The pace of development of the Indian Giant is one of the major variables weighing on the Asian balance of power and, consequently, the global one. The possibility of counterbalancing the Chinese Giant depends on it. If India were to maintain a sustained pace, it could narrow the window of opportunity available to the Chinese Dragon to establish itself in Asia before the regional balance becomes less favourable—or, in any case, before other powers can rely more heavily on the Indian Elephant to condition it.
The old metropolises of imperialism could therefore encourage India's rise, at least until the second Asian imperialist marauder presents them with the bill.
Harsh Pant, vice president of the Observer Research Foundation in New Delhi, reports on this from the subcontinent's point of view. The think tank was founded in 1990 by the Ambani family, owners of India's leading conglomerate, the petrochemical group Reliance Industries, with assets of $228 billion and 382,000 employees. Pant and his co-author write in Power and Purpose [2025] that, after the liberalisation of 1991, India's economic, political, and military rise has made it a nation to ally with
in Asia, partly in order to balance China. Asian military spending is already skyrocketing. War is returning to the centre of international relations, to the point of prompting Japan to reconsider its conventional and strategic rearmament.
The Indo-Pacific region will be the critical theatre of tensions, a crucial hub of the global economy and politics. India, Pant concludes, will be able to capitalise on its multi-alignment strategy in the region, provided it can sustain another uphill stretch in its economic ascent.
The dialectic between the economic rhythms of the Ganges and the political-military tempos of the Pacific refers back to our analysis of uneven economic and political development and the effects of imperialist development on the Asian chessboard. Analysis of the shifts in economic strength grounded in the defining features of the imperialist phase provides the preliminary framework within which relations among imperialist powers unfold, but it cannot explain them. To explain, or merely describe these relations, a specific analysis of the System of States is needed, namely the Marxist science of international relations. As for the essential characteristics of India's rise, we must return to the five main hallmarks
of the imperialist phase identified by Lenin.
Imperialism is the product of the uneven development of capitalism and, ultimately, of uneven degrees of concentration among corporate groups, economic sectors, and countries. It is no coincidence
, observes Arrigo Cervetto, that the first chapter of Lenin's Imperialism is devoted to 'Concentration of Production and Monopolies': the other chapters are nothing more than an analysis of the global consequences of the law of concentration [...] which has uneven degrees of development
. The hallmarks
should therefore be understood as working tools for analysing uneven imperialist development, for investigating the process, and not for labelling it or confining it to the straitjacket of a series of schemes.
In the course of development, the concentration of production and capital reaches such a high degree that it creates dominant business groups with a decisive function
in economic life on the domestic market, and therefore on the world market. The concentration of the banking sector leads to the merging of banks and industry into finance capital.
India has seen precisely this formation of large-scale enterprises, which, according to the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations, now employ 30% of the Indian labour force in manufacturing. Fortune's ranking of the top 500 global corporate groups by turnover now includes nine Indian conglomerates, the same number as China had in 2000. The largest is Reliance Industries: beginning in the 1960s with textiles in Maharashtra and Gujarat, it expanded into petrochemicals and began manufacturing polyester yarns through agreements with the American company DuPont.
The State Bank of India is the country's leading financial enterprise. Originating from the Imperial Bank, it was formed in 1921 from the merger of the British Presidency banks: the Bank of Calcutta founded in 1806, the Bank of Bombay in 1840, and the Bank of Madras in 1843. The history of finance capital brings to mind Marx's writings on the early stages of capitalism in India, in the wake of British colonialism. Over 170 years of uneven development have come full circle with the maturation of Indian imperialism.
The concentration and centralisation of capital now overflow into external projection, and the export of capital assumes great importance. The world powers are integrated into the financial globalisation of unitary imperialism; they engage in intense competition over the differentiated returns arising from their mutual capital interpenetration; and they project themselves into regions of expansive development. Each power is characterised by uneven degrees of capital internationalisation.
The United States is the major debtor, since it has $35 trillion in foreign assets, including direct and portfolio investments, credits, and monetary reserves, but $62 trillion in liabilities, i.e., foreign investments and capital deposits in the US. The decline in the US's net position is a sign of the growing disproportion between the driving force of the leading power and its fragility, and is one of the great unknowns of this decade. Next comes the Eurozone, with $40 trillion held abroad and $39 trillion incoming, followed by the United Kingdom ($18 trillion and $18 trillion), and Japan ($11 trillion and $7 trillion). It is important to bear in mind the influence of share prices and exchange rates on these figures, but above all the high degree of interpenetration between the old powers, which accounts for about half of the stock: the primary destination of European capital is the United States and vice versa. This is the result of the historical intertwining between the big business groups and powers of the old imperialist cartel.
China has joined the fray in the last fifteen years, going from $3 trillion to $10 trillion in foreign assets, partly thanks to the Silk Road initiative, to which another $3 trillion should be added from Hong Kong's extra-China assets. We have investigated the emergence and maturation of this imperialism and therefore have a wide range of comparisons with which to investigate India's rise, from a similar continental starting point. A Chinese script can be placed alongside the American and European scripts in the study of the social and political phenomena of imperialism in the age of the Asian Giants.
