Indias Potential And Promise Amid Tectonic Shifts In Global Order Fareed Zakaria

TITLE: India’s potential & promise amid tectonic shifts in global order - Fareed Zakaria elaborates CHANNEL: ThePrint URL: https://youtu.be/Mjdwbk2O7H8?si=tS8KGx63s338B-tx

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Good afternoon. Let me welcome you all to our opi jindal distinguished lecture of this semester. I’m Ashoto VN, a professor here at the Watson Institute. Watson school now Watson school uh starting this year Watson School of Public and International Affairs and uh also professor in political science but um more importantly for the purposes here the founding director of the Saxenna Center for Contemporary South Asia which is hosting this lecture. Luckily our founders are here. Um welcome.

Let me start with a a bit of history um of these lectures. Sajjun and Sangeita Jindal Brown parents 2012 have endowed these lectures in perpetuity in memory of Mr. Op Jindal that’s why they call op Jindal lectures Sajjun’s deceased father the purpose of the endowment is quote to promote a discussion of the politics both international and national economics culture and social change in modern India here at Brown.

And since the fall of 2012 these lectures have been held once every semester. And the previous lecturers include to name just a few um economists and economic policy makers such as Ragur Ram Rajan the former governor of the Reserve Bank of India which is India central banks, Duflau the Nobel laureate in economics, Koshik Basu former chief economist of the world bank and also former chief economic adviser of the government of India. Monte Alwalia, a principal architect of India’s post 1999 economic reforms. Novelists Salman Rushi and Amitav Goss, historians Ram Guha and William Dal Rimple, political scientists Atul Kohli, film director Mira Na, journalists ward Rajan, Ravish Kumar and Shikhar Gupta, all from India.

Our speaker today is Fared Zakaria, a leading public intellectual of our times. He is the host of Fared Zakaria GPS, a weekly show on CNN that most of us watch. And my father, my deceased father couldn’t live without it. And also my father-in-law had also said that he couldn’t live without it in India. They watch it in India every week. and a weekly columnist for the Washington Post. To my mind, and this is my conceptualization, my own conceptualization of Fared’s work, he truly exemplifies an important but increasingly weakening tradition. A tradition that combines scholarship and public commentary.

As an example, read today’s column. his column today in Washington Post where America’s current troubles in the Middle East have been examined in light of British imperial troubles at the turn of the last century. Absolutely worth reading and a lot of scholarship put into that column. He has written five New York Times bestsellers, The Age of Revolutions, 10 Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World, In Defense of a Liberal Education, The Post American World, and the Future of Freedom. And in the future of freedom, he proposed a new concept for democratic theory, something that I’ve been spending a lot of time studying these days. once again in preparation for writing a book on Indian democracy and that concept is illiberal democracy.

The concept he first wrote about in foreign affairs essay in 1997 and that played a very big role in his 2003 book the future of freedom. The concept of illiberal freedom was always there in some way but no one quite captured it as well as fared did in the foreign affairs essay. And therefore whether you read Adam Shavorki today the leading democratic theorist whether you read Steven Levitzki when they use the term illiberal democracy fared is cited for that that’s how the concept was born.

As a journalist fared has interviewed Joe Biden Barack Obama Emanuel Mcron Vladimir Putin, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Erduhan among others and I think Lee Kuanu in the 1990s. He has received a Peabody award and three Emmys for his television work, a national magazine award for his writing. In 2010, India awarded him the Padma Bhushan, one of the country’s highest civilian honors. And in 2022, Ukraine awarded him the order of merit.

Born and raised in Mumbai, he holds a BA from Yale and a PhD from Harvard in political science. He will speak here for roughly 40 to 45 minutes. The topic is a new star rises, India’s potential and promise. After that we will open up for discussion. Please welcome Farid Zakaria to Brown.

Thank you so much Ashu. It’s a huge pleasure to be here. I first met Ashu when I was a graduate student and he was an assistant professor at Harvard and he was as insightful and intelligent then as he is now. So it’s a huge pleasure to be here and it is a huge pleasure to be at Brown. I remember very very fondly the commencement speech I gave here and found it to be an extraordinary place probably more distinctive than any university that I’ve been to in the way in which for example that commencement is really just the undergraduates and few university officials huddled together in that church the undergraduates have played some part in designing the ceremony. So in mine there was a bunch of people undergraduates who come from Africa. So there were West African hymns being sung along with old New England ones. I’m sure this is causing some people in Washington to shudder these days, but I thought it was magical and very American in its own way.

