Ashley Tellis struggles to grasp that India has deliberately chosen strategic autonomy over rigid alliance systems. He overlooks the transformative, deep, and wide-ranging strategic partnerships that Modi’s India has sedulously built with the West, while maintaining independent partnerships with Russia, BRICS, the Gulf states, the Global South and others wherever our core interests dictated.
Ashley Tellis’s recent essay in Foreign Affairs, “India’s Great Power Delusions,” marks a surprising departure from his earlier conviction that India was on a credible and essential path to becoming a leading power. In a recent pathbreaking book, “Grasping Greatness: Making India a Leading Power”, which Tellis co-edited and I reviewed in depth, he argued that India’s rise rests on the tripod of rapid economic growth, liberal democracy, and military strength, under the continued leadership of a visionary and doer like Prime Minister Modi.
He credited Narendra Modi to be the first prime minister to articulate a comprehensive conception of and path to India’s greatness, blending soft and hard power, and that under a bold and reformist leadership like his, India would remain steadfast in its rise. Since then, PM Modi has secured a historic third successive term, led multiple federal victories, and deepened his transformational agenda. It is therefore puzzling to see Tellis now question not just India’s capability to become a global power, but also its chosen strategy of multi-alignment in foreign economic and security policy to achieve that goal.
In doing so, he conflates ambition with approach and misreads the logic of multipolarity. We must therefore unpack both the legitimacy of India’s ambition and the strategic rationale and robustness of its external partnerships while exposing the limits of Tellis’s assumptions of delusion.
First, Tellis’s repeated comparison of India to China is a flawed and tired trope, echoing that of the Global Times of China. Why must the trajectories of two countries with dissimilar politico-economic and social systems be analogised or compared odiously, simply because they are large populous countries in Asia? When China made its way to becoming a leading power by following its own trajectory, quite unlike that of the Western countries, were such comparisons made?
China’s rise was forged in authoritarian stability and state-managed capitalism. India’s rise is being authored in the crucible of democratic contestation, federal negotiation, and open information. India’s unique path to self-realisation deserves the same consideration, if not respect.
India is the world’s fourth-largest economy and also its fastest-growing large economy for most of the last decade, and continues to roar. Its GDP has doubled from $2.1 trillion in 2015 to $4.3 trillion in 2025, and it is poised to cross $5 trillion, overtaking Germany to become the world’s third-largest economy by 2030. Its trade has swelled to $1.8 trillion, and it ranks among the top five global recipients of FDI. India’s growth is not merely numerical; it is multidimensional. Its middle-class expansion is creating a demand-driven, innovation-rich economy, which is ripe for friend-shoring by Western capitals.
India’s demographic dividend is unmatched: 900 million under the age of 35, digitally literate, English-speaking, and skilled. India is on course to leapfrog traditional development models. Our embrace of Industry 4.0 technologies is turning India into a laboratory of scalable, frugal, and inclusive innovation.
For example, Chandrayaan-3 not only achieved a historic soft landing near the lunar south pole but also did so at a fraction of the cost of similar missions. India is among the top five countries in installed renewable energy capacity, has founded the International Solar Alliance, and is fast-tracking green hydrogen with a five million tonne annual target by 2030. Nothing illustrates India’s technological capabilities and its humanity more than its miraculous development and deployment of Covid-19 and other vaccines to serve and save not just 1.4 billion Indians, but also millions in need in other countries. This is in sharp contrast to inward-looking leading powers.
India hosts the world’s third-largest startup ecosystem, with 119 unicorns. With over 1.4 billion Aadhaar enrolments and monthly UPI transaction value crossing $291 billion, India is the world’s most digitally connected democracy. Reforms such as the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code, PLI, GST, Direct Benefit Transfer, scrapping of over 25,000 compliances, and repealing 1,400 obsolete laws have already borne fruit.
Foxconn is setting up a large-scale manufacturing facility in Uttar Pradesh’s Noida region, focused on chip assembly and advanced electronics production, while Tata Electronics has committed over $314 million to develop an OSAT (Outsourced Semiconductor Assembly and Testing) plant in Assam—India’s first major chip packaging unit. With the 5th largest known reserves of rare earth minerals, India is moving to develop self-sufficiency in this critical space.
