The Colonial Roots of India’s Strategic Paralysis
How Hindutva’s Mimicry of White Supremacist Hierarchies
Undermines New Delhi’s Global Ambitions
Mohan Jyoti Dutta
THE STAGE AND ITS SCRIPTURE
The
scene deserves close reading. At the Raisina Dialogue in New Delhi last
week—India’s flagship geopolitical forum, co-organized by the Ministry of
External Affairs and the Observer Research Foundation—U.S. Deputy Secretary of
State Christopher Landau sat on stage before a large screen bearing the
conference’s Sanskrit theme: Saṁskāra. Beneath it, three English words arranged
like a catechism: Assertion, Accommodation, Advancement. The organizers’
framing was aspirational. Saṁskāra, they explained, is a civilizational
inheritance of identity that enables societies to assert who they are,
accommodate difference, and advance through refinement. The language gestured
toward sovereignty, toward a post-Western order in which India’s civilizational
depth would finally be recognized as a form of geopolitical authority.
What
transpired beneath that banner was something else entirely. Landau, speaking
with the relaxed authority of an official who knows he holds the stronger hand,
delivered a message that collapsed the aspirational framework into its material
opposite. The United States, he explained, would not repeat the mistakes it
made with China twenty years ago. Washington would not allow India to develop
markets and then find itself beaten commercially. Any trade arrangement would
be structured to protect American interests first. He was, he noted cheerfully,
not in New Delhi to do “social work or charity.” He was there because the
relationship served American purposes. And when asked about India’s energy
crisis—deepening as the U.S.-Israel strikes on Iran destabilize the Gulf—Landau
pivoted smoothly to salesmanship: he could not think of a better energy
supplier than the United States of America.
Read
the scene again. A representative of American imperial power sits on India’s
premier stage, framed by Sanskrit scripture and civilizational keywords, and
proceeds to dictate the terms under which India will be permitted to develop
economically—while pitching American oil as the solution to a crisis American
bombs created. The audience of Indian diplomats, military officers, and policy
intellectuals received this with what reporters described as composure. No one
on stage challenged the framing. No one asked Landau to reconcile his
warning—that the U.S. would structurally prevent India from becoming a
commercial rival—with the banner above his head proclaiming Indian
civilizational “Assertion.” The Saṁskāra, it turns out, was not a statement of
Indian sovereignty. It was the decorative backdrop for American condescension.
THE COMMUNICATIVE ARCHITECTURE OF SUBORDINATION
The
culture-centered approach (CCA) to communication foregrounds the interplay of structure, culture, and agency
in determining whose voices circulate, under what conditions, and in whose
interests. Applied to the communicative practices of the nation-state, CCA
reveals how discourse does not merely reflect power but actively constitutes
it. What a state says, to whom, and with what degree of conviction is itself a
form of material politics. And what it cannot say—or chooses not to say in the
presence of those who hold structural power over it—reveals the actual
distribution of agency beneath the rhetorical surface.
The
Raisina Dialogue stage is a near-perfect case study in what I term
communicative inversion: a discursive pattern in which the louder the assertion
of sovereignty and civilizational authority in one communicative domain, the
more complete the surrender in another. The conference theme—Saṁskāra:
Assertion, Accommodation, Advancement—was designed to project India as a
civilization-state reclaiming its rightful place in a fragmenting global order.
The three English sub-headings performed the work of translating Sanskrit
philosophical depth into the grammar of Western strategic discourse, signaling
that India could operate fluently in both registers. But the translation itself
is the tell. Saṁskāra—a concept that in its classical usage refers to the deep
impressions that shape consciousness, the karmic residue of accumulated
experience—was conscripted into the service of a thoroughly neoliberal
triptych: assert your brand, accommodate the market, advance your position. The
civilizational concept was hollowed of its philosophical content and refilled
with the vocabulary of a McKinsey strategy deck.
