How Racism Destroys India’s Geopolitical Ambitions

There must still be people around who would remember the time when India did not beg for a seat at the table; it helped to build the table.

In the early decades after independence (August 15, 1947), under Jawaharlal Nehru, India stood as a moral colossus in the post-colonial world. The country spoke not with the trembling voice of a petitioner, but with the steady authority of a civilizational state that is conscious of its weight.

Under Nehru, India did not loiter anxiously at the vestibules of power, hat in hand, seeking approval like a colonial clerk promoted beyond his competence. Indian leaders did not whisper their preferences in Washington’s corridors before deciding whom to trade with, which wars to condemn, or which principles of international law and morality to uphold.

The country stood composed and unapologetic as a civilizational state conscious of both its weight, its responsibilities, and its obligations.

Under Jawaharlal Nehru, India was not merely a country; it was a towering figure in what is today called the Global South. Alongside Gamal Abdel Nasser and Josip Broz Tito, it midwifed the Non-Aligned Movement, not as diplomatic theatre, but as a strategic doctrine.

For the then Indian far-sighted leaders, Non-alignment was not fence-sitting. It was sovereignty weaponized; a refusal to be dragooned into the imperial quarrels of Washington and Moscow.

What stands in the place of solid post-independence today, under Narendra Modi, is something far less dignified: an anxious contraption performing elaborate diplomatic gymnastics and baptizing the spectacle as “strategic autonomy.”

India today behaves less like a pole in a multipolar order and more like a subcontractor within an American imperial architecture. Its policy bandwidth is increasingly calibrated to what is permissible within Washington’s comfort zone.

When a nation of 1.4 billion people, heir to millennia of statecraft, must glance over its shoulder before signing energy contracts with Russia, we are no longer in the realm of diplomacy. We have entered the theatre of managed sovereignty.

Modi and co should feel ashamed of themselves.

In geopolitics, vassalage does not command respect; it invites quiet contempt. And Americans are experts at rubbing it in. Malignant Narcissus Pedo Trump has perfected the art of treating vassals with the contempt they deserve.

Nowhere has this decline been more theatrically displayed than in India’s posture toward West Asia. The choreographed embrace between Modi and Genocidalist Benjamin Netanyahu was not a routine diplomatic flourish. It was a globally legible, unambiguous diplomatic and geopolitical signal.

India, once the careful balancer of contradictions, has shed all pretense of non-alignment; it has chosen the side of imperialist oppressors.

The reaction across the Global South has been swift and unsentimental. From Jakarta to Johannesburg, India is no longer perceived as an independent civilizational voice but as an auxiliary node in a Western-aligned axis, which includes hypocritical Europe and the genocidal settler regime in occupied Palestine.

Words such as “hypocrisy,” “double standards,” and “betrayal” now cling to India’s diplomatic reputation with uncomfortable persistence.

Modi and his colleagues forgot that in geopolitics, perceptions are not cosmetic; they’re currency.

Within forums such as BRICS, this shift has not gone unnoticed. Vladimir Putin watches with the patience of the chess player he is. Beijing calculates with the cold precision of a true Taoist. Others, like Brazil and South Africa, hedge, quietly recalibrating their expectations of a once mighty India.

The unspoken question to India hangs in the air like an accusation: can a state so visibly entangled with Washington be trusted to advance a genuinely multipolar agenda?

The answer, increasingly, is delivered not in words but in strategic distancing.

While India’s external drift is merely symptomatic, its deeper pathology lies within. For what we are witnessing is not simply a misalignment of interests, but a collapse of coherence, what the geopolitical thinker Alastair Crookehas long identified as the cardinal sin of statecraft.

India today suffers from precisely this dissonance. It proclaims civilizational confidence while practicing strategic dependency. It invokes the language of sovereignty while operating within externally defined constraints. It seeks leadership of the Global South while alienating that very constituency through both policy choices and social conduct.

For beneath the grand rhetoric of “Vishwaguru” lies an uglier, less discussed reality: a persistent and deeply embedded discomfort with Blackness. The treatment of African migrants within India, marked by periodic eruptions of violence, harassment, and open racial abuse, could no longer be called an aberration. It has become a pattern.

From the mob attacks in Greater Noida to the humiliations endured in Delhi and Bangalore, the message has been consistent and damning.

A nation that seeks to lead the Global South cannot simultaneously dehumanize segments of that same South without consequence.

This is India’s fatal contradiction.
You cannot preach solidarity with Palestine in the morning and clasp hands with its most relentless genocidalists by afternoon. You cannot invoke South-South cooperation while treating fellow Southerners as disposable intruders.

Modi and his gang should understand that leadership is not a press release; it is a lived ethic.

Even the sanctified figure of Mahatma Gandhi is not immune from this reckoning. His early writings in South Africa, often excused as artifacts of their time, reveal a discomforting hierarchy of race that history has not entirely exorcised. Shadows, once cast, have a habit of lingering.

It was the anger felt by India’s virulent racism that provoked the toppling of Gandhi’s statue at a university in Ghana following protests in 2018.

What we are witnessing is not merely India’s geopolitical decline, but its civilizational confusion. A state that once articulated the grammar of post-colonial autonomy now struggles to conjugate its own principles. India wants to be a pole in a multipolar world, yet behaves like a supplicant in a unipolar hangover.

Across Africa, new alignments are forming. States are diversifying partnerships, asserting agency, and rediscovering the strategic instinct that India once helped inspire.

The irony couldn’t be more devastating: the intellectual architect of non-alignment now finds itself excluded from its contemporary reinvention.

This is not India’s destiny; it is a choice made by Modi and his Hindu fanatics.

India’s potential remains immense, demographic, economic, and civilizational. But potential, without direction, is merely dormant power.

To recover its standing, India must undertake a far more difficult task than issuing communiqués or hosting summits.

New Delhi must remember that sovereignty cannot coexist with dependency masquerading as partnership. That leadership is earned through consistency, not proclaimed through ambition. That respect, in international affairs, is reciprocal or it is nonexistent.

Above all, India must rediscover the confidence that once allowed it to stand apart from empires rather than lean into them.

Until then, India will continue its peculiar performance, gesturing toward greatness while negotiating its limitations in someone else’s shadow.

India, a civilization that once built the table, now waits to be assigned a seat.

©️ Fẹ̀mi Akọ̀mọ̀‌làfẹ̀ (1st Dan)

(Farmer, Writer, Published Author, Essayist, Satirist, Social Commentator, Geopolitical Analyst.)

My Mission: Ignorantia et stultitia delendae sunt / Ignorance and stupidity must be destroyed.

Blog: https://femiakogun.substack.com