India exhibits restraint in a fractured world

IN an age of rising tensions and retreating truths, India nears 80 years of freedom with quiet deliberation. Our trail is a record that needs retelling — even as we envision our hundredth, not by expanding power but by deepening purpose.

While others scramble for dominance, India holds its course — anchored not in ideology, but in a civilisational ethic we call youmanship (not misspelt): dharmaniti — a steady code of national conduct, shaped by memory, guided by proportion and rooted in restraint. It is not a slogan; it is how we act even when unseen and how we stop despite all eyes being on us. This ethic is drawn from our oldest vocabulary.

The world wobbles under war and warning. Gaza bleeds; Ukraine attrits; Iran and Israel test thresholds. Trade has turned coercive. Climate virtue is weaponised. Technology is both tool and threat. Nuclear restraint, once sacred, now slips casually into rhetoric. The UN remains paralysed. The P5 act only when interests align. The very architecture that promised balance has long been wired to exclude by design.

Our choices, from 1948 to 2025, tell a consistent story. We stopped at the doorstep of Lahore, returned Haji Pir, and did not capture Muzaffarabad, even in pursuit. We retook Kargil without crossing the line. We liberated Dhaka and repatriated 90,000 prisoners of war, who were treated generously under the Geneva Conventions. We went to the Maldives and Sri Lanka on invitation. On nuclear matters, we uphold the principle of No First Use (NFU) without brinkmanship. In each case, India had the force to go further, but had a greater intent to not abandon proportion. Where others retreat unfinished, India ends with clarity and conviction.

In 1962, the Hindi-Chini-bhai-bhai bonhomie dissolved into coercion when China, an ancient civilisation with whom we sought peaceful coexistence, chose deception over dialogue. The war was swift. When the dust settled, one did ask: what did China gain by forsaking civility and what did it lose by discarding the coexistence ethic? The trust was broken.

Lord Curzon, delivering a Romanes lecture on ‘Frontiers’ at Oxford in 1907, remarked that “there is more to be got from unsettled borders than settled." A century later, China seems to have absorbed that creed and weaponised it.

Today, with India’s restraint tested and resolve demonstrated, China finds itself not leading, but gaming a role — that of the heir apparent of proxy coercion. Operation Sindoor was the first instance to call that bluff. It was also a message to China and its proxy Pakistan: that India will not be baited into their games of escalation, but neither will it flinch. The elephant remembers. And from memory, it calibrates with proportion, not provocation.

India’s rise has not followed the Palmerstonian playbook of eternal interests and expendable allies. It has preferred consistency over coercion. In an era when deterrence becomes a spectacle and alliances turn transactional, India stands for balance — not because it is easy, but because it is right.

Our global posture reflects this ethic. We engage in multi-dimensional alignments, not dependence. We advocate reform in trade, tech and climate governance — not for power, but for fairness. We pursue peace, even as we prepare for war. India does not claim to be a pole. It offers something rarer: a fulcrum; not a location, but a principle.

Where the world tilts, India steadies. When others provoke, we calibrate. In Ukraine and Iran, we called for de-escalation — not out of distance, but deliberate neutrality. As superpowers create polarity, India seeks multi-polarity.

The high table rarely seats the consistent and the steady — it rewards the pliable.

Even as global institutions unravel — the WTO weakened, UN muted, climate compacts gamed — India remains composed. It absorbs turbulence without amplifying it. Its ambition: conscience, not conquest. This is restraint as realism. India does not just echo the past, it scripts the future. And in that future, it must serve as the anchor for the Global South. If G7 marks weight, then G20 must reflect conscience. India is its natural centre — not because it demands to lead, but because it refuses to abandon proportion.

As the world stumbles toward 2047, what it needs is not more grand funerals, but a moral core; a conscience; a fulcrum. Not Munir’s divisive death served for dinner; not Netanyahu’s doctrine of displacement; not Zelenskyy’s comedy turning into a European tragedy; not Russia clinging to a Tsarist nightmare; not China walking the Curzon line to slice and grab the Himalayas, now with proxies. And certainly not Trump — disrupting democracies, gaming institutions and emboldening proxies in every theatre.

India has faced its provocations too — but it has not yielded to vendetta or vacillation. It held the line.

In the global memoryscape, where one civilisation remembers, another feigns forgetfulness. India, like the elephant, carries a long memory — of betrayal and forbearance, of alliances honoured and lines never crossed. China, like the dragon, chooses amnesia — testing boundaries once respected, rewriting understandings once shared. But memory matters. It is the moral ledger of history. And while the elephant moves slowly, it does not forget.

At the heart of this quiet confidence is its youth: calloused in hand, agile in mind, wired for innovation and rooted in civilisational morality. They ask for no crutches. They seek no validation. They script a signal all their own — seeking only that their talent be tapped.

India does not want to be the pole. It chooses to be the fulcrum — the unseen balance that steadies a splintering world. And nowhere is this clearer than in our National Anthem. Jana Gana Mana is not a chant of supremacy; it is a symphony of belonging. It is the evocation of this idea that makes India the fulcrum.

Restraint is a measure. A world order that does not recognise restraint will soon exhaust its capacity for recovery.

Let the UN@80 debate this and ask: what did we overlook? And who paid the price? It is a climactic call for global

introspection.

Lt Gen SS Mehta (Retd) is ex-Western Army Commander and Founder Trustee, Pune International Centre.

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