There is a quiet consensus in India today that time is on our side, scale will save us, and history will somehow bend in our favour.
It is a comforting belief. It is also wrong.
India likes to describe itself as an “emerging power”. The problem is that emergence has become a permanent condition. We are always arriving, never quite there—strong enough to be taken seriously, weak enough to avoid hard choices.
But the world will not reward intent, demographics, or moral positioning. It will reward capability. And capability, brutally speaking, is where India remains hesitant, inconsistent, and often self-deluding.
India’s global relevance for three decades rested on information technology and services. That story is ending. Automation, AI, and platformisation are flattening the very advantages that once made Indian ITeS indispensable. Yet policy thinking still treats tech talent as an inexhaustible natural resource, rather than a perishable strategic asset.
The uncomfortable truth is this: India does not control the technologies it increasingly depends on. We integrate systems designed elsewhere, optimise costs for others, and celebrate scale as if it were sovereignty. It is not.
Nowhere is this self-deception clearer than in artificial intelligence. India hosts conferences, drafts ethical frameworks, and issues strategy documents—but owns neither frontier models nor the compute infrastructure that underpins them.
This is a strategic, not a moral failure.
AI power is not built on hope or regulation-first governance. It is built through compute, data control, and ruthless talent retention. India currently bleeds its best minds into American and Chinese ecosystems while congratulating itself on “frugal innovation”. And while frugality is admirable, it cannot be a substitute for fundamentals.
At the current pace, India risks becoming an AI-dependent power—forced to adapt tools built by others, constrained by architectures it did not design, and vulnerable in domains where autonomy matters most: defence, intelligence, and critical infrastructure.
India’s military self-image rests on bravery, numbers, and selective excellence. None of these are insignificant. But none of them are sufficient.
Modern wars are not won by platforms alone, but by systems—sensor fusion, real-time decision loops, AI-enabled targeting, cyber and space resilience. India fields capable missiles and aircraft, yet remains structurally dependent on foreign engines, electronics, and electronic warfare suites.
This gap cannot be masked by parades, slogans, and the comforting “we are lethal” refrain. Lethality is not dominance, nor does raw courage compensate for technological lag. Future wars will punish delay, not forgive valour.
India’s central weakness is not corruption, poverty, or even bureaucracy. It is comfort.
We are comfortable debating instead of building, announcing instead of measuring, and regulating before understanding. Institutions are rarely penalised for failure; timelines stretch without consequence; ambition is performed, not enforced. This culture produces adequacy at scale—but never excellence at speed.
China builds first and apologises later. Israel prototypes, fails, and iterates in real time. The United States tolerates chaos but protects capability. India, by contrast, seeks consensus before competence and reassurance before readiness.
The world does not need India to be another China, nor a moral counterweight to the West. It needs India to become something rarer: a systems-capable power that can absorb shocks, stabilise regions, and offer alternatives without dependency.
India’s real long-term value lies in:
- Human capital at scale with technological depth
- Digital public infrastructure that enhances state capacity
- Strategic autonomy backed by real capability, not posture
None of this is automatic.
- Demography without skill becomes liability.
- Autonomy without technology becomes vulnerability.
- Scale without systems becomes stagnation.
By the mid-2040s, India will either be:
- A large but dependent power—respected, consulted, but constrained; or
- A systems power—limited in some domains, formidable in the ones that matter
That outcome will not be decided by declarations or destiny, but by India’s willingness and ability to abandon comforting narratives and embrace uncomfortable execution.
History is littered with civilisations that mistook longevity for inevitability.
India’s challenge is not to rise—but to stop settling for being almost powerful.
In a career spanning three decades and counting, Ramananda (Ram to his friends) has been the foreign editor of The Telegraph, Outlook Magazine and the New Indian Express. He helped set up rediff.com’s editorial operations in San Jose and New York, helmed sify.com, and was the founder editor of India.com.
His work has featured in national and international publications like the Al Jazeera Centre for Studies, Global Times and Ashahi Shimbun. But his one constant over all these years, he says, has been the attempt to understand rising India’s place in the world.
He can rustle up a mean salad, his oil-less pepper chicken is to die for, and all it takes is some beer and rhythm and blues to rock his soul.
Talk to him about foreign and strategic affairs, media, South Asia, China, and of course India.
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