India’s Vision of a New World Order

Every state has views about the world it lives in; only a few states have a vision of the world they want. India has claimed the second position for eighty years — first as the voice of the decolonising world, then as the leader of the non-aligned, and now as a large economy that says the arrangements of 1945 no longer describe the planet they govern.

• The claim is examined here on its own terms:
  • what India says the existing order gets wrong,
  • what it proposes instead,
  • what it has actually built,
  • and whether the proposal amounts to a different order or a better seat in the existing one.

What “world order” means, and where the Indian critique bites

Before anything else, the phrase has to be pinned down, because most of the confusion in this topic comes from using one word for three different things. An international order is a settled pattern of activity that sustains the elementary goals of a society of states — a formulation owed to Hedley Bull, who insisted that order is a description of behaviour, not a synonym for peace or for goodness. On that reading, order can be asked three separate questions, and India’s answer differs on each.

The register	What “order” means here	The Indian objection	What India actually proposes
Distribution of power	Who has the capability to shape outcomes — a matter of poles, not of rules	The distribution is no longer unipolar in fact but is still treated as unipolar in practice	Multipolarity: a description India welcomes and a preference it states
Institutions and rules	The Security Council, the Bretton Woods bodies, the NPT, the WTO, the climate regime	Membership, weighting and entry conditions are frozen at 1945 or 1968 or 1995	Reformed multilateralism — expansion, requota, restored dispute settlement
Legitimacy	Whose consent the arrangement rests on, and by whose values it is justified	The rules were written by a few and applied to the many, and universality was exported from one civilisation	Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam, an “alternative universality”, the Global South’s voice

• India’s critique runs across all three registers; its remedies concentrate almost entirely on the second.
  • This asymmetry is the single most useful observation in the topic, and it explains both the coherence of the Indian position and the charge most often levelled against it.
• On power, India describes rather than demands. It observes that the world has become multipolar and asks that policy catch up with the observation; it does not propose a mechanism for redistributing capability.
• On legitimacy, India speaks in a civilisational register that is deliberately unspecific. It offers a temperament — pluralism, non-conditionality, no single model — rather than a rival doctrine.
• On institutions, by contrast, India is precise, insistent and repetitive. It names bodies, dates, quotas, seats and formulas. Almost everything India has actually asked for in eighty years is institutional.

Bull’s distinction, and why it recurs

• Bull separated order from justice.
  • Order is the maintenance of a workable pattern; justice is the moral claim of those the pattern disadvantages.
  • The two are not automatically compatible, and Bull’s point was that pursuing justice can cost order.
• The Indian position is that in the present case the two coincide — that an order excluding the largest populations is not merely unjust but unstable, because compliance from the excluded cannot be assumed indefinitely.
• That is a strong claim and it is contestable.
  • The counter-argument is Bull’s own: an imperfect order that functions is preferable to a redistributive project that does not, and Happymon Jacob has observed that New Delhi in practice prefers orderly change to change as such, and would take an imbalanced world over a chaotic one.
• The tension is real and India has not resolved it. India argues for justice at the General Assembly and for order in the Indian Ocean, and the two arguments are not always the same argument.

The liberal order and its two projects

G. John Ikenberry‘s account is the standard defence of the existing arrangement and the argument India’s position must answer. He treats the modern order as the product of two projects rather than one: a Westphalian project running from 1648, concerned with sovereignty, territorial integrity and non-intervention; and a liberal project, led by Britain and then the United States, concerned with openness, rules and multilateral institutions.

• On this reading the order is not really American or Western, even if it initially looked that way — the Westphalian half was what decolonisation used to make its case, and the liberal half is what rising states have used to grow.
• Ikenberry’s central empirical claim is the one that stings: the emerging powers do not want to contest the basic rules of the liberal order; they want more authority and leadership within it.
  • Brazil, China and India, on his account, all became prosperous by operating inside the order and have deep interests in preserving it.
• His conclusion is that what is occurring is not American decline but other states catching up and growing more connected, and that the real fault line is between those who want to renew multilateral governance and those who prefer spheres of influence — a line that does not map onto West and non-West.
• For India this argument is simultaneously flattering and damaging. It confirms that India is a stakeholder rather than a spoiler; it also implies that India’s demand is for promotion within a club whose rules it accepts.

