View from Delhi: Indian Grand Strategy in a Multipolar World

India’s future role should be less of a spoiler and more of a stakeholder and beneficiary in the multipolar setting, writes Zorawar Daulet Singh, an award winning author and strategic affairs expert based in New Delhi.

There are three novel features about today’s multipolar world, each with significant implications for Indian statecraft in the years ahead.

The rise — or the return — of major powers in Greater Eurasia

First, we are seeing a geo-cultural change from the western civilisation-led order to a multi-civilisational order. What makes the present power shifts truly unique is that they are occurring outside the confined spaces of the geo-cultural and geopolitical West. For the past half-millennium, the rise and fall of great powers was exclusively a western affair, with each power being displaced by an even larger and more formidable one from within a common geopolitical and geo-civilisational space. From the Italian city-states, Holland, Portugal and Spain, France, and later England and then Germany and finally the US, each of these players assumed the mantle of leadership over the international order. But for the past 500 years, the fundamental civilisational values and strategic cultures between these different western powers were more alike than distinct, allowing for a cohesive hegemony after every major transition. This cycle of the baton being passed from one western power to another has been permanently broken.

The rise — or the return — of major powers in Greater Eurasia (China, Russia, India, Iran, Indonesia, to mention a few) is a departure from this long pattern. This leaves open the possibility that world order will be built around non-western ideas that are still evolving. What we can say is that world order is not going to be built on a homogeneous idea, given the diversity of strategic experiences and ideologies among the Eurasian players. The emerging multipolar order is in its essence plural and cannot have a universal ideology as its normative edifice.

For India, to be part of a world order where non-western civilisations are seen as equal members of the international community — and not as identities and cultures to be modified, reformed or erased — is something that obviously bodes well for the evolution of Indian nationhood too.

The second feature of today’s multipolar world is in the geoeconomic and technological realm. Historically, the pace of change in a power shift has been directly linked to the rapidity with which the dominant power or bloc’s technological advantages are diffused to its competitors and rising powers.

One of the novel features of the contemporary power transition is the relatively rapid development of comprehensive national power, including economic power, outside the US-led bloc in recent decades. There is little historical precedent for this, and it explains much of the erratic policy rhetoric and behaviour from the collective West — because it has occurred under their watch and partly as a consequence of their own specific policies towards globalisation in the past three decades. But the horse of this diffusion of power has already bolted!

It is the non-West that is projected to account for nearly 70 percent of global production

The present picture of the top eight leading economies (in terms of GDP, PPP) would have been unimaginable a generation ago: it includes China, India, Russia, Brazil and Indonesia. Only the US, Germany and Japan represent the US-bloc. The changing structure of global industrial capabilities is equally stark: in the year 2000, the G-7 accounted for over 70 percent of global production; by 2030, it is the non-West that is projected to account for nearly 70 percent of global production.

In terms of strategic commodities, energy resources, industrial technologies and scalable human capital, Greater Eurasia is already the centre of the world economy, albeit in an uneven distribution among the various great and regional powers. At an aggregate level, the preponderance of the G-7 has been permanently broken, and this implies very different production and supply chains from those that existed in the pre-multipolar era. The prospect of the non-West being equal partners with the West in economic interdependence — if not leading certain supply chains — is now all too real.

India’s challenge is resetting its geoeconomic compass from a West-centric economy to a Eurasian-oriented economy with a global footprint. In some sectors, the adjustment will be easier, and in some areas restructuring production chains, financial networks and even entire sectors of the domestic economy will require major policy reform. From a connectivity standpoint too, India is putting in place various projects and initiatives that aim to develop lines of communication in terms of transport networks and corridors with Greater Eurasia from multiple directions.

Finally, we come to the geopolitical. The geographic areas of structural competition on the global chessboard are shifting away from the Euro-Atlantic to Greater Eurasia and the Western Pacific.

In the epic struggle between western maritime powers and Eurasian continental powers, India’s geographic position on the Rimland of Greater Eurasia, with a direct frontier with one of the great powers, China, provides the contemporary context for Indian statecraft.

A transition to multipolarity

There are two levels of change in this transition to multipolarity. One is the global contest between continental Eurasia and the maritime West to establish the future contours and ground rules of the new world order. The other is an intra-Eurasian order-building process to promote geopolitical stability and deeper economic interdependence, while also maintaining a power equilibrium that blocks any easy pathways to hegemony by any single power — with the obvious reference being China.

India has deep stakes in both these geopolitical processes that are unfolding simultaneously. We are likely to see this manifest in its statecraft through sustained engagement and investment in several areas, but also military neutrality on certain conflict zones and potential flashpoints. India’s grand strategic goal is promoting global multipolarity and co-creating more inclusive and responsive governance norms through institutions such as BRICS, while also promoting Eurasian multipolarity, interdependence and co-developing regional institutions to manage complex security problems.

Ultimately, multipolarity means India reimagining the broader region’s geopolitics and making intelligent policy adjustments with all the great powers. While many strategists still insist that China is the only existential challenge for India, this is inevitable only to the extent that India is an active participant in the new Great Game.

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