Indian strategists, ordinarily, should have been delighted at the recently concluded International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) conference held in New Delhi discussing the rise and apparent unveiling of India as the new global power. Except, Minister Kamal Nath in his opening remarks began by expressing his discomfort with the concept of ‘power’, a theme that dominated the rest of the proceedings. His reasoning, unsurprisingly for a trade minister, was based on economic grounds but it also reflected a mindset that looks confidently at the successes of the past and is hesitant of future challenges and opportunities. In some ways, this is disingenuous as the past, from an institutional perspective at least, is either misread or unknown. Moreover, in terms of institutional capacities, and this perhaps explains the discomfort with the concept of power, India has yet to understand what rising power entails. Finally, what the conference failed to capture was the ‘generational divide’, with rising economic and political ambitions of a young India.

One of the strangest ironies of the conference was witnessing foreign delegates hailing the rise of India as a new global power while Indian participants were quick to underplay this. To a student of Indian history, this should not be surprising — attaining independence in a ‘non-violent’ manner and suffering from years of colonialism, the Indian political and intellectual class has traditionally been wary of the concept of hard ‘power’. The internalisation of the non-aligned mantra — which essentially was a strategy of the weak to play a disproportionate role in global affairs while safeguarding India’s ‘strategic autonomy’ — cemented this pattern. Hence, despite Indira Gandhi’s liberation of Bangladesh, against the wishes of most global powers, India is still perceptually uncomfortable with the idea of power.

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