India's Potential & Promise Amid Tectonic Shifts in Global Order

ELI5 / TLDR

The world’s 80-year-old operating system — America builds the rules, everyone else follows — is crashing. America is walking away from its own creation. Into that vacuum steps India: the world’s biggest democracy, soon its third-largest economy, and the only country with enough scale to be a genuine alternative to China. Zakaria’s pitch is that India could be the next liberal superpower, carrying the torch from Britain to America to itself. The catch: India is currently sliding toward the kind of illiberal nationalism that makes that vision harder to believe. His argument is basically, “the DNA is still there, the backlash is global and temporary, and a country this messy is too hard to run as a dictatorship.” It’s more hope than prediction, and he’s honest about that.

Summary

This is Fareed Zakaria delivering the OP Jindal Distinguished Lecture at Brown University, hosted by political scientist Ashutosh Varshney. Zakaria maps the collapse of the US-led liberal international order — 80 years of free trade, multilateral institutions, and American hegemony — and argues that India is uniquely positioned to fill the void. Not because India is perfect, but because it’s big, democratic, messy, and has the economic scale to actually matter. He traces the liberal order from Gladstone through Wilson through Roosevelt through its current unraveling under Trump, then makes the case that India’s “multi-alignment” foreign policy, its consumer-led economy, and its cultural DNA of pluralism make it a natural heir to this tradition. The Q&A is unusually good — Varshney and the audience push hard on democratic backsliding, caste, media self-censorship, Hindu nationalism, and whether Zakaria’s optimism is warranted.

Key Takeaways

• The liberal order isn’t just declining — its architect is actively dismantling it. The US has gone from the world’s leading free trader to its leading protectionist. The current approach to Iran has none of the multilateral window-dressing that even the Iraq war had. This isn’t drift; it’s policy.

• India has replaced China as the maker of every iPhone 17. Four years ago, zero iPhones were made in India. Now 100% of iPhone 17s and about 50% of all iPhones come from there. This is the kind of high-precision manufacturing at scale that was supposed to be China-only.

• Emerging markets went from 5% to 50% of the global economy in 30 years. They now account for 60-70% of global growth. The “rise of the rest” is the defining economic fact of our era.

• India is the second-fastest-growing large economy over 25 years. It will never match China (fastest large-economy growth in human history), but compared to the other 195 countries, the record is strong.

• India’s per capita GDP is still $3,000. The potential is enormous precisely because it’s still poor. People expecting Shanghai get Bangalore in some places and the 17th century in others — and Zakaria argues that’s actually an advantage (cheap labor in Bihar, world-class engineering in Bangalore).

• Non-alignment has become multi-alignment. India buys Russian weapons and oil at a discount while deepening military ties with America. It can do this because it’s too important for anyone to insist on exclusivity.

• Hindu nationalism gets about 36% of the vote (44% of Hindu votes). Modi does not have a majority of the Hindu vote. Parliamentary math translates minority support into dominant power.

• Media self-censorship is the mechanism of control. A major TV newsroom editor told Zakaria he’s never had to censor anyone — everyone just knows where the lines are. The government made a few high-profile examples (NDTV), and the rest fell in line.

• The farms-to-factories path may be permanently closed. Global manufacturing now requires so much automation and software that you can’t do it with masses of human labor. India (and fast-growing African countries) are not seeing the classic industrialization trajectory. India may be pioneering something new — disaggregated, bottom-up, service-and-entrepreneurship-led growth.

• South India grows at four times the pace of North India but faces political marginalization through delimitation (losing parliamentary seats because it successfully controlled population growth).

Detailed Notes

The Liberal International Order: A 150-Year Experiment

Zakaria starts not with India but with the system India might inherit. The story goes like this:

The world has had a liberal hegemon — a powerful country willing to set rules based on something beyond raw self-interest — for about 150 years. First it was Britain, starting with Gladstone in the 1870s-80s. Gladstone was the first major-power leader to talk about human rights in foreign policy, to argue that Britain should care about, say, Bulgarians being oppressed by the Ottoman Empire. The British Navy abolished the slave trade. London was the world’s financial capital. The pound was the global reserve currency.

That tradition jumped the Atlantic. Woodrow Wilson tried the League of Nations (failed because America didn’t join). Roosevelt and Truman built the post-1945 order: free trade, the UN, the Bretton Woods system. The core idea was simple — make it easier for countries to get rich through trade than through war.

After 1989, when the Soviet Union collapsed, this system went from covering half the world to all of it. America became dominant on a scale not seen since Rome. China was 2.5% of global GDP. Russia’s economy shrank 40% between 1990-1998 (worse than WWII). The second and third richest countries, Germany and Japan, voluntarily subcontracted their foreign policies to America — something that “violates every tenet of international relations theory.”

The System Crashes

Two things killed that order. First, what Zakaria calls “the rise of the rest” — emerging markets going from 5% to 50% of the world economy. Second, and more surprising: America voluntarily walked away.

