Is India a sleeping giant, rising power or a great global power ?

I. How do you assess India’s level of preparedness to assume a greater role in international politics?
Let me make a general remark about historically what great powers do. Good great powers are seen as custodians of an international system from which they benefit. So they are interested in global commerce, security, and more recently, the environment. Bad great powers suffer from the strategic entrepreneurship of misguided leaders who have eccentric ideologies. Indifferent great powers suffer from strategic arthritis. Their leaders’ well-meaning attitude makes them reluctant to advance either principles or interest in international affairs.
I am sure India would be a unique great power. But India will need to develop a certain idea of what it wants to do in international affairs. At present it remains, at the highest level of formality, committed to the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). But in practice it is interested in multiple alignments. It has a foreign policy that sees it want to maintain very good links with a number of different societies, cultures, countries, and people. At present the Indian leadership is interested in progressing, deepening, and managing those multiple alignments outside of its neighborhood. And yet it would not be easy to deal with a neighborhood like the one you find yourself in and at the same time conduct an extrovert foreign policy. The Indian leadership is now caught between the requirement of its neighbourhood and the ambition of being seen as a global player.
II. How do you see India’s relation with China working out in the future while it tries to project itself as a military power in the region?
Both India and China are investing substantially in defence. China more spectacularly so — 18 per cent (of GDP), by its own admission, last year. China wants to have capacities that will take it outside of its own region. India is doing the same. One sees in India’s defence diplomacy real activism towards two areas where it had little engagement before — South East Asia, where there is a great deal of interest in helping in the security of Malacca Strait; and the Persian Gulf, where India has large and expanding economic interests and where the security of Hormuz could affect its interests. It’s an objective fact that when you have three Asian powers rising at the same time, there will be competition. It will not be a competition that any of the three powers will want openly to talk about, because the nature of Asian diplomacy doesn’t permit that. But you have Japan wanting to be a more normal power. You have China wanting to be a global power and India wanting this role, too. Other countries in Asia will be playing these countries off against each other. The invitation to India to join the East Asia summit came from ASEAN states that wanted to have a diplomatic balance to Chinese presence at the summit. So it’s not only the case that India and China have border disputes and parallel ambitions but also that other regional countries perceive that and conduct their diplomacy with that perception.
Dr John Chipman, D G & Chief Executive of the International Institute for Strategic Studies
Indian Express 20 April 2008