So what I thought I’d do is talk a little bit about the way the world is changing and then where India fits into it because I really do think we are watching one of these extraordinary tectonic shifts in global affairs that one watches very rarely. We are witnessing the end of one age but we’re not quite sure what the new age we are entering into will look like.

For the last 80 years we have lived in a system an international system that was largely created sustained and defined by the United States after 1945. And one doesn’t think enough about how radical a break this was. After 1945, the United States and to a certain extent Britain conceived of a new international order that would be wholly different from the ones that had preceded it. And this was very much part of Franklin Roosevelt’s vision as to why the United States should enter World War II, how it should enter, and what the ultimate purposes of it should be. And the idea was that it would try to fundamentally reshape international relations so that you did not have the kind of nationalism, narrow self-interest, nationalist competition and war that had characterized particularly the European world for centuries before.

And in doing that, the Roosevelt administration and then the Truman administration insisted on a series of features that would be the defining features of that new order. Free trade was one of the absolute cornerstones of it. We went from a world with the Smoot-Hawley tariffs where the United States had become the leading protectionist power in the world to being the leading free trade power in the world insisting on a free trade regime for the world. A world in which there was an international organization called the United Nations a series of associated organizations the so-called Bretton Woods system that helped govern international economics and the idea behind all of this was very simple that it should be much easier for countries to grow rich and powerful through economics and trade rather than through nationalism competition and war.

Now obviously this was the broadest and most generous aspiration of the liberal international order. Large part of the world did not accept it. The communist world. There were many points at which the system existed more in the breach than in the observance particularly by the United States itself at various points. But you still had this as the default operating system of the international world.

And while it went through many ups and downs, the most dramatic shift of course takes place when the Soviet Union collapses in 1989. And that system goes from encompassing roughly speaking half the world to the entire world. And at that point, the United States really does become the most dominant power in the world and on a scale that really hadn’t been seen since the Roman Empire. There was simply no country that could in any meaningful sense contest or compete with the United States. Just to remind you in the early 1990s China is about 2.5% of global GDP. Russia is in freefall. Russia’s GDP contracts by 40% between 1990 and 1998 which is a greater contraction than took place during World War II.

The richest countries in the world outside of the United States were actually Germany and Japan which were both treaty allies of the United States that had accepted something completely unique in history which was that as the second and third richest countries in the world, they would subcontract their foreign policy to the richest country in the world. The idea that a rival economic power would not choose to build up its military and contest the number one power but instead accept a kind of subordinate status in which it subcontracts its foreign policy to the number one country is not only unheard of but violates every tenant of international relations theory in which states are meant to balance against each other when they rise. But that was the world that existed.

That world is over. And it’s over for a number of reasons. I wrote a book called the Post-American World and I was in that trying to capture the beginnings of this shift which I largely thought had to do with what I called the rise of the rest. You had had four centuries of the rise of the west and you were entering a world which was characterized by the rise of the rest. And very simply the data behind it is about 30 years ago the so-called emerging markets in the world made up about 5% of the world economy. Today they make up about 50% of the world economy. And if you look at global growth, they represent 60 or 70% of global growth. And that reality, the rise of China, the rise of India, the rise of Brazil and Indonesia and all these countries was reshaping the world in a way that I think people had not particularly in the west and in the United States become aware of.

The additional feature of what has happened since that period which I did not completely anticipate I must confess in that book was the voluntary abdication of its role as the leading power in the world that has taken place with the United States. Now it hasn’t taken place as a formal abdication but what the United States has done is largely turned its back on many of the core elements that define the system that it put into place.

So if you look today at the world as it exists, the United States is once again the leading protectionist country in the world. It has gone from broadly speaking having the lowest tariffs in the world to roughly speaking having the highest tariffs of any advanced industrialized country in the world.

