In 2016, veteran scholar of Indian foreign policy, Ashley J. Tellis, published an important paper scrutinizing Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s call for India to become a leading, rather than a balancing, power on the global stage. Six years later, he’s published a new volume on the subject, Grasping Greatness: Making India a Leading Power (co-edited by Bibek Debroy and C. Raja Mohan). This week, Tellis expanded on his findings on the Grand Tamasha podcast, a co-production of the Hindustan Times and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
In a conversation with host Milan Vaishnav, Tellis noted that for India to achieve leading power status, it must sustain high rates of economic growth, build effective state capacity, and strengthen its liberal democracy.
On the economy, Tellis explained that the Modi government’s welfarist orientation reflects its particular vision of how to get growth going. “What I think [Modi] is trying to do as a matter of economic strategy is to empower the base through a variety of distributionist palliatives [like cooking gas, electricity, and bank accounts],” explained Tellis.
“The theory of the case, I think, is that if you give people at the bottom the means to achieve some standard of living that is simply more than subsistence, then you essentially enable them to join the marketplace as productive economic agents far more quickly than the alternative of a top-down strategy alone,” he added.
India’s economic power is necessary for building up military capability, but not sufficient. Tellis argues this has much to do with India’s conception of military power. “The Indian state has never thought of military forces in a way that early modern European states thought of military forces, which is: these are usable instruments of state power and the more you refine the instrument and the capabilities of that instrument, you can actually use it to attain certain political outcomes,” explained Tellis.
He added: “In that sense, India still thinks of military forces primarily as instruments of defence. They exist simply to prevent others from coercing the Indian state. Their primary utility is not for use to coerce others.”
On the question of whether external perceptions of democratic backsliding in India have hurt its great power ambitions, Tellis stated that the effects have been muted because of the nature of global competition. “Thus far, I think the external receptivity has not had a consequential effect, partly because of the character of evolving global geopolitics,” he noted. This is principally because “the most important great power—the United States—sees India as an important asset in the competition with China and, therefore, is less inclined to pay attention to the internal transformations that are taking place in India.”