The difficulty of being a rising power

During the last few decades, it is speculated that India’s time has come, and the Indian public is euphoric that their country is poised to become a global power. Indian political leaders often bloviate that India is destined to acquire its rightful place in the committee of nations for its age-old civilisation, geo-strategic location, huge labor force, fourth largest military, and formidable consumer market. Rightly so, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had urged the Heads of Indian Missions “to use this unique opportunity to help India position itself in a leading role, rather than just a balancing force, globally.”

Believe it or not, many have gone to the extent of visualising India becoming a true pole by 2050, along with other principal entities (China, the United States, the European Union) dominating the international system. Arvind Virmani foresees India as a pole in the tripolar world consisting of China and the USA as the other two poles by the middle of this century. Meanwhile, many are also pessimistic about India’s prospects of becoming a global power, even though it is staggering forward, for the economic downturn which is understandable. There are undoubtedly compelling and logical reasons why India is not a great power yet.

But very few are bothered, or ready, to comprehend how global powers of top echelons can resist the entry, or emergence, of a new power that might upset their superiority. Many nations simply cannot tolerate the emergence of their peer as a new global player, therefore join hands with the conspirators to exploit the domestic faultlines, target economic-industrial activities, blacken reform initiatives, and defame Indian industrial houses at the global level—largely to derail and distress its growth trajectory. Overconfidence in India’s rising global profile seems to blind many who lash out at political leaders’ apprehension on the hatching of a global conspiracy to destabilise India.

For long, neighbors like China and Pakistan have fantasised disintegration of India and have strategic nexus vis-à-vis India. No sensible Indian can overlook former Pakistani Dictator General Zia-ul-Haq’s promise to “bleed India with a thousand cuts”, and Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s vow to raise a long war to break India and takeout Kashmir. In 2018, Maulana Bashir Ahmad Khaki, a senior functionary of Jamaat-ud-Dawa—a Pakistan-based terrorist outfit of the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT)—has threatened that “India and Israel will get disintegrated as more and more martyrs will be produced”. Furthermore, a decade ago, a Chinese strategist was noticed suggesting China to facilitate ‘the disintegration of India’ into some 30 smaller states, so as to decimate all challenges to its supremacy and establish a pax-Sinica in the Asia-Pacific region.

Such allegations of conspiracy against India is nothing new. In the early sixties, the US-based scholar, Selig S Harrison had also declared that India would fall apart into ‘12 states’. Wild allegations by Indians against the combination of Christianity and Zionism for trying to destroy the world in general, and Hinduism in particular, were made during the 1970s when many overseas Indians were unlawfully thrown out by the rulers of Fiji, Uganda, Kenya and Burma.

Whatever may be the truth, such polemics do provide glimpses of the fantasies by India’s enemies, even though they are incapable of breaking India’s civilisational fabric at any cost. But they are undoubtedly capable of damaging India, and they would prefer a weaker India in the global sphere. But one may wonder how India’s emergence would threaten the established powers when India is striving at the cost of none.

Even though India’s rise would not threaten others, the dominant presence of Indian business and industrial houses and their forceful competition with global tycoons may not be digested as they who until now have dominated the global commerce. India is gradually innovating and venturing into the newer energy sources; its investors are undertaking multinational developmental projects; its diaspora is getting into policy and power corridors in various advanced countries. All these and many such spectacular achievements bound to draw the evil attention of many.

Instances of targeted conspiracies have been reported in recent times where Indian business houses, developmental projects, and reform initiatives are taken hostage or sabotaged by disguised external forces taking advantage of domestic dissent voices and disgruntled groups. This may sound unrealistic, or taste propagandistic, and can be sarcastically rubbished, but if analysed through the prism of the current geopolitical power game, every Indian can feel and realise the difficulty of being a rising power.

One may consume a handful of salt to swallow the assertions of politicians who view “Love-Jihad and religious conversions are being funded by foreign countries and a big conspiracy against India” or the anti-CAA protest as a global conspiracy by Muslim countries to “divide the country”. But the organizations involved in anti-nuclear protest around Kudankulam were proven to have been financed and backed by foreign vested interest groups. India has faced a huge loss for the hostage of the project leading to cost escalation and production delay.

Similarly, projects undertaken by Indian conglomerates abroad are facing the wraths of such vested interest groups who doesn’t like to see India’s increasing footprint in global trading and commerce networks. The Adani group is facing heavy flak from activists in Australia over its Charmichael coal mine project in Queensland, besides targeted defamation and maligning the Indian farm through social media by the “national and international parties with vested interests”.

Earlier, the France-based asset management company Amundi threatened to sell off SBI green bonds held by it unless State Bank of India (SBI) stopped its Rs 5,000 crore loan plan to Adani’s Carmichael coal mine in Australia. The New York-based BlackRock Inc. and Norway’s Storebrand ASA have also reportedly pressured the SBI about the loan.

It is certainly difficult to authenticate or substantiate the allegations of conspiracy against India as the matter is too sensitive with far-reaching implications. Also, such allegations lose seriousness as they are often used by some politicians “to cover up their failures. But does that mean there can never be a conspiracy against India?” As Abhishek Banerjee reminds, “Everyone knows the story of the boy who cried wolf. Not everyone notices that there are actually two lessons in that story. Don’t cry wolf for no reason. We all realised that one. The second lesson? Sometimes, there really is a wolf. So, watch out.”