Much like post-war Japan, India’s economic rise since 1991 under prime minister P.V.Narasimha Rao and finance minister Manmohan Singh (the present PM) has been accompanied by a loss of political will to deploy and enforce national power to influence and achieve geo-strategic outcomes favourable to the country.  

India’s South Asia regional power status -  which was a consequence of the third prime minister, Indira Gandhi’s successful creation of Bangladesh from East Pakistan in 1971, the proactive integration of the Indian Ocean islands and Sikkim state bordering Tibet, and the first nuclear test in 1974 - is in a shambles now. Nepal, despite sharing a common majority religion, Hinduism, threatens to relaunch into a pro-China orbit the same as Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, whose victory against the LTTE terrorists was assisted with Chinese weapons’ systems, including fighter planes. Pakistan, propped up as a nuclear weapons’ counterweight to India by China post-1971 is poised to assist to grow Chinese national power alongwith Saudi Arabia if and when (which is sooner than later) the United States quits Afghanistan to the worldwide advertisement of Barack Obama’s weak presidency.

Why has the political will of the Indian leadership as the driving force of national power so debilitated since 1991? That was the year India’s ex-dynastic PM questing for a second term, Rajiv Gandhi, of the Nehru-Indira Gandhi family, was assassinated. Narasimha Rao, a non-dynast chosen by the Congress party to be PM, was an exceptional head of government, but his energies were expended keeping at bay the hounds let loose by the dynasty and preserving India’s territorial integrity from both heightened Pakistan-stoked Punjab and Kashmir terrorisms and the empire-and plural-states’ destructive centrifugal forces unleashed by a break-up of post-Afghanistan Soviet Union.

Narasimha Rao’s most stable prime-ministerial successor, A.B.Vajpayee, significantly accreted national power by authorizing the second nuclear test in 1998, but he showed no political will to counterattack Pakistan in Punjab (like Lal Bahadur Shashtri had ordered in the 1965 war) when it aggressed in Kargil in 1999, nor was the LoC crossed and a fully mobilized army rotted in still-born action when Parliament was attacked by Pakistani terrorists in December 2001, three months after the WTC and Pentagon bombings. If anything, Indian political non-will has been artfully dressed up as “restraint” by the US government, which is loathe to give up its British inheritance of the post-colonial “colonies” of India and Pakistan.

But the lack of Indian political will is most acutely felt in the face of a growingly belligerent China, whose national power is uniquely optimized to win favourable geo-strategic outcomes by virtue of permanent UN Security Council membership with veto power, being an NPT nuclear weapons’ state, being the fastest growing country holding the highest US debts and possessing the key to American economic recovery, and having a leadership that is as totalitarian as it has brilliant great power vision. Much as India may deny, the crushing defeat to Chinese forces in 1962 still haunts it, and the Indian leadership is unable to respond to or counter Chinese aggressiveness as it bids to overcome Uighur and Tibetan revolts once and for all.

The collapsed Indian political will are consequences of a shrinking base of the Congress party, the unviability of a post-Vajpayee BJP to morph into a strong opposition of a two-party system, the rise of regional and dynastic parties whose power and influence is inversely proportional to the power and influence of the two main parties, the Congress and BJP, and the lack of soil nourishment to grow the older class of national, pan-Indian leaders.

Tellingly, despite all the advantages of pedigree, Rahul, Rajiv and Sonia Gandhi’s son, is struggling to make a leadership mark, and the BJP under L.K.Advani and Rajnath Singh has proceeded from power to nowhere. But the political non-will is all the crueler, because India’s astonishing and unprecedented rise, at least in the last two hundred and fifty years, has provoked unremitting jealousies and competition, with China stating on record that two suns cannot rise in one place, meaning Asia.

According to one estimate, between 1750-1900, India as a whole (that is, including present-day Pakistan) crashed in its relative share of world manufacturing output and per capita levels of industrialization from respectively 24.5 and seven to 1.7 and one chiefly on account of the “bloodshed, rapine and plunder” of British colonial wars and colonialism. The Indian leadership’s lack of will shows no signs of abating, making India ripe for the picking again. But China, which went down the same terrible trajectory as India, has spectacularly learnt its lessons.