India A Superpower Without Sidewalks

TITLE: India: A Superpower Without Sidewalks? | GNSI Video Series CHANNEL: Global and National Security Institute DATE: 2026-04-23 ---TRANSCRIPT--- I think one of the reasons that India is at is at you know $2,800 per capita GDP is that the quality of the of the politics and the quality of the politicians sometimes is lacking. But on the other hand, you can look at it as you know and and and see that uh it has by and large um pulled off what many people would have argued was an impossible feat. Good day everyone. Welcome to another episode of the GNSI video series. I’m Jim Cardardoso, senior director for the Global and National Security Institute here at the University of South Florida. We’re joined today by Saddana Dume. He’s a senior research fellow for the American Enterprise Institute. He’s also a columnist with the Wall Street Journal. He’s here in Tampa for a few days lecturing and discussing the concept of India as an unlikely superpower and we’re really pleased to have him with us today. Saddan, great to have you here today.

Great to be here. So, uh, you had an engagement with the students just before this which I understand went well and tonight you’re speaking to the Tampa Bay Area Committee on Foreign Relations and your topic, your theme has been India as an unlikely superpower. So why why do you why the word unlikely in there? What’s the reason for that? Because I mean a few reasons. Um the first of course is historical. Uh when India became independent in 1947 which is accompanied by the partition of the subcontinent as you know with a with a great loss of life and and great upheaval. Um at that time India was an achingly poor country with an extremely low literacy rate uh and uh one of the most uh backward spots in some ways in the world. So the idea that you know some 75 years later that this country could be considered uh as a as a potential superpower um is itself I think in some ways a remarkable story. Um the other thing is that India I think is quite unique in some ways because it has certain attributes that one normally associates with great powers or even with superpowers but it also has certain attributes that are associated more commonly with u much more underdeveloped countries. So let me just give you a few examples. Uh India has an active space program. It’s one of only four countries to land a craft on the moon and it was the first country to land one I believe on the dark side of the moon. It’s a nuclear weapons power. It’s been a it’s been a declared nuclear weapons power since 1998. It has a blue water navy. India has been running aircraft carriers or at least one aircraft carrier uh for several decades. It has the world’s largest population since 2023. Uh it has one of the world’s largest armed forces. So these are all attributes of a very large significant power. Right now it’s the fourth largest economy at market exchange rates. The International Monetary Fund predicts that by 2028, India will be the world’s third largest economy at market exchange rates. It has already been the world’s third largest economy in terms of purchasing power parody since roughly around 2011. But even at market exchange rates which is a higher bar and I think much more important for questions of you know when when we’re talking about geo geopolitics and geopolitical power uh it will be the third largest in the next within the next couple of years. So all of these things are things that point toward a kind of imminent superpower status of sorts and the Indian media of course loves this idea as you can imagine. So they’re are all convinced that India is already a superpower. M but then there’s the other side of the of the coin which is that India has by far the largest uh cohort of subsistence farmers. 45% of India’s workforce is engaged in agriculture and that 45% of the workforce only accounts for about 15% of Indian GDP. So now what we’re looking at is a country where hundreds of millions of people are ekking out a sub subsistence level living from the earth literally in some ways that haven’t sort of hasn’t changed dramatically over over a long time. Uh just to put this in perspective for for your for for for most of your viewers uh in the US only about 2% are are engaged in agriculture. So you got 45% versus 2%. uh you’ve got the fact that in uh absolute terms India’s per capita income remains very small. It’s a very large economy but it’s a very large economy in large part because it has 1.5 billion people per capita income is roughly 2 $2,800. So it’s you know between the average China Chinese per capita GDP is between four and five times greater than India’s. M so in that sense in this sort of if you once you start sort of breaking things down and looking at them in per capita terms uh on many human development indicators for example India is roughly two decades behind the Chinese sort of where China was in 2005 and then you also have the fact that you know India is rising in a world where there are two countries that economically militarily and technologically are just far far ahead of the rest of the back and those two obviously being the United States and and and China. So when people talk about India being the third largest economy by 2028 that may well be true but at that moment in time you’ll have the US at roughly about 30 trillion you’ll have China at roughly about 20 trillion and you’ll have India at roughly about five. So there’s a very very large gap between one and two leading this pack. one which is significantly ahead which is the US obviously but two which is closer to the US than we would have imagined some time ago but still far far ahead of India. So those are kind of I would say you know you know the paradoxes and in my forthcoming book there are other paradoxes right. So I have a subtitle in my forthcoming book which which is superpower without sidewalks. So you know so there in India seems it seems to be this country that is able to do things that u many countries are not able to do and not able to do things that many countries are able to do such as have sidewalks in its cities. So I I think that those those are some of the paradoxes that come to mind. That’s interesting. I mean do you think that I mean isn’t there sort of like a a a a cycle that a a country needs to go through towards development? You start agrarian and then you move to uh kind of an industrial revolution and then to a service-based economy. Is there is there a sense that India is trying to like accelerate that and maybe trying to jump ahead you know to to try to catch up with some of the other superpowers that they’re like you said the US and China that they’re they’re competing with. So I don’t think India is trying to do it differently sequentially but it has ended up doing it differently sequentially right and and and it has ended up without really the industrial stage of that so it’s moved from agriculture and suddenly services has become much more important over time um and it hasn’t really industrialized and this is something that goes back now to Indian independence where you know successive governments have had this goal um of uh of industrializing. And obviously it makes a lot of sense, right? Because the most obvious thing to do when you have a very large cohort of people living off the land is to try to get them into factories, try to get them into, you know, more productive jobs, more organized jobs, get them into the uh the organized sector. That for various reasons which we can get into if you like, um has not quite happened. And in fact, Prime Minister Modi in 2015 had pledged that he would raise the share of manufacturing in Indian GDP from at the time from roughly around 15% to 25%. And you know 10 years later the the needle has barely budged. And so in in some ways that inability to make that transition fully, it’s not as though there’s no industrialization. You know, India is a it’s it’s a very large economy. is for example the second largest steel manufacturer in the world the third largest cement manufacturer in the world I think the second largest textile manufacturer after China it’s not as though everybody’s in a farm there is there is a lot in terms of sheer volume India is uh has has industrial heft but in terms of having completed the process of industrialization and development uh it’s not even close to having done that and I think that is one of the weaknesses that India has that uh you would not expect a country that is aspiring uh to great power status to have. Do you on Prime Minister Modi do you think uh the era has do you think it’s really materially changed India’s trajectory towards that great power status or has it mostly changed just the narrative around it? So I think that just by by because of sheer mass uh I think India is vastly more significant to the world uh than it was when it became independent in 1947 right and and and some of this is just you know it’s just a question of when you have 1.5 billion people and the economy has been growing roughly 6% for over the past three decades um that has compounding effects and so I think the real the the rise of India is both real and often exaggerated. Uh what is real is that it’s the world’s largest polity. What is real is that it has since embarking upon economic reforms in 1991. Uh it has enjoyed uh reasonably fast growth and it has outside of China it has pulled the most number of people out of poverty. What is real is that it has done a very good job of almost eliminating extreme poverty. Right? So as recently as 1991 roughly a third of the population was living in extreme poverty and now that would be under 5%. But the flip side of that is that it has not gone from being a poor country to a rich country. It remains a very poor country. it has not been remotely as successful as China for example in catching up in terms of frontier technologies. Uh you don’t you know you’re not people around the world are not typically uh driving Indian cars or or or using Indian apps on their iPhones and so on. So it’s a you know it’s a it’s a story that you could look at it as a glass half full story as a glass half empty story but it’s you know essentially uh you could tell it either way. Do you I mean I’ve sometimes heard that India is described as too big to fail. Would you would you agree with that that that construct and and do the size and demographics of India um protect it from governance challenges or almost uh exacerbate them? So I don’t think any country is too big to fail. I I don’t I I don’t think uh I don’t think I don’t think that’s true. Uh India right now is you know it’s it’s one sixth of humanity, right? every sixth person on the planet is is Indian and obviously that brings uh enormous advantages uh right it it has the ability to do some of the things it is able to do is because of this power of aggregation right uh for example India is the world’s largest or you know it kind of varies sometimes it’s the largest sometimes it’s the second largest depending