India’s geopolitical aspirations in 2023

India is weeks away from overtaking China as the country with the largest population, according to latest UN projections.

The landmark event, predicted for mid-April, is a “timely reminder of the growing influence that India and its activities exert on the rest of the world”, wrote Viraj Mehta of the World Economic Forum (WEF).

After celebrating the 75th anniversary of Indian independence, the emerging Asian superpower assumed the G20 presidency in December – fuelling speculation about New Delhi’s geopolitical goals and ambitions.

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Climate targets

India has been “at the forefront of driving global action on climate change”, said WEF’s Mehta. India has co-founded the International Solar Alliance with France, “and in doing so, is leading the global movement towards solar power”.

Prime minister Narendra Modi last year also vowed to establish a National Hydrogen Mission, “with an aim of making India a hub for the production and export of green hydrogen”.

And in a “major step” in achieving India’s long-term goal of reaching net zero by 2070, said Mehta, the nation’s updated Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC), adopted under the Paris Agreement, “translates” Cop26 pledges into enhanced climate targets.

Despite these ambition goals, India has a mixed record on climate. The country is the world’s third-largest emitter of CO2, although its per capita emissions are lower than the world average, according to the UN’s latest Emissions Gap Report.

Russia and Ukraine

Since the invasion of Ukraine, India has been buying more and more discounted Russian oil, despite global criticism. According to data from energy cargo tracker Vortexa, India imported around a million barrels per day in December.

The oil deals have left India in an “odd position over the past year”, said Jyoti Malhotra of New Delhi-based news site ThePrint. Modi’s government may be “holding its nose” at what Vladimir Putin is doing in Ukraine but is “unable to say much about it because it needs Russia”.

“Leaving aside the thorny issue of ethics in foreign policy”, said Foreign Policy’s Ravi Agrawal, India’s leaders have “exhibited a growing confidence in asserting their own strategic interests instead of the West’s”.

“I am entitled to weigh my own interest,” said External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar last summer, amid criticism of India’s oil purchases. Western critics should “grow out of the mindset that Europe’s problems are the world’s problems”, he added.

The tensions over Ukraine could be offset, however, by Washington’s “increasingly fractious economic relationship” with China, said France 24.

“Countries like the US, some in Europe, others in the Indo-Pacific, see India as a geopolitical counterbalance to China and an economic alternative or a democratic contrast,” Tanvi Madan, a Washington-based senior fellow with the Brookings Institution, told the news site..

The “big question”, she added, was whether India could “take advantage of this window before it closes”.

Nuclear hotspot

The Indian military was believed to have approximately 160 warheads as of last summer, and “continues to modernise its nuclear arsenal”, according to experts from the Nuclear Information Project with the Federation of American Scientists (FAS). In an article for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, FAS researchers warned that tensions between India and Pakistan “constitute one of the most concerning nuclear hotspots on the planet”.

The two nuclear-armed nations engaged in “open hostilities” as recently as 2020, when Indian and Pakistani soldiers exchanged artillery and gunfire over the Line of Control, leading to at least 22 deaths.

More recently, in March 2022, India accidentally launched what appeared to be ground-launched cruise missile 77 miles into Pakistani territory, damaging civilian property.

A ‘credible challenger’ to Modi

The country’s main opposition leader is on the final leg of a 3,500km (2,175 miles) march with a “simple message – religious harmony and prosperity for all”, said Shruti Kapila, professor of Indian history and politics at Cambridge University, on Al Jazeera earlier this month.

Rahul Gandhi, the face of the Indian National Congress, is “offering the world’s largest democracy a new political vision and script pitched against the shrill political Hinduism” of Prime Minister Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party, Kapila wrote, and has “emerged as a leader with mass appeal”.

With a “simple message of interreligious harmony and prosperity for all”, the epic walk has “focused on common human interactions” based on conversations with “farmers and workers, young and old, men and women and children too about their shattered dreams under the Modi government”.

The march – scheduled to end on 30 January in the northern city of Srinagar – has “resonated with ordinary Indians, who’ve turned out in their thousands to join him”, said the South China Morning Post. Gandhi has positioned himself as a “credible challenger”, raising hopes among those who feared India was turning into a dictatorship.

Demographic ‘time bomb’

With India on track to leapfrog China to become the world’s most populous country, this “demographic dividend” could boost economic growth, said CNN. India’s working-age population is expected to rise from 900m to more than a billion over the next decade.

But “there are fears the country might miss out”, the broadcaster reported, because “India is simply not creating employment opportunities for the millions of young job seekers already entering the workforce every year”.

India is “sitting on a time bomb,” said Chandrasekhar Sripada, professor of organisational behaviour at the Indian School of Business. “There will be social unrest if it cannot create enough employment in a relatively short period of time.”