The multiplex alternative

Amitav Acharya rejects the framing that the choice is between American order and its collapse, and his formulation is the one that most closely matches what Indian officials actually describe.

“A decentralized, diversified and multidimensional world in which actors — state and non-state actors, established and new powers, global and regional groups, from both the North and the South, interact in an interdependent manner.”

— Amitav Acharya

• The image is a cinema multiplex: several shows running at once, with multiple producers and directors, rather than a single film on a single screen.
  • Ideas about peace, development and stability have multiple points of origin that nonetheless intersect.
• The claim is stronger than multipolarity.
  • Multipolarity redistributes power among great powers; the multiplex world changes the nature of order itself — multiple modernities, regional orders with their own logics, overlapping and competing institutions, and no single organiser.
• This is the theoretical home of the Indian vision, whether or not Indian officials cite it.
  • When India says universality can be built from many traditions rather than exported from one, it is making Acharya’s argument in a civilisational idiom.

Is American power declining, and does the answer matter?

The structural condition of the order is the trajectory of American power, and the academic argument has run in both directions for three decades without settling.

• The durability case.
  • After 1991 the United States held an unprecedented preponderance — an economy far larger than any rival, defence spending exceeding the next several states combined, and leadership in higher education, scientific research and advanced technology.
  • Stephen Walt argued this position would endure well into the century; John Mearsheimer added the counter-intuitive point that American withdrawal from Europe would produce not stability but unbalanced multipolarity, the most dangerous configuration of all.
• The declinist case.
  • Vietnam, the 1970s, the 2003 Iraq war, the 2008 financial crisis and the 2021 Afghan withdrawal each generated a wave of decline literature; each wave receded.
  • The pattern of premature obituaries is itself an argument for caution.
• The 2026 evidence complicates both cases.
  • American material preponderance in military reach, financial infrastructure and frontier technology is intact.
  • What has changed is disposition rather than capability: on 7 January 2026 the United States announced withdrawal from 66 international organisations, treaties and alliances, thirty-one of them United Nations bodies, including the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Green Climate Fund and — pointedly for India — the International Solar Alliance.
• The pattern continued through the year.
  • The United States boycotted the Johannesburg G20 summit of 22-23 November 2025, the first held on African soil, then took the 2026 presidency and barred South Africa from the Miami summit scheduled for 14-15 December 2026.
• The analytical point is not that America is weak.
  • It is that the state that built the order has become an inconsistent participant in it, which is a different and in some ways more destabilising condition than decline.
  • A hegemon that departs leaves a vacancy; one that stays and defects leaves institutions that exist but no longer work.

India’s difficulty is not an America that is leaving, but an America that remains powerful and has stopped underwriting the rules it wrote.

The distribution of power, disaggregated

The commonest error in writing about world order is to assert a polarity without saying which dimension of power is meant. The distribution is sharply asymmetric across domains, and any accurate description has to disaggregate.

Domain	How power is actually distributed
Economic output	Genuinely multipolar. Several economies of comparable weight; the largest single share has fallen substantially over four decades
Military reach	Highly concentrated. Only one state can sustain operations globally; several have formidable regional capability
Financial infrastructure	Concentrated. The dollar’s share of reserves and settlement, and control of clearing and messaging systems, confer coercive capacity
Frontier technology	Bipolar and narrowing. Two centres in semiconductors, artificial intelligence and quantum, with chokepoints held by a small number of firms and jurisdictions
Normative authority	Diffuse and contested. No state or bloc commands agreement on what the rules are
Demography and resources	Shifting toward Africa and South Asia across the century