on what’s happening with the Ukrainians but you know one of the world’s largest importers of of arms now that’s because it’s a very large country which in absolute terms has a large economy. Um but it’s also true that a large amount of India’s energy uh is devoted to managing its enormous diversity. Right? This is a country which is literally continental in size and it has 17 different languages on each currency note. uh it just has a you know it has a it has an incredible amount of religious diversity. It has an incredible amount of linguistic diversity. So it’s just it’s it’s it’s it’s like it’s it’s its politics is um so complex as a result of that and and trying to manage all this in a democratic system. And so a lot of its energies going go into just you know uh keeping that keeping keep keeping a keeping a lid on things. And uh that’s partly just the nature of having a very heterogenous uh heterogenous society that had embraced uh democracy and universal suffrage at an extremely low level of income. So for example, I mean one of the things that political scientists talk about is that one of one of the things that’s striking about the Indian experiment is that there was no other country that embraced universal suffrage before universal literacy and that’s part of the experiment and I don’t want to be stareyed about it. I think India has paid a price for that to a certain extent. I think one of the reasons that India is at is at you know $2,800 per capita GDP is that the quality of the of the politics and the quality of the politicians sometimes is lacking. But on the other hand, you can look at it as you know and and and see that uh it has by and large um pulled off what many people would have argued was an impossible feat which is to have uh elected leaders uh uninterruptedly more or less except for a brief period in the 1970s 2-year period in the 1970s when Indra Gandhi suspended democracy. uh it’s you know it’s been an uninterrupted democracy a flawed democracy for sure and a democracy where liberalism faces a lot of problems but nonetheless at a very basic sense you know a country where people elect their leaders and expect to elect their leaders so I think in that sense it’s been quite a remarkable experiment and it’s you know in this march towards becoming the uh the unlikely superpower the uh the adjective that you use is there any I guess any uh institution or I mean you reference You referenced the you know the democracy universal suffrage that’s come with some some challenges injected because of that. Um is there any um system or institution within India that that you see as a as a significant um barrier towards that continued march towards being that that superpower status? Yeah, I think that I’m not sure if it’s institution but I think there are certain you know there are sets of uh you know attitudes that I think are a hindrance to India and one of the most striking ones I think is uh that is a if I had to pick on two I would say uh insularity and complacency and one of the sort of remarkable things if you sort of you know I’ve been reading a little bit about the uh Chinese economic reforms under Jang Xiaoping and one of the most remarkable things about that is that the extent to which the Chinese were very hungry to learn from the world the degree to which they they they called in you know experts from around the world and it really you know they weren’t very doctrinary about it in that in that period in the 1980s right so you could be a Keynesian or you could be an Austrian school person and they could have you know Milton Freriedman sitting next to some Hungarian economist and they just were like you know we want to know what this beast called a market economy is teach us Mhm. Um I don’t see that same openness and hunger to learn from the world in India. Um and that’s one of the things that worries me. The other thing that worries me is that there’s a strong sense of complacency. This in fact drives me nuts, Jim, because they sort of have this idea that you know before the industrial revolution the two largest economies in the world were China and India. And of course it’s going to be you know that’s what it was in the 1500s and that’s what it’s going to be again. And and I’m like just wait a minute. There was something that happened in between. There’s a few hundred years of things that happened and right and it’s just it’s just not it’s just not faded. It happened because other societies uh were able to harness science and technology and markets in certain ways. It’s not just going to happen because you know you have a lot of people. And uh I think the complacency is this this idea that good things are just faded and they’re just around the corner and they will happen even if we don’t um make the hard decisions that need to be made even if the political class is not uh always able to grapple with these hard economic challenges in the way that it should. Mhm. That I think is another uh is is another problem for India. Do you think that you know you talked about China a bit and you know India has the uh the line of control uh with China that there’s been some some tension there especially since

