Opinion | The Freedom To Choose: Modi’s I-Day Speech And India’s Case For A Multipolar World

As global rivalries sharpen, India is trying to ensure that no single power can dictate its choices by building more capacity and more alternatives.

India marked its 80th Independence Day this morning. Vande Mataram, now 150 years old, was performed as part of the official Red Fort programme for the first time, and the celebrations were themed around the national song and the role of Yuva Shakti in the journey to 2047. It was Narendra Modi’s thirteenth consecutive address from the ramparts.

He used it to unveil ‘Shakti Ki Saptadhara’, the seven strengths he identified as manufacturing, agriculture and food processing, technology and innovation, connectivity, defence production, green energy and the Blue Economy, and soft power. The announcements attached to them included artificial intelligence training for one crore young Indians, a target of 100 GW of nuclear capacity by 2047, seven to eight new semiconductor plants within two years, and the opening of former offshore ‘no-go areas’ for deep-sea exploration under the Samudra Manthan initiative. On defence, Modi said India cannot remain merely a market for the world and must supply next-generation technology to others.

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Every item on that list addresses a dependency that currently gives other governments leverage over Indian decisions. Fuel, chips, weapons and capital have each been used as instruments of pressure on New Delhi within the past two years. The Saptadhara will be the industrial programme underneath India’s foreign policy, and the past twelve months have shown why the government believes it needs one.

The clearest test of India’s willingness to absorb pressure has been Russian crude. Russia supplied India fewer than 100,000 barrels a day in 2021, roughly 2.5 per cent of imports, according to US Energy Information Administration figures; that rose to about 740,000 bpd in 2022 and nearly 1.8 million bpd by 2023. Washington........

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