It has gone from being a country that believed in the international system that it had put into place to one that openly violates it and I think the openly violates it part is important. The United States made many mistakes violated those principles often but it always tried to frame its actions in the context of a country trying to uphold those. So, for example, the Bush administration’s war in Iraq, the Bush administration went to the United Nations, tried to get resolutions, had inspectors put in place, all done by an international organization and in pursuit of international objectives, tried to frame the issue in broad terms that affected the whole world. gathered a coalition of 40 plus nations, went to the United States Congress, and then went to war with Iraq. Now, the war may have been misguided, but there was an effort to put it in the context of this larger international order that the United States believed in and was part of.

The current war in Iran has none of those features. There was no effort to frame it in larger terms. There was no effort to go to the United Nations. There was no effort to go to Congress. The United States has exactly one ally, Israel. And that is not an oversight. That is I think by design. The Trump administration doesn’t believe in any of those features. It wants the unilateral exercise of American power for American national interest as it conceives it to be the primary motivating force that defines the way the United States acts in the world. And that is a huge shift and it is one that I think makes it very difficult to imagine how this international order survives. At the very least, it will need to be reconceived almost recreated in some way if it were to survive.

I think that the challenge going forward is even broader than the one I described because if you go back before the United States the leading power in the international system was Britain and while again you don’t need to tell somebody who grew up in India just 20 or 30 years after the British were ruling the country. Britain could very often violate many of the values that it supposedly upheld. But Britain also had a kind of liberal international conception of its role in the world and of the international system. It was much more nascent, much more intermittently expressed. But if you go back to the 1870s, 1880s, what you see in Gladstone, William Gladstone, the four-time liberal prime minister of Britain, what you see in his writings and speeches is the beginning of what I would call the kind of liberal international view of world affairs as articulated by a statesman. There have been people like Kant who had articulated it much earlier. But to have a sitting prime minister as Gladstone was talk about the role of human rights in foreign policy, the necessity for Britain to act in support of the Bulgarians or whoever it was being oppressed in those days by the Ottoman Empire was unusual. It was the first time you had had a major power want to act in ways that were more about some kind of broader values.

And of course the Gladstone’s tradition gets transmuted into Wilson in Woodrow Wilson and Wilson then makes an effort at the first international organization the League of Nations which of course collapses because the United States in part because the United States never participates in it. And so you have really had an international system that for 150 years has been animated by a liberal hegemon that has been willing in some way or the other to articulate it and in some way or the other to underwrite it. London was the world’s financial capital before New York. The British pound was the reserve currency before the dollar. The British Navy was the guarantor of freedom of the seas.

And so when you think about it today, you are confronting a world in which the great liberal hegemon, the United States, is retreating from that role, might maybe even turning its back on that role. Other great powers are rising and they have not a very clear conviction or disposition to extend that particular conception of international order. And so you enter into a world that the Charles Kindleberger the economist described very well when he was talking about the 1920s — Britain was losing its capacity to play that role in the international system and the United States at that point had no interest was too parochial too isolationist too uninterested in playing that role and that created the power vacuum of the 1920s that led to the rise of dictatorships and aggression in the 1930s. I’m not in any way predicting that will happen. There are variety of reasons why it might not. But that is the nature of the challenge of the order we face.

So into this international flux enters India as a very different country than it has been in the past. India is now I don’t know whether one would call it an upper middle power or a great power but India is one of the most important countries in the world. Without any question it is the third or fourth largest economy in the world, the most populous country in the world and has achieved and is achieving a level of economic and technological sophistication that is new.

If any of you have the latest iPhone in your pocket, the iPhone 17, it was made in India. Every single iPhone 17 was made in India. About 25% of all smartphones and about 50% of all iPhones are now made in India. And what is remarkable about that is particularly on the iPhone dimension if you go back four years zero were made in India. This is India essentially replacing China as the principal manufacturer of smartphones for the United States within four years.