Western critiques of Indian democracy often lack context. As C. Raja Mohan argues in “Grasping Greatness”, India’s democratic model operates at a scale and heterogeneity unfamiliar to most Western nations. Governing a polity of 1.4 billion people, diverse in language, religion, caste, and region, within a constitutional framework is an act of democratic engineering, not decline. Nationalism is yoked to the aspirational “developed India by 2047” goal. It draws strength from Ambedkar as much as Vivekananda. It unites castes and communities and celebrates our tribal President, SC Chief Justice, and diverse cabinet. Far from retreating from liberal democracy, India is expanding access to rights and welfare at a scale unmatched in history. The West would do well to show empathy and support for a liberal democracy that is keeping faith and demonstrating that it works to deliver development rather than show impatience or discomfort with its rise.
And what a rise it is! The sheer proportions of social, economic and environmental development reforms undertaken by the Modi government and their impacts easily dwarf any pessimism. Extreme poverty, by the World Bank’s reckoning, has been brought down from 27 per cent to 5 per cent in 11 years. India has been ranked among the top 100 in the UN’s global Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) rankings for the first time ever. Over $43 billion has been transferred to over 110 million farmers under PM-KISAN. Three hundred million houses have been built through Awas Yojana. Over 100 million LPG connections have been allotted to women under Ujjwala Yojana. More than 150 million households have been provided tap water connections, and over 780 million citizens are covered by Ayushman Bharat health insurance.
Tellis also overlooks the progress India has made in turning strategic vision into military operational strength. From Galwan to the LAC build-up, India has reinforced border infrastructure and deployed advanced surveillance systems. Over 75 per cent of capital procurement in FY 2023-24 was sourced from Indian industry, reflecting the success of Make in India reforms. Indigenous defence production crossed $14.8 billion, while there was a thirty-fourfold increase in defence exports in FY 2024-25.
Today, homegrown platforms such as the Tejas Mk1A, BrahMos, Arjun Mk1A, and indigenous anti-drone systems are enhancing India’s defence readiness while being featured in export portfolios. The commissioning of INS Vikrant, India’s first indigenous aircraft carrier, further solidified its status as a full-spectrum maritime power.
India’s evolving doctrine of proactive deterrence was most recently validated during Operation Sindoor, launched in May 2025 in response to the Pahalgam terror attack. Indian forces struck nine terror sites in Pakistan and PoK using a combination of air superiority, electronic warfare, and drone systems. The operation highlighted the strategic coherence of India’s diversified defence partnerships, including the operational reliability of the Russian S-400 system, which thwarted almost all enemy retaliation. At the same time, it underscored the growing role of indigenous platforms developed under Atmanirbhar Bharat.
Tellis struggles to grasp that India has deliberately chosen strategic autonomy over rigid alliance systems. He overlooks the transformative, deep, and wide-ranging strategic partnerships that Modi’s India has sedulously built with the West, particularly with the United States and the European Union, over the past 11 years, while maintaining independent partnerships with Russia, BRICS, the Gulf states, the Global South and others wherever our core interests dictated.
Without binding itself to any bloc, many of which, such as NATO and the G7, are themselves in disarray, India has become a core pillar of the U.S.-led Quad. It is integral to the West’s Indo-Pacific strategic and security architecture, co-leads the iCET initiative, and is driving the IMEC initiative for economic connectivity and integration with Europe and West Asia. At the same time, India’s presidency of the G20 brought the Global South and its concerns to the heart of multilateral decision-making and embedded the Indian civilisational values of Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam: one Earth, one family, one future into its ethos.
It is a time of unprecedented geopolitical churning, where alliances are fluid and the past few years have shown how quickly the strategic calculus of our partners can change. India’s multi-aligned, diversified approach is not ideological; it is pragmatic, even existential. It ensures that in a world of fractured cooperation and transactional statecraft, our interests are not held hostage to other nations’ electoral cycles or foreign policy vacillations.
The world does not seek a new hegemon or a system-maker. It seeks a system-shaper and a force for the global public good, whether it is peace and security, sustainable development, or humanitarian crisis response. India is positioning itself to be exactly that—assertive but not aggressive, proud but not parochial, autonomous but not aloof, reformist but not revisionist. India is well on its way to greatness, one that is beneficial to the world. Its rise is not delusional. It is deliberate. Our path to perfectibility may be strewn with some internal and external challenges, but India will not be stopped. It will power ahead.
* Lakshmi Puri is a former Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations and Deputy Executive Director of UN Women; and a former Ambassador of India.
