It is often claimed that India is part of the anti-Western club. According to our author, it is by resolutely turning toward the West that India, potentially isolated in a Sino-centric Greater Asia, can make significant progress in terms of development & power. https://desk-russie.info/2024/06/05/towards-a-geopolitical-transformation-of-india.html
https://old.reddit.com/r/geopolitics/comments/1dcmuk5/on_indian_diplomacy_sinorussian_eurasia_and_the/
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It is often claimed that India is part of the anti-Western club. According to our author, it is by resolutely turning toward the West that India, potentially isolated in a Sino-centric Greater Asia, can make significant progress in terms of development & power.
This was a poorly written article not only with multiple factual errors but also a poor understanding of India-Russia ties. China has a gdp per capita 10x of India? In nominal terms, it is 4.5x greater and 2x greater in PPP terms. It seems to assume that India is buying Russian oil as if to pose itself as anti-west when in reality, India is happy to buy from anyone, and its firms choose the lowest market prices. It seems to forget the 1971 war, and its geopolitical implications, as well as the Russia support to India, even after the collapse of the USSR. Incredibly biased, and Euro-centric view of the author.
If India wants to join the ranks of economically developed countries, there are not too many models to copy from. No one can predict the future but one can learn from recent history. This is primarily an economic argument and how it potentially affects geopolitics.
India has lots of natural resources but it is too large a country to rely on simply natural resources to grow in wealth.
India has tried a relatively strict policy of import substitution. This inward looking model has mostly not brought about strong growth. This is especially true if compared to China, an equally large country that started the 1980s at somewhere like half of India’s GDP and is now so much larger.
Most examples of countries that developed into middle income nations did so through urbanization and industrialization. The result is a much smaller fraction working in agriculture. This model nearly always focuses on exports driven by rapid capitalization and infrastructure investment.
While we can’t predict the far future, a country the size of India trying to industrialize would almost certainly rely on exports to wealthier economies where it can leverage its lower labor cost and high labor availability. But the West is learning from China that giving market access to another country without focusing on geopolitics can be dangerous. So it may be that regions like the EU and US will be more cautious about balancing the geopolitics with trade.
China, meanwhile, has the far larger industrial base and it will be hard for India to take export share away from China. One means to do so would be for India to appeal to these nations that India is less risky and more geopolitically aligned with the West. While India might still be acting mostly in self interest and to maximize their strategic flexibility, it will likely have to make some choices.