Can India translate growth into global influence?

‘There’s flies in the kitchen, I can hear ‘em there buzzin’/ And I ain’t done nothin’ since I woke up today’. – John Prine, ‘Angel from Montgomery’

It was just the Pahalgam anniversary. One year since April 22, 2025, when 26 innocent people were killed in a valley that has seen too much blood. Dan Qayyum’s recent essay in The Pakistan Playbook, marking that grim milestone, is quite engaging – especially against the background of Islamabad’s new efforts at brokering peace and, diplomatically speaking, punching well above its weight. Still, Qayyum’s is a cynical and one-sided piece.

We know the grim details of April 22. Qayyum’s assessments are acerbic. He dismisses the attribution of the attack to Pakistan-backed elements, Operation Sindoor, and the accompanying political narrative as little more than domestic theatre.

The victims get reduced to props in an ongoing performance. Most provocatively, Qayyum asserts that the world sees India not as a geopolitical power but merely as a large market. He states, “It is a commercial reality that [India’s] leadership has spent a decade failing to convert into anything else.”

Let’s pause on this claim. Such sweeping reductionism ignores India’s substantial strategic advances. New Delhi has moved well beyond a passive consumer status, building resilient defence capabilities and asserting its voice as a leader of the Global South.

To categorise a nuclear-armed state with an expanding space programme and a pivotal role in global supply chains as merely a “market” is deliberate narrative erasure. Consider India’s role in the Quad, or its emerging position as a critical node in semiconductor supply chain diversification. These are not the achievements of a mere market.

But Qayyum’s critique contains a kernel of truth: India’s economic heft has not yet translated into agenda-setting power. It can convene but cannot compel. It can participate but cannot shape outcomes.

Still, Qayyum’s essay reads more like narrative warfare than sober analysis. That said, the piece prods at an uncomfortable broader reality about our long-enduring stalemate. John Prine captured this kind of quiet human weariness in a powerful song from his 1971 debut album:

‘I am an old woman named after my mother/ My old man is another child who’s grown old./ When I was a young girl, well, I had me a cowboy/ He weren’t much to look at, just a free ramblin’ man/ But that was a long time, and no matter how I try/ The years just flow by like a broken-down dam.’

A generation ago, the consensus was that the new century would be defined by Asian resurgence, with New Delhi as one of its twin pillars. How many times did we hear it – This is Asia’s century – that India was destined to take its rightful place on the world stage? Yet as the geopolitical map hardens into a purely polar reality, India does risk being viewed as a destination for capital rather than an architect of the global order.

Qayyum points to stalled regional initiatives and even to Pakistan’s recent diplomatic manoeuvres as evidence that India remains more consumer market than regional power broker.

Converting market strength into sustained influence remains a profound challenge. It requires more than reactive operations or symbolic posturing; it demands a rigorous commitment to building resilient institutions and a diplomacy that prioritises tangible strategic outcomes over optics.

The wholesale neglect of normative power is particularly telling: in India, this manifests through the chasm between academia and governance, the former impoverished in funding, the latter impoverished in ideas. That glaring gap will hobble India’s great power ambitions as long as it’s left unaddressed.

‘How the hell can a person go to work in the morning/ Then come home in the evening and have nothing to say?’

If focus remains on managing perceptions rather than resolving structural dependencies, India risks validating the very critiques it rightfully seeks to silence. The subcontinent’s people deserve a future built on more than recycled patterns of accusation and denial; we need economic potential translated into a stable, independent regional order.

‘If dreams were lightning and thunder were desire/ This old house would’ve burned down a long time ago’.

Perhaps this is our deepest pathology: the sheer exhaustion of repeating the same arguments, fighting the same battles, mourning the same losses, generation after generation. Qayyum’s essay, for all its provocation, reflects Pakistan’s own weariness with a conflict that has consumed resources and stunted potential for seventy-five years.

His dismissal of Indian power may be overstated, but his implicit challenge still piques. The machinery of enmity grinds on, producing heat but precious little light, while both nations’ citizens watch their potential futures deferred indefinitely.

‘To believe in this livin’ is just a hard way to go.’

The writer, as Dr Jekyll, is a Professor of Philosophy, Politics and Law, author and editor of over 20 books and counting, and as Mr Hyde, one of India’s top-ranking Ironman triathletes.

(Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.)