India’s Statecraft in a Disorderly World: Why Growth Must Come First

For economic policymakers, foreign policy is not an exercise in posture or positioning. It is a determinant of economic growth. The central question for India’s statecraft today is not where it stands in an unsettled global order, but whether its external choices expand or constrain the conditions required for rapid, sustained growth. Strategic autonomy, seen through this lens, is not an ideological inheritance. It is the policy space needed to grow.

India’s growth imperative is unusually stark. It must generate employment at scale, absorb a rapidly urbanising population, finance massive investments in infrastructure and the energy transition, and move decisively up the technological ladder—within a compressed time frame. Failure on this front would overwhelm any diplomatic success. Growth is not one objective among many; it is the binding constraint within which all others must operate.

A World Where Economics Has Become a Weapon
The emerging global order complicates this task. Rules are less predictable, economic instruments are routinely weaponised, and political authority in major economies has become increasingly personalised. Shocks now travel rapidly through trade, finance, technology, and supply chains. In this environment, foreign policy choices directly affect capital flows, access to technology, export markets, and macroeconomic stability. A strategy that is not anchored in growth fundamentals becomes a liability.

This is why India’s external engagements must be judged not by symbolism, but by their growth consequences. Dependencies alter bargaining power. The overriding concern is whether today’s decisions preserve the flexibility required to sustain growth tomorrow.

Constraint Management Under Growth Pressure
Seen this way, statecraft becomes a problem of constraint management. In economic policy, governments balance growth, stability, equity, and fiscal prudence. Foreign policy operates under the same arithmetic. Excessive proximity to any single power may ease short-term friction but introduce vulnerabilities that later restrict growth options. Excessive caution may protect autonomy temporarily, but at the cost of foregone investment and integration. The objective is not avoiding risk but avoiding irreversible constraints on growth.

Power increasingly operates through economic channels. Tariffs, export controls, sanctions, and technology restrictions do more than signal intent; they shape investment decisions, productivity growth, and long-term competitiveness. Their cumulative effects are slow but decisive. For India, whose development trajectory depends on openness, scale, and technological upgrading, this linkage is existential.

China: Risk Management, Not a Binary Choice
China presents the most complex challenge. It is simultaneously a strategic competitor and a central node in global manufacturing and supply chains. Excessive dependence creates strategic risk; abrupt disengagement imposes growth costs. From an economic standpoint, this is not a binary choice but a portfolio problem. Dependencies that threaten long-term technological or industrial upgrading must be reduced, even at short-term cost. Others can be managed or diversified. The guiding principle is whether an exposure accelerates or constrains India’s movement up the value chain.

Security Competition and the Cost of Preparedness
Security competition must be read through the same lens. Sustained strategic pressure absorbs fiscal resources, diverts administrative attention, and raises uncertainty for investors. Deterrence is necessary, but it must be economical. Growth cannot be indefinitely subordinated to preparedness without eroding the base that sustains national power. The challenge is to deter escalation while preserving fiscal and developmental bandwidth.

Domestic politics compound these constraints. When foreign policy becomes a vehicle for domestic mobilisation, policy flexibility declines. Recalibration becomes politically costly even when economic conditions change. A growth-oriented policy requires adjustment to data, shocks, and opportunities. Centralisation may speed decisions, but it can weaken feedback loops essential for correction.

When Personality Replaces Process
These pressures intersect with a broader structural shift in global diplomacy: the growing role of personality in foreign policy. Decision-making in several major economies, including India, has become increasingly personalised and performative, shaped less by institutions and more by leaders’ perceptions and desire for visible assertion. This is not a tactical innovation; it is a systemic condition.

Ego-aware diplomacy, properly understood, is therefore not a strategy to be emulated but a risk to be managed. Personality-driven diplomacy increases volatility, weakens predictability, and raises uncertainty premiums across the global economy. Investment is deferred, supply chains are defensively rerouted, and partnerships become fragile. For an economy pursuing scale and stability, this volatility carries real cost.

Why Institutions Matter More Than Optics
The danger for India lies not in engaging ego-driven leaders—that is unavoidable—but in internalising ego-politics as a mode of statecraft. Reputational capital is a growth asset. Credibility, restraint, and institutional seriousness influence investor confidence and negotiating leverage. Symbolic accommodation may occasionally be unavoidable; erosion of credibility is rarely reversible. India’s task is therefore to insulate its growth strategy from personality-driven volatility.

Institutionalisation matters more than personal rapport. Agreements embedded in law and process provide predictability—a critical input into growth. Personalised diplomacy may ease momentary frictions, but durable outcomes depend on rules that survive leadership cycles.

Beyond Insulation: Moral Leadership and BRICS
Strategic non-alignment, viewed through this prism, is not moral distance but economic diversification. No growth-oriented economy concentrates risk in a single market, currency, technology standard, or capital source. Diversification preserves optionality.

Yet insulation alone is insufficient. India’s own history suggests that growth and moral leadership need not be mutually exclusive. In the early Cold War, India leveraged normative leadership to expand strategic space despite material weakness. Whether a measure of that leadership can again serve growth—by shaping a more predictable and inclusive external environment—remains an open question.

BRICS offers a test case. Conceived as a plural, reformist platform, it once promised to amplify the voice of growth-seeking economies. Power asymmetry has narrowed its agenda, with China increasingly driving it, but the platform remains salvageable. India’s opportunity lies not in contesting dominance, but in exercising quiet, agenda-based leadership on growth-relevant public goods: development finance norms, debt sustainability, health systems, climate adaptation, and institutional reform. Such leadership is slow and understated, but it can reduce uncertainty and widen opportunity.

Autonomy as the Freedom to Grow
India thus faces a strategic choice. One path prioritises insulation, hedging, and resilience in a coercive and personality-driven order. The other complements this with selective normative leadership that expands strategic space. Both must serve the same end: sustaining rapid economic growth. Any approach that compromises that objective, however elegant it may be diplomatically, is untenable.

In a world defined less by balance than by volatility, the central test of statecraft is not assertion but agency. Countries will be judged not by how loudly they speak, but by how consistently they grow. Autonomy, in the end, is about retaining the freedom to develop at scale and at speed.