Coined by Arnold van Gennep in 1909, ‘liminality’ describes a transitional section, or a passage between identities. India, in 2025, embodies this idea geopolitically, economically and strategically. It’s each rising and restrained, international and grounded. Removed from a weak spot, it could be India’s strongest asset in a fractured world.
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Geopolitically, India walks a tightrope between energy blocs. It’s a part of the Quad with the US, Japan and Australia, however buys oil from Russia. It has deep ties with the West, but engages with China, internet hosting dialogues and managing crises in Ladakh. This isn’t confusion; it’s deliberate calibration.
India’s regional function is equally nuanced. It towers over South Asia economically, with a $3.9 trillion GDP, but stays slowed down by border tensions and neighbourhood instability. Within the Indo-Pacific, it performs sentinel—shadowing Chinese language survey ships close to the Andamans whereas deepening ties with Southeast Asian companions.
This liminality additionally lets India form the World South’s voice. Its push to incorporate the African Union within the G20 in 2023 wasn’t symbolic, however strategic. It indicators that India sees itself not merely as an rising energy however as a bridge between the world’s divides: North and South, East and West.
Economically, India’s dualities are stark. It’s residence to world-class innovation in addition to rural stagnation. Regardless of the dimensions of its financial system, its per capita GDP stays underneath $3,000. It exports $77.5 billion price of products to the US but in addition runs an $85 billion commerce deficit with China.
Financial liminality extends to commerce technique. India exited the Regional Complete Financial Partnership in 2019 to guard native industries, its common tariffs are among the many world’s highest and it courts overseas capital however restricts market entry. India is neither absolutely open nor isolationist—intentionally so. The problem is to steer the ‘China plus one’ shift.
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Strategically, India operates with energy and restraint. Its defence price range exceeds $78 billion. It’s modernizing its navy, co-developing jet engines with the US, and sustaining army ties with Russia. But, it initiatives no doctrine of dominance and avoids entangling alliances. Its doctrine is pragmatic autonomy. In 2018, it purchased Russia’s S-400 missile system regardless of US objections. It is able to construct a secure relationship with China, primarily based on mutual respect and sensitivity. It builds capability with out overreach.
Within the Indian Ocean area, India has elevated strategic help; $4 billion to Sri Lanka in 2022, expanded commerce with Bangladesh and infrastructure diplomacy within the Maldives had been efforts to steadiness China’s Belt and Street push. India’s Indo-Pacific function encapsulates this liminal posture. It’s each a core safety actor and a regional energy. It instructions sea lanes close to Malacca however stays constrained by continental frictions. Its energy lies in being versatile, not inflexible.
This steadiness between independence and engagement is usually mistaken for hesitation. However it’s, in actual fact, a technique. Strategic autonomy is India’s chosen path—a coverage rooted in its Chilly Warfare non-alignment and reinvented for a multipolar twenty first century.
Liminality and strategic autonomy will not be the identical. Liminality is a situation—an in-between standing formed by historical past, geography and financial scale. Strategic autonomy is a selection—a choice to stay unbound by inflexible alliances. Collectively, they allow India to behave with agility. Liminality offers house; autonomy permits intent. One is structural; the opposite is behavioural.
In a Trump 2.0 period, as US-China rivalry hardens and multilateral boards weaken, India’s center place features worth. It speaks to all, submits to none. It hosts Quad summits with out becoming a member of Nato-style coalitions. It buys oil from Moscow and semiconductors from Washington.
The Brics enlargement in 2024 additional showcased this. India stayed in a bloc now joined by Iran and the UAE, whereas main G20 diplomacy with African and Latin American companions. It doesn’t see a contradiction between the 2.
What does this imply for India’s future? By 2040, it might be a $10 trillion financial system, with at the least three plane carriers and a UN Safety Council seat, talking for the World South. Its twilight will yield to sunlight, however its threshold id will stay. The following section will demand even sharper decisions. Will India settle for overseas army bases? Will it be a part of commerce blocs or rewrite them? Can it maintain strategic autonomy whereas scaling its financial system and army muscle? These will not be questions of capability, however of will.
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India could not stay liminal eternally. However even because it matures into a number one energy, its twin nature—its capability to function throughout binaries—will endure. That’s its distinctive contribution to the world order: a mannequin of fluid energy, rooted in precept however open in posture. The West had its second of ascent within the nineteenth century; China has had its surge within the twenty first. India’s rise will look completely different—not as an exporter of ideology, however a rustic that shapes the world by straddling divides. Its liminality shouldn’t be a section. It’s a power.
Tailored from a lecture delivered just lately at Nationwide College of Singapore.
The creator is a former Indian Overseas Secretary and former Indian Ambassador to Washington and Beijing.
