India

From Gothpoodle

• Population: 1.8 billion
• Aspects: Great Power, Controlled, Third Wave

For most of the past century, India has exercised considerable influence in its own region. For example, Indian troops won two short conventional wars with Pakistan in the 2020s. India also provided much of the diplomatic weight enforcing Singaporean neutrality in the late 2070s. Despite all this, India has continued to fall short of truly global influence. Although it has a large population, a well-educated elite, and a sound military establishment, its serious social problems have prevented it from attaining global power anytime in the last century. Today, India seems to be a “sleeping giant,” perhaps ready to awaken and shake the world.

India is characterized by factionalism. Its huge population is chronically divided along lines of religion, ethnicity, class, language, and ideology. Indeed, in many ways India is less a nation than it is a loose confederation of many nations. This factionalism has often weakened Indian government and caused rapid shifts in policy.

The dominant trend in current Indian politics is a struggle over nanosocialism. The local nanosocialist movement goes back to the late 2050s, and has managed to win a substantial bloc of seats in the People’s Assembly. Meanwhile, the conservative Indian National Alliance opposes the further spread of socialist ideas. The INA has held the government since 2082, and has done much to make India a more effective power on the world stage. Its policies are based on a confrontational stance toward China and the Transpacific Socialist Alliance, an aggressive Indian space program, and the development of Fifth Wave industries. Despite the INA’s successes in economic and foreign affairs, it has failed to stem the growth of Indian nanosocialism, and it seems possible that the coalition will fall within a few years.

If the INA loses power, either peacefully or through civil war, then India would almost certainly join the Transpacific Socialist Alliance. This would more than double the population and economic strength of the Alliance, and bring the powerful Indian military onto the side of the nanosocialist bloc. This would certainly discomfit the TSA’s main rivals, China and the Pacific Rim nations. On the other hand, India’s entry into the TSA would also upset the alliance’s leadership structure, forcing Indonesia to step down from its current position of prominence. Outside observers have noticed a distinct lack of enthusiasm among the TSA leadership toward the prospect of nanosocialist revolution in India. Clearly, whether India succeeds in increasing its global influence or not, it stands at the fulcrum of today’s balance of power.

India is the most populous nation on Earth. The per capita GNP is about half that of the United States at the beginning of the century, but this productivity is not shared equally by the whole population. Instead, about 10% of the population has a high standard of living with the full range of Fifth Wave technology, while the bulk of the population lives at a much lower standard. India has done much to ensure that all its citizens have an adequate diet, protection from infectious diseases, and decent housing, including the creation of a small number of very impressive high-biotech arcologies. Despite this, in much of the country even a telephone or a personal computer is still a luxury.

For decades, India has applied its own distinctive approach to technological and economic development. The social elite maintains cutting-edge technological skills, and acts as a managerial class. Meanwhile, Indian entrepreneurs have always had access to a vast pool of unskilled (but hard-working and inexpensive) labor. They have often found ways to apply such workers to produce the same goods and services as a much smaller skilled force. The strategy of investing relatively little in the workforce has carried over into the adaption of new technologies. While India has produced several impressive mega-projects, domestic industry has not invested heavily in sophisticated computers, robots, bioroids, or gene-altered human labor – but Indian businessmen have often manufactured such goods for export.