• The order is therefore multipolar in the register India emphasises and unipolar in the registers that decide outcomes. India’s economic weight is real; its exposure to financial and technological chokepoints is equally real.
• Weaponised interdependence is the concept that names the danger.
  • Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman showed that networks of finance, data, energy and supply have hub-and-spoke structures, and that states with jurisdiction over the hubs acquire two capabilities: the chokepoint effect — denying an adversary access to the network — and the panopticon effect — seeing everything that moves through it.
• The illustrations are now routine: exclusion of banks from financial messaging systems, export controls on semiconductors and fabrication equipment, and restrictions on the processing of critical minerals.
• This reverses the liberal expectation. Interdependence, which liberal theory treated as a source of peace, has become a source of coercive capacity — which is why India’s insistence on plural partnerships is a hedging strategy.
• Institutional competition has replaced institutional replacement.
  • New bodies are built not to abolish the old but to compete with them — the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the New Development Bank alongside the World Bank.
  • The result is regime complexity, in which states choose the forum most favourable to their position.
• Minilateralism is the third instrument, and it belongs to India’s story in particular: small, purpose-built groupings that trade universality for effectiveness, gaining speed and cohesion at the cost of legitimacy and the exclusion of those most affected.

How the order behaved under stress in 2026

The Iranian war that began on 28 February 2026 is treated in full elsewhere in this unit; what belongs here is only what it revealed about the order.

• No universal institution stopped it, paused it or ended it. The Security Council did not act; the eventual framework was negotiated outside the United Nations.
• The mediation was done by middle powers — Pakistan, Qatar and Oman, with Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Egypt facilitating — producing the Islamabad Memorandum of 17 June 2026, which expired on 17 August 2026 with no final agreement.
• Passage through the Strait of Hormuz was allocated bilaterally, state by state.
  • On 26 March 2026 Iran named China, Russia, India, Iraq and Pakistan as permitted to transit.
  • A global commons was rationed as a favour, which is the clearest single illustration of what a rules-thin order looks like in practice.
• India’s non-alignment bought India something concrete — a place on the permitted list — and that is an argument for the posture.
  • It is also an argument against the vision, because the benefit came from bargaining outside the rules rather than from the rules working.

The Indian critique of the existing order

The most economical statement of the Indian position belongs to Happymon Jacob, and it is worth quoting because the three words carry the whole argument.

“At the risk of oversimplifying, India’s view of the current world order can be summed up in three words: unequal, discriminatory and unrepresentative.”

— Happymon Jacob

Each word points at a different failure, and India’s institutional demands can be sorted under them almost without residue.

Unrepresentative — the frozen membership problem

• The Security Council’s permanent membership has not changed since 1945. The five permanent members are the victors of a war that ended eighty-one years ago; United Nations membership has grown from 51 to 193 since.
• The arithmetic of exclusion is the Indian argument’s strongest form.
  • A body that decides on the use of force worldwide contains no permanent member from Africa or Latin America, and none from the world’s most populous state.
• The reform process is the evidence for the charge.
  • Intergovernmental Negotiations on Council reform have run since 2009 and by mid-2026 had completed seventeen cycles without producing a negotiating text.
  • In July 2026 India’s representative told the General Assembly that Indian philosophy holds that the soul passes through cycles of birth and death making incremental progress before attaining liberation — and that after seventeen cycles there was “no liberation in sight.”
• The mechanics of that reform contest belong elsewhere in this syllabus.
  • What matters here is the doctrinal consequence: three decades of advocacy have produced procedure and no outcome, and that record is the sharpest available weapon against India’s own preferred remedy.
• The counter-example India cites is the G20.
  • The African Union’s admission as a permanent member on 9 September 2023, on India’s proposal, is the only instance in the recent record of a major body being enlarged to include a previously excluded constituency — and it happened in an informal grouping without a charter, not in a treaty body.

