India is a great country, but in ways that don’t matter in world affairs which are almost entirely tuned to the needs of capital | Photo Credit: bluebay2014

There has been a lot of angst in India that America chose Pakistan to ‘mediate’ between it and Iran. This disappointment comes after the Modi government, for the last few years, has been claiming how important India is in the world.

As always the truth is neither this nor that. It is something we don’t like to be told but India is, and always has been, quite irrelevant to the interactions between the big powers. And there is a reason for this.

We don’t spend our money in a way that would make us powerful, in any globally relevant way. In the last 25 years India has been spending around a quarter of its annual budgets on welfare. That’s a lot of money which yields a lot of social and political returns but not economic or military returns.

It is, if you like, a part of the price we pay for our genuinely competitive politics. It’s the money that is spent on notions of fairness in governance, an emphasis on equity, a hankering for social justice, insistence on political stability and, above all, an innate sense of decency that humans have. Some of this money also goes to purchase votes.

What’s the cost to the national power of this expenditure? Apart from high taxation, it is that much less money for military and economic muscle. Imagine if that money had been spent on weapons and subsidies to private industries à la China.

Much like Europe

In a very real sense therefore we are like Europe subsidising people rather than capital. We are willing to pay the price for social equity in terms of foregone machoness. And so like Western Europe, we don’t matter much in world affairs even though Europe’s GDP is more than four times ours at $22 trillion. And don’t forget that Western Europe got here after 500 years of greed.

In sum, we don’t have the money. We don’t have the muscle. We don’t have enough tradeable energy or raw materials. We don’t have enough industrial output that feeds into global supply chains. What we have are lots of people whom no one wants.

India also doesn’t really constitute a very large market, 100-120 million at best, though the actual number is perhaps 30 per cent less. In other words, economically we are small. We are the nice guys who come last.

From a different perspective, global GDP in 2025 was around $115 trillion. The US GDP was $30 trillion, EU around $22 trillion and Chinese around $20 trillion. India wasn’t even $5 trillion. Is it any wonder that we don’t count for anything?

You may well ask why. We’ll, it’s a choice we made in 1950 when we adopted a soft state approach of governance. As countless others have pointed out in the last 75 years it is the only way of keeping a vast and diverse country as a unified constitutional entity.

This is not to say that we aren’t a great country. We are, but in ways that don’t matter in world affairs which are almost entirely tuned to the needs of capital. Marxists call it imperialism.

Whereas the others are fully focused, we almost wholly aren’t. When we do focus it’s on local politics.

The absence of enough capital to make its pursuit and protection an absolute goal and the absence of a non-divisive political goal merely makes us what Ravi Shastri called bits and pieces players. That is, dispensable and replaceable.

Or if you want to be polite, we are a middle power. Neither here, nor there. Pakistan which raises so many hackles here is not in this situation. It’s a glow gopher and enjoys the advantages of that status.

Our 2,500-year-old cultural and religious history, a great liberal constitution, a genuine democracy, rule of law, regardless of what the nitpickers in Western media say, social peace, political stability, an excellent judiciary even if not a very good judicial system, a gentle people, etc., are very important to us — but no one else. These are not the things the world wants from us.

So one must ask what the point is of pretending to be otherwise as the Modi government has been so strenuously doing, or, conversely, lamenting, as the Opposition has been doing, that no one really bothers about what we think or why the world has such a poor opinion of our ability to influence events.

We are what we are, a decent country by and large which is content to actually believe in vasudhaiva kutumbakam. It’s not a bad thing to be because the alternative is to be beastly to everyone.

T

Published on April 13, 2026