India's Strategic Will and a Multipolar Future

Ashley Tellis struggles to grasp that India has deliberately chosen strategic autonomy over rigid alliance systems. He overlooks the transformative, deep, and wide-ranging strategic partnerships that Modi's India has sedulously built with the West, while maintaining independent partnerships with Russia, BRICS, the Gulf states, the Global South and others wherever our core interests dictated.

- LAKSHMI PURI

Ashley Tellis's recent essay in Foreign Affairs, "India's Great Power Delusions," marks a surprising departure from his earlier conviction that India was on a credible and essential path to becoming a leading power.

In a recent pathbreaking book, "Grasping Greatness: Making India a Leading Power," which Tellis co-edited and I reviewed in depth, he argued that India's rise rests on the tripod of rapid economic growth, liberal democracy, and military strength, under the continued leadership of a visionary and doer like Prime Minister Modi.

He credited Narendra Modi to be the first prime minister to articulate a comprehensive conception of and path to India's greatness, blending soft and hard power, and that under a bold and reformist leadership like his, India would remain steadfast in its rise. Since then, PM Modi has secured a historic third successive term, led multiple federal victories, and deepened his transformational agenda.

It is therefore puzzling to see Tellis now question not just India's capability to become a global power, but also its chosen strategy of multi-alignment in foreign economic and security policy to achieve that goal.

In doing so, he conflates ambition with approach and misreads the logic of multipolarity. We must therefore unpack both the legitimacy of India's ambition and the strategic rationale and robustness of its external partnerships while exposing the limits of Tellis's assumptions of delusion.

First, Tellis's repeated comparison of India to China is a flawed and tired trope, echoing that of the Global Times of China. Why must the trajectories of two countries with dissimilar politico-economic and social systems be analogized or compared odiously, simply because they are large populous countries in Asia? When China made its way to becoming a leading power by following its own trajectory, quite unlike that of the Western countries, were such comparisons made?