In 1947, newly independent India set out on one of the twentieth century’s most consequential development experiments. Jawaharlal Nehru’s government rejected both Western free-market capitalism and alignment with the Soviet bloc, betting instead on a mixed economy, state planning, and non-alignment as the foundations of an independent national path. Eight decades later, that bet looks all but abandoned. India has become one of the closest strategic partners of the United States and Israel in Asia — all while deepening ties with Russia and remaining an active member of BRICS. The acceleration came under Narendra Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), but the shift itself began long before Modi ever took office.

That is the argument of this essay: India’s realignment cannot be explained from the inside out, as a story about Hindu nationalism or a change of ruling party. It has to be explained from the outside in. The real starting point is the crisis of American hegemony and the rise of China — a causal chain that runs from the reorganization of global production, through Washington’s strategic need for an Indian counterweight to Beijing, to the transformation of India’s domestic power bloc, and only then arrives at its political and ideological expression under Modi and the BJP. Modi did not start this process. He accelerated and gave it a political face. Its real origins lie in the crisis of the world capitalist system and in India’s own 1991 economic reforms.

What has actually changed is the coalition that rules India — a bloc of finance capital, industrial capital, tech firms, a new urban middle class, and Hindu nationalist forces that has carried the country’s development project from post-independence state capitalism into globalized neoliberalism. Drawing on Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-systems theory, Antonio Gramsci’s concept of the power bloc, and Marxist political economy, this essay argues that India’s tilt toward the West is not a sign of total dependency, nor of full independence. It is a strategy pursued by this bloc to raise India’s position in the global hierarchy of capital.

India today is one of the most important semi-peripheral powers in the world capitalist system — a power exploiting the crisis of American hegemony and the US-China rivalry to expand its own room for maneuver, while remaining firmly inside the circuits that reproduce global capitalism. India’s ascent should be read as part of a broader relocation of capital accumulation from the traditional core of the world system toward semi-peripheral powers. The crisis of American hegemony does not mean the collapse of capitalism; it means a redistribution of power within the same system — and India is one of the chief beneficiaries of that redistribution. Its impressive growth, alongside deepening class inequality, expanding informal employment, and widening social fractures, suggests that India’s rise is less a model of independent development than a new stage in the evolution of global capitalism itself.

Introduction: From the Dream of Non-Alignment to Great-Power Rivalry

Few countries reflect the last seventy years of upheaval in the international system as clearly as India does. A state that once presented itself as the standard-bearer of the Non-Aligned Movement and a leading voice of the Third World is now a central player in the geopolitical contest between the United States and China. A government that once built national development around planned economics, extensive public ownership, and independence from power blocs is today among the world’s largest recipients of foreign capital, one of the most important markets for multinational corporations, and a strategic partner in Washington’s project to contain China. Its military and technological ties with Israel, meanwhile, have reached a depth unimaginable three decades ago.

This raises an obvious question. Has India abandoned Nehru’s anti-colonial, independence-minded legacy to become part of the West’s geopolitical project? Or is this closeness merely tactical — a way for a rising power to expand its room for maneuver in a shifting world order?

The conventional answers oscillate between two opposing narratives. The first, favored by liberal commentators and Modi’s own supporters, treats the pivot as the payoff of successful economic reform, military modernization, and foreign-policy realism: India has finally outgrown the limits of non-alignment and emerged as a rising global power. The second treats it as a story of growing dependency — India as a junior partner fully absorbed into Western geopolitical strategy, its historic independence traded away for a role in containing China.

Both narratives capture part of the truth, and both miss what actually drives the transformation. Both treat “India” as a single, homogeneous actor. But it is not Indian society that makes investment decisions, redirects economic policy, or sets foreign policy — it is a specific power bloc operating inside it.

“Power bloc” is used here in Gramsci’s sense: a coalition of economic, political, and ideological forces that has secured hegemony over state and society and set the direction of development. The central claim of this essay is that what has changed over the past three decades is, above all, the composition of that bloc. The state capitalism of the Nehru era — anchored in a developmentalist bureaucracy, public-sector industry, and a national bourgeoisie — has gradually given way to a new coalition: finance capital, tech firms, private industrial capital, a new urban middle class, and Hindu nationalist forces, all engaged in redefining India’s development project as globalized neoliberal capitalism.