The US is now the leading protectionist among advanced economies. But the bigger shift is qualitative, not quantitative. Even when America broke its own rules before, it maintained the pretense of caring about them. The Iraq war went through the UN, Congress, had 40+ coalition nations. The current action in Iran has one ally (Israel), no Congressional authorization, no UN involvement, no multilateral framing. “That is not an oversight. That is by design.”

Zakaria invokes the economist Charles Kindleberger on the 1920s: Britain was losing the capacity to lead, America had no interest in leading, and the resulting vacuum produced the dictatorships and aggression of the 1930s. He’s careful to say he’s not predicting that outcome. But the structural parallel is real.

India Steps In

India’s pitch for the role of next liberal hegemon comes down to four things:

Scale. It’s the only country that can be an alternative to China across the full range — manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, precursor chemicals, minerals, tech services. China has 90% of the precursor chemicals for penicillin, 75-80% for ibuprofen and Tylenol. Only India has the size, the cost structure, and the technical capacity to build alternative supply chains.

Economics. India’s economy is consumer-led, service-heavy, and compatible with western economies. It’s not a predatory export machine that floods other people’s markets with excess manufacturing. This makes it a natural partner, not a source of tension.

Strategic position. The rise of China is the first new great-power entrant in 150 years (since Germany and Japan). The world needs an Asian balancer. India is the obvious candidate.

Values. India has been a democracy since independence — one of very few poor countries to manage that. It has a rich tradition of pluralism. Its economy is open and messy. All of this is closer to the American vision of how the world should work than the Chinese ethno-nationalist vision. China’s worldview is “make China great” — other countries can’t become Chinese because they’re not ethnically Chinese. India, like America, has a universalizing impulse.

The Counter-Arguments (And They’re Strong)

The Q&A is where this gets interesting. Varshney and the audience don’t let Zakaria off easy.

Hindu nationalism views pluralism as the problem. Varshney points out that every ideological text of the current rulers says India’s diversity drains its strength. Modi told the US Congress about “a thousand years of slavery” (the arrival of Muslims). The BJP controls Delhi and 20 of 28 states. If they get two-thirds of parliament plus half the states, they can amend the constitution to make India legally Hindu nationalist. It’s not there yet — “politically increasingly so, but not legally so.”

Elite support makes this different from MAGA. A political scientist in the audience makes a sharp distinction: in America, the reactionary movement is rural and non-college-educated. In India, cities and elites support the BJP. Mumbai, Delhi — the spaces of cosmopolitanism — are the social base of Hindutva. When the politics of reaction has elite backing, that’s a different animal.

Caste is India’s original sin. A PhD student invokes Ambedkar’s line that “democracy in India is only a top dressing on Indian soil which is essentially undemocratic.” Hinduism is doctrinally tolerant but internally rigid. The Mandal Commission found that Brahmins (maybe 5-7% of the population) held 90-95% of the top 1,200 civil service jobs despite decades of quotas.

Media and courts have collapsed as checks. In America, courts have been the strongest pushback against executive overreach. In India, the judiciary is partly an arm of the government. Media operates on self-censorship — the NDTV takeover served as the object lesson. Online opposition media exists but doesn’t scale.

Zakaria’s Response: Why He’s Still (Cautiously) Hopeful

His case is structural, not sentimental:

1. The backlash is global, which means it’s probably cyclical. If the same anti-pluralism is happening in India, America, Turkey, Israel, and across Europe simultaneously, it’s likely a pendulum response to 30 years of rapid globalization. “Never mistake the undertow for the wave.”

2. India is too diverse to run as a monolith. Different political regions, languages, castes, religions — centralizing all of this under one ideology is just very hard. The BJP has 36% of the vote.

3. Hinduism’s DNA is tolerant. The Rig Veda expresses genuine ambiguity about whether God exists. “To have a religious document in one of its central verses expressing genuine ambiguity about whether or not God exists — that is a level of tolerance very difficult to imagine in the world of the Ten Commandments.” Zakaria notes that Modi’s word for “slavery” (gulami) is itself Urdu, not Hindi — a word born from the very thousand-year encounter he claims was oppression.

4. India’s economy is becoming more liberal, not less. In response to US protectionism, India has moved toward greater free trade. Canada, India, and others are net-net implementing more market reform because everyone needs growth and free trade works.

5. South India is a structural counterweight. Growing at four times the north’s rate, largely free of Hindutva’s influence, with Chinese-level growth rates. The south might replay the role it played in the 1960s when it first broke the Congress party’s monopoly.

Manufacturing and the New Growth Model

A Chinese PhD student at Brown asks the right question: isn’t India’s service-led economy a problem, since every country that got rich went through an industrial phase first?

Zakaria’s answer: that path may no longer exist. Manufacturing now requires so much automation that it can’t absorb masses of workers. Mukesh Ambani’s polymer plants in India are highly automated despite cheap labor, because global specifications demand machines. India’s industrial employment as a share of total is flat despite being the world’s fastest-growing large economy. The same is true in Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana, South Africa.

