India’s seat is already reserved: G7 has passed its sell-by date

The G7 is the world’s High Table. India is invited every year as a guest, as it was in France this year in a gesture of inclusivity. But it is a gesture by those who don’t belong any more to the G7 High Table — or to any global High Table. All seven G7 members are former colonial powers: Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Canada, Japan and the United States.

Indians harbour a deep-seated complex about the country’s place at global high tables. In an op-ed in The Indian Express, Amitabh Mattoo, dean of the School of International Studies (SIS) at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), wrote plaintively: “Let us hope the more valuable gift the Iran-US deal leaves India with is the questions it forces us to ask ourselves about our illusions, about our place at the table.”

More from Opinion

Like most Indian commentators, Mattoo betrays a colonial mindset about India’s “place at the table”. Instead of calling out the G7 for being a geriatric club of declining former colonial powers, Mattoo believes that India’s place in the world is an “illusion”.

Rewind millennia to understand this psychological bent of mind. India has long fascinated foreigners. Alexander the Great sought to conquer it but returned bloodied from the banks of the Beas river to Babylon. Warlords from the steppes of Central Asia marauded their way through India’s northern plains. The Portuguese, Spanish, French and British soon arrived in ships, coveting Indian textiles and spices, and setting up trading posts along India’s western and eastern coasts.

Cut to the present. India now has over 1,800 Global Capability Centres (GCCs). Why do foreign business and political leaders, 426 years after the arrival of the East India Company (EIC), still covet India?

Most Indian analysts, immersed in self-flagellation, miss where India stands today economically. They talk ceaselessly about India’s middle-income trap. Economist Rathin Roy wrote in an op-ed: “Welcome to the depressing, mediocre country playbook. A crisis has arrived and brings with it the predicted bleakness.”

Roy’s words drip with schadenfreude: “The world’s 4th largest economy has, in a few months, shrunk to being the 6th largest. Global investors are fixated on two growth areas: AI and commodities. India is not a player in either. Foreign investors and political leaders switch from insincere brown-nosing to thinly veiled contempt. Acolytes become critics. Panic sets in.”

This isn’t rational commentary. It is an unintended display of self-contempt. When India reclaims its position as the world’s 4th largest economy in 2027 (which it will, given the respective GDP growth rates of India, Britain and Japan and the rupee’s increasing stability), it is Roy’s words that will attract thinly veiled contempt from the “brown-nosing” foreign investors he alludes to.

Now consider the empirical evidence of where India stands today. Take key manufacturing, industrial, technological and service domains in which India occupies the top three places globally. India is a clear world leader in fintech and digital payments. It has the highest volume of real-time digital transactions of any country in the world. UPI records an average of 2,300 crore (23 billion) transactions per month valued at Rs 26 lakh crore. This is an extraordinary success story of digital technology applied at a scale no other country has matched.

India processes and polishes 11 out of every 12 diamonds in the world. It produces 25 per cent of global milk and dairy supply. India was the third-largest steel producer behind China and Japan in 2015. It has overtaken Japan and is now the world’s second-largest producer of steel. A similar story revolves around passenger cars. In 2015, India was ranked the world’s seventh-largest car manufacturer. It is today the world’s third-largest manufacturer of passenger cars.

In several industries India is a global leader and has maintained its position over the past decade: it is, for example, the world’s largest manufacturer of tractors and the world’s largest producer of cotton. India is in second place globally in several other sectors: generic pharmaceuticals, mobile phones, tea, salt, rice and wheat.

We return to Mattoo’s gloomy and factually inaccurate commentary in The Indian Express:“We have insulated ourselves comfortably to Pakistan being a failing state — failing, bankrupt, falling behind us as we steam past. The Iran crisis explodes that delusion of Pakistani irrelevance. For a nation that has bet its survival on fostering chaos, it is becoming today the interlocutor every foreign ministry is desperate to cultivate. This is not a momentary embarrassment for India. It is a serious long-term threat that demands our attention.”

Mattoo adopts a defeatist tone. He exaggerates Pakistan’s rise in the eyes of the West. He ignores the fact that the West has often used Islamabad to disrupt India’s rise. The US Seventh Fleet did not come to the Bay of Bengal in 1971 to help India. It came to help Pakistan, which was committing genocide in East Pakistan.

The naivety of analysis by Mattoo and Roy is lapped up by the foreign media. Many Western journalists are embedded in their countries’ ecosystems. Those countries have an interest in backing Pakistan, which poses no threat to the West. India does pose a threat as a future economic and geopolitical rival. China today, India tomorrow.

At the G7 summit in France, Trump was careful to flatter PM Modi and India. It is a sign that the most powerful incumbent at the G7 High Table realises that the G7 itself has passed its sell-by date.

(The writer is an editor, author and publisher. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.)