Unequal — weighting, quotas and the price of entry

• The Bretton Woods institutions weight votes by capital subscription, which means that influence tracks the economic hierarchy of the moment at which the last review was concluded, not the hierarchy of today.
• The Sixteenth General Review of Quotas, approved in December 2023, is the case in point.
  • It raised total quotas by 50% — from SDR 477 billion to SDR 715.7 billion, roughly US$960 billion — by an equiproportional increase, in which every member’s share stayed exactly where it was.
  • More money, no realignment.
• The leadership convention survives untouched: by unwritten arrangement the Managing Director of the Fund is European and the President of the Bank American. No formal rule requires it; no reform has removed it.
• The consequence for India is measurable. India’s quota share remains well below its weight in world output on either a market or a purchasing-power basis, and the gap is precisely the “unequal” of Jacob’s triad.
• The demand is modest and has still not been met, which is why India’s economic-order argument has migrated toward new institutions — the New Development Bank, the AIIB, currency arrangements — rather than remaining a reform argument alone.

Discriminatory — rules that create classes of state

• The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty is the paradigm case.
  • It divides the world into nuclear-weapon states, defined as those that tested before 1 January 1967, and everyone else — with hortatory disarmament obligations on the first group and enforceable non-proliferation obligations on the second.
• India’s objection has been constant since 1968 and is a legitimacy objection, not a security one: a treaty that fixes rights by a calendar date is a rule that discriminates by definition.
  • India remains outside it, along with Pakistan and Israel.
• Rohan Mukherjee‘s work explains why this fight lasted so long.
  • His argument is that rising powers’ behaviour toward institutions turns on institutional openness — how easily a newcomer can take a leadership role — and procedural fairness — whether the institution treats members by the same rules.

“All else being equal, inclusive and fair institutions will elicit greater cooperation from rising powers. By contrast, exclusion and unfairness will cause rising powers to try and delegitimate, protest or undermine the core institutions.”

— Rohan Mukherjee

• Mukherjee’s warning applies directly: an institution designed to prevent an outcome can produce it, and a non-proliferation treaty that humiliates a rising power can create a new nuclear power.
  • That is a description of 1974 and 1998.
• The trade regime carries the same charge in economic form.
  • The WTO’s Appellate Body has been unable to hear appeals since December 2019 because appointments have been blocked,
  • which means the only compulsory adjudication system in the multilateral economy has been switched off for nearly seven years — and a member that loses at first instance can appeal “into the void” and escape the ruling.
• The Fourteenth Ministerial Conference at Yaoundé in March 2026 did not restore it.
  • India, with Oman and South Africa, tabled a reform statement acknowledging that the dispute settlement system “is not fully functional and needs reform” and proposing a facilitator-led process with staged checkpoints running to 2027.
  • A procedural remedy for a structural failure is the pattern of the whole file.
• The climate regime carries the charge in its purest form, because the object being divided — the remaining carbon budget — was largely consumed by states that industrialised first.
  • This is treated below as an element of India’s positive agenda rather than only as a grievance.

The new inequalities: compute, data and standards

The 1945 institutions are not where the next generation of asymmetry is being created, and the most interesting part of the Indian critique is that it has begun to move.

• Semiconductors concentrate design, fabrication equipment and manufacture in a handful of firms and jurisdictions, and export controls have become the principal instrument of strategic competition — an instrument no multilateral rule constrains.
• Artificial intelligence concentrates compute, data and talent still more sharply, and governance of it is being contested between innovation-first and risk-first approaches in forums where most states are absent.
• Critical minerals have their chokepoint not in extraction but in processing, which is more concentrated than reserves.
• Standards are the quietest form of power: the body that writes a technical standard shapes the market that follows, and standard-setting bodies are not organised on one-state-one-vote lines.
• India’s response has been to build in this space rather than only to protest.
  • Digital public infrastructure offered as a replicable public good,
  • and the AI Impact Summit held in New Delhi from 16 to 21 February 2026 — with delegations from over a hundred countries and a declaration endorsed by 89 countries on 19 February 2026 — are attempts to establish an Indian claim in the domain before the rules harden.
• The summit’s substance was deliberately Southern: platforms for affordable diffusion of AI, under-represented languages in models, frugal innovation, and shared tooling — with every commitment voluntary and non-binding, which is both what made broad participation possible and what limits what it can achieve.