Today, the Dragon has surpassed Japan in all respects, but it also has the size to challenge the US and Europe, with their $30-40 trillion of external capital projection accumulated in the long post-war cycle. India, on the other hand, stands at the level of a rising middle power, slightly above Brazil, with $1 trillion in foreign assets and $2 trillion in inflows. As in China before 1999, the take-off phase sees a prevalence of capital inflows fuelling imperialist development. On the other hand, the foreign capital stocks of the two rising Asian Giants are growing at twice the rate of the old powers.
India has a working-age population of 900 million, an active population of 600 million, and a wage labour pool of over 300 million: a reserve of surplus value that the Indian bourgeoisie and international capital can exploit to fuel the rise of the new Asian imperialist marauder, alongside hundreds of millions of latent, potential, and urbanising proletarians. In India, informal work is, in reality, the typical form of employment in many sectors: a substantial proportion of urban employment, including self-employment and casual work, is believed to be undeclared; according to the 2026 Economic Survey, workers with regular contracts are 52% of those employed in the service sector, 26% of those in industry, and only 1% of those in agriculture.
It can be estimated that India's take-off is one generation behind that of China, with the added complication, compared to China, of having a looming rival ahead of it and, in any case, a narrower space in power relations. In this regard, in the coming years, it will be necessary to assess the entry of Indian corporate groups into the international concentrations that divide up the world market, and India's participation in the contention between the great marauders of imperialism, who divide up the world in proportion to the uneven dynamics of their economic strength. Strength
, Lenin pointed out, varies with the degree of economic and political development
, whether economic-financial or political-military. It is therefore necessary to follow how the rise of Indian imperialism manifests itself in international relations.
India is the third Asian country to sign a security and defence partnership agreement with the EU, after Japan and South Korea, and the third country in a few months to sign a trade agreement with European imperialism, after the Mercosur bloc and Indonesia. Raja Mohan writes in The Indian Express on January 14th that Europe is being compelled to rethink its long-standing dependencies — on Russian energy, Chinese supply chains, and American security guarantees. India confronts its own set of pressures: US trade coercion, excessive reliance on Russian weapons, and mounting Chinese challenges on its frontiers
. This results in a sort of objective convergence between the two powers, in the revision of their respective relations with the United States, China, and Russia, and in the prospect of combining India's demographic scale and market depth with Europe's industrial strength and technological sophistication
.
Three considerations can be put forward. The first concerns the weight of inter-imperialist agreements between the EU and India in the overall relationship between the powers. Clearly, trade agreements in Asia and South America are part of Europe's response to the Atlantic crisis triggered by the US, along with the doubling of military spending, but they have further implications. The Euro-Indian agreement preceded, and contributed to, the provisional agreement between the US and India on trade tariffs. In turn, these agreements weaken the energy relationship between India and Russia, even though Delhi denies having capitulated to American pressure and the controversy between the Indian political currents rages on. Finally, the shift will affect relations between Russia and China, and between India and China. Therefore, the reciprocal changes in the multilateral relationship between the powers must be measured. If Japan is included in a six-power system, this implies fifteen bilateral relationships and twenty triangular relationships, i.e., a complex system of interdependencies which requires specific analysis beyond the study of economic factors, however necessary. This will be a concrete analysis of the crisis in the world order in Asia.
The second observation concerns multi-alignment as India's imperialist theory, not in the sense of an exclusive characteristic — all powers have multiple relationships — but in the sense of a political tradition in Delhi in which the abandonment of the old non-alignment has gradually corresponded to imperialist maturation. For years, like China before it, India has had a sort of induced weight
, given by the interest of the powers in playing the Indian card
in the Asian balance of power. This is partly confirmed, especially towards China, but at the same time it is also transformed by the imperialist use that India can make of it in its action as an autonomous power. In this sense, if non-alignment sought to capitalise to some extent on the imperialist power game played by other countries, multi-alignment is the theory of India as a power.
Finally, Delhi's imperialist ambitions must be commensurate with the extent of its continental body. It is revealing that the free trade agreement with the EU excluded agriculture, which is said to be non-negotiable, as some 700 million people depend on it for their livelihood. On the other hand, it is the Indian big business groups which are pushing for openness. Natarajan Chandrasekaran, chairman of Tata Group, wrote in The Times of India on January 30th that Indian manufacturers will soon find themselves integrated into EU production and their trade in goods with other global partners. [...] Hundreds of new factories will be built in India
. V. Anantha Nageswaran, economic adviser to the government and author of the Economic Survey, comments in The Indian Express on January 31st that India's manufacturing profile is beginning to move up the value chain
, but delays in land acquisition, utilities, regulatory approvals, and dispute resolution affect investment decisions. [...] As manufacturing becomes more spatially concentrated [...] the role of State and local governments will be decisive
. These are the issues that Indian imperialist democracy will have to resolve.