Seen this way, the deepening relationship with Washington, expanding military cooperation with Israel, active participation in coalitions like the Quad, and the simultaneous preservation of ties with Russia and membership in BRICS are not contradictions. They are components of a single strategy aimed at raising this bloc’s position within the global division of capitalist labor.

This reading rests on Wallerstein’s world-systems theory: capitalism, from its origins, has been a single world system, and a country’s position within it is determined not by political borders but by its place in the global division of labor. India, then, cannot simply be filed under “developing country” or treated as a fully independent power. It is one of the most consequential semi-peripheral powers of our time — one working to exploit the openings created by the crisis of American hegemony, competition with China, and the broader reordering of the world system, without ever stepping outside the logic of global capital accumulation.

The real question this essay poses, then, is not whether India has moved closer to the West. It is why India’s ruling power bloc chose this strategy at this particular historical juncture, how that choice relates to the broader transformation of global capitalism, what it has done to India’s class structure and domestic development, and where it is likely to lead.

China, America, and the Making of India as a Geopolitical Power

The true starting point of this analysis is the crisis of American hegemony and the rise of China as an economic and geopolitical power — a shift that redefined India’s strategic orientation before any purely domestic Indian decision did. India’s pivot to the West cannot be understood without grasping the intensifying rivalry between New Delhi and Beijing, a rivalry playing out across economics, the military, technology, and regional order — one whose groundwork had already been laid by the 1990s economic reforms that integrated India into global capitalism.

During the Cold War, despite border disputes and regional rivalries, India tried to define itself outside any single power bloc. Non-alignment — associated with Nehru, Nasser, and Tito — never meant strict neutrality; India leaned closer to the Soviet Union on many occasions, especially after relations with Washington soured in the 1970s. But that closeness never turned India into a formal Moscow ally.

The Soviet collapse in 1991 changed the calculus. India lost one of its principal geopolitical anchors and, simultaneously, found itself needing Western capital, technology, and markets for economic development. The end of the Cold War laid the groundwork for a gradual rapprochement with the United States.

The more decisive factor, though, was China’s rise. From the 1990s onward, China became the world’s factory at unprecedented speed, while India took a different route — services, information technology, knowledge-intensive industries. That divergence produced not cooperation but structural rivalry between two Asian powers.

For India’s ruling class, China was not just an economic competitor but a challenge to India’s own position in the Asian order. China’s vast industrial infrastructure, expanding military, global investment networks, and projects like the Belt and Road Initiative extended Beijing’s reach into India’s own periphery. In response, India sought a new balance through closer ties with the United States, Japan, Australia, and Israel.

Out of this emerged the Quad — the security grouping linking the US, India, Japan, and Australia. New Delhi still speaks the language of “strategic autonomy,” but in practice its military and technological cooperation with Washington has reached unprecedented levels: defense agreements, naval cooperation in the Indian Ocean, intelligence-sharing, and participation in technology supply chains have brought India closer than ever to America’s geopolitical architecture in Asia.

This has to be read against the backdrop of the crisis of American hegemony itself. After the Cold War, the US tried to consolidate unipolar order, only to see that position challenged by China’s rise. Washington gradually concluded that containing China was not achievable without India’s participation. India thus became important not merely as an economic partner but as a geopolitical instrument in the contest with Beijing.

The relationship, of course, cuts both ways. Indian governments recognized that the US-China rivalry had created a historic opportunity: access to Western capital and technology, the relocation of production chains out of China, and an upgrade in New Delhi’s global standing. Modi’s 2014 “Make in India” campaign was conceived precisely within this frame — an explicit bid to turn India into a global manufacturing hub and draw in multinational firms.

Seen through a critical political-economy lens, though, the project carries serious internal contradictions. The inflow of foreign capital is not, by itself, a sign of independent development. When a national economy remains locked into global capitalist chains chiefly as a source of cheap labor or an assembly point for finished goods, the lion’s share of value still accumulates at the centers that own technology and finance.