The line of descent: from non-alignment to multipolarity

The vision is not new, and treating it as an invention of the last decade misreads it. Three earlier Indian positions are its direct ancestors, and each contributed one element that survives.

• Non-alignment contributed the refusal of blocs.
  • Its operative claim was that a newly independent state should judge issues on their merits rather than by the requirements of a patron, and that a world of two camps was itself the problem.
  • Multipolarity is the same argument restated for a world with more than two poles — and the continuity is one of logic rather than of nostalgia, since the movement’s own machinery has long ceased to be India’s principal instrument.
• The demand for a New International Economic Order, pressed through the 1970s, contributed the economic content: that formal sovereignty without terms of trade that permit development is incomplete independence.
  • Today’s Southern agenda — debt relief, climate finance, technology transfer, vaccine equity, institutional reform — is that agenda in current vocabulary.
  • Its history belongs to India’s economic-diplomacy file; the line of descent is what belongs here.
• The nuclear argument contributed the legitimacy claim. India’s refusal of the Non-Proliferation Treaty was the first occasion on which India said, in a specific institutional setting, that a rule can be binding and still be unjust.

What changed, and why it complicates the claim

• India is now a large economy, which makes it both a more credible advocate and a less obvious member of the constituency it advocates for.
  • Nehru spoke for the South as one of the poor; India today speaks for the South as one of the largest economies in the world.
• The receipts have changed too.
  • In 1974 India could offer solidarity; it can now offer vaccines, satellites, credit lines, disaster response and payment systems.
  • Capability converts rhetoric into a record — and simultaneously converts India from claimant into competitor in the eyes of others in the South.
• The vocabulary has hardened.
  • Where the earlier language was moral, the current language is institutional and interest-based.
  • Jaishankar has argued that India will pursue an interests-first rather than values-first approach, will decline to conform to norms set by others, and will refuse a binary reading of global polarity — a formulation that is a deliberate break with the idiom of the 1950s even where the substance overlaps.
  • He has also described a grand strategy that works by identifying and exploiting the opportunities that global contradictions create, which is a candid account of what multi-alignment is for.
• The offer is conditional and India says so.
  • The recurring official formulation is that India is prepared to take up greater responsibilities in the international system, and simultaneously that it expects the injustice faced by the Global South to be decisively addressed — responsibility offered in exchange for representation, not in place of it.
• The most useful frame for the shift is status.
  • On Mukherjee’s argument, a rising power that is admitted on fair terms cooperates and one that is excluded contests.
  • India has spent eighty years testing that proposition and has received both answers — admitted to the G20, the nuclear-commerce arrangements and the climate bargain; excluded from the Security Council, the Non-Proliferation Treaty’s privileged class and the quota hierarchy.

The positive vision: five propositions

Stripped of ornament, what India proposes reduces to five claims. Each has evidence behind it and each has a weakness, and stating both is what separates analysis from advertisement.

Proposition	The claim	The evidence	The weakness
Multipolarity	The world already has several centres and policy should reflect it	Economic weight is genuinely distributed; India’s own plural partnerships	India describes multipolarity; it has no mechanism to produce it
Reformed multilateralism	Universal institutions should be kept and repaired, not abandoned	G20 enlargement; sustained reform advocacy; peacekeeping and treaty compliance	Three decades of advocacy, no structural reform delivered
A rules-based order	Rules should bind everyone and be written by more than a few	Law of the sea compliance; the 2014 maritime award accepted; freedom of navigation	Selective application by India itself, most recently on arbitration
Development first	Development is the primary international issue, not a secondary one	Vaccine supply; credit lines; digital public goods; solar and disaster coalitions	Scale far below the need and far below Chinese delivery
Alternative universality	Universality can be built from many traditions, not exported from one	Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam; non-conditional partnership; civilisational framing	Hard to operationalise; easily read as branding

