Artículo World Politics Review, 19.06.2025 Adarsh Badri, candidato doctoral (POLSIS-U. de Queensland)
India has long aspired to be a mouthpiece for the Global South, but those aspirations have grown since Prime Minister Narendra Modi took office in 2014. In recent years especially, India has hosted and convened multiple high-level global summits, proclaimed and defended its strategic autonomy and spoken the language of democratic values and global solidarity. And in doing so, India has sought to position itself as a bridge between Western societies and the developing world—one that is postcolonial, powerful and poised to lead.
But despite Modi’s rhetoric of Vishwa Mitra, or friend of the world, and Vishwa Guru, or teacher of the world, India has struggled to match its foreign policy ambition with achievements. Even as Modi seeks to portray India as the leader of the Global South, its domestic conditions—including socio-economic inequality, religious intolerance, curbs on free speech and democratic decline—suggest it actually lacks the capacity to lead. Instead, India’s foreign policy today increasingly resembles that of what economist Lant Pritchett has called a “Flailing state” —the head makes plans, but the limbs don’t follow them.
From a distance, India looks like an ascendant power, and by a number of metrics, it has risen steadily over the years. India now sits at the high table of global diplomacy. New Delhi has maintained steady and stable relations with other global players, including Washington and Moscow. Despite significant backlash over its positions on global issues, particularly the Ukraine War, India has held its ground in the name of national interest and strategic autonomy.
However, beneath this image of autonomous leadership lies a stark reality and multiple contradictions, evident in its strategic communications. For instance, Modi’s India claims to represent a diverse, multicultural, democratic Global South, but simultaneously, its own democratic values have come under attack at home. Religious tolerance continues to be eroded. Democratic institutions are being hollowed out and under siege, while dissent is criminalized, and the rule of law is applied selectively.
Moreover, India’s economy, while growing at an average clip of 6.5 percent in GDP terms since Modi took office, has created a profoundly unequal society, with more than 20 percent of national income going to just 1 percent of the population. A report published last year by the World Inequality Database found income inequality is far worse in India today than under British colonial rule. The G20 summit hosted in New Delhi in 2023 offered a stark display of both this growing inequality and how it clashes with the global image India hopes to project: Several slums across the capital city were bulldozed; people were displaced; and entire neighborhoods were walled off from view behind green plastic sheets.
Also at odds with India’s rhetoric of friendship abroad is Modi’s nationalist Hindutva doctrine, which seeks to establish India as a Hindu nation, rather than the secular state its constitution provides for. The assertive Hindu nationalist push has been accompanied by increased violence against Muslims and other minority groups, as well as a rise in caste- and gender-based violence.
Modi’s government has also actively sought to curb free speech through police and surveillance strategies. Freedom of the press has significantly declined, with India ranked 151 among 180 countries in Reporters Without Borders’ World Press Freedom Index in 2025. In addition to the press, civil society groups, universities and think tanks have all increasingly come under attack. Even academics are getting arrested, with the recent detention of Ali Khan Mahmudabad in the state of Haryana a case in point.
As much as Modi’s rhetoric, these domestic abuses shape how the world views India and affect its global standing. For example, a 2024 survey published by the ASEAN Studies Centre at the Singapore-based ISEAS think tank painted a bleak picture of ASEAN societies’ outlook on India’s foreign policy instincts and capacities: Only 1.5 percent of respondents trusted India to do the “right thing” in global matters, while 40 percent agreed that “India does not have the capacity or the political will for global leadership.”
Consider India’s immediate neighborhood, where it has fewer friends than before and more countries treating its intentions with suspicion. Once a close partner, Bangladesh is recalibrating its relations with New Delhi since the ouster last year of former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina by a student-led popular protest movement. Amid growing anti-India sentiment—in part due to Hasina’s close ties with India, where she fled in exile—bilateral relations have hit a new low. In recent years, Nepal has protested India’s territorial claims, while Sri Lanka continues to balance between India and China. Even the Maldives, once an all-weather friend to India, elected pro-China President Mohamed Muizzu, who rose to power last year on the back of anti-India sentiment and asked India to withdraw its troops stationed in the island country as one of his first moves upon taking office.
India has also been ineffective in handling Chinese incursions across the India-China border in Ladakh, in the Himalayas. More recently, India responded to April’s deadly terror attack in Indian-controlled Kashmir with air strikes across Pakistan. But this quickly escalated into an exchange of air and missile strikes that lasted a week, before a fragile ceasefire—for which U.S. President Donald Trump claimed the credit—was reached. Trump has even suggested mediating India and Pakistan’s territorial dispute over Kashmir, which New Delhi has historically insisted was a bilateral matter. And most importantly, India was ineffective in influencing world opinion with regard to its central claim of Pakistani sponsorship of terrorism, perhaps because India’s military action and the subsequent escalation on both sides shifted attention toward mitigating nuclear brinkmanship in the subcontinent.
Meanwhile, New Delhi’s attempts to forge new “minilateral” forums and effectively become a “net security provider” worldwide have met with limited success. The so-called I2U2, comprising India, Israel, the United Arab Emirates and the U.S., is ambitious but lacks grounding. The Quad—or Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, comprising India, the U.S., Japan and Australia—has been taking on some substantive issues, like technology-sharing, but remains a mainly symbolic partnership.
In short, Modi’s global aspirations are out of sync with New Delhi’s capacity to shape and transform international outcomes, while India’s domestic conditions are often difficult to reconcile with its aspirations as the leader of the Global South. As a result, even as its foreign policy rhetoric—directed to audiences both at home and abroad—portrays itself as an all-powerful nation, India is losing ground.
If India truly aspires to lead the Global South, it must embody at home the principles it seeks to uphold abroad. Strategic autonomy should not be divorced from democratic values. India may use the language of a global leader, but until it addresses its domestic shortcomings, it risks finding that no one is following.
