India, the awakening of a new Asian giant

Symbols govern the world, they represent a higher reality and, therefore, they push us beyond our strength and our own reality. Symbolic can be a person, an object or an event.

Gandhi He was the precursor and champion of the independence movements of an entire generation. The black stone of Mecca annually attracts millions of Muslims on pilgrimage. In 1905 Japan defeated Russia, becoming the first Asian country to defeat a Western power. That event cemented Japanese nationalism, and its subsequent imperialist career.

In this 2022, the India has ousted Britain, its former metropolis, as the fifth economic power in the world. Perhaps this is also quite a symbol of a new order.

This is what the ultra-nationalist was referring to. indian prime minister Narendra Modi, emphatically stating that India had left behind those who had ruled it for 250 years and that, rather than moving from sixth to fifth place, the joy was in having left behind years and years of slavery. “The opportunity is now. We will not stop”, he concluded.

Much is said about the new world order being multipolar, but the reality is that we have not yet broken the bipolar inertia of the Cold War and practically everything is settled between China and the USA. It is in this context that the soft power India and its aura as a non-aligned country are becoming necessary to resolve the international challenges we face.

Since Modi came to power in 2014, India has experienced greater assertiveness in the way it interacts in international politics, moving away from its traditional more moderate line. This is because there are clear political-economic signs that both its economy and the country as a whole are on an unstoppable rise to the top.

India, endowed with nuclear power in China’s backyard, is going to change the rules of the international geopolitical chessboard, but it still has to better define what kind of soft power it wants to exercise.

In contrast, an outstanding aspect of Chinese soft power is that it makes continual references to its hard power, especially in recent years. This means that great initiatives, such as the New Silk Road (Belt and Road InitiativeBRI) are perceived with mistrust instead of being seen as huge infrastructure improvement projects from which countless countries will benefit, as the political scientist Parama Sinha Palit points out.

india first

Politically speaking, India is stepping stronger than ever. Your prime minister has abandoned white-collar diplomacy and last September had no qualms about avoiding your host, the almighty Xi Jinpingin the corridors of his own home, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), as in publicly admitting that he has had telephone conversations with the Dalai Lama, something that unnerves the Chinese government.

On the other hand, not only Tiktok and 58 other Chinese apps have been banned in India, but Chinese companies have been excluded from public tenders for 5G.

Since the Sino-Indian War of 1962, from which India came out badly, relations between the two countries had developed more or less peacefully. That until 2020; that year 20 Indian soldiers died on the border with China. The Indian authorities considered that the clash was the logical consequence of a growing policy of aggression on the part of China. Something that clashes head-on with the revived Indian nationalism, promoted by Modi, and the renewed economic status of this emerging India.

It is probable that, in the recent strengthening of relations american indianWashington is taking full advantage of the classical Indian theory of Kautilya Rajamandala by which your neighbor is your enemy and your neighbor’s neighbor is your friend.

Modi, one of the world leaders with the most followers on Twitter (the second, to be more exact), shows his firmness and realpolitik also beyond its borders. “This is not the time for war,” he told Putin, at the same time that, with a very practical mindset, he buys oil from Russia at bargain prices. India first, whoever falls, which is usually one of the first manifestations of nationalism.

competitors and neighbors

As much as China and India are different, they nevertheless share general characteristics that can be decisive for the future of humanity. To begin with, they are ancient civilizations, proud of their past, settled in an extensive territory and very densely populated.

In market terms, the complete incorporation of India into the channels of international production and consumption will turn around world economic indices in all sectors, from tourism to technology, as has happened with China.

Indian development follows in the footsteps of Chinese development. Modi has created the Made in Indiaparallel to Made in China of the eighties, accompanied by a battery of economic measures with all sorts of subsidies and incentives, aimed at snatching from China the title of hub global manufacturer.

Without going too far, the Indians have won a tremendously symbolic battle against the Chinese. Apple has announced that it will start producing its iPhone 14 in India. This represents a radical change in the company’s production policy. Previously, Apple only started production outside of China when it was proven that the production of the new model did not entail any risk. Other companies are following the same steps.

But it is that, in addition, the apple company is encouraging its suppliers to move their production to India. These movements are due to the fact that companies abhor conflict as much as nature abhors a vacuum. So, to avoid supply chain disruptions stemming from both China-America tensions and Chinese policies of zero covidcompanies are seeking to diversify their risks by moving their production centers to the Indian Ocean.

India, like its neighbor to the north, also aspires to be a hub global technology, but with Indian characteristics.

China’s transition from world factory to tech hub was largely driven by the Chinese government. First, since the time of Deng Xiaoping, encouraging foreign companies to open offices in China to create an atmosphere conducive to business creation. And second, sending batches of students to study in American universities.

Indian graduates for the world

The Indian model has not been so remote but Indian students abound in American science degrees. More than half of international students in the USA studied STEM careers.

Once they graduate, these students often take advantage of US immigration laws because the H-1B visa allows companies to hire specialized foreign workers.

In 2017, 73.9% of these visas were granted to Indians. China was second, with 12%. As far as gender is concerned, only 20% were Indian women, compared to 45% Chinese.

According to the Chinese Ministry of Education, 80% of Chinese students return home. Chinese entrepreneurs prefer to create their companies in China: Tencent, owner of WeChat; Alibaba, the Amazon of China, or Xiaomi.

By contrast, India has the highest level of population living abroad: 17.5 million, so it has a talent retention problem.

India is the country with the highest number of CEOs among companies top of the world: Arvind Krishna (IBM), Sundar Pichai (Google LLC & Alphabet), Satya Nadella (Microsoft). The last to join this illustrious list has been Parag Agrawal, CEO of Twitter, born in 1984.

unstoppable growth

India is released and technologically its nerve centers, Chennai, Hyderabad, and Bangalore, are at the forefront of technological advances in Asia.

There is a renewed India that competes from you to you con the most painted. The Times of India boasted just a month ago that, in the first half of 2022, India beat China in the creation of unicorns: 14 vs. 11. This race is led by the Americans, with 138 more unicorns in the same period. However, it is already known that the growth numbers in Asia are overwhelming.

India faces immense political, social and economic challenges, as is often pointed out, emphasizing them in such a way that it appears to be a giant with feet of clay. The point is that the axis of the world has definitively turned to the East, and that the same was said in the West of the meteoric rise of China. And the reality is that the dragon has been breaking record after record.

For now, the Indian government is confident that this year the economy of its country will grow above 7%, several points more than the rest of its competitors, including Great Britain, which is struggling to stay around 3.5%.

Each of the records that India is breaking are symbols on which the Modi government is leveraging itself to give the great leap forwardwith Indian characteristics.

Symbols are uncannily capable of uniting contrasting magnitudes and few countries have as many contrasts as India.

Félix Valdivieso, Chairman of IE China Center, IE University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original.