India has built genuine capacity in recent years — pharmaceuticals, IT, digital services, aerospace. But a large share of its workforce remains stuck in the informal economy, with little job security. High growth on its own has not narrowed the country’s deep class divide. The contradiction runs straight through Modi’s own economic program: infrastructure expansion, digitalization, and foreign capital inflows on one side; policies that have concentrated wealth in a handful of private conglomerates — chiefly Adani and Reliance — on the other.

The close relationship between the Modi government and India’s biggest capitalists is one of the defining features of contemporary Indian capitalism. Critics call it a form of crony capitalism, in which the state uses fiscal policy, project allocation, and regulatory design to accelerate the growth of favored capital groups. Contrary to conventional wisdom, India is not simply transitioning from a state economy to a market economy. It is developing a form of oligarchic developmentalist capitalism, in which the state and large private capital cooperate on a shared project of national power.

Israel occupies a distinct place within this broader realignment — one illustration of it, not an independent axis. The relationship, cautious and limited during the Cold War, became a full strategic partnership after 1991 and especially under Modi: part of India’s larger transformation from a non-aligned developmental state into an emerging capitalist power.

Yet India remains a complicated actor. Unlike some of Washington’s other allies, New Delhi has refused to enter the American camp wholesale. What most conventional analyses miss is that India has not simply moved closer to the US — it has simultaneously held onto a set of memberships and relationships that appear to contradict each other: it sits in the Quad and deepens military cooperation with Washington; it maintains extensive military ties with Russia and has kept buying Russian oil since the Ukraine war began; it has not just remained in BRICS but actively pushed its expansion; and it continues to sit inside the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, where China and Russia hold the central seats.

This behavior shows that Modi’s India cannot simply be called an “American ally” — but it cannot be treated as a holdover of classical non-alignment, either. The more precise description is that India has not abandoned non-alignment so much as rebuilt it as strategic multi-alignment: rather than distancing itself from all power blocs, it holds active membership in several competing blocs at once and uses the tension between them to increase its bargaining weight in the world system. Only a country large, industrialized, and geopolitically significant enough that no single great power can afford to write it off could pursue this strategy — a feature that sets India apart from most other semi-peripheral states.

It is worth pausing on a dimension most accounts of India’s rise leave out entirely: semi-peripheral powers are rarely just victims of unequal global relations. In certain respects, they reproduce those same relations on a smaller scale, against weaker neighbors. India’s economic and political weight over Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives — expressed through trade leverage, infrastructure financing, and periodic diplomatic pressure over their alignment choices — repeats, in miniature, the very asymmetries India itself resents in its dealings with Washington or Beijing. The same holds domestically for Kashmir, where the 2019 revocation of Article 370, a prolonged security lockdown, and demographic and land-ownership changes were carried out in the language of national integration and development — the same language great powers use to describe their own peripheries. A semi-peripheral power, in other words, does not simply absorb the logic of imperial hierarchy; it also exercises it, one rung further down.

The essential question remains: will this path turn India into an independent power of the Global South, or into an emerging capitalist power locked inside a new circuit of imperial rivalry? Answering that requires returning from the geopolitical level to the very domestic crisis that made this strategic pivot possible in the first place — the crisis of the Nehruvian development model and the reconstitution of India’s internal power bloc.

The Crisis of the Nehruvian Model and the Roots of the Neoliberal Turn

Understanding India’s turn under Modi requires looking well beyond the rise of the BJP and its Hindu-nationalist ideology. Modi’s 2014 victory was a decisive turning point, but it was the product of a much longer structural shift that began in the 1980s and accelerated with the economic reforms of the 1990s — under Congress governments. Modi’s India emerged on ground that had already been eroded by the gradual collapse of the Nehruvian development model. It is more accurate, then, to see Modi not as the originator of this shift but as its accelerator and political architect — the figure who fused an already-existing trajectory in India’s political economy with Hindu nationalism and a more assertive foreign policy.

