India's rise and the emergence of a multiplex world

Manjeet S. Pardesi: "India also faces significant domestic challenges as it climbs the international order."

We are amid a dramatic transformation of the world order. First, the rise of China as a great power has ended the United States’ post-Cold War unipolarity – the period of global politics with only one great power. It is now widely believed that we are moving toward a multipolar world with multiple great powers.

The 2023 Strategic Policy Assessment of the New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade explicitly notes that “the world is transitioning to a “multipolar” order that has a number of competing powers.”  

Second, and perhaps even more importantly, the world is also shifting away from the core-periphery international order of the past two centuries that had a Western core (underwritten by US leadership after the Second World War) and a ‘Restern’ periphery (Buzan and Lawson 2015).

Although the Western powers have been at the helm of international politics and the world order for almost two hundred years now, the “rise of the Rest,” especially Asia, has transformed global politics.

Three of the world’s top five economies are now in Asia (China, Japan, and India) compared to two in the North Atlantic (the United States and Germany). Similarly, two Asian countries (China and India) are now among the five largest defence spenders in the world along with three from Europe and the North Atlantic (the United States, Russia, and Britain). As such, instead of replacing West-centrism with Asia-centrism, the emerging world order will be decentered even as power asymmetries will continue.  

As the world transforms away from American unipolarity and Western dominance, a deeper transformation of the international order is underway. While the world is certainly moving towards multipolarity (and therefore, will be marked by the absence of the hegemony of any single power), regions rather than single countries (poles) are becoming the primary sites for the making of international order.

Leaders from the United States, Japan and India at the launch of the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity (IPEF), in Tokyo, Japan, 2022.

The Indo-Pacific region – a reconfigured Asia – is now seen as the primary theater of the US-China great power rivalry. However, strategic competition is not simply about the United States and China and their traditional security partners. As noted in the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service’s 2024 threat assessment, there are “several” competing centers of power in the region, including India and those in Southeast Asia.

A key consequence of this trend towards regionalisation of the international order is the increasing importance of non-great power states such as New Zealand and those in Southeast Asia in terms of order-making and shaping. Consequently, a far more complex order is in the making – a world of multiple great powers where regions will be the primary theaters of action, and one in which smaller regional powers will also play a formative role.

In other words, a multiplex world order is in the making that will be decentered, non-hegemonic, and marked by the absence of a core-periphery configuration (Pardesi and Acharya, forthcoming). India is rising to great power status in the Indo-Pacific region and contributing to the making of this multiplex, multi-regional order world. But what kind of great power will India be and what does India’s rise mean for the New Zealand-India relationship?   

India rising 

Jawaharlal Nehru signing the Indian Constitution

India has aspired to great power status since independence from British colonial rule in 1947.

India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, believed that India was one of the four great powers of the then extant world together with the United States, the former Soviet Union, and China. Indeed, India’s diplomacy, especially in Asia, was marked with the vigor of a great power-in-the-making during the 1947 Asian Relations Conference, the 1949 Conference on Indonesia, the 1950-51 Chinese invasion of Tibet, the 1950-53 Korean War, the 1954 Geneva Conference, and the 1955 Bandung Conference. However, India’s dramatic defeat in the 1962 Sino-Indian War eliminated India as a contender for great power status in Asia for the rest of the Cold War (Ganguly, Pardesi, and Thompson 2023). It was only after the end of the Cold War when New Delhi undertook structural economic reforms to enable its integration into the world economy that India was perceived as a claimant for great power status again. 

In 2005, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh noted that India’s foreign policy was now shaped by India’s “yearning to recover our [India’s] lost space in the global economy and our [India’s] economic status in the comity of Nations” (Singh 2005a). A few months later while accepting an honorary degree from Oxford University in the United Kingdom, Singh (2005b), citing the Cambridge historian Angus Madison, noted that India’s share of world GDP had collapsed under two centuries of British colonialism, falling from 22.6 percent in 1700 (when it was on a par with the combined share of Europe’s GDP) to a mere 3.8 percent in 1952.(1)

Former Indian Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh talks with former United States President Barack Obama during a G-20 leaders working dinner in 2009

Singh was one of the architects of India’s economic reforms after the end of the Cold War to help kickstart the country’s economic recovery. Although India’s domestic politics has dramatically changed since Singh’s leadership, the desire to restore India’s global economic status has been a consistent feature of its domestic and foreign policy.   India’s current Prime Minister Narendra Modi is determined to make India into a developed country by 2047 in addition to one of the world’s “leading powers” (Paul 2024). 

