India stands at a pivotal moment where it can choose to redefine its role in global power dynamics rather than accept existing hierarchies, according to strategic analysts.
A quiet fatalism is beginning to shape India’s strategic discourse, fostering a belief that global power is inherently unequal. This perspective suggests that major powers like the United States dictate terms, and realism demands that India accept this imbalance with maturity. In this view, asymmetry is not a condition to be negotiated but a destiny to be internalized.
This polished argument, however, represents a profound misreading of how nations rise. It treats power as a static hierarchy, viewing it as a ledger of GDP, military budgets, and alliance structures, while considering diplomacy merely a mechanical consequence of these numbers. The strong extract, and the weak adjust; agency becomes an illusion, and imagination is dismissed as indulgence. While realism may describe the world, it fails to explain how the world can be remade.
The flaw in this passive realism is not its acknowledgment of asymmetry—power imbalances are indeed real—but that it freezes these imbalances in place. It mistakes a moment for a map and confuses the present with the permanent. More damagingly, it denies nations the ability to shape their own development trajectories.
Historically, nations like Japan in the 1950s, South Korea in the 1960s, and China in the 1980s did not enter the global system with symmetrical power. Instead, they leveraged their weaknesses. They traded access for technology, markets for manufacturing depth, and alignment for industrial upgrading. They did not accept the hierarchy; they climbed it. Had they embraced the logic currently urged upon India—that asymmetry justifies unequal outcomes—their transformations would have been stunted. Realism devoid of ambition is merely fatalism with footnotes.
Today, India is not a peripheral petitioner; it is a central economic and geopolitical pivot on the world stage. Its leverage is structural, characterized by a vast future consumer market, a globally embedded technology workforce, strategic centrality in the Indo-Pacific, a decisive role in supply-chain reconfiguration, and democratic legitimacy in an era wary of authoritarianism.
These attributes are not mere adornments; they are instruments of power. Modern power is defined not just by size but by position within networks. India occupies a unique node—large enough to matter, independent enough to resist, and credible enough to attract. To treat India as a supplicant is to fundamentally misunderstand the architecture of twenty-first-century influence.
Despite this, India’s recent trade and strategic negotiations remain opaque. Ministers often project confidence and highlight gains, as is their institutional role. However, the responsibility of citizens, analysts, and intellectuals is to interrogate state choices rather than echo them. Trade agreements significantly impact farmer livelihoods, manufacturing competitiveness, technological sovereignty, public health systems, and employment pathways. When the terms of these agreements remain hidden, realism becomes abdication. A democracy cannot outsource strategic judgment solely to executive discretion; opacity is not strategy; it is a substitute for it.
The real debate is not merely between optimism and pessimism; it is between two philosophies of statecraft. Passive realism posits that India is weaker and must concede, while strategic imagination asks how India can leverage today’s asymmetry to build tomorrow’s parity. India’s objective should not be to achieve equal outcomes today but to secure asymmetric gains over time. This necessitates prioritizing technology absorption over tariff cuts, manufacturing depth over short-term market access, skills transfer over capital inflows, and domestic capability over mere consumption growth. Trade must evolve into an instrument of structural transformation rather than a celebration of incremental exports. The realist school emphasizes what India cannot demand; a strategic state focuses on what India must extract.
China’s rise offers a lesson that India has yet to fully embrace. China did not negotiate as a passive recipient; it staged access, imposed conditions, demanded technology transfer, and sequenced liberalization to align with its domestic capabilities. Its dominance in manufacturing, renewable energy, electric vehicles, batteries, electronics, and critical minerals is not merely a product of wealth but a result of strategic negotiation. It treated trade as development policy, not a diplomatic courtesy. India’s reluctance to learn from this example—favoring abstract discussions on hierarchy—has cost it dearly over the past two decades.
Why, then, does passive realism persist? It is emotionally convenient; it absolves policymakers of responsibility and analysts of imagination. It transforms negotiable outcomes into inevitable fate and trains citizens to accept structural inferiority as natural. A rising nation cannot afford such a mindset.
Power is not a possession; it is a construction. It is built through institutional strength, industrial depth, technological sovereignty, educational excellence, policy consistency, and strategic patience. Every major power once lacked these attributes. The purpose of diplomacy is not to mirror current distributions of power but to reshape future ones.
India requires a doctrine grounded in leverage rather than deference, development-centric trade rather than export fetishism, radical transparency instead of strategic opacity, long-horizon negotiation over short-term optics, and moral confidence rather than defensive modesty. These are not rhetorical flourishes; they are the foundations of a nation that intends not merely to navigate the world but to shape it.
At its core, this debate transcends geopolitics; it concerns who bears the cost of realism. When trade deals disadvantage farmers, weaken small manufacturers, or constrain public healthcare, it is not merely abstract GDP that suffers; it is the most vulnerable citizens who bear the brunt.
A political economy that asks the weakest to absorb the shocks of global asymmetry while the elite capture the gains is not realism; it is injustice disguised as prudence. The true measure of national power lies not in how deftly a country navigates elite diplomatic circles but in how effectively it expands the life chances of its most vulnerable citizens.
India stands at a civilizational inflection point. It can choose to internalize a doctrine of acceptance—learning to coexist within hierarchies—or it can adopt a doctrine of transformation, using each negotiation as a rung on the ladder of ascent. Realism instructs us to understand power; history teaches us to build it. Nations that endure adapt; nations that lead transform. India still has the opportunity to become one of the great architects of the twenty-first-century order—not by inheriting the logic of power but by redefining it.
According to Satish Jha, the author, this moment is crucial for India to assert its agency on the global stage.