Proposition one: multipolarity, as description and as preference

• The description is the easy half. Several economies of comparable weight, several regional security systems with their own logics, and no single organiser: this is what the data show, and it is not a controversial claim.
• The preference is the contested half.
  • India prefers a multipolar world because a state of India’s size does better where several powers compete for its alignment than where one power sets terms.
  • The preference is a calculation about leverage, and it is honest to say so.
• The Indian formulation adds a second clause that is often missed: a multipolar Asia within a multipolar world.
  • That is not a statement about the international system; it is a proposition about China, and it means that India resists Asian unipolarity as firmly as it resists global unipolarity.
• The posture that follows — strategic autonomy exercised through plural partnerships rather than through abstention — belongs to India’s foreign-policy doctrine and is treated in full elsewhere.
  • What matters here is the logical relationship: multipolarity is the order India wants; multi-alignment is the method by which India operates inside it.
  • Confusing the two collapses an argument about the world into an argument about India.
• The vulnerability is that multipolarity may be a condition India benefits from, not an order India can construct.
  • A world in which several great powers court India is pleasant; it is not obviously an order, and it lasts only as long as the courting does.

Proposition two: reformed multilateralism

• The phrase is India’s own coinage and it is doing precise work.
  • It is not “multilateralism”, which would endorse the institutions as they stand; and it is not “alternative multilateralism”, which would abandon them.
  • It asserts that the institutions are worth keeping and that keeping them requires changing them.
• The content is narrower than the phrase suggests.
  • What India actually asks for is expansion of the Security Council in both permanent and non-permanent categories; realignment of Fund and Bank shareholding; restoration of binding trade adjudication; a larger Southern voice in standard-setting; and reform of the multilateral development banks’ lending capacity.
• What India does not ask for is equally telling.
  • It has not proposed abolishing the veto, replacing the United Nations, or building a rival universal system.
  • The demand is corrective, not architectural — and that is the fact on which the sharpest criticism of the whole vision turns.
• The doctrine also has a negative half that is rarely stated.
  • Jacob’s formulation captures it: India prefers strong global institutions, is reticent about regional organisations that assume global mandates, and is increasingly unwilling to defer to bodies that are not representative.
  • India is a universalist about jurisdiction and a reformist about composition.
• Its record as a member is the argument’s foundation.
  • India has been among the largest contributors of personnel to United Nations peacekeeping, has accepted adverse international decisions and has paid its assessments — which is what allows it to argue for change from inside.

Proposition three: a rules-based order whose rules are made by more than the few

• The Indian formulation always contains a qualifier, and the qualifier is the argument.
  • The order should be rules-based; the rules should be made through dialogue and apply equally; and they must bind the powerful as well as the weak.
• The fullest official statement of the content belongs to H.V. Shringla, who has described India as valuing a multipolar international order underpinned by international law,
  • premised on respect for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all states, the settlement of disputes by peaceful negotiation, and free and open access for all to the global commons.
• Terrorism is where India presses the equal-application argument hardest.
  • The Indian position is one of zero tolerance — that no motivation, grievance or political context justifies an act of terrorism, and that no rhetoric can wash out its consequences.
  • The complaint is about selectivity rather than about the rule: designations, listings and sanctions have repeatedly been blocked or delayed for political reasons, which for India is the clearest demonstration that a rule the powerful apply selectively is not yet a rule.
• The distinction from the Western usage is deliberate.
  • Where “rules-based international order” in American and European usage often means the existing corpus of rules, the Indian usage means a corpus still to be negotiated among a wider membership.
  • The same three words carry a status-quo meaning in one mouth and a revisionist meaning in another.
• India’s strongest single credential here is maritime.
  • India accepted an adverse award under the law of the sea in its maritime boundary arbitration with Bangladesh, which conceded the larger share of the disputed area — a costly compliance that India cites, correctly, whenever the charge of selectivity is made.
• The counter-evidence is recent and awkward.
  • India rejected the award of the Court of Arbitration constituted under the Indus Waters Treaty on 31 August 2026, which held the treaty in force and the purported abeyance ineffective.
  • Whatever the merits, a state that has just refused an arbitral award has a harder time arguing that rules must bind the powerful.
• The honest position is that India’s compliance record is good by the standards of large states and imperfect by the standard of its own rhetoric. Both halves of that sentence have to be said.