It is the kind of thing you used to believe that only China could do which is a kind of high precision manufacturing at scale. It was always thought that you needed the kind of discipline and direction that the Chinese state could provide which allowed for this kind of thing and to a large part it used to be true. I had a friend who was a CEO who had factories in China and India and I told him what is the big difference between operating in China and India. He said in China when you go to these factories people are very obedient. They just execute and it’s very hard to get them to tell you what’s wrong with what’s going on. And in India he said it’s the opposite. You can’t get people to shut up. Every worker has three ideas about how they if they were owning the factory, they would transform it. And I don’t know whether that’s true anymore, but for some reason or the other while talking too much, the Indians are also making a lot of stuff and are doing it at a very very high level.

If you look at almost every area of advanced economics now India has begun to participate and remember the potential remains huge because India is still a poor country. This is one of the things I now have to tell American friends when they are going to India because in the old days you had to tell them you know don’t worry you will be able to get a good meal you will be able to stay in a clean hotel room. Now when you go to India people are expecting to see Shanghai and you have to remind them India’s per capita GDP is still $3,000. It is still a country that is very much developing but it has enormous potential and it is realizing that potential.

And what that means is India’s foreign policy is changing. If you think about the India of the 1950s to a certain extent Nehru’s foreign policy of non-alignment was born of necessity more than out of some grand articulation of values. India was a country that was not really powerful enough to be able to shape the international order. And so it wanted to avoid being shaped by it and stay out of the great battle of the time the cold war. And there was a certain pragmatism to it.

But India today is in a very different position and therefore the non-alignment has moved to a multi-alignment. And multi-alignment as Prime Minister Modi has expressed it and practiced it is a much more active foreign policy in which India chooses how it will align itself and how it will conduct itself and is able to do that because it occupies such a central place both economically and strategically that countries have to accept that India will not be entirely in their camp but will do business with them nonetheless. So India is unusual in being able to buy Russian military equipment, buy Russian oil at a discount while at the same time forging closer and closer ties with the United States even militarily, even in defense terms. It is able to work out economic arrangements with Russia and at the same time with Europe and that reality comes out of India’s pivotal position.

So I talked about the economic side but obviously there is the strategic side that is even more significant which emanates from the single most important strategic shift of the last few decades and that is the rise of China. The rise of China has completely reordered the international system. The rise of China is really the first new entrant to the great power club in about 150 years. Since the rise of Germany and Japan, you have not had a new entrant at that level. China represents that and represents a lot more because it comes out of a very old tradition. And it comes out of a part of the world that has not had many great powers and it is transforming the geography of Asia and the geopolitics of the world and in that context the world is searching for some kind of Asian balancer to China and India seems to be the most obvious candidate because it can do it geopolitically but it can also do it geoeconomically.

If you think about the example I gave about the iPhone, it’s very difficult to imagine any other country being able to as quickly and on the scale that it did come into that market and provide an alternative to China. And India can do that in phones. It can do it in other manufactured goods. It can do it in pharmaceuticals. It can do it in precursor chemicals. It can do it in minerals. It can do it in almost every area because of the size of India, the scale of it and because of the fact that India does have fairly advanced technology and science. Manmohan Singh used to say that India exists in several centuries at the same time. And that is true for anyone who’s ever visited India. You go to Bangalore and it feels like you’re in the 21st century and you go to Bihar and it feels like you’re in the 17th century. And that reality is actually now turned into an advantage because you can get low-cost labor in Bihar and high quality engineering in Bangalore. And that means that India has this extraordinary maybe unique role that it can play.

Now the current administration has not seemed to completely recognize that reality for India with its tariff policy. But it’s fair to say that is not just true of India. The Trump administration has not discriminated on the basis of race, religion or geography. It has abused all its allies. And so India is only one among many countries that is dealing with bewildered by the fact that it has been placed in this position trying to understand what it means. And some of it I think will sort itself out but the longer strategic outreach that the United States has made to India over the last 25 years is I think likely to endure because it is rooted in the geoeconomic and geopolitical realities that I was describing.

And so I think that there is a new weight to India in the world. The potential in a sense is already being realized. The question becomes does India can India also fulfill the promise that India represents in some way. Now what do I mean by that? I mean that India is perhaps unusual maybe even unique among the rising great powers. If you think of a Brazil, you think of an Indonesia, certainly you think of China. In that it is a country that also stands for something. It is not just an emerging nation that has become more and more powerful and economically competent and militarily strong. It’s the biggest democracy in the world. It’s a country that in many ways reflects some of the most important values of this liberal international order that I was describing. And in that way it is different I think from a Brazil or an Indonesia though both of them are democracies. Because India has been a democracy from the start. It was a democracy when there were very few poor countries that were democracies and it has managed to maintain that democracy with one brief interruption for its entire independent existence.

