What It Takes

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Does India have what it takes to become a great power on the world stage?

University of Chicago political scientist Paul Poast wrote in World Politics Review that he is skeptical.

While India’s population and economy are growing and the country appears ready to invest more to make its military top class, the massive country – the world’s largest democracy – still faces major issues, from poverty to ethnic rivalries and violence among its many different cultures, languages and ethnic communities, Post argued.

“It is not yet a great power, let alone a superpower,” he explained. “For now, it remains a sleeping giant, and there’s no guarantee it will ever awaken.”

India boosters like Martin Wolf of the Financial Times might disagree. Martin recently argued that India will rise to the top of the geopolitical hierarchy for no other reason than its population is now the largest in the world and growing.

India, noted Martin, is on track to hit 1.67 billion people in 2050, while 1.32 billion people will live in China and the US population will be 380 million.

Post was also raising questions about a “great power partnership” between India and the US, as outlined in an Atlantic Council article by Free & Open Indo-Pacific Forum President and Atlantic Council non-resident senior fellow Kaush Arha and Samir Saran, the president of the Observer Research Foundation, India. India has always maintained relations with China, Russia, and other US rivals.

Among India’s greatest challenges to achieving its full potential arguably is caste, or “the most important fault line in Indian society,” noted the Economist. As the BBC explained, the caste system is a 3,000-year-old form of social stratification that divides society into rigid hierarchical groups based on economic class, profession, family history, and so forth.

In an example of how caste sows disunity in India, the country’s Supreme Court recently issued controversial decisions on the matter, rejecting a petition to declare the traditional caste system as unconstitutional, wrote the Jurist. “There are provisions in the Constitution specifically referring to caste, to socially and educationally backward classes,” noted a justice.

They further found that officials could not fire government and bank staffers hired due to their caste even if the government had otherwise removed their castes from the so-called “schedules” that track caste statuses throughout the subcontinent, added the Hindu.

Perhaps most importantly, the court also legalized the sub-classification of folks within the castes in which they are already classified. The Indian Express was critical of the idea, saying it would cause more problems in the lowest castes as they jockey for status within the bottom tiers.

If India can overcome this problem, it has the right to be a global superpower.