Proposition four: development, and the Global South’s claim

• The proposition is that development is not one issue among many but the organising issue — that debt, finance, technology and market access determine whether sovereignty is substantive, and that an order which treats these as technical matters has made a political choice.
• India’s development-partnership model is the practical form of the claim, and its distinguishing feature is the deliberate absence of policy conditionality: concessional credit, training and scholarships, grant projects and turnkey construction, offered without governance prescriptions.
• The model’s attraction and its criticism are the same fact. Non-conditionality is what makes India welcome; it is also what makes India unable to press for governance improvement.
• The comparative advantage is capacity rather than concrete.
  • India cannot match the scale of Chinese infrastructure finance and has stopped trying; its offer is trained personnel, affordable medicines and replicable systems — transferable know-how rather than built assets.
• The claim to speak for the South is a claim to convene, not to command.
  • The South is not a bloc with a leader; it is a coalition that several states attempt to assemble, and China assembles it too, with more money.

Proposition five: civilisational framing — substance or branding?

The question has to be asked directly, because the civilisational vocabulary is the most conspicuous and the most easily dismissed part of the Indian vision. Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam — the world is one family — was the theme of India’s G20 presidency, rendered as “One Earth, One Family, One Future”. Is this content or is it packaging?

• The case that it is branding is strong and should be stated first.
  • A Sanskrit maxim from the Maha Upanishad is not a rule of international law; it does not tell a state what to do when interests conflict; it is unfalsifiable, and it appeared on a summit logo.
  • No policy has ever been derived from it.
• The case that it is substance rests on what it does rather than on what it says. It performs three specific functions that ordinary diplomatic language cannot.
  • It supplies a non-Western source of universalism. The claim that universality can be built from many traditions rather than exported from one requires at least one demonstrated alternative tradition, and this is India’s.
  • It licenses a particular institutional preference — for inclusion over exclusion, for consensus over voting, for enlargement over efficiency — which shows up concretely in the African Union’s G20 admission and in India’s insistence on ASEAN centrality.
  • It marks a claim to civilisational standing, which in status terms is exactly what a rising power seeks: recognition as an originator of order rather than a recipient of it.
• The honest verdict is that it is both, and that the proportions depend on delivery.
  • Rhetoric matched by an admitted African Union, a hundred-country solar coalition and a vaccine programme is a frame; rhetoric that is not matched is a slogan.
  • The formula does analytical work only where a decision followed from it.
• The sharper objection is domestic.
  • A vision grounded in civilisational pluralism invites scrutiny of pluralism at home, and partners in both the South and the West have raised it.
  • The vision’s credibility is not entirely in the gift of Indian diplomacy.

A civilisational vocabulary is neither proof nor pretence; it is a claim that has to be redeemed by conduct, and the ledger is genuinely mixed.

The evidence India offers

A vision that produces nothing is a preference. India’s answer to that objection is a ledger, and the ledger is real, uneven and worth reading item by item rather than as a list.

