Can India become a superpower?

[Pindi Boy]

India will not become a superpower, says Ramachandra Guha, renowned historian and author of India after Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy.

Taking the lead in a special report by the London School of Economics, Mr Guha outlines seven reasons to support his thesis.

The challenges which will hold India back, he writes, are the Maoist insurgency, the "insidious presence" of the Hindu right wing, degradation of the "once liberal and upright" centre, the increasing gap between the rich and the poor, trivialisation of media, the sustainability of "present patterns of resource consumption" and the instability and policy incoherence caused by multi-party governments.

More importantly, Mr Guha believes that India should not even attempt to become a superpower.

"In my view, international relations cannot be made analogous to a competitive examination. The question is not who comes first or second or third, whether judged in terms of Gross National Product, number of billionaires in the Forbes or Fortune lists, number of Olympic gold medals won, size of largest aircraft carrier operated, or power of most deadly nuclear weapon owned," he writes.

"We should judge ourselves not against the achievements, real or imagined, of other countries, but in the light of our own norms and ideals... We are a unique nation, unique for refusing to reduce Indian-ness to a single language, religion, or ideology, unique in affirming and celebrating the staggering diversity found within our borders (and beyond them)."

In fact, as Mr Guha's teacher, the late historian Dharma Kumar, once said, Indians should applaud the lack of homogeneity.

"Instead of regarding India as a failed or deformed nation-state we should see it as a new political form, perhaps even as a forerunner of the future. We are in some ways where Europe wants to be, but we have a tremendous job of reform, of repairing our damaged institutions, and of inventing new ones," Ms Kumar had once written.

India, as the participants in the LSE study say, should strive to become a more inclusive and efficient society, rebuild its broken institutions and engage with the egregious problem of state corruption. Superpowerdom can wait.
Why India will not become a superpower - BBC News

 

[AnnoyingOrange]

The bigger question is "Can India become a responsible World Power?" Superpower or not... We really don't care.... I mean look at what some of the so called super powers have done to the world as we know it.

 

[Dakóvic]

What does India need to become a superpower?

The first thing is for it to become a Great Power. This is defined in international relations as a sovereign state with the ability to exert its influence globally. We can count the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council — the US, China, France, Russia, the UK — as Great Powers.

They can influence global events because of their Security Council veto, but also because of their wealth and military power. In some of these states, like France and the UK, military power is deliberately being allowed to dwindle as war is less likely between countries today.

Not quite Modi-fied!

After these five come two other states that are influential globally economically, but not militarily, and they are Germany and Japan. After these are smaller states that are wealthy but not particularly influential, like Spain, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Taiwan, Italy, Chile, Australia, the Nordic nations and so on.

India can be clubbed in the group of nations under these, with other large populations that are not wealthy and because of a lack of resources are not powerful militarily. These include South Africa, Indonesia, Brazil and Nigeria. It may surprise the reader that I am clubbing India with Nigeria, but both countries have the same per capita income. It is only India’s large population that makes it seem more relevant than it actually is.

To put this in perspective, India’s nominal Gross Domestic Product, or GDP, in nominal dollars is much less than Italy’s. But Italy’s population is only 60 million people (or six crore), meaning it is 20 times smaller than India’s population. So India is less than five per cent as productive per individual as Italy. This is changing in India’s favour, but very slowly.

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So what does India need to do to turn into a Great Power? I would say only a very small aspect of this is the job of the government. If we look at India’s financial newspapers, the theme is focused on ‘reforms’. There is an insistence that the government bring about reforms if India is to succeed. Reforms generally address deregulation and ease of doing business. The fact is that many nations have carried out reforms but are not Great Powers. There are nations that have carried out no reforms and have become Great Powers. The Soviet Union was a command economy, meaning every single thing was run by the government and there was no reform. But the Soviets regularly managed double digit growth between 1947 and 1975 on a much higher per capita income than India’s. Cuba has no deregulation either but it has among the highest Human Development Indicators (for health and education) anywhere in the world. So clearly ‘reforms’ is not the only thing needed. There are two conditions all successful countries in history, without exception, have met.

The first is the penetration of the state. I define this as the ability of governments to monopolise violence, to make their citizenry submit voluntarily to taxation, to efficiently deliver justice and services. It doesn’t matter whether the state is capitalist, socialist, dictatorial or democratic. It must penetrate. The Indian state regularly fails in all of the above, even in Gujarat.

The second condition is a robustness and dynamism in society. A progressive society is marked by its ability to invent, by its instinct to do philanthropy. This is a complex subject and I will write about it another time.

So far as the first condition goes, in simple terms, it is not about laws or changes in laws. In short, it is not about ‘reform‘. It is about governance. It is about the ability of the state to implement. In the absence of that, no changes in law will mean anything.

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This is why the prime minister’s speech in Malaysia interested me. These are the main points of what he said: “Reform is not an end in itself. Reform for me is just a way station on the long journey to the destination. The destination is the transformation of India.”

He added that when he was elected in May 2014, the economy faced serious challenges in the high fiscal and current account deficits, stalled infrastructure projects and persistent inflation. “It was obvious that reforms were needed. We asked ourselves the question — reforms for what? What is the aim of reform? Is it just to increase the measured rate of GDP growth? Or is it to bring about a transformation in society? My answer is clear: we must ‘reform to transform’,” he said.

It seems to me he has framed the issue in the right way. Of course, in my opinion societies are not transformed by governments from the outside, but from within, culturally.

India has all the things it needs to become superpower, however its not even close to being one right now.