2020. Um what does that reveal as far as that you know that that kind of that tension between ambition and capacity and how can they can India maintain that uh kind of that asymmetric competition with that large and superpower status neighbor just to their north? I mean it’s a central security challenge that India faces right and it’s a particularly tough challenge because in both countries there’s a great deal of nationalism and there is a great deal of uh emotion that is stirred up by the idea of borders right so from the Indian perspective India sees itself and and is legally you know uh the the the main successor state of the British Raj and its job is to protect the borders that were bequeathed to it when it became independent in 1947. Of course, you know, there was a partition and and that was agreed to and there was another country called Pakistan that was created at the time but that doesn’t really you know for the most part it does to it does it it does uh Pakistan does play into the India China equation in many ways but the India China border dispute really you know dates back to uh a line drawn drawn in the early part of the 20th century uh but when India was a British colony. Now the way the Chinese see that they see that line as illegitimate. They see that as one of the symbols of what they call their century of humiliation. Um obviously um it doesn’t get the same kind of attention and doesn’t ignite the same degree of emotion as their claims on Taiwan. But nonetheless there are parts of there are parts of India you know places where you know Indians have been filled with Indian citizens who vote in Indian elections and carry Indian passports um that China regards as parts of China right particular the Indian state of Arnajal Pradesh. Um and so this this territorial dispute has been extremely sticky one of the stickiest disputes if not the stickiest dispute in Asia. Um as you know the Chinese have resolved they have lots of maritime disputes right um but the nine dash line and so on right where they have all kinds of extensive and rather aggressive claims uh you know on the Japanese and on on the Philippines and on Vietnam and so on but they have at least formally resolved all their land border disputes including with Russia. uh the only one that remains is with India unless you count Bhutan but I don’t really count Bhutan because first of all the amount of land involved in that dispute is very small and secondly Bhutan to a large extent re relies on India in terms of its foreign and defense policy so that’s effectively also part of the India China dispute and um it’s a fundamentally sticky issue they have been uh and you know in various ways they’ve tried been trying to resolve this since the 1950s and they have not been able to resolve it. So it’s a live territorial dispute uh in the heart of Asia and uh it’s a problem for India exactly for the reasons you pointed out because two or three two things are happening at least one is that as we discussed China has raced far ahead of India economically militarily and technologically so even while India has risen to be more important than it was before it has also found that another country has emerged as the world’s second superpower effectively and that’s on its doorstep and has claims on its territory.

Mhm. So that’s been a real uh that that that that’s an issue. And then the second issue that is related to this is demographic. You know, ever since the middle of the 18th century, uh China has always been the most populous nation in the world. Uh since 2023, uh that has been India. And if you look at demographic projections, China is already losing people. Like every year, China has fewer people. India’s population is projected to grow until around60 at which point it’ll have 1.7 billion people according to trend to to projections, which would be several hundred million more than China, right? Because China is sort of so right now they’re both at about 1.4 billion 1.45 billion. So over the course of the next 30 years, India will add a few hundred million and China will lose a few hundred million. So the demographic balance of power will shift and so for the Chinese and I I believe that this creates a certain certain amount of instability injects greater instability because from a Chinese perspective the relative power differential between the two countries uh may well be at its peak right now. Hm. Do you do you think that that could lead to um because right now it seems like there’s kind of an an uneasy um uh peace over this border dispute. Do you think that with China seeing this seeing how India is rising as that again that unlikely superpower does that lead to any potential for Chinese China to take more aggressive action? And I don’t mean militarily necessarily, but in other ways a Chinese uh power can be applied to a a neighbor to the south that they may see as as a threat looking out not next year but decades uh of significance. Well, I mean that’s and that the Chinese in fact have been doing that, right? Uh the most obvious example of course is the very close Chinese uh military and political relationship with with Pakistan, right? Like I always joke with, you know, with some of my younger friends that if you, you know, if you’re looking around for some bad poetry with which to impress your girlfriend, look at ch look at China Pakistan joint statements because they’re full of sort of they’re just full of language about their, you know, their their their love for each other being deeper than the deepest ocean and higher than the highest mountain and and and and so on. Nice. So the uh so there’s that. So the Chinese uh then China has becoming has become much more influential particularly over the last 30 years in the rest of South Asia. Uh if you look at China’s influence in Sri Lanka or in Bangladesh or in most vividly