Alyssa Ayres

India has long desired to be counted among the world’s top powers, an aspiration that is finally at hand. In her latest book – Our Time Has Come: How India is Making Its Place in the World – Alyssa Ayres, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, explains that while on the path to becoming a recognized great power, India has not fully abandoned its past policy positions. In the following interview, Ayres discusses India’s progress toward becoming a “leading power” and what New Delhi brings to the global table.

The title of your new book – Our Time Has Come – certainly sets the tone: India has arrived on the great power scene. Can you describe, in brief, some of the changes that have taken place over the past 25 years to bring India to this point?

Let me expand on this, as the book is actually more nuanced on this issue. The title is a quote from the current and former prime ministers of India. I believe it captures a sensibility across parties: that Indian leaders want to see their country counted as one among the world’s powers in a multipolar world. This ambition in fact is not new, as I chart in the book. But India is now closer to attaining that ambition than at any time in the past. Part of this is due to changes in the world, a shift to more of a multipolar order. Part of this is due to India’s own economic growth, which has allowed the size of its economy to overtake those of Canada, Brazil, and Italy. It is entirely possible that the Indian economy could surpass those of France and the U.K. this year as well, making it the world’s fifth largest. That is automatically a different kind of heft. India has also, over the past decade and a half, placed increasingly greater priority on modernizing its defense forces, shoring up its capabilities as a maritime power, and declaring its ambition for primacy in the Indian Ocean, including embarking upon its first-ever overseas military bases. Add to all this India’s continued push for reform of the twentieth-century institutions of global governance to better accommodate its voice — and its willingness to help create new ones — I could go on, but you take all this together and it paints a very different picture of India today than the India of some years back.

It is still, of course, true that India faces many domestic challenges, and I believe it will continue to struggle with those important concerns, of eliminating poverty, of working to end violence against women, overcoming and ending long-standing challenges of discrimination on the basis of caste, religion, or region. I just believe that we should not allow the fact of India’s substantial challenges to eclipse what we see and recognize as its growing power on the world stage. And in fact most of my book does not belabor the question of whether India has in fact become a global power, but rather what the global power known as India is likely to do on the world stage, and what it will likely seek from the international order — as a means of thinking through priorities for U.S. foreign policy toward India.

To what extent is India’s new confidence on the world stage due to the Modi’s government’s specific approach to international affairs rather than a natural outgrowth of India’s expanding economic influence?

Certainly India’s economic growth underpins its ability to further enhance its defense capabilities, and it also supports the growth of India’s expanding diplomacy. It’s why continued reforms and efforts to attain sustained high rates of economic growth with robust job creation are such crucial goals. The Modi government has “amped up” India’s foreign policy, but has done so in line with previous governments. What is new is the concept of a “leading power,” a term not previously used by anyone to describe a rising power, and New Delhi is defining this term as it goes.

You note that India continues to wrestle with the policies that defined its past, such as nonalignment. As India seeks more recognition on the world stage, will we see India wading in to global hot button issues like North Korea or the Israel-Palestine conflict?

We may see this some decades in the future, but I see a wholesale desire to comment on every crisis (in the U.S. mode) as less likely in the near term. For example, India has said little about the myriad issues in the Middle East even as (or because) the livelihoods of millions of Indian guest workers are affected by turmoil there. In general India’s comfort zone remains issues affecting its near neighborhood. But that said, we have in recent years seen greater willingness from New Delhi to publicly support the positions of its close partners on matters like freedom of navigation in the South China Sea, and the importance of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. Take a look at New Delhi’s statement on why India did not attend the Belt and Road Forum last May for a sense of what a more outspoken Indian foreign policy posture sounds like.

Last summer’s standoff at Doklam put the India-China relationship in the spotlight. Did the Doklam crisis mark a break in India's traditional approach to relations with China? What should we expect from that bilateral moving forward?

I don’t believe the Doklam crisis marked a huge break – India has defended its territorial concerns with respect to China on their undemarcated border for decades. What was different about the Doklam crisis was India’s willingness to mobilize quickly to defend Bhutan’s claims. Here, the experience of China’s recent island-building and militarization of the South China Sea (gradual actions that over time added up to significant change) coupled with the strategic nature of the Doklam plateau and its proximity to a vulnerable stretch of Indian territory, presented a situation in which India felt compelled to defend its own interests by defending Bhutan’s. The China-India relationship will likely remain brittle on these unresolved territorial issues.

After Doklam and India’s embrace of the “free and open Indo-Pacific” concept, just how far can we expect New Delhi to embrace the BRICS, the SCO, and the nonaligned movement? Or is India fully pivoting toward the United States?

In terms of the larger framework of the Indo-Pacific, it’s actually Japan, India, and Australia that have used this term more regularly (i.e., it is not the case that the United States convinced India to embrace it). On the question of India’s direction(s), I examine this larger issue at length in the book. India is not “fully pivoting” toward the United States. It continues to pursue its national interests, which New Delhi believes are best served by strengthening partnerships with as many countries as it can. New Delhi has gone all-in on the BRICS, but that has not prevented India from continuing to deepen its ties with the United States, Japan, France, Germany, the U.K., and many many others.

There has been a significant amount of hand-wringing about the future of democracy around the world. How is India’s democracy faring in the age of “fake news” and resurgent nationalism?

Does India have problems at home, and are there concerns in India about its democratic institutions? Yes, there are, and this is a topic of considerable domestic debate.  An assessment of India’s democracy is not part of the scope of my book, which is focused on India externally, and maintains a focus on the stances India takes on the world stage. I examine how the world’s largest democracy does and does not promote democracy in the world; it certainly does not promote democracy in the way the United States does, but it has been a champion and founder of the UN Democracy Fund and the Community of Democracies. But don’t look for India to launch a UN Human Rights Council resolution focused on problems in other countries anytime soon — New Delhi does not believe these types of actions help. Yet at the same time, India is building training capacity on the mechanics of elections, and there have been some cases — usually close to home — where India has been willing to use the power of the public statement to press for change.