By the late 2030s, India is projected to become a $10 trillion economy, up from $4 trillion today. Its growth—powered by demographic scale, reorienting global supply chains, domestic demand, a rapidly digitizing economy, and a surging startup ecosystem—has remained remarkably stable over three decades and is expected not to fall below 6-7% annually (with the potential to touch 8.5% given factor market reforms and improving logistics) for at least another decade. Unlike other middle-income democracies like Brazil or South Africa, India combines scale with institutional depth and strategic geography.
This rise will coincide with an uncertain global order: a still-powerful but introspective West, an assertive and authoritarian China, a weakened Russia, and a fragmented Global South. India will not merely be one among many emerging powers. It will be the only one that combines democratic legitimacy, civilizational depth, military ambition, and economic scale.
That combination will compel a fundamental shift in how the world perceives not only India but power itself. Whether governed by the Hindutva right or by a pluralist, center-left alliance after 2029, India will not be post-national. It will be civilizational—shaped by millennia of Sanskritic, Buddhist, Jain, Mughal, and colonial legacies and guided by a tradition of political thought that spans from Ashoka to Akbar and from Tagore to Ambedkar. It may be majoritarian if the present political trend consolidates or reassert its pluralist heritage if the opposition prevails. But it will never be Western in its assumptions. It will be democratic—perhaps even deeply so—but not in the Anglo-American mold.
Paradoxically, it may become liberalism’s most effective champion precisely because it is not Western. A Nehruvian revival in 2029 would make India the most powerful advocate of constitutionalism, free expression, secularism, and economic justice in a century where the West itself appears to be abandoning these ideals.
A Strategic Order Defined by Hard Constraints
India’s normative potential will be shaped by its hard constraints. For at least the next two decades, New Delhi will remain locked in two existential rivalries: with communist China and with sectarian Islamism from Pakistan and elsewhere. Neither of these rivalries is easily soluble; both are embedded in history, geography, and identity. China, an authoritarian superpower seeking regional hegemony, directly challenges Indian sovereignty from Ladakh to the Indian Ocean. Pakistan, a nuclear-armed state long reliant on jihadist proxies, continues to manipulate global narratives to secure false equivalence with India.
India’s confrontation with both forces it to position itself—whether governed by Hindutva or its Nehruvian alternative—as a democratic, secular, and pluralist state defending order and stability. This position may be delivered with rhetorical inconsistency, but it is structurally fixed: India must contest authoritarianism and sectarianism even if it does so from within the confines of an illiberal turn at home.
India’s deepening relationship with the West—especially the United States, France, Israel, and Greece—flows from this strategic alignment. In defense of semiconductors, AI, and renewable technology, India is becoming indispensable to the democratic world’s efforts to balance China. Its participation in Quad, I2U2, the EU-India Trade and Technology Council, and bilateral partnerships with France and the U.S. reflects this pivot.
Yet the relationship remains burdened by two major fault lines: Russia and Pakistan. The West continues to express frustration with India’s balancing act on Moscow—its refusal to join sanctions, its reliance on discounted oil, and its foreign policy elite’s sympathy with Russian narratives on NATO and ‘persecuted Russian speakers in the Donbass.’ India, in turn, remains deeply aggrieved by Western equivocation on Pakistan—what it sees as a longstanding tendency to frame Indo-Pak tensions as a symmetrical dispute rather than one between a democratic state and a military-dominated patron of terror.
These frustrations are unlikely to vanish, but they will be superseded by deeper convergence. India cannot contain China alone; the West cannot sustain Indo-Pacific stability without India.
A Civilizational Norm-Maker
Where India could most transform the world, however, is not in hard power but in ideas. The modern world has long defaulted to a Western vocabulary of freedom, development, secularism, and democracy. But as the West falters—polarized, post-industrial, and plagued by crises of legitimacy—India offers an alternative history and grammar of these same ideals.
Thinkers like Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Rabindranath Tagore, B.R. Ambedkar, Jayaprakash Narayan, Sundarlal Bahuguna, and Ram Manohar Lohia—drawing from Sanskrit ethics, Buddhist metaphysics, Jain ahimsa, Mughal cosmopolitanism, and the experience of India’s freedom struggle and subsequent social movements—have produced an indigenous account of pluralism, freedom, and justice. Ashoka and Akbar are not “Indian versions” of Western liberal monarchs; they are civilizational models of moral authority and religious tolerance. India can reclaim them not as heritage but as horizon. Rajeev Bhargava and Ashis Nandy have written extensively on India’s distinctive form of“ secularism—“principled distance”—as different from Western church-state separation and a new model of radical tolerance as original as French laïcité.