But what does India’s economic trajectory tell us about the kind of great power that India is becoming?

India is currently the fifth-largest economy in the world and is expected to become the third largest after the United States and China by 2030, though by quite a gap. According to Goldman Sachs (2022), the United States will be the world’s largest economy in 2030 with a GDP of US$27 trillion while China will be the second largest with a GDP of US$24.5 trillion.

By contrast, India will trail in third place with a GDP of US$6.6 trillion. Although China is likely to become the world’s largest economy by 2035, India is expected to catch-up with the United States and become the world’s second-largest economy only by 2075. This tells us that India is not a contender for the apex position as the world’s leading great power – obtaining that top rank will remain a contest between the United States and China for the foreseeable future. Instead, in the emerging world of multiple great powers, India will be one of the many poles vying for influence.  

India and the United States: Common strategic interests 

Manjeet S. Pardesi : "...the United States does not see India as a peer that is in competition with the United States for the status of the leading great power..."

The regionalisation of world politics and the growing salience of the Indo-Pacific for the competition between the United States and China will boost India’s role in the emerging regional order despite asymmetries with these two larger powers.

There are three primary reasons for this.

First, China and India are strategic rivals just like the United States and China. Strategic rivals perceive militarised threats vis-à-vis their adversaries and prepare for possible militarised contests. China and India have been in a positional rivalry for leadership in Asia/the Indo-Pacific since the 1940s.(2) They are also in a territorial rivalry as they share the world’s longest unmarked frontier along a bitterly disputed border. On the other hand, despite occasionally frosty political relations, the US-India relationship is not a strategic rivalry. If anything, concerns about China have brought the United States and India together.  

Second, Indian nationalism is not centered around anti-Americanism or anti-Westernism even as India’s postcolonial identity remains sensitive to real and imagined Western slights and humiliations. This was expressly stated by S. Jaishankar (2019), India’s current foreign minister during a visit to the United States in 2019 when he noted that there has not been “a kind of mobilization around an anti-western nationalism” in India even as “India had two centuries of humiliation by the West.” He added that this was despite the fact India had encountered the West “in its predatory form” during British colonial rule that might have extracted wealth to the amount of “$45 trillion at today’s value” from the subcontinent. Although China was not explicitly mentioned when the expression “century of humiliation” was invoked,(3) Jaishankar’s political signaling was clear in its intent.  

Third and finally, the United States does not see India as a peer that is in competition with the United States for the status of the leading great power, neither globally nor in the Indo-Pacific. Consequently, the United States is willing to accommodate the gradual rise of India; and good relations with the United States are also a part of India’s strategy to facilitate its own ascent and manage its troublesome relationship with China.  

Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi holding an all-party meeting via video conferencing to discuss the situation in India-China border areas in New Delhi in 2020

Although the United States and India were “estranged democracies” (Kux 1994) during the Cold War, especially after the mid-1960s, the two countries have been in the process of forging a close partnership in the twenty-first century.

The United States partially accommodated India’s rise, and more specifically India’s status in the nuclear order, through the 2005 US-India Civil Nuclear Agreement. Later, in 2010, then US President Barack Obama (2010) endorsed India as a permanent member of a reformed United Nations Security Council and added that “India is not simply emerging; India has emerged” in his remarks to a joint session of the Indian Parliament. Under Donald Trump’s first term as US President, one of the United States’ “desired end states” in the Indo-Pacific was to ensure that “India remains preeminent in South Asia and takes the leading role in maintaining Indian Ocean security, [and] increases engagement with Southeast Asia” (National Archives 2021).  

President Donald J. Trump and Prime Minister Narendra Modi meet in 2017

These policies were continued under President Joe Biden, when defence industrial cooperation between the United States and India also received a boost. Over the past two decades, India has ordered or purchased high-end American military hardware, including Apache combat helicopters, C-130 and C-17 transport aircraft, P-8I Poseidon patrol and anti-submarine warfare aircraft, and anti-tank, anti-ship, and surface-to-air missiles. While it is difficult to predict how the US-India relationship will evolve during Trump’s second term, the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi hailed the US-India relationship as a “mega partnership” during his visit to the United States in February 2025, and Trump mentioned that the United States would provide F-35 fighter jets to India. 