And that means it has perhaps a special role to play given the context I was outlining. India could play a role as one of the key redefiners, recreators of this liberal international order. An order that would be based not just on might makes right, not just on spheres of influence, but on the idea of certain values as well. And it’s perfectly poised to do that because it has this rich tradition behind it.

The challenge of course is that India in its own way has been straying from those very traditions. This is not my opinion. If you look at the three institutes that rank democracies around the world all three of them show significant democratic decay or slippage in India. I think two of them place India in almost a zone where would be an illiberal democracy. And if you look at the measures they’re looking at, they’re hard to argue with, independence of the judiciary, independence of courts, all kinds of things that usually constitute the kind of inner stuffing of democracy have been moving in a difficult direction in India for the last 10 or 15 years.

And so the challenge becomes can an India that is experiencing some democratic slippage or reversal play this role in upholding a broader international order?

I believe it can and I think it can for a variety of reasons. To begin with, you don’t have to be perfect to believe in some of these values and to uphold some of these values. Let’s remember that the United States that created that international order was a United States that was actively and aggressively practicing Jim Crow in the South. The man who conceived of this international order, Franklin Roosevelt, had never confronted his own party on Jim Crow in the South and all the associated inequities that it involved. And it’s simply a way to remember that nobody is perfect. No country has ever been able to completely fulfill the aspirations of some of these ideas and certainly no country that is very powerful. I often say that you have to compare the United States’s reign as the leading power in the world, not with Costa Rica, but with the other leading powers of their time — the Soviet Union, the Kaiser’s Germany, Hitler’s Germany, Imperial France, Imperial Britain.

And India in that sense is a mixed bag right now. There are some areas where when I look at India, it’s extraordinarily dynamic. There are things to be incredibly proud of. The way in which India is able to move fast and quickly. The way in which it has been able to reform some of the parts of both the economy and even the bureaucratic and political systems that seemed impossible to imagine being done. You go to Bombay now the extraordinary buildout of infrastructure in Bombay is almost Chinese in its speed and efficiency.

But you do have the reality I was describing. And there I think my hope for India comes from the reality that India is a very big complicated place in which many things are happening at the same time. So you do have some of this democratic slippage, but you also have a country with enormous pluralism and vitality and civic engagement at every level. And I think this may be my own hope and perhaps even sense of prediction about India is that the power of that internal pluralism and dynamism and bottom-up civic activism will over time ensure that Indian democracy doesn’t move from greater liberalism to illiberal democracy and then to authoritarianism. I think a country with so many different political regions, linguistic regions, caste differences, religious differences is going to be very hard to run as a single monolithic country by one centralized regime.

And if you look at the cultural basis of Indian life, Hinduism, it feels to me as a non-Hindu but as somebody who grew up as a minority in India that the defining feature of Hinduism is its tolerance. I can think of no other major world religion in which you could say you can be a vegetarian and consider yourself a strict Hindu and you can be a non-vegetarian and consider yourself a strict Hindu. You can worship one god or 300 and consider that to be the absolute requirement of your religion. Hinduism has extraordinary absorptive power. When you think about it, this is a country in which Buddhism was created, where Buddha comes from. And yet it’s the one country where basically there are no Buddhists because Hinduism just absorbed it and said oh wait you want to believe in nonviolence we believe in that too. You want to believe in not killing animals we believe in that too. It can incorporate almost any element because it is defined almost by its tolerance and pluralism. And for a religion like that, which is really more a philosophy of life, to take on an exclusionary intolerant kind of worldview seems to me ultimately not where the DNA of India is and not what the DNA of Hinduism is.