Even today, the constitutional imagination of India’s preamble (affirming socialism, secularism, democracy, and individual rights) is being reinterpreted by popular figures such as Acharya Prashant in civilizational terms—aligned with Upanishadic and Buddhist moral values rather than Enlightenment abstraction. This isn’t a rejection of modernity, but its indigenization. Milan Vaishnav and C. Raja Mohan have explored how India can shape a multipolar-but-liberal world order (as distinct from the Kremlin’s vision of multipolarity as an alternative to the liberal world order) as a “civilizational democracy.” Shivshankar Menon’s writings articulate a new Indian diplomatic framework that blends deterrence with moral legitimacy. Amartya Sen’s The Argumentative Indian (2005) presents India’s democratic ethos as rooted in deep historical traditions of pluralism and reasoned dissent.
If India anchors this intellectual legacy to material success—preserving democratic institutions, nurturing its academic and creative capacities, and exporting a model of governance that works—it can become a normative superpower. On AI and biotechnology, India could advocate ethical models that are neither algorithmic authoritarianism (China) nor Silicon Valley anarchy. For instance, India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act (2023) and NITI Aayog’s “Responsible AI” strategy papers emphasize transparency, consent, and digital inclusion. Indian-origin ethicists like Abhishek Gupta and researchers at IIT Madras, IIIT-Hyderabad, and The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) have framed decolonial, inclusive ethical standards for AI. India’s AI for All campaign and its leadership role in the Global Partnership on AI (GPAI) position it as a democratic voice in shaping algorithmic norms.
On climate justice, it could lead Global South diplomacy without succumbing to victimhood. India could push a new development paradigm: green industrialization with social equity—e.g., its LEDS (Long-Term Low Emission Development Strategy) stresses “just transitions” for coal workers and farmers. Another vehicle of influence could be the International Solar Alliance, an Indo-French flagship multilateral effort begun in 2015 to foreground climate justice for the Global South.
On migration, it could model a civic pluralism that Europe and America now struggle to maintain. (Conversely, its increasing paranoia about Bangladeshi and Rohingya immigrants may add to our Trumpian dystopia.)
India hosts millions of internal migrants and manages one of the world’s most complex multilingual democracies, with 22 official languages and dozens more in use. A normatively ambitious India would likely foreground inclusive urban planning, linguistic diversity, and citizenship reform—offering global models of coexistence.
The West’s India Problem
Western discourse remains ill-equipped to comprehend this transformation. Conservative figures like Douglas Murray or Jordan Peterson have largely ignored Hindutva, despite its alignment with many of their anxieties, because India does not fit into their Christian-nationalist frames. Liberal commentators like Ezra Klein and Anne Applebaum acknowledge India’s democratic backsliding but rarely grasp the depth of its political-philosophical inheritance. Even the most sympathetic interpreters—like Timothy Garton Ash—tend to translate India into Western metaphors instead of engaging its grammar on its own terms.
Herein also lies a central paradox of the Western India imaginary: for all its talk of democracy and pluralism, the West, as exemplified by Obama and Macron, and not just the West as exemplified by Trump, has over the past decade listened far more intently to the alien muscular nationalism of Narendra Modi, sometimes in admiration, sometimes in order to criticize, than to the purportedly kindred, even inspirational, liberal universalism of Jawaharlal Nehru, who instead was treated as a bothersome, moralizing pauper in the 1950s, owing to India’s extreme poverty, persistent structural challenges, and minimal geopolitical clout back then. That Orientalist lens—whether in admiration or critique—is increasingly untenable. A $10 trillion India with a large, modern armed forces, deep economic integration with the West, and expanding cultural soft power through cinema, digital infrastructure, and ideas, will demand recognition as a peer.
But Western ambivalence about India is rooted less in simple Orientalism than in a deep, unresolved guilt. India, with its Zoroastrian field marshal, Muslim air vice marshal, and Sikh and Jewish generals in the Eastern Command, ended the 1971 genocide while feeding and accepting 10 million refugees—a humanitarian triumph that starkly exposed the West’s hypocrisy and complicity, as Nixon and Kissinger backed the ethnonationalist Pakistani regime responsible for the extermination of three million Bengalis. Similarly, the British colonial-era mass starvation of Indians by the oft-lionized Winston Churchill was a Holodomor-style atrocity. Such episodes fundamentally unsettle the Western self-image as the uncontested purveyor of liberalism, upending the narrative that India must learn liberal values from the West rather than the other way around. Modern Indian history alone underscores how the West has often been less about its proclaimed values and more about a naked pursuit of power, which paradoxically is better understood in its Sanskrit framing as Matsya Nyaya.
