The Current Relationship between India’s Viksit Aspiration and Genuine Strategic Autonomy
Indian Prime Minister Modi and his ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) have declared and continue to assert that Bharat (the Hindi name for India) will be a viksit (developed) country by 2047, its centenary year of Independence. It is important to achieve such status, no doubt, not least because such status is a prerequisite for achieving genuine and consistent strategic autonomy. This, in turn, is essential for India’s assertion of independent external geopolitical and geoeconomic positions which are highly desirable status for any major country like India for it to be universally respected, be a leader of the Global South, and for its independent and credible conduct of international relations.
However, genuine strategic autonomy is very difficult if not impossible to achieve in practice for India currently both because of its internal, domestic structural vulnerabilities and weaknesses and because of today’s volatile and polarized regional and global landscape.
India’s inability to achieve genuine strategic autonomy is reinforced both by the personalization of most of its important positions and relationships through the persona of one leader, its current Prime Minister. This has been especially so because the positions India has taken on critical global and regional issues in the last decade, especially since Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine have not been genuinely neutral or statesmanlike. It is widely agreed that the country’s current political leadership across the board is bereft of any great statesmen or women. Indeed, we should lament the current absence of the calibre of giant or great statesmen or women such as Mahatma Gandhi, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, BR Ambedkar, Sarojini Naidu, Sucheta Kripalani and even Vijayalakshmi Pandit and Vallabhai Patel that India had at the time of its freedom struggle and straight after gaining independence from the British in 1947.
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*This article is an expanded and revised version of an article first published as: Kamal Malhotra. 2026. ‘India’s 2047 Viksit Aspiration and Realising Strategic Autonomy: Major Transformations Needed’, in the IIC Quarterly, Volume 53, No. 2, Autumn, pp. 15–31.