The post-independence economic model associated with Jawaharlal Nehru rested on state planning, heavy-industry development, public ownership of key sectors, and an independent foreign policy. It was never socialism in the Marxist sense, but a form of developmentalist state capitalism in which the state directed both capital accumulation and the broader economy. On the international stage, India was a founding member of the Non-Aligned Movement, a policy aimed at carving out independent space between the Cold War’s two poles.

The model carried internal contradictions from the start. India was a country of mass poverty, an enormous rural population, deep class structures, and a heavy colonial legacy. The postcolonial state tried to pursue an independent development path without breaking existing property relations and without a social revolution. The result was a contradictory mix: on one hand, the creation of industrial infrastructure, universities, core industries, and scientific capacity; on the other, the preservation of much of the existing class structure and concentrated private ownership, which blocked deeper social transformation.

In the first decades of independence, this model delivered real achievements — steel, machine-building, energy, aerospace, nuclear industries, the growth of an urban middle class, expanded higher education, and new technological capacity, all of which set India apart from many other newly independent states. But slow growth, a bloated bureaucracy, weak private investment, and the failure to generate sufficient employment exposed the model’s limits over time.

The 1980s debt crisis and the 1991 balance-of-payments crisis marked the end of the period in which India could largely set its own economic course. Under pressure from international financial institutions, the government launched sweeping reforms: reducing the state’s economic role, liberalizing trade, opening the door to foreign capital, and gradually privatizing parts of the economy.

These changes pushed India into a new phase. Contrary to standard neoliberal narratives, though, the 1991 reforms were not a simple story of “economic liberation.” They were the gradual integration of India into the logic of global capitalism. India moved from a relatively closed, state-centered economy to one whose growth increasingly depended on global capital, international financial markets, and transnational production chains.

The transition nonetheless differed from the experience of many other countries. Unlike much of Latin America or Africa, India entered liberalization with real industrial capacity, a skilled workforce, an enormous domestic market, and a powerful central state. So rather than a full collapse of state capacity, economic liberalization produced a hybrid capitalism — part large domestic conglomerates, part foreign capital, part continued state control.

This is the period in which India’s biggest capitalist groups — Tata, Reliance, Adani — gained real power, benefiting not only from liberalization itself but from close ties to the state and public policy, a pattern that later became one of the defining features of Indian capitalism under Modi: the convergence of state power, big domestic capital, and geopolitical ambition.

The class effects of reform were double-edged. India saw the rise of an urban middle class, the expansion of information technology, and greater integration into the global economy — Bangalore became a global hub for software services, and Indian firms carved out an important place in the global tech market. But millions of rural and informal workers saw none of this benefit. Much of India’s growth occurred without generating stable employment for its enormous young population — the phenomenon economists came to call “jobless growth”: an economy that could raise GDP without generating a proportional number of secure, organized jobs.

That contradiction created the social terrain on which Modi’s politics grew. Those who had benefited from economic globalization wanted deeper integration into the world economy; those who felt left behind turned toward an identity-based nationalist politics promising to restore India’s greatness.

The BJP and Modi managed to fuse these two currents — contradictory on their face — into a single political project: the promise of development, investment, and global economic power on one hand; the revival of Hindu nationalism, a redefinition of national identity around the religious majority, and the image of India as a historic power reclaiming its place on the other.

This combination marks the real difference between pre- and post-Modi India. Earlier governments, even after economic reform, retained something of the postcolonial commitment to independence and official secularism. Modi offered something different: neoliberal capitalism fused with Hindu nationalism and a more assertive foreign policy within the frame of great-power competition.

For this reason, India’s turn toward the West cannot be reduced to a change of government or ruling-party ideology. It was the convergence of several structural processes at once: the crisis of the old development model, the need for foreign capital and technology, the rise of a new capitalist class, competition with China, and Washington’s own effort to balance against Beijing.

India’s deepening closeness with Israel belongs in this same frame — one expression of a broader realignment, not an independent center of it. A relationship that was limited and cautious during the Cold War became a strategic partnership after the 1990s, and especially under Modi, as part of India’s wider shift from a non-aligned developmental state to an emerging capitalist power.

