India will engage with the world, but not at the cost of those who have no voice, no ballot, no recourse
Lt Gen SS Mehta (Retd)
COLONIALISM did not just extract wealth — it amputated dignity. It taught subjugated nations to doubt themselves, to defer instinct and to seek validation from distant capitals. For India, the wound was not just of stolen grain or looted treasure. It was the deeper theft of agency: the idea that governance, order and moral judgment were foreign imports.
And yet, when Independence arrived, India did not echo its oppressors. It did not adopt vengeance as doctrine or exclusion as policy. In the ashes of the Partition, amid staggering poverty and a fractured subcontinent, India made a radical choice, to trust its people completely. Not just men, not just the educated, not just the wealthy. Everyone.
Universal adult franchise was not a gradual concession. It was foundational. Before America passed the Voting Rights Act, before many European powers fully enfranchised their citizens, India gave each of its citizens a voice. At birth, our democracy was not a borrowed idea, it was a civilisational affirmation.
But time has a way of testing moral memory. Today, the very powers that once tutored us on liberty now struggle to uphold their own democratic compacts. The markets they once liberalised are now shielded behind digital walls and tariff barricades. The freedoms they once evangelised are selectively withheld, offered to allies, denied to others. Compassion has become conditional. Trade has become a tool of coercion.
If democracies now attack free markets, stifle voices, trump tariffs, call names, befriend terror regimes, for sudden bursts of greatness, and evade their own moral compacts, then what price these signatures they proudly affix to charters and conventions?
In multilateral forums, we see declarations diluted by design. Human rights reduced to instruments of leverage. Climate promises repeated, then quietly set aside. Refugees are dehumanised. Minorities are policed in plain sight. Wars are judged not by their human cost but by who wields the weapons.
India, meanwhile, has remained a paradox to many. Growing and democratic. Chaotic, yet durable. Large, yet rarely imperial. We have absorbed the scorn of those who misunderstood our method. We have tolerated the indifference of those who dismissed our voice. But we did not lose faith in the silent contract we forged, with our people, and with the world.
We are not perfect. We have our faults. But we are not pretending. And that distinction matters.
We did not enter the global order to inherit its hypocrisies. We do not seek a seat at the table to mirror its cynicism. And we certainly do not need lectures from those who treat memory as a convenience and justice as a bargaining chip.
Our restraint has often been mistaken for reticence. Our civility, for servility. But India’s civilisational compass does not swing with the tides of global approval. It is rooted in something older than balance sheets and summit declarations. It also has the DNA of self-correct.
And now, as the world begins to fracture under the weight of its own contradictions, the temptation will be to retreat, to once again let others narrate the world, while we nod in polite deference. But that age has passed.
The elephant remembers
It remembers 1947, when we chose democracy over dominion. It remembers 1971, when we stood alone against genocide. It remembers 1991, when we restructured not just our economy, but our self-belief. It remembers 1998, when the haves decided that nukes were global currency, and we broke in, and declared no-first use (NFU). And the world has just witnessed Op Sindoor in 2025.
Restraint and Resolve are the key in what we do. We have heard the growls of superpowers, the barks of belligerence, the shrill cries of opportunism. But the world has not yet heard the elephant trumpet, not as a cry of war, but as a call of memory, morality and direction.
That time is now
Not because we seek to impose, but because we refuse to imitate. Not to dominate the conversation, but to anchor it in something more enduring than expediency.
The new hypocrisy is strategic: speak of values, act for interest. Raise your voice for Ukraine, but look away from Gaza. Sanction one tyranny, salute another. Trade in freedoms, but partner with regimes that continue rule of uniform and imprison their own leaders who ask for change.
India does not roar. It does not bray. It does not echo. But it remembers. And when it finally speaks, not with anger, but with conviction, it does not seek to drown others. Only to remind them.
And as democracies begin to blur their own reflection, allying with military regimes, winking at dispossession, and finding convenience in strongmen, they risk abandoning the very ideals they once exported.
When the price of strategic access is silence on suppression, when military juntas cloak themselves in the language of order, and when governance becomes the preserve of crypto-familial elites masquerading as reformers, then the compact between the state and its people is no longer democratic. It is dynastic. It is durable only for the few.
The elephant trumpets
Our partnerships are not transactional. Our friendships are not blind. We will engage with the world, but not at the cost of those who have no voice, no ballot, no recourse.
Because memory is not merely about what we recall. It is about what we refuse to become.
The elephant does not forget.
It has 1.4 billion caught between dignity and demand in a free market.
It does not follow. It reflects.
It chooses when to walk, and when to trumpet.
Lt Gen SS Mehta (retd) is ex-Western Army Commander and Founder Trustee, Pune International Centre.
