India faces challenges from four specific directions. The first is from established Western powers that believe India, not just China, is likely to be the West’s principal threat in 2050. To slow—even stall—its rise is now an established part of US foreign policy. Co-option failed. Subalternship too failed. Sanctions and tariffs have been weaponised. – Minhaz Merchant
Award-winning author Pankaj Mishra was involved in a famous literary feud with historian Niall Ferguson in November 2011. The embers of that feud, in which Ferguson threatened to sue Mishra for libel, may have died down, but the substance has a bearing on the geopolitical and domestic challenges India currently faces.
Mishra had written a long and savagely critical review of Ferguson’s book Civilisation: The West and the Rest in the widely read London Review of Books. Ferguson’s main charge against Mishra was that the Indian-origin author had called him a racist.
Racists are notoriously sensitive about being called racist. Racism is not acceptable in polite society, which prides itself on being culturally and socially evolved. In the West, you can be a racist in private but not in public. The title of Ferguson’s book, segregating the West from the Rest, is a racist dog whistle. Mishra called it out in his review.
An incensed Ferguson replied: “It is not my habit to reply to hostile book reviews, but a personal attack that amounts to libel is another matter. Pankaj Mishra purports to discuss my book Civilisation: The West and the Rest, but in reality his review is a crude attempt at character assassination, which not only mendaciously misrepresents my work but also strongly implies that I am a racist.”
The neo-imperial world that Ferguson endorsed in Civilisation: The West and the Rest is meanwhile falling apart. Europe has been struck simultaneously by de-industrialisation, low economic growth, and illegal immigration. The United States is retreating into its own Dark Ages. Its powerful military has lost every major war it has fought since 1945: Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and now Iran. The Pentagon has run out of munitions. It doesn’t have enough ballistic missiles to relaunch its war on Iran.
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American society is fractured. President Donald Trump’s MAGA base is deeply and openly racist. Members of the Trump administration like Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security, are self-declared white supremacists.
For India, this is an especially challenging period. When new powers rise, established legacy powers react in three chronological sequences. First, they attempt to co-opt the new power in a subservient alliance. Second, if the new subaltern displays an independent streak, they impose restrictions on its growth — subtle but severe. Finally, when the rising new power begins to pose a significant threat to the established order, its trajectory is disrupted in a variety of ways: sanctions and tariffs to start with, followed by encouraging local dissent. The tourniquet tightens slowly.
India faces challenges from four specific directions. The first is from established Western powers that believe India, not just China, is likely to be the West’s principal threat in 2050. To slow—even stall—its rise is now an established part of US foreign policy. Co-option failed. Subalternship too failed. Sanctions and tariffs have been weaponised.
The second challenge for India is China and the China-Pakistan axis. India’s rise worries Beijing far more than it concedes in public or private. It knows its own economy is on an unstoppable downward spiral. The country is ageing and shrinking. Ghost towns with empty buildings dot the country. Property prices have crashed by 50 per cent from their 2020 peak. In response to the changing geopolitical architecture, Beijing has armed Pakistan against India.
The third challenge India faces is an Opposition that does not understand the function of an Opposition in a democracy. That function is to oppose, not disrupt, and to suggest constructive policy solutions to India’s multiple problems: broken city governance, endemic corruption, and poor law enforcement.
The fourth challenge is the incompetence of the NDA government itself. It has done well across domains in the last 12 years but has allowed old weaknesses to reappear. The old Licence Raj may have been dismantled, but a Bureaucratic Raj has replaced it.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi has always preferred dealing with bureaucrats. He has installed former IAS officers as RBI governor (Sanjay Malhotra) and SEBI chairman (Tuhin Pandey). The head of the Ram Mandir construction committee (Nripendra Mishra), also a former IAS officer, earlier served as PM Modi’s principal secretary. Even two of his standout Union ministers—Dr S. Jaishankar and Ashwini Vaishnaw—are former bureaucrats. External Affairs Minister Jaishankar is a former IFS officer and MeitY and Railways Minister Vaishnaw is a former IAS officer.
The solutions
Dealing with Western powers that want a strong India but not a dominant India needs strategic nuance. India must turn Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping’s advice in 1979—“hide your strength, bide your time”—on its head: “build your strength, await your time.” India’s time will come. Till then, strengthen the economy and military.
Tackling the China-Pakistan axis is complex. But here too, the answer lies in strengthening the economy and modernising the military. Pakistan’s Sunni-Islamic defence pacts with Saudi Arabia and Türkiye should not worry India unduly. As an Iranian leader said last week, these are mere pieces of paper. If Saudi Arabia reforms its policies, he said, it would not need to “beg” others for security.
The Indian Opposition and the internal anarchists it promotes, meanwhile, need a structured approach. India has several governance issues—cities, corruption, crime—and the government must focus on these as much as it does on winning elections through delimitation.
The biggest challenge lies within the government. After 12 years, many compliances have gone, but others have crept in. On taking office in 2014, PM Modi promised a red carpet for global investors. Today that carpet is held in place by red tape. – Firstpost, 12 August 2026
› Minhaz Merchant is an editor, author and publisher.
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BHARATA BHARATI 