The growing US-India partnership has also facilitated closer relations between India and America’s closest allies in Asia. The Quad (or the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue) grouping of the US, India, Japan, and Australia is the most visible manifestation of this. While India was missing from Japan’s mental map of Asia after the 1960s, Australia’s strategic analysts were worried about India’s naval expansion in the Indian Ocean until as late as the late 1980s. However, the Quad grouping – initially established in the aftermath of the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami and re-established in 2017 – has changed those perceptions and forged closer relations.

By 2020, India had signed a logistics agreement with all three of its Quad partners that enables reciprocal provision of supplies between their respective armed forces, supports military coordination in response to regional humanitarian crises, and promotes closer military-to-military links. As such, India’s “look east” and “act east” policies have now extended beyond Southeast Asia to include Australia, Japan, and engagement with the United States as an Indo-Pacific power. Not surprisingly, one of China’s leading scholars of India has noted that the Indo-Pacific construct promotes “India from the periphery of the Asia-Pacific region to the core of the Indo-Pacific region” (Li 2018, 45).  

President Donald Trump and India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi participate in a bilateral meeting at United Nations Headquarters in New York during Trump's first term in office in 2019

The United States and India have a shared vision of the regional order in the Indo-Pacific centered on preventing Chinese hegemony in the region. According to China’s Science of Military Strategy (2013, 81-82), India intends to “control the South Asian subcontinent and the Indian Ocean,” before “advancing to the east and expanding to the south” as it strives to be “a first-rate power in the world.” Consequently, China is officially preparing for two “1.5 war scenarios” with India in the context of a war between the United States/Japan and China in maritime East Asia (You 2018).

The first scenario envisages India opening a continental front in the Himalayas, and the second scenario sees India taking advantage of China’s maritime vulnerabilities in the Indian Ocean. In other words, India is now a factor in China’s calculations in its own strategic rivalry with the United States. It also means that a Sino-Indian war may drag the United States into a regional conflict.(4) As such, the Sino-Indian rivalry has implications for not just the regional order in the Indo-Pacific, but also for the global order. 

Differences and domestic challenges 

Though the United States’ and India’s strategic interests are congruent, they are not convergent. To begin with, India aspires to emerge as a genuinely independent pole in world affairs, and not just as a follower of the United States or that of any other great power. In fact, India’s elites have always aspired to foreign policy independence or strategic autonomy. Furthermore, given the material power asymmetry between China and India, as well as the fact that they share a disputed land border, India is keen to prevent a high-tempo strategic rivalry with China.

As India strives to create a multipolar Asia and a multipolar world with New Delhi as one of its poles, China is a partial institutional partner insofar as its institution-building efforts are transforming the global and Asian regional order to India’s benefit.  

India is a member of the China-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) where New Delhi has the second-largest voting share after Beijing. Similarly, India is a member of the BRICS grouping of emerging economies that now includes ten countries.(5) India is also a founding member of the New Development Bank (NDB), a multilateral development bank established by the BRICS states and headquartered in Shanghai. Although much smaller than the US-led World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the AIIB and NDB are challenging American dominance and Western hegemony in the global economic order. In other words, even as India is not actively seeking to undermine the international order built by the United States in the postwar era, India’s rise will contribute to the transformation of that order.(6)

India is a member of the BRICS grouping of emerging economies that now includes ten countries

There are also other important differences between the Indian and American approaches to global issues. India is not in a strategic rivalry with the United States’ other great power rival, Russia.(7) If anything, India and Russia are close defence partners, a legacy of the Cold War when the United States and India were “estranged”.(8) Furthermore, India’s vision of multipolarity envisages Russia as one of the poles of the emerging world order. However, it remains unclear if the United States—not to mention America’s European allies and partners—will accept Russia as one of the poles of the global order given the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014 and its invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

To the great disappointment of the United States and its European allies and partners, India did not condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Not only did India not join the Western sanctions against Russia (that have not been authorised by the United Nations due to the Russian veto in the United Nations Security Council), but India has also continued to buy cheap Russian oil .(9) However, during Prime Minister Modi’s 2025 visit to the United States, India agreed to buy more oil and gas from the United States. 

