DeepSeek has spurred the search for homegrown Indian models, but the track record of being at the frontier of this competition is not encouraging. Great powers are not measured by improvement or cumulative numbers whose significance is vastly exaggerated. (Reuters)
Feb 1, 2025 06:56 IST First published on: Feb 1, 2025 at 06:56 IST
India is such a big country that just our existence is of relevance to the world. India’s arrival is loudly proclaimed at all global fora, not least by our own leaders. But the truth is that if you look at global politics right now, without the blinkers of our propaganda, India is actually risking a slide into irrelevance, an unserious country that is a victim of its own myth-making.
It is palpably clear just how irrelevant India is to much of the world’s consciousness. We are so much in the grip of a feel-good anecdote that we cannot measure the scale of our own irrelevance. Services exports are supposedly India’s success story, where its growth rate is impressive and higher than the rest of the world. But India still accounts for only 4.6 per cent of global trade in services. India’s merchandise exports are inching up, but still less than 2 per cent of global trade. In December 2024, the Press Information Bureau proudly announced that India’s FDI journey had reached the remarkable milestone of $1 trillion since 2000. This was meant to establish India’s relevance. But India’s share in global FDI is close to 2.5 per cent in proportional terms and declining. With Indian consumption growing at less than 3 per cent, the country is not as big a deal for global exporters as you might imagine. The supposed opportunity for India provided by investment moving out of China has barely materialised. In proportional terms, India may at best get 10-15 per cent of that investment, and this was before the US’s insistence on onshoring.
Story continues below this ad
India gets barely 1.5 per cent of international tourist arrivals. Its entertainment sector is growing rapidly, but including the total domestic market, it is only 5 per cent of the world market; it is not a soft-power export powerhouse. India’s defence budget has been relatively stagnant, with a proportion of GDP under 2 per cent. President Donald Trump might demand from Narendra Modi that India make significant arms purchases. But claims about India’s purchasing capacity are hugely exaggerated. India has good talent. Indian science has been improving. But again, India is still relatively irrelevant to most of the global discussions on the frontiers of technology innovation. India has performed an important role in some sectors like pharmaceuticals and some low-cost medical innovation. But on any measure of critical technologies for the future, whether it is AI or green energy, India seems far behind the global competition.
DeepSeek has spurred the search for homegrown Indian AI models, but the track record on being at the frontier of this competition is not encouraging. Great powers are not measured by improvement or cumulative numbers whose significance is vastly exaggerated. They are measured by the degree to which they are indispensable in a whole range of sectors — services trade, manufacturing, technology and innovation, green energy transitions, nuclear energy, defence technology, research and development or finance. Of course, a country of India’s size will always have some amazingly interesting success stories. But by the same measure, it is quite shocking how dispensable India is.
India is politically important. But if you look at history dispassionately, it is hard to argue that that importance has increased. Reading archives, declassified documents and histories from the Fifties and Sixties leaves you with a distinct impression that India’s political importance has certainly not increased. But the source of that importance, contrary to what we think, was not India’s ability to project raw power, which is still quite limited. It was always the potential moral example of its democracy. India’s ability to convert routine protocols of international diplomacy — a G-20 summit, a possible hosting of a Quad meeting — into world historical events, aided by a foreign policy establishment and ecosystem that likes to underscore its own importance by exaggerating India’s power, is truly astonishing. The world does not care. India has, in terms of relative authority, lost standing in the Global South. It is India’s great virtue that it can have good relations with every country in the world: It can deal with both Russia and the US, and Israel and Iran. But this supposed privilege India has in the world system also reveals its weaknesses. India’s position actually does not matter enough for countries to really get upset.
Story continues below this ad
The above account may seem a bit graceless. But this kind of cold shower is necessary if we are to confront one incontrovertible fact: India is really not significant to global consciousness as much as we like to think. Our sense of our own significance is not a product of the hard realities of our global situation. It is a product these days, partly of propaganda, where we believe our own lies about being a vishwaguru. It is partly a consequence of our framing. I was struck by the fact that India’s targets and aspirations are defined in terms of whole numbers that sound impressive — cumulative FDI of one trillion, or a five trillion economy and so forth. These make for nice headlines but are irrelevant. I was stuck reading old Chinese policy documents of how targets were powerfully defined in ways that made China indispensable to the world system — a quarter of global exports, X per cent of global critical technologies and so forth. They were emphatic statements of aspiration for relative power, rather than a number that looked big.
most read
India is also partly deluded by the visibility of Indians. The way we relate to their visibility actually underscores our own irrelevance and insecurity. It is absolutely astonishing that significant parts of the ruling establishment’s ecosystem in India are treating the Tulsi Gabbard and Kash Patel hearings as if they were the manifestation of Hindu pride and piety that should matter to India. It should be a comical affectation of little relevance but it is nevertheless revealing: A projection of pride based on some kinship affinity that ought to be completely irrelevant to thinking about India’s place in the world. We were delighted that Indonesia’s president apparently has Indian genetic material. But we should be more concerned that China has a quarter of Indonesia’s trade. Our existence should not be our relevance.
India has enormous potential. But unless we take a cold hard look and acknowledge that self-importance is not the same thing as importance, we will not begin to understand how India risks being irrelevant. For honest patriots, it ought to be a shock how little India actually matters.
The writer is contributing editor, The Indian Express