And I say this with humility as an outsider, but as somebody who lived and saw that reality in the India that I grew up in, which was I think considerably more pluralistic and tolerant and secular than at times it has seemed today. And again I want to emphasize I’m not one of these people who believes there was ever a golden age anywhere. The Bombay I grew up in had religious riots, very bad religious riots, people coming to the door. But it also had enormous cultural tolerance, pluralism and synergy. And when I came to America I remember telling people that to me the big difference seemed that the America I was in people tolerated each other’s religions. In India, the India I grew up in, people celebrated each other’s religions. We would go and celebrate Diwali and Holi. Our friends would come and celebrate Eid. Everyone celebrated Christmas. My uncle, in fact, who later on became an imam, used to be the Santa Claus because he had the big beard. He didn’t have to get a fake one.

And that was the kind of the India that I remember. And I think it’s not just memory there was a great deal to it. And so to my mind if that India becomes more and more powerful on the world stage and articulates some of these values that are core to what it is then India can be a model for this new emerging world order and it can help define this new emerging world order as one that doesn’t involve a move to narrow nationalism exclusion and conflict but instead one that represents more.

And in many ways India is a much more understandable model for most countries in the world. When I go around the world and this was particularly true about five or seven years ago you go anywhere in the world I remember once even going to Iran and being told this by an official we all want to be like China. And what all of these countries meant by that is we want to maintain our dictatorship but we want to get rich and the trouble with that is it’s very very hard to do. There are very few countries that have figured out how to be extremely pro-market extremely efficient and extremely Leninist at the same time. That is a very complicated balancing act that the Chinese have managed to do which very few other countries have.

India by contrast is an open messy chaotic democracy which somehow has managed in the openness chaos and democratic process to also grow pretty fast. When people will often moan about India and it’s not growing as fast as China which is true and it will never grow as fast as China. China has had the fastest growth of any large economy in the history of the world and it will not be equaled by India. But India has been the second fastest growing large economy in the world for the last 25 years. So it’s not a bad record if you compare it to the other 195 countries in the world. It’s just not China.

And I think that in some ways it’s much more approachable. It’s much more manageable. If you’re a developing country and trying to figure out how to grow, you’re going to find more interesting lessons that you can copy from an India than you are from a China. And India in that sense can play a much larger and broader role.

The question is does India want to play that role? India has been unusually reticent over the last three or four decades to play a larger part in the world. In the 1950s and 60s India was willing to make stirring speeches in the United Nations but do very little. It was all rhetoric, often very self-righteous rhetoric, but it didn’t go anywhere. Now, it has taken on a much more practical cast, which I think is a reflection perhaps of recognizing that the Nehruvian era and the high-minded rhetoric got it very little.

But it might be time for India to step up and start articulating its vision of the world and not simply try to make sure that it can cut a good deal with the United States and with Russia. And that vision to my mind would be one where India would recognize that its destiny really lies with the west. First of all there’s a practical reality. India’s economy is a much more natural partner for the western economies of the world. It is a high consumption consumer-led economy in very much the same way that the United States is. India is not a predatory export-led economy which is going to play a role that inevitably involves a certain degree of tension with the western world as you can see even now with China as its excess manufacturing goods flood markets not just in Europe but in Southeast Asia it produces an inevitable tension.

India is a much more open consumer-led economy largely driven at the high end by services. All of this is very compatible with the way in which western economies work and you could imagine a much greater degree of synergy. It’s also true that India much more easily can be integrated into the west. Not every Indian speaks English but a large number do about 15% of the country speaks it. It means that there is a natural ability to integrate into the western world. There is a large Indian diaspora in the west which helps in that way. But more importantly there is this alignment of values. India in its DNA is part of this liberal world that believes in universal values.

India has always articulated itself as believing in those. It just doesn’t do it consistently. It doesn’t do it loudly. But it is very much if you were to ask an Indian what India stands for, it would be those kind of things. And in that sense, India has more of that sense of proselytizing than say a China. If you think about the difference between the United States and China in terms of its world role, the United States does have this high Protestant proselytizing mentality which says when you go to a place like Iraq, we want Iraqis to become just like Americans. We want them to become capitalists and democrats and we’re going to transform that country. The Chinese have no such conception. The Chinese look at a country like Iran or Iraq, they would say they can never be Chinese because they’re not Chinese. It is an entirely ethno-nationalist conception of what it means to play a role in the world. China’s goal is to make China great. And you can’t transform other countries into China because they’re not ethnically Chinese.

