A New Roadmap for India

Description: India needs to focus on strengthening its infrastructure, Khanna says.

Question:  Should India start to challenge China?

Transcript:  India has a lot more internal lot to do, I think it would focus a lot more on a domestic developments side of things which is the real ultimate internal basis for expanding your influence overseas. Secondly if they were to compete with China traditional terms it would lose, it is not nearly as powerful as China. It would get quite simply be up, that is not some thing that it should be want to happen. Indians talk a lot of about wanting to be a different kind of power, they say a bridging power, we are a constitutional super power. We are Diaspora power, lots of different ways to try to be different from the traditional great power model. I would like to see India achieve that and I would even like to be a part of India achieving that, but I don’t think that they have a road map for doing so and some one who follows very closely how they try to use globalization, recruit the Diaspora and use economic leverage internationally to gain prestige. I see a mixed picture of good and bad positive trends, negative trends. It is a work in progress till they have a road map for that, I don’t think they should be challenging any one. 

Question: What does India need to do?

Transcript:  I think the road map would be some of the things that I sort of hinted at them wanting to do. So it is the economic integration of United States such that a third of Sulphur and manufacturing from American corporations now happens in India. It is the integration with China economically such that they can buy into Chinese enterprises and vice versa and create this incentives so there will be sort of conflict between them. There is developing deeper economic ties because they are already are demographic ties with gulf countries where there so much Indian labor. So they don’t just get energy resources from the gulf but they can also project a positive influence in the gulf countries. For example, when Iraqis or when Indians are voted in Indian elections were the Iraqi election has expatriates in the gulf, Arabs have scratched their heads and said I can’t believe these people who they treat very very poorly are able to vote in another country and we don’t vote in our own country. So things like this are the kinds of examples that the ways in the trend you have like to set for the example for the rest of the world, but it needs to do so a lot more proactively and successfully for that matter, before I can really be a role models and so.

Recorded on: 3/3/08