Then
Landau walked onto that stage and performed the real-world content of each
term. Assertion? The United States asserted that India would not be allowed to
develop into a commercial competitor. Accommodation? India accommodated this
publicly delivered ultimatum without visible protest, on its own soil, at its
own conference. Advancement? The advancement on offer was a trade deal
structured on American terms, with American energy replacing the Gulf and
Russian supplies that American foreign policy was simultaneously destroying.
The Sanskrit frame was not subverted by Landau’s presence. It was completed by
it. The saṁskāra—the deep civilizational impression—on display was not
sovereign confidence. It was the inherited pattern of colonial deference,
replaying itself in real time under Sanskrit decoration.
THE GENEALOGY OF TIMIDITY
This
communicative inversion—swagger at home, silence abroad—is not incidental to
the Hindutva project. It is constitutive of it. Hindutva did not emerge as a
rejection of British colonialism. It emerged as its opportunistic mirror. V.D.
Savarkar and M.S. Golwalkar, the movement’s intellectual architects, did not
seek to dismantle the colonial state; they sought to capture it, to “Hindu-ize”
its apparatus while retaining its extractive logic, its majoritarian governance
structure, and its racial hierarchies—merely substituting the Hindu upper caste
for the white colonizer at the apex. The movement’s foundational anxiety was
not the injustice of colonial rule as such, but the perceived weakness of
Hindus within it relative to Muslims and Christians. Its prescription was not
liberation but emulation: become a “proper” nation-state in the European mold,
prove worthiness to the white gaze, discipline internal minorities as the
British had disciplined the natives.
That
genealogy is the skeleton key to the Raisina Dialogue scene. The same
government that bulldozes Muslim neighborhoods in Uttar Pradesh to demonstrate
civilizational resolve cannot bring itself to challenge an American official
who tells India, on Indian soil, that it will not be permitted to compete
commercially. The same prime minister who inaugurates the Ram Temple at Ayodhya
with the production values of a coronation accepts American energy patronage—“I
hope you are thinking of alternate sources,” Landau said, with the tone of a
senior partner advising a client—with visible gratitude. The same
foreign-policy establishment that projects “Vishwaguru” confidence through
every domestic media channel hosted a conference where the American guest
explained, in plain language, that India’s economic advancement would be
permitted only insofar as it did not threaten American dominance, and responded
with what former Ambassador Kanwal Sibal accurately described as a failure of
diplomatic nerve.
The
pattern is structurally consistent: ferocity toward the weak, deference toward
the strong. Cow vigilantes murder Muslim cattle traders in Jharkhand; diplomats
nod politely when Landau describes India’s development as a risk to be managed.
Bulldozers flatten Dalit and Adivasi settlements to make way for smart cities;
Jaishankar describes the post-1945 order as a mere parenthesis while his
government negotiates a trade deal whose terms were dictated by the Trump
administration. This is not pragmatic realism. It is the behavioral signature
of the colonial mimic—a formation that, as Homi Bhabha theorized, can never
achieve the authority it imitates precisely because its power depends on the
approval of those it mimics. The Vishwaguru cannot teach the world because it
is still seeking a grade from Washington.
THE ANTI-COLONIAL ALTERNATIVE
The
tragedy is clarified by historical contrast. The India that earned genuine
global respect in the decades following 1947 operated from a fundamentally
different communicative and strategic foundation. The Nehruvian state’s foreign
policy was rooted not in civilizational braggadocio but in anti-colonial
solidarity. India co-founded the Non-Aligned Movement and gave it intellectual
substance. It defied American pressure on Vietnam. It recognized Bangladesh’s
independence against a Pakistani military backed by both Washington and
Beijing. It championed the Palestinian cause when doing so was diplomatically
costly. It led the global campaign against apartheid in South Africa. These
were not gestures of a supplicant seeking approval. They were the actions of a
state whose leaders understood that genuine sovereignty required moral
consistency—that credibility on the world stage was a function of the coherence
between domestic governance and international posture.
