India at the Fourth Turning

China and America will try their best to slow down India’s economic growth and it will need all our geostrategic skills to thwart these two superpowers at least till we touch the $7-8 trillion level, for after that, our rapid rise cannot be stopped.

- GAUTAM R. DESIRAJU

The present time is one of the most intriguing and unusual for any curious Indian, born and living in this country. The past is being forgotten rapidly, the present, while puzzling, is full of promise, and the future, as is usually the case, is substantially unpredictable. If one reckons that our civilization is 5,000 years old, it ran a normal course for 4,000 of these before a cataclysmic encounter with alien forces and influences debilitated it to such an extent that by the end (Muhammad bin Qasim invasion of Sindh in 712 till our Independence in 1947) its very existence as a civilization had come under serious threat. Unexpectedly, the last decade has seen a fundamental shift in the way many Indians, living in their country, perceive it. This perception is not political, although it is easy enough to dismiss it as such.

I would say it is rather a matter of feeling a unifying identity as an Indian, an inhabitant of an ancient land coming to terms with living an honourable life in a new multireligious country.

India in 2025 is part of a world that was organised in a very specific and tight way during the past eight decades following the end of World War II, and which organization is now rapidly unravelling. This organization was largely economic, and used technological prowess and military power to enforce an American rules-based order that secured the economic interests of the powerful Western world, essentially the G7 countries and their auxiliaries. The Soviet bloc played some role in limiting the total hegemony of the West but their experiment did not last long and by 1990, one was talking about a monopolar American world. If nothing had changed, India with its "Hindu rate of growth" would have eventually succumbed to its natural disadvantages, and become a client of the West in one way or another.