INDIATHE ELEPHANT THAT REFUSES TO BE NAMED

AS NEW DELHI NAVIGATES THE GLOBAL HIGH TABLE, ITS SMALLER SOUTH ASIAN NEIGHBOURS FIND THEIR OWN STRATEGIC HORIZONS INCREASINGLY COMPRESSED BY AN ANXIOUS AND ASSERTIVE GIANT

- By Ms. Jeevani Senevirathne

India's metamorphosis into a global titan— surpassing Japan in GDP and China in population—is a defining shift of the multipolar age. Yet, beneath the confident rhetoric of “strategic autonomy” lies a jarring regional paradox. While New Delhi demands sovereign flexibility on the world stage, it increasingly views the same agency in its neighbours as a security threat. For states like Sri Lanka, integration with India is becoming less a partnership of equals and more an inescapable landscape of managed dependence

In international politics, power is rarely controversial in its possession; it is controversial in its use. Rising states are not judged merely by the scale of their capabilities, but by the political orders they construct around them. In South Asia today, India stands at such a moment of reckoning - its ascent unmistakable, its intentions carefully articulated, yet its regional conduct increasingly questioned. India’s rise is empirically undeniable. It has surpassed China as the world’s most populous country, overtaken Japan in nominal GDP, and is projected to become the third-largest economy globally within this decade. Diplomatically, New Delhi occupies a position of unusual breadth, strategic partner of the United States through the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue(QUAD), a full member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization(SCO), a founding participant in BRICS, and a stakeholder in the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank(AIIB). Few contemporary powers straddle competing institutional architectures with such confidence.