In a Sweet Spot: India is exactly where it wants to be in the emerging global order

THE POST-COLD WAR global order has fallen apart. Tariff regimes are rewritten overnight, alliances that once looked permanent are renegotiated, and multilateral institutions built for a different century struggle to keep pace with a world where power disperses rather than concentrates. It’s against this unsettled backdrop that Anil K Antony’s Advantage India makes its case for India’s place, not as a bystander to the change but as one of its more consequential shapers.

The book’s premise is unfussy: India’s rise cannot be explained by GDP growth figures alone and its real leverage lies in a combination of scale, technological ambition, and diplomatic dexterity. The argumen truns that Aadhaar, JanDhan, UPI, DigiLocker, etc cannot be seen as “isolated innovations but a coherent philosophy... Where Silicon Valley often built for the top of the pyramid, India built for the base.” One result is a digital commons instead of a monopoly. The significance of this technologically, economically and socially cannot be overstated.

Where the book earns its keep is in the ground it covers. Antony links technology, defence, energy, diplomacy, and economics into a single argument rather than treating them as siloed chapters. He moves comfortably between hard security questions—defence manufacturing, the shift away from import dependence— and less-covered terrain like India’s role in stitching together multilateral coalitions on climate and disaster resilience. In fact, India-led frameworks like the International Solar Alliance, the Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure, or the Global Biofuels Alliance do not get the mainstream media space they deserve. If “[r]eliability has become the currency of global influence in a predominantly interest-driven world,” then reliability is India’s USP when China is extractive and America is infirm.

There is also a necessary connection made between domestic policymaking and foreign policy, reading them as two expressions of the same national strategy. It’s a sound instinct: in a world where trade, technology and security are increasingly entangled, treating them separately risks missing how they reinforce one another. Antony’s linking of sectors is also validated by facts on the ground: in 2014, India crossed the $2 trillion economy barrier; thereafter it reinforced its status as the fastest-growing major economy; and 250 million Indians were lifted out of poverty in one decade. None of this would have been possible without a holistic approach from the top.

The author’s own vantage point—time spent in Silicon Valley earlier alongside his current political role in BJP—gives the technology chapters a texture that purely academic or bureaucratic accounts often lack. When Antony says “technology could not be left to evolve only in the hands of corporations in California,” and needed to be adapted and redirected for 1.5 billion people, it’s the voice of the erstwhile but genuine insider who has since witnessed firsthand India’s “silent revolution” rapidly unfold. To his credit, Antony does not write India’s rise as a foregone conclusion. He is willing to flag the distance still to be covered, which lends the book’s underlying optimism more ballast than a simple triumphalist account would carry. Viksit Bharat 2047 is a vision and India is well on its way there. But it’s not a certainty. Apart from global factors, Indians too could let the focus slip. Therefore, they must build on the firm foundations and never take their eye off the road.

Read at a moment when the assumptions underpinning the post- 1945 order are all but dead—America’s remaking of itself and the world under Trump, the fraying of old security guarantees, a Global South unwilling to take sides irrespective of India’s leadership role—Advantage India offers a reasonably grounded account of how one large, complicated democracy is positioning itself for what comes next.