The winds were at India’s back at the tenth Raisina Dialogue, a geopolitical conference held last week in New Delhi by the Observer Research Foundation and India’s Ministry of External Affairs.
The three-day dialogue, from where I’ve just returned, is India’s “bazaar world order” manifest – a counter to East Asia’s bipolar power politics dominated by the United States and China. Europeans, Russians, Ukrainians, Iranians, and Arabs are all thrown into an unlikely multipolar mix. Just about everyone it seems (apart from maybe China and a few South Asian neighbours) needs more of India.
Here are a few impressions:
Trump is seen as a potential boon rather than a problem to be managed
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India is largely sheltered from the global volatility of President Donald Trump. It sits in a sweet spot. Delhi is not nearly as dependent on Washington as its US allies, but Prime Minister Narendra Modi has forged a historic rapprochement with the United States and is feted by Trump as a fellow strongman. The leaders of the world’s largest democracies are both at the helm of domestic political movements moulded firmly in their image. To the extent that Trump 2.0 downgrades formal alliances in favour of a looser more multipolar set of arrangements, America will now look more like India on the world stage too.
India feels vindicated by US efforts to bring Russia in from the cold
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The “reverse Kissinger” theory popular among some Trump advocates, which holds that Russia can be prised away from China’s orbit, closely mirrors India’s own rationale for continuing a strategic and economic lifeline to the Kremlin in the wake of its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Shashi Tharoor, a prominent Indian opposition MP and former diplomat, went so far as to apologise on stage at Raisina for ever doubting Modi’s approach to Russia.
Despite the sense of vindication, it's not clear why President Vladimir Putin wouldn’t pocket closer relations with Trump, as he has done with Modi, without giving up on his no-limits friendship with President Xi Jinping. (Though Russian think tankers at Raisina were also surprisingly open about signalling their Ukraine war weariness.)
Trump’s mixed signalling on China worries India more
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China is omnipresent as a topic, but its officials are nowhere to be seen at Raisina. There is a reason for that. China’s challenge to India on their disputed Himalayan border and in the competition for influence in South Asia is a core driver of Indian geopolitics. (In reverse, what happens on the India-China border during a Taiwan contingency must also keep Beijing strategists up at night.)
Though – like Australia and Japan – India’s calculus won’t be immune to the Trump administration’s settling point on China either. Following US Vice President JD Vance’s [assault on Europe](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCOsgfINdKg) last month, the Quad partners have been waiting to see how the other American shoe will drop in the Indo-Pacific.
Sadly, US spy chief Tulsi Gabbard offered few answers at Raisina. Her charm offensive was so devoid of US national security strategy as to border on being pacifist. The only hint of a possible Trump administration direction on China was her emphasis on the need “to prevent the risk of World War Three” above all else.
If there is a Yalta-style agreement to be had, India will want a seat at the table
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Speculation was rife in Delhi that if the White House can forge a de facto entente with Moscow, it might be tempted to have one with Beijing too. That may explain why India has chosen to accelerate efforts already underway to put a diplomatic floor under its fractious ties with China.
In a [podcast with the American computer scientist Lex Fridman](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPUtA3W-7_I), released just prior to Raisina and reposted by Donald Trump, Modi spoke of the need for India and China to put aside their disagreements in favour of more cooperation. Putin will soon be hosting both Modi and Xi at Russia’s Victory Day parade on 9 May. Hard-headed Indian realists present this as a tactical adjustment rather than a wholesale strategic reset. Tensions in the relationship are too entrenched to simply ignore. But it does suggest Delhi is keeping some diplomatic options open.
Europe and India are getting much closer despite their often-clashing worldviews
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Every year, a bevy of current and former European leaders descend on Raisina to engage in mutual courtship and mutual lecturing with their Indian counterparts. This year, there were new Indian concerns that a Europe scarred by Trump will be receptive to making good with China – in what would amount to Beijing’s version of a “reverse Kissinger”. But if anything, India's strategic autonomy has now become a bit of an unexpected role model for Europe. Its market attraction, representing one-sixth of humanity, will only grow as Brussels is forced to make its own way and derisk from both Xi’s China and Trump’s America.
For all its convening power, India still falls short in setting the global agenda
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If Russia is an arsonist and China is a global order builder, then India’s great skill is forging partnerships based on what it is not. To the West, it is not China. And to the rest of the world, it is not the West. That formula explains the success of the Raisina Dialogue in an age of fluid geopolitics.
But it can also be self-limiting. Often, India still finds itself reacting to, not shaping, the global agenda. Its Foreign Minister S Jaishankar is a savvy and outspoken critic of the post-1945 order but much vaguer on what should replace it. Similarly, Indian strategists don’t seem to fully appreciate how far India lags its great rival in normative, and not just economic, influence. For all modern India’s diplomatic verve, it has no equivalent to China’s Global Development Initiative, the Global Security Initiative, or the Global Civilization Initiative.
India has mastered the art of contradiction in a world adrift but is not yet an agent of its transformation.