in Nepal uh it has grown considerably. One Indian foreign affairs analyst referred to China in South Asia as rising like a second sun and that’s of course been a very big challenge for India. Uh the third thing is that the Chinese I think there’s some evidence that China wants to ensure that India does not follow China’s path in industrializing. So things like you know discouraging Chinese engineers, discouraging Chinese managers uh from importing some of their skills for example at Apple iPhone factories in in India. So the Chinese are very aware of that. They want don’t want India to catch up and also they haven’t really put the military sol option off the table. Now so far I think at least since in 1962 there was a there was a full a full out there was a real war and India lost that war. Um but since then the way I see the Chinese strategy in the Himalayas is kind of akin to what they’ve been doing in the South China Sea in the sense that they prefer salami slicing. So what they do is they you know they move in and they change the facts on the ground. They’ll sort of, you know, there was that there may be an area where traditionally both the Indians and the Chinese had patrolled and then one day the Indians wake up and they find that they’re they’re blocked and they can no longer patrol where they’ve traditionally patrolled and then the Chinese will build defenses and build infrastructure there and then over time that just becomes the new normal and that is what they’ve done with you know with their island building in the South China Sea and that is very similar uh to what they’ve doing so so far. So I think from from the the question is is that what they’re going to try to continue to do um along with using you know other tactics to kind of keep India in a South Asian box and prevent India from breaking out um and becoming more of a global power or would they at some point feel the need it’s very similar to debates about Taiwan in a way in the sense that in that limited sense that at some point do they do the Chinese feel uh kind of compelled L to or do they feel that it is it’s advantageous to them? Yeah. To just uh break out, go for broke and try to and and and and try a military solution. And and you know, your guess is as as good as mine on which way it’s going to go, but one thing is indisputable. Uh this is this conflict uh remains fundamental and isn’t going away anywhere soon. Yeah. your your most recent article in the Wall Street Journal. It’s entitled India’s timid economic reforms and kind of addresses a bit you know the struggle there’s a seems like there’s a struggle between talent and entrepreneurship into that industrial technological power we associate with a superpower. So talk to me about that your article and kind of what you’re trying to get at with those timid economic reforms and how that applies to that situation. Yeah. So again you know bringing it back to the to the China comparison which I think is quite instructive right um both India and China uh modern India and modern China are you know gained independence around the same time India became independent 1947 uh the Mao took over China in 1949 right and so by the 19 early 1950s lots of scholars journalists and professors and so on were already kind of looking at these two countries their neighbors the two most populous countries in the world of course at At that time China had more people now India has more people. Uh they and that had chosen uh very dramatically different forms of government. India chose to become a liberal democracy. It had instituted universal franchise. uh the Chinese obviously they’re they chose to create a one party communist state and the and and for the first 30 years I would say both of them had you know pretty miserable economic governance right you had you know Mao you had the great leap forward you had the cultural revolution it was you know complete complete chaos and some of it was just you know idiocy and call it what it is right and and India had you know naruvian socialism which wasn’t as extreme in the sort of its craziness um as some of Mao’s successes but was also something you know was was a system that borrowed to an extent from the Soviets they borrowed the idea of 5-year plans of of of planning uh they gave bureaucrats an enormous amount of control over the economy and the Indian economy even though it was a very low level of per capita income uh progressed extremely slowly and India found over that period between 1950 and 1980 that it had fallen dramatically behind countries that it was once ahead of. Um and the most vivid example of that of course is is China itself. Uh because in in 1950 if you compared for example steel production, cement production, electricity generated, freight carried by railways, uh number of textile spindles. I mean you there were a whole bunch of sort of you know uh markers if you use if you looked at that India was ahead in almost all of them. Um and by 1980 India was was already far behind. Now you would have imagined at that point where 30 years into the experiment where India finds that China that China has already raised ahead that India would be the country that was right filled with an urgency to to reform. But in fact it was the opposite. China was was filled was filled with an urgency to reform starting in the 1980s with Dang Xiaoping and that really embraced uh market economics in this in in a in a way that is of course you know proved to be extremely successful and India kind of tinkered