Be that as it may, by 2040, India will have risen—not merely in GDP rankings or defense budgets, but in meaning. It will compel a new global conversation about democracy, development, pluralism, and power—perhaps for the good, perhaps for the opposite, but one that will force the West to adapt to a completely new phenomenon.
India’s Megaphone: The Battle of Ideas
Therefore, as India’s material power grows, its intellectual and moral voice must expand with it—not merely to defend its image, but to define its meaning. This requires an ecosystem of thinkers who can respond to Western narratives, both admiring and condescending, without falling into mimicry or wounded defensiveness. Indian intellectual life already spans a wide arc—from the liberal universalism of Amartya Sen and the post-imperial melancholia of Pankaj Mishra to the reparative cosmopolitanism of Shashi Tharoor, who demands justice from history without rejecting the liberal present. There is also the unapologetic assertiveness of Sanjeev Sanyal, who seeks to reframe India’s story as one of civilizational resilience and agency, not victimhood. Cultural interpreters like Devdutt Pattanaik bring the symbolic world of Indian mythology into contemporary public ethics, while scholars like Gurcharan Das blend philosophical tradition with market pragmatism. These thinkers help craft a discourse that is not derivative of Western liberalism, nor blindly loyal to it, but civilizationally self-aware—a discourse that insists India is not a delayed version of someone else’s past, but an original experiment in its own right.
But this ideological contest is not only internal. India’s new power will grant it a megaphone—and with that comes the responsibility of speech. Its thinkers must now speak not only to the West but also to the Global South, where India’s example holds both promise and suspicion. Can a multi-religious, multilingual, poor-yet-technologically-ambitious democracy thrive at scale? Can it resist both Chinese authoritarianism and Islamist sectarianism without replicating them? Indian scholars must also confront a growing tide of hostile disinformation from Chinese- and Qatari-funded channels, which alternately portray India as a fascist Hindu theocracy or a pliant servant of American hegemony. Both narratives miss the truth—but the response cannot simply be denial. Whether through the civilizational histories of Sunil Khilnani and Ramachandra Guha, the institutional critiques of Pratap Bhanu Mehta, or the subaltern interventions of Dalit, Adivasi, queer, feminist, and Muslim historians and public intellectuals, India needs intellectual frameworks that speak across borders and engage with all manner of audiences.
Equally, India’s rise will empower thinkers whose goal is not to explore a uniquely Indian idiom for liberal democracy but to displace liberal democracy altogether. The most prominent of these are voices like J. Sai Deepak and Anand Ranganathan, who offer a deeply sophisticated, Sanskritized, legal-philosophical case for Hindu majoritarian rule—combining civilizational grievance with a vision of statecraft rooted in pre-modern hierarchies. Their writings represent the intellectual scaffolding of Hindu neo-fascism: a system that borrows selectively from Enlightenment and decolonial ideas while rejecting their universalism, instead proposing a majoritarianism and reactionary Hindu civilizational state with its own internal logic and laws. With India’s economic and cultural influence growing, such ideas will not remain confined to its borders. The rise of authoritarian ideologies claiming to defend “civilization” and “tradition” may find inspiration from New Delhi as much as from Moscow or Tehran.
Conclusion: Civilization as Responsibility
This is where India’s moral crossroads lies. For centuries, it was the object of the Western gaze—admired, patronized, feared, but rarely understood. Now it is becoming a subject in world affairs: not only a great power but a civilizational one. With that comes not just the right to speak, but the duty to mean something. Whether governed by Hindutva or a revived Nehruvian pluralism, India will face the same structural realities: rivalry with authoritarian China; pressure from Islamist regimes in its neighborhood and beyond; ever-deepening integration with Western economies, geostrategic architectures, and technologies; and increasing pressure on India to pull its weight in shaping global norms such as those on climate, pandemics, AI ethics, pluralism, migration, warfare, and much else.
India will thus have to become something the West has never encountered before: a postcolonial, democratic superpower, deeply civilizational, whose philosophical traditions—from the Upanishads and the Dhammapada to Akbar’s sulh-i-kul and Ambedkar’s Navayana—demand to be engaged on their own terms. Its scholars must become translators, critics, and visionaries—speaking to Washington and to Dakar, to Brussels and to Jakarta, to both the echo chambers of the West and the silos of the Global South. Not to explain India as an exception or a copy, but as an original.
For the first time in modern history, India’s mind, no longer marginal due to India’s newly acquired economic and hard power, must be allowed to shape the world—not through mimicry or resentment, but through the full, fierce clarity of civilizational responsibility.