Two very different visions and I think that India being big and plural and messy and democratic and liberal is actually closer to the American conception than to the Chinese conception and so my hope has always been that India will be able to recognize that its destiny lies with the west. It would be good for India, good for its internal organization but also good for the world. And I think it would be a powerful legacy for India to leave the world. It would be maybe too dramatic, too hopeful and too extravagant to say you could imagine a world that went from English hegemony to American hegemony to Indian hegemony having then had three liberal superpowers that define the world. But it’s an aspiration that I can’t help thinking about.

The title of the speech “a new star rises” comes from Nehru’s Tryst with Destiny speech which as a young boy because my father was a politician we used to hear this in the background of my house the way that my kids listen to Taylor Swift. And so even now even though I’ve never think I’ve ever read the speech I can still probably recite certainly the first paragraphs of it from memory. But when reading it for this talk I noticed that a little bit further down in the speech Nehru talks about a new star rising in the east and he says it is a star of freedom and so even there right in the great founding document of India is a reference to India’s rise but also to its values and my hope is that what you see is not just an India rise but it rising holding its values intact for itself and the world. Thank you.

[Q&A SESSION]

The moderator (Ashutosh Varshney) raises the challenge that the current rulers of India view pluralism as a fundamental weakness, noting that every Hindu nationalist ideological text says India’s pluralism is a problem that drains strength. He asks why we should believe pluralism will return.

Zakaria responds that this backlash is not unique to India — it’s happening in the United States where JD Vance and Stephen Miller say America’s diversity is a weakness, in Europe, Israel, Turkey. The very fact that it’s happening everywhere makes him feel it’s a pendulum — a backlash. He says “you should never mistake the undertow for the wave” and that the world is moving forward. He also points out that India, like America, has an inherent diversity that makes it hard to impose a monocultural vision.

On democratic institutions, Zakaria says the media and the courts are where he worries most about democratic decay in India. In America, courts have been the strongest pushback. In India, the judiciary has not played that role. On media, he describes “a stunning level of self-censorship” — citing a friend who runs a major TV newsroom who said he’s never had to censor because everybody self-censors. They all know where the lines are.

On India’s economy vs manufacturing, Zakaria notes that despite being the fastest growing large economy over the last 10 years, industrial employment as a percentage of total is flat in India. He suggests manufacturing may have changed globally — precision manufacturing now requires heavy automation and software, so the classic farms-to-factories path may be over. India may represent a new model with disaggregated bottom-up growth and local entrepreneurship.

On India vs South Asian neighbors, Zakaria says the fundamental advantage is scale — only India can match China’s supply chain positions. Pakistan had advantages (more business-friendly, higher on ease of doing business) but is weighed down by military control. He notes Lee Kuan Yew’s observation that China had Hong Kong five miles from Shenzhen; India had no equivalent.

On India-Israel relations, Zakaria says it’s a mix of pragmatism (multi-alignment), recognition that the old anti-Israel pro-Arab policy was based on a fantasy that Israel would disappear, and ideological affinity under Modi — a sense of shared hostility to Islamic fundamentalism.

On South India as a bulwark, it’s noted that South India grows at four times the pace of North India but faces potential political marginalization through delimitation. Zakaria says a clash between center and south feels like it’s coming, but Modi is a shrewd politician who is putting enormous energy into gaining a foothold in the south.

On Indian Islam, Zakaria says Islam in India is distinctive because it has always been a minority — even when it was the ruling minority — so it always had to accommodate itself to a larger culture. He points to the extraordinary syncretism: Urdu and Hindi are essentially the same language with different vocabulary sources; Indian ghazals put Persian poetry to Hindu musical structures (ragas). “Culture three” emerged — a strange melange that nobody felt the need to take apart.

The moderator notes that the BJP gets about 36% of the vote, which translates to roughly 44% of Hindu votes — so even Modi does not have a majority of the Hindu vote.

Zakaria closes by noting India has “an enormous amount of self-satisfaction” these days and could benefit from more self-awareness. He points out that what India thinks of as a tech industry is really a labor arbitrage industry of cheaper engineers, accountants, and lawyers — not true technological innovation.