, “targeting our sisters and daughters,” and “misleading innocent tribals and seizing their lands.” Above all, demographic changes pose national security challenges and sow seeds of social tension. Such a Mission should complement the efforts of external security agencies.
Security has evolved from being merely an instrument of protection; it now integrates economics, and we are perhaps on the path to merging economic security with national security.
Modi’s pedal push on self-reliance is timely across at least three domains. First, he celebrated the surprise that India’s military evoked regarding its weaponry and expertise. “The enemy had no inkling of what weapons and capabilities we possessed, what power was destroying them in the blink of an eye,” he said. “Imagine if we were not self-reliant, could we have executed Operation Sindoor with such swiftness?” He attributed these outcomes to efforts to foster defence self-reliance over the past decade. On the narrative side, this displays the strength of working in silence.
Second, he highlighted the primacy of technology in the 21st century and emphasised the need to master it at the national level. Here, he focused on the history and politics of semiconductors. India was among the leaders in chip technology even five decades ago, he said, but “the idea was stalled, delayed, and shelved.” Addressing the requirements of the current time and scale, Modi said that six semiconductor units are underway, and another four have been given the green signal. He promised that “by the end of this very year, ‘Made in India’ chip, manufactured in Bharat by the people of Bharat, will be available in the market.” He held forth similarly on energy self-sufficiency, highlighting that there has been a 30-fold increase in solar energy capacity over the past 11 years, and that 10 new nuclear reactors are under development.
The 2025 reincarnation of ‘Swadeshi’ emphasises technological platforms and operating systems, artificial intelligence, and cybersecurity.
In an era of deglobalisation led by the US, Modi has reimagined the concept of ‘Swadeshi’—the idea originated in 1905, inspired by Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Anandmath (1870)—and embedded it into the national security domain. Modi’s ‘Swadeshi’ is no longer focused on the charkha (spinning wheel) or handicrafts. The 2025 reincarnation of ‘Swadeshi’ emphasises technological platforms and operating systems, artificial intelligence, and cybersecurity.
In other words, with security finally aligning with economics, one pillar of India’s grand strategy is being constructed. Consider this hypothetical regarding the country’s dependence on US-based social media platforms: the earnings and engagements of Indians through YouTube, Facebook, and X could disappear the day the US decides India is no longer a viable partner and seeks to ‘punish’ it. In February 2022, this very troika blocked the Russian side of ‘free speech’. This erosion of trust, not merely in US politics but also across US platforms, is a risk that Modi urged the country to mitigate. Drawing inspiration from the global success of India’s UPI, which is now the world’s largest payments platform, he said: “I challenge the youth of my country, why don't we have our own platforms?”
And third, Modi spoke about the reforms undertaken by the government, which figured 25 times in his speech. He celebrated India’s startup ecosystem and invited entrepreneurs to set up enterprises, with a promise of “significant reduction in their compliance costs, which in turn will give them new strength.” Modi announced the constitution of a time-bound task force to advance these reforms. “Current rules, laws, policies, and procedures must be re-drafted to suit the 21st century, to fit the global environment, and to align with the vision of making Bharat a developed nation by 2047.”
But this is an idea that the Prime Minister has been pushing for a long time. In the last compliance reforms, enacted through the Jan Vishwas (Amendment of Provisions) Act, 2023, the Modi government decriminalised merely 113 out of 5,239 provisions under the Union government. We hope that the ongoing Jan Vishwas 2, which Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced in Budget 2024 and Budget 2025, will finally come to fruition. The government must pursue a more ambitious scale—with a larger chunk of provisions being decriminalised in Budget 2026. This will boost entrepreneurship, alleviate the fear of inspectors, and simplify doing business for small and large, Indian and foreign entrepreneurs alike. Until then, businesses and consumers must be content with the promise of a reduction in the Goods and Services Tax by October, around Diwali.
Unlike Trump’s outbursts, perhaps the Indian way is more mature—working behind the scenes rather than making bombastic statements without any assurance of follow-through. Such fervour for reforms, defence preparedness, and self-sufficiency does not emerge out of the blue. Trump is definitely a big trigger to manage these uncertainties.
The one threat Modi did not address directly concerned Trump’s recently imposed additional tariffs against Indian goods. But he did draw a red line. “Modi is standing like a wall against any harmful policy related to the farmers of India,” he said. “India will never accept any compromise regarding its farmers, its livestock farmers, its fishermen.” In other words, while India wants to engage with the US and the world, it cannot do so at the cost of domestic politics or against the interests of Indian farmers.
Unlike Trump’s outbursts, perhaps the Indian way is more mature—working behind the scenes rather than making bombastic statements without any assurance of follow-through. Such fervour for reforms, defence preparedness, and self-sufficiency does not emerge out of the blue. Trump is definitely a big trigger to manage these uncertainties. It seems as though the country was waiting for these crises to unite and reform, much like it did in 1991, on the brink of a financial disaster that prompted economic reforms under Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao.
Modi’s vision is clear. But that does not mean it will be executed in a linear manner. The high-resistance administrative trickle-down, an area where the Indian state and its officials excel, could hinder progress. The ideas in Modi’s speech must see the light of day. As a corollary, bureaucratic reluctance must be reformed and dragged, even if kicking and screaming, to serve the country’s national interests and strengthen India’s grand strategy.
Gautam Chikermane is Vice President at the Observer Research Foundation.
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Gautam Chikermane is Vice President at Observer Research Foundation, New Delhi. His areas of research are grand strategy, economics, and foreign policy. He speaks to ...
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