Fẹ̀mi Akọ̀mọ̀làfẹ̀
There must still be people around who would remember the time when India did not beg for a seat at the table; it helped to build the table.
In the early decades after independence (August 15, 1947), under Jawaharlal Nehru, India stood as a moral colossus in the post-colonial world. The country spoke not with the trembling voice of a petitioner, but with the steady authority of a civilizational state that is conscious of its weight.
Under Nehru, India did not loiter anxiously at the vestibules of power, hat in hand, seeking approval like a colonial clerk promoted beyond his competence. Indian leaders did not whisper their preferences in Washington’s corridors before deciding whom to trade with, which wars to condemn, or which principles of international law and morality to uphold.
The country stood composed and unapologetic as a civilizational state conscious of both its weight, its responsibilities, and its obligations.
Under Jawaharlal Nehru, India was not merely a country; it was a towering figure in what is today called the Global South. Alongside Gamal Abdel Nasser and Josip Broz Tito, it midwifed the Non-Aligned Movement, not as diplomatic theatre, but as a strategic doctrine.
For the then Indian far-sighted leaders, Non-alignment was not fence-sitting. It was sovereignty weaponized; a refusal to be dragooned into the imperial quarrels of Washington and Moscow.
What stands in the place of solid post-independence today, under Narendra Modi, is something far less dignified: an anxious contraption performing elaborate diplomatic gymnastics and baptizing the spectacle as “strategic autonomy.”
India today behaves less like a pole in a multipolar order and more like a subcontractor within an American imperial architecture. Its policy bandwidth is increasingly calibrated to what is permissible within Washington’s comfort zone.
When a nation of 1.4 billion people, heir to millennia of statecraft, must glance over its shoulder before signing energy contracts with Russia, we are no longer in the realm of diplomacy. We have entered the theatre of managed sovereignty.
Modi and co should feel ashamed of themselves.
In geopolitics, vassalage does not command respect; it invites quiet contempt. And Americans are experts at rubbing it in. Malignant Narcissus Pedo Trump has perfected the art of treating vassals with the contempt they deserve.
Nowhere has this decline been more theatrically displayed than in India’s posture toward West Asia. The choreographed embrace between Modi and Genocidalist Benjamin Netanyahu was not a routine diplomatic flourish. It was a globally legible, unambiguous diplomatic and geopolitical signal.
India, once the careful balancer of contradictions, has shed all pretense of non-alignment; it has chosen the side of imperialist oppressors.
The reaction across the Global South has been swift and unsentimental. From Jakarta to Johannesburg, India is no longer perceived as an independent civilizational voice but as an auxiliary node in a Western-aligned axis, which includes hypocritical Europe and the genocidal settler regime in occupied Palestine.
Words such as “hypocrisy,” “double standards,” and “betrayal” now cling to India’s diplomatic reputation with uncomfortable persistence.
Modi and his colleagues forgot that in geopolitics, perceptions are not cosmetic; they’re currency.
Within forums such as BRICS, this shift has not gone unnoticed. Vladimir Putin watches with the patience of the chess player he is. Beijing calculates with the cold precision of a true Taoist. Others, like Brazil and South Africa, hedge, quietly recalibrating their expectations of a once mighty India.
Read the full article here: https://femiakogun.substack.com/p/how-racism-destroys-indias-geopolitical
– Fẹ̀mi Akọ̀mọ̀làfẹ̀ (1st Dan); Blog: https://femiakogun.substack.com; YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@FemiAkomolafe; www.tiktok.com/@panafricandigest
