What if the next world superpower was India, not China? With its 1.4 billion inhabitants, India is already the most populous country in the world. Under the leadership of Narendra Modi, India has embraced both ultra-productivity and ultra-nationalism. Everything that happens in the world happens in India on a much larger scale.
In the past decade, Modi has transformed and reshaped the country: for the better according to his supporters, for the worse according to his opponents. India is now the fifth largest economy in the world and has democratized access to technology. No one can deny the scale of the country’s social, political and cultural transformation. Slowly but surely, Modi is positioning India as a counter- balance to the West. He has silenced his opponents, rewritten the national narrative to the point of erasing whole swathes of its own history and created a new apartheid.
But India, which often seems so distant and far removed from our preoccupations, has also become the magnifying glass of global challenges. The strategic choices made by Narendra Modi to manage his population of 1.4 billion reflect our own choices on a global scale. For it is also in India that the solutions to many of the world’s problems are to be found..