The Transformation of India’s Power Bloc: From the Nehruvian Developmentalist Coalition to a Neoliberal Historic Bloc

To grasp this shift with any precision, we need to move beyond foreign policy and engage what Gramsci called the “historic bloc” — a coalition of social forces that imposes a shared project on society not through domination alone but through the manufacture of consent and cultural hegemony. What has happened in India over the past half-century is the replacement of one historic bloc with another.

The Nehru-era power bloc rested on a coalition of a developmentalist bureaucracy, large state-owned industry, and segments of the national bourgeoisie, all of which accepted the legitimacy of a state-led development project in exchange for state support for import-substitution industrialization. This bloc avoided any social revolution or radical redistribution of property, but it managed to build a relative consensus around national independence, centralized planning, and non-alignment.

The 1980s crisis and the 1991 reforms broke this bloc apart from within. The developmentalist bureaucracy could no longer marshal the resources to sustain the old model, and segments of the same national bourgeoisie that had once thrived under state protection now wanted liberalization and direct access to global capital and markets. It was in this opening that the elements of a new power bloc took shape.

The first element is finance capital — banks, investment institutions, and stock markets, which gained growing influence over economic policy after the financial liberalization of the 1990s. The second is tech capital — India’s software and IT-services industry, which, through its integration into global value chains, became one of the most powerful constituencies invested in maintaining close ties with the United States and Western markets. The third is big private industrial capital — conglomerates like Tata, Reliance, and Adani, which profited from privatization and proximity to the state and now sit at the core of the country’s economic decision-making.

The fourth element, and the politically decisive one, is the new urban middle class. A direct product of globalization, the growth of the service sector, and the expansion of the digital economy, this class has become the BJP’s principal social base in recent decades. Where the Nehru-era middle class located its identity in the state bureaucracy and a secular national ideal, this new middle class defines itself through globalized consumption, individual competitiveness, and often a nationalist pride that aligns neatly with the narrative of a “Great India” reclaiming its place in the world.

The fifth element is the Hindu nationalist movement, which supplies the ideological glue holding the whole bloc together. This is precisely what transforms it from a purely economic coalition into a historic bloc in the Gramscian sense: Hindu nationalism provides a common language in which tech capital’s ambition for global integration, industrial capital’s interest in market expansion, and the urban middle class’s yearning for international status all get articulated through a single narrative — the return of India’s greatness.

Under Modi, this bloc has consolidated its hold not only ideologically but institutionally, in ways that deserve to be named directly rather than left implicit. Electoral bonds — an opaque corporate-financing instrument the Supreme Court itself struck down in 2024 — channeled vast, largely untraceable sums from precisely the conglomerates most tied to state contracts into BJP campaign coffers. Broadcast media has consolidated heavily into groups aligned with the government, most visibly through the Adani Group’s acquisition of NDTV, one of the country’s last major independent networks. Investigative agencies — the Enforcement Directorate and the Central Bureau of Investigation chief among them — have been used with visible selectivity against opposition politicians and critical journalists, while central appointments to the judiciary and to nominally independent regulators have increasingly tracked the ruling party’s preferences. None of this amounts to the wholesale institutional capture and state-of-emergency purge seen in Turkey after 2016, but it performs an analogous function: it narrows the space in which the historic bloc’s dominance can be publicly contested, even as elections continue to be held and courts continue to operate.

Unlike the Nehruvian bloc, this new coalition no longer needs to justify itself through egalitarian ideals or economic independence. Its legitimacy comes from a blend of economic growth, national pride, and security against internal and external threats. That is exactly why Modi-era foreign policy — from the tilt toward Washington to expanded cooperation with Israel to the simultaneous preservation of ties with Moscow — should not be read as a series of ad hoc decisions. It is the direct expression of the interests and ideological horizon of a power bloc that has also redefined India’s domestic political economy.

Seen this way, the connective tissue linking India’s domestic economy, domestic politics, and foreign policy is precisely this historic bloc: a transformation in the class composition of power that has shaped both the country’s development path and its international strategy at once.

