India has embarked on a large-scale infrastructure development program, ranging from highways to airports, a critical government-led push to provide the economy a strong base to build upon.
India will head into elections from the middle of next month in what is the world’s largest democratic exercise. Prime Minister Narendra Modi will be in the race to win a record third term at a time when optimism about the India story is prevalent while simultaneously dread of a global disorder is also creeping in. At the recently concluded India Today Conclave, the Prime Minister mentioned that India will offer stability and prosperity for an uncertain world in the coming five years. The India story is in concert with global security and stability, and one without the other, will struggle to thrive.
The number of conflict flashpoints has only steadily increased over the past few years, even as global economics, and politics, struggle to recover from the assault of a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic. From wars in Ukraine and Gaza to fundamental challenges against political narratives, globalisation today also hosts strong markers of sovereign tribalism, insular and protectionist policies, coupled with divisional politics on race, religion, and culture. These crevasses are also increasingly visible in Europe and the US alike, long considered bastions of liberalism, prosperity, and patrons of the ‘global order’ as we know it today.
Sturdy, government-led infrastructure investment projects will feed into capacity building by private industry, which needs a certain level of guarantees to invest in an economy.
While the opportunity is in India’s favour, the challenges are also immense, both from an economic and geostrategic perspective. India has embarked on a large-scale infrastructure development program, ranging from highways to airports, a critical government-led push to provide the economy with a strong base to build upon. Sturdy, government-led infrastructure investment projects will feed into capacity building by private industry, which needs a certain level of guarantees to invest in an economy. For business, the bottom-line reigns supreme, and the onus is on the state to provide attractive policy incentives, specifically for foreign direct investments (FDI).
India’s robust outreach to the Gulf highlights an interesting model for the above. While a lot of analytical capacity is spent on deciphering a bilateral such as that of India and the UAE from the lens of a Hindu-nationalist BJP’s relations with the Islamic world, the pragmatism of geopolitics often goes well beyond the binaries of black and white political takes. From an Indian perspective, the outreach to the Gulf under Modi is multilayered, ranging from promotion of multipolarity as a conceptual, and almost doctrinal foreign policy design that New Delhi seeks to promote, to just the plain fact that the Middle East (West Asia) is poised to be the only region on the planet to be home to three trillion-dollar plus wealth funds shared between Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Kuwait. Add Qatar’s wealth fund into the mix, now clocking at over $500 billion, the region is flush with funds looking for high-return economies beyond their own domestic spending.
To thrive, wealth funds need stable and attractive markets. India, wants, and should, be at the top of their list. And this is not just perceptional, but a mandate given to Indian diplomats across the Persian Gulf region. Geoeconomics is the core game and aim today.
However, it is important to internalise that geoeconomics does not and cannot exist insularly from both security, and hard power. New Delhi’s relationship with power is already in an evolutionary stage, with the 2019 Balakot strikes inside Pakistan in response to the Pulwama terror attack in Jammu and Kashmir being a pivotal moment. The traditionally risk-averse and defensive Indian tactical posture broke some much-needed barriers during this operation, despite certain failures, such as losing a MiG-21 and the capture of its pilot by Pakistan and the loss of a helicopter in friendly fire. Nonetheless, it significantly reoriented strategic intent, something, arguably, Pakistan’s planners had not considered to realistically happen. Another more recent example was India’s showcasing its capacities in anti-piracy operations along the eastern African coast where it deployed warships, drones, reconnaissance aircraft and special forces to retrieve a commercial ship forcefully commandeered by pirates. In all probability, this extent of hard power was not required for the operation as India has conducted similar manoeuvres since 2008. But the opportunity was present to showcase both hard power and intent towards securing Indian and international interests alike.
The traditionally risk-averse and defensive Indian tactical posture broke some much-needed barriers during this operation, despite certain failures, such as losing a MiG-21 and the capture of its pilot by Pakistan and the loss of a helicopter in friendly fire.
The above development of intent is also going to be critical for Modi’s approach towards China if his government is re-elected in June. The China threat is elementally different, where India is the weaker power and economy. Management of the same requires deeply thought-out policy of engagement with caution, while building new collaborators, like the US. Critical information on the border issue, such as current and exact location of boundary claims since the Galwan crisis of 2020 remains veiled in opaquely available information. India’s capabilities, despite the bravado, to upscale both military capacity and border infrastructure to take on China is constricted by the reality of its larger challenges, including domestic costs towards large scale social programs required by our socio-economic realities.
Finally, cultivating an institutionally strong relationship between geoeconomics and hard power will be a critical blueprint for India to anchor its interest in a world order which will go through tectonic shifts in the time to come. A clear vision of India’s interests both as a state and the role it intends to play on an international scale will be need of the hour, specifically in the coming 12 months. Developing this vision will be a more complicated endeavour than many would expect.
This commentary originally appeared in India Today.
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Kabir Taneja is a Fellow with Strategic Studies programme. His research focuses on Indias relations with West Asia specifically looking at the domestic political dynamics ...
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