Is India Back?
New Thinking for a New World - a Tallberg Foundation Podcast
05/18/23
•37m
About
Comments
Featured In
India's backstory is largely unknown in the West. Between the 1st and 17th centuries AD, the country had the world's largest economy, controlling as much as one-third of global wealth. But that seemingly endless prosperity was followed by almost 500 years of decline as India was plundered and pushed aside by modern powers.
Fast forward to 2023: India is the world's most populous nation with one of the largest economies. The three trillion dollar Indian economy is expected to grow faster this year than any other major country in the world. Foreign investment is pouring in, partly looking for a safe haven from China's geopolitical ambitions and partly seeking to participate in India's new dynamism.
The man who has presided over this renaissance—Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in office since May 2014—is a global rock star. Indeed, some pollsters make the case that he is the most popular leader in the world. He has brought a degree of stability to a country where political violence used to be endemic and somehow produced an economically and geopolitically resurgent India. His and the country's importance are recognized by India's 2023 presidency of the G-20, as well as the West's aggressive courting of Modi and India as rivals to Xi and China.
Yet Western (as well as some Indian) critics worry that Modi's version of democracy is too autocratic and inward-looking, too rooted in Hindu nationalism to be sustainable. And they are skeptical that India has an economic model that can sustain the kind of outsize growth that transformed China from a country with lots of people to an economic superpower. Is India's continuing rise inevitable? Can India leverage all those people and their aspirations into supersized economic growth and power? Or might the underlying centrifugal forces of religion, inequality, and nationalism—and the sheer weight of almost 1.5 billion people—overwhelm what Modi and other Indian public and private sector leaders have set in motion? Could India really become an alternative to China?
Milan Vaishnav is a senior fellow and director of the South Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington and an accomplished India watcher. He shared some answers in a recent New Thinking for a New World podcast.
What do you think: Will India continue its evolution to become a global power?
Previous Episode
Africa's Arc of Misery: Sudan
May 11, 2023
•29m
Sudan is at war with itself. The revolution that drove Omar al-Bashir from office after 30 years produced coups, conflict and military rule rather than peace, democracy and prosperity. Today two generals—Abdel Fattah al-Burhan of the Sudanese Army and Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo of the Rapid Support Forces—are locked in mortal combat for control. The price of their rivalry is enormous: hundreds dead, millions displaced internally and across borders, spreading hunger and disease, and a crushed economy.
The tragedy of Sudan is compounded by the risk of broader conflict in the Horn of Africa, which abounds with deep-seated conflicts and tensions. There is a real possibility of a regional war, stoked by outside powers, which would have consequences far beyond Khartoum. So far the diplomats have failed to find even a temporary solution.
Unraveling all this is complicated, so in this episode of New Thinking for a New World, we turn to Samah Salman, a Sudanese businesswoman and civil society leader. At the moment she is in Washington D.C. trying to help her country find peace.
What do you think?
Next Episode
What’s Love Got to Do With It? Building a Different Middle East
June 1, 2023
•40m
Over the last several months, there have been a series of extraordinary developments in the Middle East that could have almost as big an impact on the shape of the new global order as Russia’s war on Ukraine. Consider even a partial list:
- China's engineering of rapprochement between supposedly implacable enemies Iran and Saudi Arabia;
- The Arab League celebrating the return of Syria's president Assad, still considered a war criminal in the West;
- Saudi Arabia's application to join the Shanghai Cooperation Organization while also moving towards membership in the BRICs;
- Countries from Morocco and Algeria to Saudi Arabia and Turkey moving away from political Islam;
- A growing web of diplomatic, economic, and financial ties among China, Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries, Iran, and Russia, that have intensified even as the West tries to enforce draconian sanctions against several of those countries.
The only thing that is clear is that a new Middle Eastern political order is under construction, one in which the United States and Europe are likely to have considerably less influence than they enjoyed over the past century.
Gilles Kepel, one of France's leading experts on the Middle East and a regular columnist for Al-Monitor, recently shared his thinking about these profound changes with New Thinking for a New World.
Listen and tell us what you think: Will the Middle East be more peaceful and prosperous without the United States playing a dominant political role?
If you like this episode you’ll love
Promoted