Growth, Inequality, and India’s Future in the US-China Rivalry

In recent decades, India has become one of the most consequential cases of transformation in the global political economy. A country once filed under mass poverty, slow growth, and a closed economy now posts one of the world’s fastest growth rates, ranks as the third-largest economy by purchasing power parity, and actively markets itself as a rising global power.

The dominant narrative in economic and political media treats this as a straightforward success story of market-oriented reform and the rise of a new Asian power — India as China’s natural successor in global production chains, the twenty-first century as potentially “India’s century.” A critical political economy demands a more skeptical reading. The question is not simply the size of the economy or the GDP growth rate, but how that growth was produced, which social forces have benefited from it, and how India’s position within the structure of global capitalism has actually changed.

India’s growth is real, but growth on its own is not development. Capitalist history shows economies can post high growth for decades while class inequality, relative poverty, and job insecurity persist unchanged. The real question about India is whether its growth has produced structural transformation in Indian society — or simply a new form of integration for a large peripheral economy into the world capitalist system.

Growth Without Social Transformation

One striking feature of India’s development path is that, unlike many industrialized countries, its growth largely bypassed classical industrialization. In East Asia — South Korea, Taiwan, even China — large-scale industrialization and a massive manufacturing sector played the central role in absorbing labor and raising productivity.

India took a different route, building much of its growth on services, information technology, telecommunications, finance, and knowledge industries. Bangalore became a global hub for software services, and Indian firms carved out real standing in global technology markets. These are genuine achievements — but they carry structural limits. A digital economy and advanced services cannot absorb India’s enormous labor force. Millions of workers remain in agriculture or the informal sector, without job security, social insurance, or stable labor rights.

India thus faces a fundamental contradiction: one of the world’s largest pools of educated human capital, alongside a crisis of job creation. High growth has not produced a proportional rise in productive employment — what some economists call “jobless growth.” Millions of young Indians enter a labor market that cannot absorb them, turning an economic problem into a social and political one. Modi’s development promises were built largely around solving exactly this problem. The gap between promise and reality remains wide.

Big Capital and the Modi State

One defining feature of contemporary India is the deepening bond between the state and big private capital. Under Modi, conglomerates like Adani and Reliance have become central actors in the Indian economy. This should not be reduced to corruption or personal ties between politicians and businessmen; the pattern runs deeper, and it recurs across many emerging capitalist economies: the state leans on national champions to compete globally, and those firms depend on state support to expand.

Indian capitalism, in this sense, is moving toward a model in which economic and political power increasingly fuse. The state has not retreated — it has changed roles, from direct manager of the economy to facilitator of large-scale capital accumulation. This resembles East Asian developmental patterns in some respects, but with a crucial difference. In South Korea or China, the state managed to direct private capital within a coherent national industrial project. In India, the risk is that the state becomes primarily an instrument for expanding the interests of a few large capital groups.

Caste, Class, and the Limits of Indian Development

No left analysis of India is complete without reckoning with caste. Legally curtailed after independence, the caste system remains a major determinant of social position, access to education, employment, and property. Indian capitalism has weakened some of caste’s traditional boundaries without dismantling them.

This is not simply a matter of identity sitting alongside class; it is written into the very geography of accumulation. The boom in IT, finance, and export manufacturing has concentrated overwhelmingly in a handful of southern and western states and cities — Bangalore, Hyderabad, Pune, Mumbai, Gujarat — while much of the Hindi-speaking north and the tribal, Adivasi-majority belt running through central and eastern India (Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Odisha) supply raw materials, migrant labor, and land for extraction, capturing comparatively little of the value they help generate. Dalit and Adivasi workers remain heavily overrepresented in exactly the informal, insecure, and hazardous segments of the economy — construction, sanitation, mining, manual scavenging — that the growth narrative prefers not to dwell on. Caste hierarchy and regional uneven development, in other words, function together as the internal periphery that subsidizes India’s celebrated growth centers.

The rise of Hindu nationalism under Modi belongs to this same terrain. The BJP has mobilized segments of the Hindu middle and lower classes around religious identity — but that identity-based mobilization pushes the class contradictions of economic inequality, and the caste and regional hierarchies underneath them, to the margins. This is one of the key functions of right-wing identity politics everywhere: converting social and economic contradictions into cultural and religious ones. The stakes are especially high for India’s Muslim minority, where Hindu-nationalist policy has raised real concerns about the erosion of secularism, religious discrimination, and a shift in the character of the Indian secular state.

