There was a time when speaking of India’s civilisational past in policy circles invited a knowing smile, sometimes a pitying one. The fashionable view was that ancient wisdom and modern statecraft belonged to separate compartments, that the former was the province of priests and pundits while the latter required a scrubbed mind unburdened by tradition. That assumption is wearing thin. The country is discovering that a resilient future need not be built at the cost of its civilisational roots, and that scientific temper and technological ambition are not weakened by an inheritance of wisdom but strengthened by it.

The old and the new are learning to work together in India, and the results are showing. Consider what we witnessed when India hosted the G20 in 2023. Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam, drawn from the Maha Upanishad, was rendered for the world as One Earth, One Family, One Future. In the hands of Prime Minister Modi this was not a translated phrase placed on a logo. It was a civilisational proposition placed before the most powerful economies on the planet, a reframing of the global agenda itself. The argument was that the framework for solving climate, debt, food, and energy crises had to begin from a recognition of interconnectedness rather than transaction.

The African Union secured permanent membership of the G20 under that very presidency, a decision shaped as much by moral argument as by realpolitik. Few diplomatic gains of recent years have been more consequential, and fewer still have been rooted so visibly in an ancient civilisational instinct. Look closer at the grassroots and the same pattern reveals itself. The Unified Payments Interface, our homegrown digital public infrastructure, processed over 22,800 crore transactions in calendar year 2025, with a daily average nearing 60 crore payments. The IMF, in its June 2025 report on retail digital payments, recognised UPI as the world’s largest fast payment system by transaction volume.

A vegetable vendor in a small town now transacts with the same fluency as a Mumbai banker. This is not the work of imported software. It is the work of a civilisation that has always understood that the small and the great occupy the same continuum, that the street vendor and the policymaker deserve equal dignity in their dealings. Antyodaya, which Pandit Deendayal Upadhyaya offered as the soul of Indian governance, has slowly become its method. Each major welfare scheme of the last decade has been........

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