Prime Minister of India Narendra Modi and Russian President Vladimir Putin in talks at the Russia–India–China (RIC) meeting on the sidelines of the G20 summit in 2018

Given these differences, it has been suggested that a rising India is likely to play the role of a “link power” that connects different countries because India desires a seat at the high table in a variety of global, regional, and institutional settings (Sinha 2016). In fact, it has been argued that India could play the role of such a “bridge power” not only between other great power rivals but also between the Global North (or the developed world) and the Global South (or the developing world) that India seeks to lead (Khilnani 2005). After all, India will continue to be a developing country for some time to come, even as it ascends through the international hierarchy.(10)

India also faces significant domestic challenges as it climbs the international order. India’s post-Cold War economic development has been highly uneven, and extreme poverty remains widespread even as it has declined  following the beginning of India’s economic reforms. Furthermore, gender inequities continue to limit the social and political opportunities for women in India. By contrast, the economic and social success of India’s East and Southeast Asian neighbors was at least partly an outcome of inclusive gender policies.

A unified "Black Day" procession on the anniversary of the demolition of the Babri Masjid Mosque by Hindu nationalists in 1992

Recent years have also witnessed the rise of Hindu nationalism in India, a country with the third-largest Muslim population in the world. This development has raised concerns about the future of liberalism and secularism in India even as it continues to remain the world’s largest electoral democracy (Ganguly 2020). Widespread socio-political tensions along these lines may impede India’s domestic developmental trajectory. Consequently, the mismatch between New Delhi’s geopolitical ambitions and India’s domestic reality is likely to continue for some time to come and will impact India’s rise. 

New Zealand and India: Looking into the future  

The New Zealand-India relationship, though friendly and warm, is bereft of strategic depth. Focused on achieving great power status, New Delhi has not yet fully understood that the global order, especially our emerging multiplex order, is being made and shaped by ambitious states irrespective of their size or military heft. For example, it is sometimes overlooked that the P4 agreement between Brunei, Chile, Singapore, and New Zealand set the stage for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) that eventually gave way to the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) in 2018.

Former New Zealand Prime Minister David Lange visited India during his first overseas tour after taking office in 1984, signalling a change of emphasis in foreign policy

India is not a member of the CPTPP, one of the largest free trade areas in the world. Nor does India have a free trade agreement with New Zealand. In turn, given its trade-driven foreign policy of recent decades, New Zealand has also neglected proactive engagement with India of the sort that was witnessed in New Zealand’s engagement with China some two decades ago when Wellington prided itself on being the first Western country to sign a free-trade agreement with Beijing.  

The larger point is that India is going to become more consequential to the international order, especially in the Indo-Pacific, and New Zealand and other small states like Singapore and Chile will also continue to pioneer partnerships such as the Digital Economy Partnership Agreement that will likely set the template for digital trade in the region and beyond – analogous to the P4 agreement that eventually gave way to the CPTPP. As such, New Zealand and India must explore new avenues for cooperation beyond those centered on trade alone. After all, our emerging multiplex order will be collectively built by the great/rising powers like India as well as proactive small states like New Zealand.

Former New Zealand Prime Minister John Key meeting with Prime Minister Modi at Hyderabad House in New Delhi 2016

In this context, the emerging space sector – a domain with both economic and military potential – offers novel possibilities. Given that private companies play a large role in the New Zealand space sector and that the Indian space sector has also been opened to private companies since 2021, technological and commercial cooperation in the space domain must be explored. Furthermore, India’s growing strategic partnership with Australia, New Zealand’s only military ally, means that the three countries can also explore trilateral military cooperation, especially on maritime issues in the Indo-Pacific. Looking ahead, the societal links between India and New Zealand are bound to deepen as Indians now constitute the third largest ethnic group in New Zealand after Pākehā and Māori (RNZ 2024).   

Conclusion 

It is prudent to conclude on a cautionary note. India’s ascent through the international order is neither preordained nor fixed on a predetermined path.

A high-intensity US-China strategic rivalry and the continued decoupling/derisking of their economies may create impediments for India’s continued economic development given that the United States and China are India’s two largest trading partners. But India’s growth will also be subject to ecological constraints.

India already has the world’s largest population, but India’s per capita income and resource consumption are a fraction of New Zealand’s (and that of the United States’ and China’s).(11) Can our planet sustain a world where the average person in the West and “the Rest” enjoy similar standards of living?

Although the rise of China and India is ending the core-periphery structure of global politics of the past two centuries, the ongoing transformation of the world order also requires socio-political and technological solutions for more equitable global development. The crucial question is: Can we peacefully manage this transformation without a war between the great powers or disruptive social conflicts? 

About the Author

Manjeet S. Pardesi is Associate Professor of International Relations and Asia Research Fellow in the Centre for Strategic Studies at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington. 

The Foundation's Asia in Focus initiative publishes expert insights and analysis on issues across Asia, as well as New Zealand’s evolving relationship with the region.