India, America, and the Multipolar Order Ahead

India’s future position in the world system depends on how it manages its relationships with three poles at once: the United States, China, and Russia. Washington sees India as its most important potential partner in balancing China’s rise. But India has no intention of becoming a mere American ally; New Delhi is trying to use great-power rivalry to expand its own independence — buying Russian oil, maintaining military cooperation with Moscow, and deepening defense ties with Washington, simultaneously.

Call it “strategic autonomy in a multipolar age” — but its limits are just as visible. The more India’s economy depends on foreign capital, technology, and markets, the more constrained its independent room for maneuver becomes. India today occupies a genuinely paradoxical position: it wants to lead the Global South and redefine the legacy of non-alignment, while needing deeper cooperation with the core centers of global capitalism to sustain its growth and compete with China.

Conclusion: Independent Power, or a New Pillar of the Capitalist Order?

The real question about India’s future is not whether it will become a great power. Nearly every economic indicator suggests that process is already underway. The real question is where this ascent will land within the global division of capitalist labor. Will India manage to reorganize part of the world’s production, technology, and financial chains in its own favor — or will it continue, as a semi-peripheral power, to perform the work of reproducing global capital on someone else’s behalf? The answer depends not only on India’s foreign policy but on the balance of class forces within Indian society, and on how the crisis of global capitalist hegemony itself continues to unfold. Two broad scenarios follow from this.

In the first, India becomes a genuinely independent great power — one that uses its enormous human capacity, domestic market, technology, and geopolitical position to chart a relatively autonomous development path. Reaching that outcome would require reducing inequality, strengthening labor rights, major investment in education and public health, and building a production-centered economy.

In the second, India becomes a great power that nonetheless remains locked inside the logic of global capitalism — a vast, growing economy in which much of the value it produces still flows outward, toward the world’s financial and technology centers. In this scenario, India may become a great power in scale while remaining structurally dependent.

From the left, the question is not growth versus no growth. It is what kind of growth, and in whose interest. Indian capitalism can build a large economy — but without a shift in class relations, without organized labor, and without expanding social democracy, that growth will not, on its own, translate into liberation for most Indians.

India’s own history shows that the end of political colonialism does not automatically produce economic and social independence. A country can fly an independent flag, develop advanced technology, and build formidable military power while still facing structural constraints within the global capitalist division of labor.

India’s future path will be decided not only in New Delhi, but in the balance of class forces within Indian society itself — in whether organized labor, social movements, and demands for equality can overcome the logic of the ruling power bloc, or whether that bloc continues to steer the country’s economic ascent toward the reproduction of domestic inequality. But beyond this, the larger picture deserves equal weight: India is neither returning to Nehru’s legacy nor becoming an Asian version of America’s traditional allies. What we are watching instead is the emergence of a semi-peripheral capitalist power seeking to use the crisis of American hegemony and rivalry with China to climb the hierarchy of the world system. Whether that project succeeds or fails will shape not only India’s future, but the balance of power across Asia — and, quite possibly, the fate of the post-American world order itself.

This matters for how the left should read India’s rise. A critique of American hegemony should not curdle into an uncritical embrace of whichever power appears to be rising in its place — Washington’s declining grip does not automatically make Beijing, Moscow, or New Delhi bearers of a more just order. India, like other semi-peripheral states pursuing strategic multi-alignment, can resist certain forms of Western pressure while simultaneously reproducing the same hierarchical relations toward its own smaller neighbors, its own internal peripheries, and its own working class and oppressed castes. Choosing sides between blocs of capital is not an anti-imperialist politics; it is merely picking a different manager for the same system. The alternative worth building is not a rearranged hierarchy of great powers but strengthened social forces from below — independent unions, caste and gender justice movements, and transnational solidarity that does not stop at the question of which capital, Western or otherwise, gets to extract the most value from Indian labor.

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