Till very recently, Indians were being told that India is the pivot of world affairs, with Narendra Modi and S. Jaishankar repeatedly asserting that no major global decision is taken without Modi’s personal imprimatur on the outcome. Jaishankar boasted about India moving from being a “balancing power” to a “leading power”, where “Modi’s chemistry” with great-power leaders had supposedly unlocked unprecedented influence. “India is not just participating in global conversations; we are now shaping them,” he added. And just before Donald Trump reassumed American presidency, India’s foreign minister bragged that while “a lot of countries [are] nervous” about Trump’s return, “we are not”, because Modi supposedly had the heft and the sangfroid to deal with the erratic American leader.
The record of Trump 2.0 suggests something very different. Faced with renewed US sanctions threat on Iran, the Modi government has quietly unwound what was once projected as a flagship assertion of India’s strategic autonomy, the Chabahar port project. Reports of Indian entities liquidating their stakes, resignations by Indian directors from the operating company, and the spectre of punitive tariffs show how quickly Delhi has fallen in line. Where does this leave Modi’s claim before the 2024 elections regarding Chabahar, that India does not take decisions based on a third party even if anyone else feels bad about it?
Modi couldn’t utter a word when Trump sent American forces to invade Venezuela or when he threatens Greenland, a claim that sits uneasily with the mythology of ‘no nonsense’ diplomacy with Washington. Prohibitive US tariffs on Indian goods remain in place, as the Trump administration further tightens immigration rules, detains and sends Indian nationals to India in shackles, while MAGA supporters use racial slurs against people of Indian origin.
Vladimir Putin, the guarantor of India’s ‘time‑tested’ friendship with Russia, has sucked in hundreds of Indian citizens as contract fighters, many lured or coerced into roles they barely understood until they reached Russian soil, for his war in Ukraine. Media reports have tracked scores of such recruits, with families back home scrambling to secure their return or basic information about their fate, while the Modi government has failed to provide any help. Even Iran has not provided the Modi government access to Indian seafarers it illegally detained in Gulf waters last month. Delhi’s requests have fallen on deaf ears.
China has gone further still. It has married the salami slicing on the border with the everyday harassment of Indian citizens, like a woman from Arunachal Pradesh humiliated at Shanghai airport. Delhi’s response has been ineffective. In the meantime, India’s trade deficit with China has jumped from $37.8 billion in 2014 to $116.1 billion in 2025.
Europe, once targeted by Jaishankar with “We do not look for preachers, particularly preachers who do not practice at home and preach abroad,” has been courted by Modi with a Republic Day invite and a trade deal, but it has not stopped embarrassing the Indian leaders. The Polish foreign minister declared at a joint appearance with Jaishankar this month that India had reduced the import of Russian oil because it was fuelling Putin’s war machine; Jaishankar acquiesced meekly. His recent Delhi visit was equally rocky. At Ahmedabad, the German chancellor spoke alongside Modi to claim India will reduce its defence dependence on Russia. Modi remained silent. Foreign leaders are now defining and explaining Indian policy.
The story at home mirrors the drift abroad. By the time Modi first became prime minister, Delhi had broken the old India-Pakistan hyphenation, and India was spoken of in the same breath as China globally. Eleven years later, India has been re‑hyphenated along with Pakistan and Bangladesh in the global conversation, and the most enthusiastic practitioners of this downgrade are often Modi’s own supporters. Television anchors, social media warriors, Hindutva ideologues and government‑adjacent commentators insistently compare India’s performance on everything, from GDP to cricket, with those of Pakistan and Bangladesh, to reassure Indians that they are ‘ahead’, rather than asking why China has disappeared from the comparator set. The loss is not just psychological. It reflects a real erosion of ambition and standing, the product of eleven years of cumulative missteps.
Demonetisation wrecked the informal economy and mutilated small businesses, but it has never received a serious post‑mortem from the government that imposed it. Farm laws, rammed through without consultation, had to be rolled back after a year‑long protest after damaging India’s standing as a stable democracy that does not unleash abrupt, untested policy experiments. Covid mismanagement left haunting images of bodies along the Ganga and of gasping patients waiting outside overwhelmed hospitals, with the Modi government alternately over‑centralising its response and then disappearing when the second wave hit hardest. Air in most Indian cities remains among the most polluted in the world. Reports of contaminated drinking water, stampedes and environmental disasters are chronic. Manipur has burnt for months, with the prime minister choosing evasive silence over visible leadership while his party governs the state. None of this can be blamed on anyone else.
Poor governance has become the hallmark of Modi’s era, not the aberration. Policy is too often driven by optics, centralisation, and an urge to shock rather than steady, iterative improvement. Parliamentary process has been hollowed out. Independent institutions have been bent or broken. Digitisation comes with an erosion of trust in the State and a creeping sense of insecurity about livelihoods, rights, and basic services. For years, Indians were told to treat this as the necessary pain of a big national project, the price of ‘decisive’ leadership. That story is now wearing thin.
A similar hollowness now haunts foreign policy. Presence in sundry forums is not the same as power. Power is the ability to say no, to shape outcomes, to shield one’s citizens and interests from the whims of other nation-states. On that test, Modi has fared poorly. The dissonance between the narrative of a strategically sovereign India and the reality of a country buffeted, squeezed and sometimes humiliated is widening.
A leadership that insists nothing is decided without it has been unable to decide, at home, that clean air, safe water, constitutional order in a border state or honest accounting for policy disasters are non‑negotiable. The same leadership that said it was “not nervous” about Trump 2.0 is now discovering the hard way that flattery, photo‑ops and personalised tamashas cannot be substitutes for institutional strength, economic depth, and sober statecraft. The crisis that was long deferred is no longer out there in someone else’s past. It is here, it is present, and it is Modi’s.
Sushant Singh is lecturer at Yale University