India could benefit greatly from restricting the emmigration of her top talented people. Right now the smartest Indians work abroad. The increasingly anti-west foreign policy might be early indications of steps towards that.
India has a long track record of being a non-aligned power. If anything india has been moving closer and closer to the west since the 90s. I think this misinterpretation of india being against the west by some in the west is because they expect their allies to be cronies who'll toe the line.
I agree with you and as does anybody with even a passing familiarity with international diplomacy, foreign policy by its very nature is about engaging with other countries to further a nation's self interests.
The problem is western democracies need to create a narrative of being the white knights of the world in order to justify use of force, coercion or influence to their people no matter how hypocritical that narrative might be considering their own actions in the past. This absolute narrative by extension also means anyone who isn't falling in line with the party line is painted as being on the "wrong side of history".
India is neither aligned with the west nor russia because of a single policy issue like china, and india does not see the world as a bipolar place like west vs russia, west vs china, whoever vs whoever...
India always engages and will always engage with nations where mutual interests are aligned, help where it can, and be assertive where it needs to be.
India is already aligned with the west in containing china amid other common objectives in the indian ocean through QUAD.
Also china isn't that big of a bugbear for india as some outside india think it is. China is the dominant strategic regional threat but is by no means even remotely close to an existential one.
The Indian people and government are furious with china's flouting of the agreed upon status quo at the border and it comes with all the nationalistic fervour that fury entails. It has also eroded india's trust in china at a diplomatic and military level.
India has been trying to counter and contain china's influence in the region with limited success and all of India's politcal, diplomatic and military institutions see china as our biggest threat.
The nuance in the "bugbear" thing is that this accelerated re-orientation against china is not coming from a place of fear, it's coming from a place of "Come at me bro".
While on paper it might seem like India is militarily outmatched by china the geopolitical and tactical reality is that china is incapable of mounting a meaningfully successful attack against India without itself suffering politically, militarily, economically and diplomatically.
I'm not a fan of the Indian government's tendency to behave like a nanny state over the past decade by arbitrary filtering/banning content on the internet. I'm not a fan of a lot of things that the Indian government does or how it goes about doing them.
As far as tiktok, there are plenty of reasons to ban it and there are plenty of reasons not to, though it seemed more reactionary than well thought out.
I don't think nuanced decision making is a strong suite of Indian government when it comes to technology especially censorship(VLC was blocked for god's sake) in direct contrast to how well it seems to be executing the India stack at scale.
This binary choice of aligning and then trapping oneself into being subservient to one sides is exactly what India is trying to avoid.
Ukraine may be fending off Russians with help of the west and may even push Russia all the way back, but their families, cultural & human capital, infrastructure are all being eroded, significantly. Future generations of Ukraine will have to pay this debt.
India voluntarily making a choice which would bring it in the cross-hairs of China or the West would be a catastrophic failure of imagination.
In a sense, Yes; because of its unique History and Geography.
There is no other place on Earth with the same degree of diversity in various aspects like Religion, Philosophies, Social structure, Cultural diversity, Languages, Food, Ethnic groups, Economic strata, Education etc. which exists as a single Nation, thriving and moving forward.
The rest of the World and in particular; "The West" can learn a lot from India on how to live together in spite of differences.
Simple minds should start here:
* From Nation-State to State-Nation - https://carnegieendowment.org/2019/12/18/from-nation-state-t...
* Followup at India is not a nation-state, or a state-nation. It is a civilisational-state - https://www.hindustantimes.com/columns/india-is-not-a-nation...
There is no 'anti-west' foreign policy. India follows neutrality in most geo-political nonsense due to its non-alignment philosophy. It has followed it for the past 75 years and will continue to follow it.
Why should the smartest Indians live in India and not move to developed countries?
Obviously there should be a better reason than that. But hard leaning nationalists tend to lack better ideas.
The level of pride in being American that Democrats have by and large is still a kind of nationalism, albeit surely a more nuanced and conscientious one than the ones Republicans have (again by and large). Can't comment on which side is actually better for the country (that's politics), but my point is that Democrats (and allied liberals) are hypocritical in the sense that their pride is supposedly healthy patriotism while another's pride is 'nationalism'.
Ultimataly both Democrats and Republicans are sustained by extensive sales pitches of what America (TM) is all about. Democrats seem to think their politics represents the One Final Political Solution to End Misery Everywhere, but it is still based on aforementioned sales pitches all around ("We're on the Good side!").
What India does need to do is to define its own response to the question of how society views LGBTQ. In some cases, in some sections of traditional society, it has developed an answer that is inclusive and friendly. In some other cases it is simply copying from the West, which is what the mainstream discourse is also heading towards. The latter imo is not authentic and will fail India in the long run.
I don't care whether something is culturally "authentic" or not. I care about whether people can live the life they want to live or not.
What I'm trying to say is that there need not be just one way to deliver on this value -- there can be more than one valid approach to making LGBT folks have freedom & respect.
India has historically been pluralistic and a one-size-fits-all approach would actually be an unwelcome deviation. With regards to women, for example, even one of Manu's commentators (Medhatithi iirc) states that women used to follow one of two lifestyles: (1) being the traditional housewife, patriarchy & all or (2) having a career (academic) and being independent, implying that those 2 options were not available at the time the commentator lived. Indians today do have the freedom to look back at this past and rework & innovate -- rather than simply saying the West is the best.
Speech by Indian External Affairs Minister S.Jaishankar on this very topic : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUtbsPOE944