India’s time will come. For now, it is a middle power in a bi-multipolar world

The Indian Express · Sanjaya Baru · 2026-11-05 14:47 UTC

Both the US and China pose a challenge for India. Neither is an option in dealing with the other. Neither can be weaponised against the other.

From his debating days at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar has had a knack for wit and repartee. Not surprisingly, therefore, when he found a European interlocutor wonder whether India, like all European powers, was a “middle power”, not a Big Power like the United States and China, Jaishankar was quick to respond with a clever one-liner — we are a “power in the middle”.

The rapid rise of China over the past two decades and the slowing down of the Indian growth process over the past decade have raised new questions about India’s place in the world. Economic status alone does not define either power or influence in world affairs. But it matters. It was not a happenstance that the view of India within the international community began to change at the turn of the century when the economy began to perform better and India’s skills in the then new field of information technology were globally sought after.

Recall the fact that the Goldman Sachs report on emerging economies, clubbing India with China, Brazil and Russia, the famous BRIC report, was published in 2001. In the same year, the influential American foreign affairs analyst, Stephen P Cohen, published his book India: Emerging Power. Through the first decade of this century, several such books were published overseas and in India. The Japanese diplomat Hiroshi Hirabayashi went to the extent of titling his book, India: The Last Super Power. By 2007 an India sceptic like Singapore’s founder-mentor Lee Kuan Yew referred to China and India as “two engines” that would power the rise of Asia.

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