“Can India become a Great Power” is the question posed by Paul Poast, Associate Professor at the University of Chicago, surveying several such attempts to answer the question by several scholars and commentators over the last couple of years. Such an aspirational aim has long been a cherished goal of Indian policy-making elites, of which the current regime with it’s febrile dreams of India assuming the role of global exemplar and exporter of ideas through its position as Vishwaguru, is just the latest iteration. Whether India’s reality can bear the weight of these perennial bullishness has been one of the recurrent questions preoccupying Indian strategic thinkers since Independence.
The biggest obstacle of course to such a trajectory looms the mammoth figure of China; a country which already has achieved Great Power status and which is expected to be on course at some point in the future to replace the USA as the global hegemon but also remains India’s main strategic rival. Already the armed clashes in 2020 in the Galwan valley which left 20 Indian soldiers dead and the inability to access 26 of the 65 patrol points in the Ladakh sector, have led to concerns that over 1,000 sq km of territory may have been lost to the Chinese, which the government in New Delhi has been unable to assuage beyond formal denials that anything has changed along its disputed Himalayan border with China. The difficulty in dealing with China poses two significant problems for India: one economic and the second military. India’s economy is strongly linked to China and despite the efforts of the India government since 2020, decoupling this link has not only proved impossible but has actually deepened. China surpassed the U.S. as India’s biggest trading partner in 2023, with a trade deficit of a staggering $85 billion in China’s favour; accounting for over 10% of India’s trade and 15% of its imports. The ostentatious tactic of economically targeting and harassing Chinese firms operating in India by authorities, a favoured tool of New Delhi has clearly had limited effectiveness. Chinese mobile brands dominate the Indian mobile market with a 75% share and Xiaomi overtook Samsung as the most popular brand last year. Perhaps more disturbing is the dependence on skilled Chinese personnel such as engineers, for key sectors of the economy; several steelmakers have failed to meet the targets set under the government’s PLI (Production Linked Incentives) scheme, investing only Rs.15,000 crore as opposed to Rs.21,000 crore, owing to the slowness in importing machinery from China and delays in obtaining visas for Chinese personnel to operate them. Despite being the second-largest steel producer globally and having a huge reservoir of technically skilled manpower, it seems that the operation of the most advanced electric arc furnaces require skilled personnel that can only be imported from China. Other hi-tech industries are also being impacted by visa restrictions on Chinese personnel, the Adani group is lobbying the government to permit the entry of Chinese engineers to help build a robust and indigenous supply chain of solar equipment for it’s solar manufacturing business. Additional pressure is coming from the electronics industry which has informed the government that these restrictions have cost the sector $15 billion in production losses, as operative capacity has remained unused and unmet demand for exports mounted. This dependence is replicated across several other industries such as: electric vehicles, pharmaceuticals, and heavy machinery. Given the Modi government’s stated goals of employment generation and infrastructure development this severely limits India’s room for manoeuvre and effectively means it has little leverage to alter it's dependent coupling with China in economic terms, thereby putting it at a serious disadvantage.
Things are not much better on the military front, with Alex Gatopoulos, an Al Jazeera journalist, critically commenting it has “a weak air force that is under-strength, an army still bogged down with strategic ideas formed in the last century and a navy that looks good on paper but is being comprehensively outclassed by China’s navy”. A key element in reaching Great Power status is possessing both a capable and sizeable military and the willingness to use that military power abroad. In practice that means both air and sea power and India’s capabilities in both these areas is limited. It’s air force is considerably understrength with only 31 squadrons out of a full nominal complement of 42; of these many are Mig-21 fighters inducted into service in 1964 and not a match for the current generation of rival aircraft; they should have been retired years ago but delays in procuring replacement ensured they remained in active service. While a crash modernization programme, including the introduction of the new Rafale fighters has proceeded apace, it will take decades to reach completion. The Indian navy does operate two aircraft carriers, one is a former Russian vessel from the 1980s, upfitted for extended service and the service has seen a shrinking share of the military budget down from 18% in 2012 to 13% in 2020 thus putting it’s modernization plans in some jeopardy, especially set against a Chinese navy with three aircraft carriers, the most recent of which is deemed to be the largest in operation outside the US Navy and which has a superior quality of smaller crafts ranging from destroyers to corvettes. While India remains the world’s fourth largest military spender at $81 billion, China at number two, spends over four times as much — $292 billion. Much of the military budget moreover, goes on personnel and pensions, with the latter consuming over 25% of the military budget, squeezing out funds that could be spent on urgent modernization of equipment. India’s defence spending as a percentage of GDP has also shown a steady downward trajectory from 2014, declining from 2.29% to 1.93% in 2023. To even maintain some level of deterrence never mind any Great Power aspiration, India will need to devote substantially more financial resources to its military expenditure over the next few decades.
Some of these deficiencies could be remedied by smart diplomacy and good management of relationship with friendly countries and potential allies but even here, India has fallen short. It’s reliance on ‘’bear-hug’’ diplomacy by the Prime Minister has achieved only limited gains, while retaining a broadly neutral stance on the Ukraine conflict, the benefits of which seem dubious — Russia has drawn even closer to China, due mainly to the impact of Western sanctions, a gyration that India has been able to do little about, and gains such as importing cheaper Russia oil to the saving of an estimated $10 billion, have gone almost entirely to the pockets of oligopolistic refiners, rather than being passed onto consumers and the broader economy. Even the much vaunted QUAD, which India is a member of along with Australia, the US and Japan and which is meant to act as a counterpoint to a rising China in Asia; suffers from a strategic mismatch, as the main concern of QUAD partners is to meet China’s maritime assertion in the Pacific and South China Sea; whereas India’s main concern is a land-based one, given that it alone shares a 2,000km border with China unlike the three other members. Just as India would have very little interest in getting drawn into a maritime conflict in East Asia, so would the other QUAD members have little interest in getting drawn into a land conflict along the Himalayas.
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Most alarmingly are the significant socio-economic problems India faces. India continues to have high levels of poverty and malnutrition. More than 10% of India’s population continues to live below the World Bank extreme poverty line of $2.15 per diem while the corresponding number for China is 0%, 16.3% of India’s population was undernourished in 2019-21, compared with less than 2.5% of China’s population, according to the most recent United Nations State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World report. India also has one of the worst rates of child malnutrition in the world with UNICEF estimating that every year over 300,000 Indian children in the 0-5 age cohort die prematurely from preventable deaths due to disease and malnutrition. Indian illiteracy levels are at 25% compared to 1% for China, and China produces nearly twice as many STEM graduates annually (4.7 million) to India (2.6 million). As many notable development economists have commented, it is difficult if not impossible to become a great economic power with a largely poorly skilled and unhealthy labour force.
These substantial problems are in addition to other significant internal ones, including social conflicts along the lines of caste, ethnicity and language and of course most importantly religious divides, which have been assiduously stoked by the Hindu nationalism of the current regime. Such conflicts not only absorb vital energy, resources, and time away from broader developmental goals but also crowd out crucial policy space and attention from essential human welfare and security concerns, preventing them from being addressed. It is for this reason that despite its increasingly important role in world affairs and huge potential that Great Power status is likely to elude India for some time to come. It is also this reason that led Lee Kuan Yew, the legendary PM and architect of Singapore’s economic miracle, who for a long time looked to India to provide a counter-weight to China, to conclude reluctantly that India would never be more than "the country of the future with that future never quite arriving".
Conrad Barwa is a senior research analyst at a private think-tank, and a senior research associate at the Birmingham Business School
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