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Flying Blind: India’s Quest for Global Leadership - Coggle Diagram
Flying Blind: India’s Quest for Global Leadership
How can India build influence?
India reacts to events rather than proactively shaping them. This should change.
India needs a consistent and coherent grand strategy to ensure its credibility and trustworthiness.
India should build influence outside the UNSC to make itself relevant to UNSC's agenda in places like Africa.
In order to have other countries support its bid for permanent membership, India needs to help them by being active and relevant in their issues.
The UN veto is an important bargaining chip and India takes UNSC reform very seriously compared to other aspirants of a permanent seat.
India should engage at a bilateral level than at the multilateral level to grow its influence.
India must build purposeful alliances with other countries both inside and outside the Security Council
India must become involved in regions that matter to the US, like Latin America. This will compel the US to act in India’s interests in places like Southeast Asia and the subcontinent.
India can't afford to have strategic autonomy in a world where the US stands up to objections from its own allies in India's favour, for example by legitimising India's nuclear programme and advocating for India being in the Nuclear Suppliers Group.
India must influence international interest groups to become an important political player in the international arena.
India must build bilateral bargaining power outside of multilateral forums.
India must resolve fundamental debate about what its foreign policy stands for.
India’s influence is not at par with its size especially during international negotiations.
Fence sitting makes India irrelevant on important international questions.
India behaves in an ad-hoc manner and is often not involved in sensitive international issues where it can play an important role.
India's influence will not automatically grow as it becomes richer. Instead, it will need to take stands on important issues.
Does India itself have the institutional capacity to help other countries build their own institutions?
India has the capacity. An example of this is the Indian Technical and Economic Cooperation Programme(ITEC), which from the days of Lal Bahadur Shastri has been giving advice to countries around the world that are trying to build institutions.
India should build international development platforms that are more inclusive and that share the lessons learnt by developing countries. Since India is itself a developing country, it has an advantage when it come to building such platforms.
If India’s own neighbourhood becomes a liability, it will not be able to achieve much internationally, whether on the subcontinent or elsewhere.
Smaller countries in the subcontinent are trying to counterbalance India by pulling in China - and signing major deals with it.
Smaller countries are suspicious of India by virtue of its size and its centrality to the subcontinent. Building trust is crucial for alleviating these concerns.
An Indian passport carries less weight than one from some smaller, more impoverished countries. This is simply because those countries are located in a more influential region of the world.