around and then finally it was sort of forced to start reforming in 1991 because it had a balance of payments crisis it had no choice and in that period since 1991 uh it’s it has reformed formed its economy. It has made it easier to do business compared to the bad old days of the what was known as the license permit Raj. Um but it’s the but its reform program has been episodic uh and often timid and a lot of it comes down to the the politics of the country seems to be engineered against um the kind of you know entrepreneurialism and the kind of uh u allowing markets to have a greater role in in in in dictating the economic freer market and innovation. Yeah. So it’s just yeah it’s just harder and then one one of the things I often sort of um point out is that you know there are a few of these statements that uh you know that are famously associated with Dang Xiaoing. So for example, you know, one of them was to get rich is glorious. And another one is it doesn’t matter if the cat is black or white as long as it catches mice. And a third one is it doesn’t matter if some people get rich first. And you know my point is that if any Indian politician said any of these three things at an election rally, um that person would immediately they’re not winning an election for dog catcher. Not that you have elections for dog catcher in India. you have elections for everything else but dog catcher. But um and and that’s just you know that’s a reality. And so when you, you know, follow politicians on the campaign trail and it’s the most, you know, uh, dispiriting experience because they’ll sort of, you know, they’re try to out compete each other by, you know, saying, “Well, I’ll give you free electricity.” And the other person, I’ll give you free electricity and I’ll toss in a goat and well, I’ll come back and I’ll give you free electricity and a goat and a TV. and and and and that’s just you know I mean I make light of it but but it it has you know uh it has serious consequences for uh and you see those aggregated right you see it when you start looking at things over a period of 20 years or 30 years or 40 years and and the fact is that as recently as 1990 if you look at IMF figures per capita income in China and India were roughly comparable and now per capita income in China is roughly at at at market exchange rates is uh almost five times higher than India and and and so the the the decision making and the the it it it does you know on on a day-to-day level it may not seem like much but it all adds up and I think at an aggregate level um India finds that even though it has done far better than it had done before and so you know India on its own terms uh looks a lot better and right um but that’s just as you know that’s not how geopolitics works but there’s other nations out there what they’re doing happens to matter also a little bit yeah you know there is competition out there um we’re winding down uh but last one last qu and and you know you’re going to be speaking tonight as well at the committee on foreign relations I’m sure you’ll be able to expand a lot more there’ll be some other questions coming to you good it’s a good audience I think you’ll enjoy it um so let’s prognosticate a little bit 30 years from now um what concrete indicators would convince you that India truly has become the superpower. And and on the flip side, what would failure look like if if they didn’t fully attain that that I I think I think I I think success would look like having a large competent globally competitive arms industry, right? Uh I don’t in right now India is largely dependent on arms imports. I think that would uh another core uh thing would be solving the jobs crisis. No longer having a very large percentage of the population employed in subsistance level agriculture or indeed in agriculture at all. And uh the third question would be uh if not completely solving uh at least ameliorating some of the internal divisions and schisms uh you know issues of you know of religion and language and cost and so on um that uh make it hard to coher society. So I have say if those three things are largely solved then you know this then the country looks much more like a a true superpower. And the flip side of that of course would be you know uh what we see uh which is equally possible which is that a country where on the whole the pie has become much larger but not compared to some of the larger leading economies of the world. Uh technologically there continues to be slippage and that India is not at the frontier. uh certainly compared to uh the United States or China and that uh in electorally it remains some kind of democracy but the liberal aspect of it uh free institutions things like a judiciary and a strong press uh continue to weaken as they have weakened over the past decade. So those are I think sort of the the the two different pathways. One is a country that is richer, more confident, uh more militarily adept and more deeply democratic and the other is a country that is muddling along and is obviously going to be significant. I think any country with that mass is obviously at some level registers um but fails to live up to its potential. Something to look forward to in the years ahead for sure. Saddana Dum, thank you for your time today. Thank you. I would like to thank Saddonna Dume for joining us today for a fascinating discussion about India as an unlikely superpower. Really appreciate you joining us today and look forward to seeing you next time on the GNSI video series.