Maybe India is the first example of a new model: bottom-up, entrepreneurship-driven, disaggregated growth that doesn’t require moving peasants into factories. Or maybe this is a problem. It’s too early to tell.

India’s Neighbors and Why They Fell Behind

Pakistan was actually more business-friendly than India for decades — it ranked 50 points higher on the World Bank’s ease of doing business. But military control of the country made sustained economic growth impossible.

The deeper story is land reform. South India had widespread land reform; North India and Pakistan kept the old zamindar (landlord) system. The Bhutto family’s land holdings in Pakistan run to thousands or tens of thousands of acres. That’s probably the single biggest explanation for divergent outcomes.

India also has a 150-year-old business class that knows how to use private capital efficiently. China 25 years ago had zero capitalist or managerial class. India’s old trading families (particularly Gujarati communities) had survived through socialism and gave Indian companies a management edge over most of the developing world.

Indian Islam: Culture Three

Zakaria makes a beautiful observation about Islam in India. It’s distinctive because it’s always been a minority religion — even during Mughal rule. This means Indian Muslims have always had the psychology of a minority navigating a larger culture, more like Jews in 18th-19th century Europe than like Muslims in majority-Muslim countries.

The result is extraordinary syncretism. Urdu and Hindi are the same language with different vocabulary — identical grammar (from Sanskrit), but Hindi draws words from Sanskrit and Urdu from Persian and Arabic. “There’s no other two languages in the world that have that kind of bizarre shared symbiosis.” Indian ghazals put Persian poetry over Hindu ragas. You end up with “culture three” — a melange that nobody felt the need to take apart.

Quotes / Notable Moments

“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. In India it’s the opposite. You can’t get people to shut up. Every worker has three ideas about how if they were owning the factory, they would transform it.”

“You should never mistake the undertow for the wave.”

“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.”

“I’ve never had to censor. Everybody self-censors. They all know where the lines are. They all know what they’re not supposed to do.” — Indian TV newsroom editor, as relayed by Zakaria

“In America I was in, people tolerated each other’s religions. In India, the India I grew up in, people celebrated each other’s religions.”

“The word he used for slavery — gulami — is an Urdu word, not a Hindi word. It’s a word that comes out of the thousand-year encounter between Islam and India.” — Zakaria on Modi using a product of the very syncretism he denounces

“What India thinks of as a tech industry is really a labor arbitrage industry of cheaper engineers and cheaper accountants and cheaper lawyers.”

“We used to hear [Nehru’s Tryst with Destiny speech] in the background of my house the way that my kids listen to Taylor Swift.”

Claude’s Take

What’s solid:

The structural argument about India’s strategic position is rock-solid. The scale point is unchallengeable — if you need a China alternative across multiple supply chains, there is literally no other candidate. The iPhone 17 fact is a genuine landmark. The data on emerging markets (5% to 50% of global GDP) is standard and well-established. The characterization of US retreat from the liberal order is descriptively accurate.

The observation about global manufacturing requiring automation — and the farms-to-factories path being closed — is increasingly mainstream among development economists (Dani Rodrik has been arguing this for a decade). This is an important and underappreciated point.

What’s more hope than analysis:

The core thesis — that India can become the next liberal hegemon — is openly acknowledged as aspirational. Zakaria says so himself. The jump from “India has tolerant DNA” to “India will uphold a liberal international order” requires crossing a lot of terrain he can’t map.

The “backlash is a pendulum” argument is comforting but unfalsifiable. The 1930s were also a backlash that was supposed to be temporary. Sometimes the undertow IS the wave, at least for a generation or two.

The argument from Hinduism’s tolerant DNA is the weakest link. Many religions have tolerant philosophical roots and intolerant political manifestations. Christianity produced both the Sermon on the Mount and the Inquisition. What matters is not what the Rig Veda says but what political actors do with religious identity today — and on that front, the data Varshney presents (BJP in 20 of 28 states, systematic attacks on pluralism, capture of media and judiciary) is more concrete than Zakaria’s response.

What the audience caught that Zakaria didn’t fully address:

The elite-support point is devastating and went somewhat under-answered. If Mumbai and Delhi support Hindutva — if the cosmopolitan classes are the social base of illiberalism rather than its opponents — then Zakaria’s analogy to America (where cities resist MAGA) falls apart. He acknowledged it but pivoted to the 36% vote share rather than confronting the structural difference.

The self-satisfaction problem he raises at the end is telling. India’s political class thinks it’s doing great and the world is knocking on its door. That kind of mood doesn’t produce the self-critical reckoning needed to play the role Zakaria envisions.

Overall: This is a first-rate lecture from someone who knows both India and the international system intimately, with a Q&A that’s stronger than most published panels. The intellectual honesty is real — Zakaria distinguishes between hope and prediction, acknowledges the counter-arguments, and doesn’t pretend the problems away. But the conclusion is ultimately romantic: India’s destiny is written in its pluralist DNA, and that will win out. History suggests DNA is less deterministic than we’d like.