Leaders
from Nehru to Indira Gandhi could project assertiveness abroad precisely
because they were not operating within the inferiority complex that Hindutva
would later cultivate. They did not need the “Vishwaguru” label because their
record—moral, strategic, and largely consistent—earned respect without
requiring proclamation. The anti-colonial tradition understood what the
Hindutva establishment cannot grasp: that a state which treats its own
minorities with dignity can demand that the international order treat all
nations with dignity. A state that practices majoritarian violence at home has
no moral ground from which to resist majoritarian coercion from abroad. Nehru
would not have permitted an American official to describe India’s economic
development as a threat to be contained—on an Indian stage, decorated with
Sanskrit—without a public response. The silence at Raisina was not diplomacy.
It was the sound of a civilizational claim collapsing under the weight of its
own inauthenticity.
THE MATERIAL STRUCTURE OF SILENCE
The
silence, however, is not merely ideological. It is materially enforced. Return
to the structural vulnerabilities that Landau’s performance so efficiently
exposed. Approximately 9.5 million Indian workers in the Gulf states generate
remittances that are structurally essential to India’s balance of payments. An
extended Middle East crisis—which American and Israeli military action has now
guaranteed—does not merely threaten energy prices; it threatens the livelihoods
of millions of families and the macroeconomic stability of the state. Russia’s
deepening subordination to China imperils Indian defense supply lines at
precisely the moment when border tensions with Beijing remain unresolved. The
renewables transition, framed domestically as a sovereignty-enhancing project,
in practice ties India further into Chinese supply chains for solar panels,
batteries, and critical minerals. And Landau’s explicit warning—that the U.S.
would not permit India to become a commercial rival—places a structural ceiling
on the very economic advancement that the Saṁskāra banner promised.
Each
of these dependencies constitutes what CCA analysis identifies as a structural
constraint on communicative agency—a material reality that forecloses certain
speech acts and strategic postures regardless of what the ideology claims. The
Hindutva establishment cannot name these dependencies aloud because doing so
would puncture the Vishwaguru narrative. The result is a policy apparatus
operating in a state of systematic communicative dishonesty: performing
sovereignty while practicing subordination, performing civilizational
confidence while internalizing civilizational anxiety, performing
multi-alignment while executing multi-dependence. The domestic jingoism—temple
politics, cow vigilantism, the systematic persecution of Muslim, Christian,
Dalit, and Adivasi communities—serves a precise psychic function within this
architecture: it compensates for the silence and submission that characterize
India’s actual conduct in the international arena. The subaltern communities
within India absorb the violence that the state cannot direct outward.
THE SAṀSKĀRA INDIA NEEDS
India
does have much to lose from a world in disorder. But what mainstream analysis
consistently understates is that the loss is compounded—made structurally
inescapable—by an ideology that confuses the performance of power with its
exercise, and the repression of the vulnerable with the demonstration of
resolve. The Raisina stage told the entire story in a single frame: Sanskrit
above, American terms below, Indian silence in between. Saṁskāra—Assertion,
Accommodation, Advancement—as performed at the 2026 dialogue, was not a
statement of civilizational confidence. It was a confession of civilizational
captivity.
Until
India’s political establishment confronts the colonial genealogy of that
captivity—the deep structural link between Hindutva’s internalization of
white-supremacist hierarchies and its inability to project genuine autonomy—its
much-vaunted “multi-alignment” will remain what it truly is: a sophisticated
choreography of subordination dressed in saffron. The tiger may roar on
television screens at home. In the real world of power, it continues to jump
through American, Chinese, and Gulf hoops—because the ideology that commands
its movements was never designed for freedom. It was designed for the approval
of masters.
The
alternative exists in India’s own history. The anti-colonial tradition—with its
emphasis on solidarity across difference, structural justice, and the moral
coherence between domestic governance and international conduct—offers a
foreign-policy foundation that Hindutva, by its very nature, cannot provide.
The saṁskāra India actually needs is not the decorative Sanskrit on a
conference stage. It is the deep civilizational impression of anti-colonial
dignity—the one that understood that a nation’s worth is measured not by the
grandeur of its claims but by the justice of its practice, not by the volume of
its roar but by its willingness to speak truth to power rather than Sanskrit to
it.
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