What India did	What it was	What it proves	The limit
G20 presidency, 2023	New Delhi Summit, 9-10 September 2023; consensus declaration despite deep divisions over Ukraine	India can broker agreement where the great powers cannot	An informal grouping, without a charter or binding effect
African Union admission	Permanent G20 membership, 9 September 2023, on India’s proposal	Enlargement is possible; India delivered it	The only structural enlargement India has secured anywhere
Voice of the Global South Summits	Three convenings, 2023 and 2024, the last with 173 dignitaries from 123 countries; the Global Development Compact announced at the third	India can assemble the constituency at short notice	Convening is not leadership; no fourth summit has followed
Vaccine Maitri	About 162.9 million doses to 96 countries by February 2022 — 14.3m as grant, 107.1m commercial, 41.5m through COVAX	Delivery at scale in the one crisis that tested everyone	Suspended for six months in 2021 when India’s own wave hit
International Solar Alliance	Founded 2015, headquartered at Gurugram; over 120 member and signatory countries	An India-headquartered treaty body that others joined	The United States withdrew on 7 January 2026
Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure	Launched at the UN Climate Action Summit, 23 September 2019; more than 50 member countries and more than 10 organisations	A second India-founded institution with a technical mandate	Small budget; advisory rather than financing
Global Biofuels Alliance	Launched at the New Delhi G20, September 2023	Agenda-setting on a subject where India has domestic depth	Membership modest; the United States retained it while leaving the rest
AI Impact Summit	New Delhi, 16-21 February 2026; declaration endorsed by 89 countries	India convening on the frontier issue, not only the legacy ones	Voluntary and non-binding by design
BRICS chairship, 2026	India chairs and hosts the eighteenth summit in New Delhi on 12-13 September 2026, on the theme Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability	A platform India has used to press quota and payments reform	Yet to be held; its outcome cannot be assumed

The first-responder record

• India has repeatedly reached crises first, and the pattern is the most concrete form of the Southern claim: humanitarian and disaster response delivered without conditions, to neighbours and to states with no bilateral leverage over India.
• The 2026 energy crisis produced the sharpest illustration.
  • While rationing its own imports and facing domestic shortages, India continued supplying fuel to its neighbours throughout — roughly 210,000 tonnes of petroleum a month to Nepal, 24,000 tonnes to Bhutan, 45,000 tonnes to Sri Lanka and 38,000 tonnes of diesel to Bangladesh.
• Evacuation is the other recurring instrument: nationals of other countries have repeatedly been brought out alongside Indians, most notably from Yemen in 2015, when 4,640 Indians and 960 nationals of 41 other countries were removed by air and sea.
• The naval record follows the same logic.
  • Anti-piracy patrolling in the western Indian Ocean since 2008, and the Navy’s largest peacetime deployment during the Red Sea disruptions, were undertaken as public goods rather than under coalition command, with India declining to join the Western escort arrangements.
• What the record proves is capacity and disposition, not primacy. It shows a state that provides order in its own region, not one that can rewrite the rules of the global one.

The Indo-Pacific: why the map was redrawn

The replacement of “Asia-Pacific” by “Indo-Pacific” looks like terminology and is in fact the most consequential Indian contribution to the vocabulary of contemporary order. It is a claim about strategic geography, and a map is an argument.

What “Asia-Pacific” meant, and why India was outside it

• The Asia-Pacific was a construct centred on the Pacific rim and its economies, organised institutionally around APEC and politically around the American alliance system in East Asia.
• The Indian Ocean was a separate theatre in that construct, handled by a different set of arrangements and a different naval command logic.
• India was peripheral by design. It was not an APEC member; it sat at the western edge of somebody else’s region and had no natural role in its architecture.
• The label therefore encoded a hierarchy, and the states that benefited from the hierarchy had no reason to change it.

The five reasons the reconception happened

The reasons are material before they are political, and stating them in that order is what makes the argument analytical rather than assertive.

Reason	The argument
Flows	Trade and energy move continuously from the Gulf, across the Indian Ocean, through Malacca to East Asia. Two separate theatres did not correspond to how goods and energy actually travel.
China across both oceans	The maritime component of the Belt and Road, port development across the Indian Ocean littoral and a sustained naval presence west of Malacca span both basins. A power operating across two oceans cannot be met in one.
India’s position	The single map relocates India from the periphery of one region to the centre of a single system, which is precisely why India adopted the term readily.
Architecture	It supplies a rationale for cooperation among states — India, Japan, Australia, France — that share concerns without sharing an alliance.
Analytical accuracy	Sea lines of communication, chokepoints and maritime domain awareness are indivisible across the two oceans; the older map cut a single problem in half.

• The reframing is also a claim about who counts as a stakeholder.
  • If the theatre extends from the east coast of Africa to the western Pacific, then littoral and island states from Mauritius to the Philippines are participants rather than objects, and extra-regional powers with interests but no coastline must justify their presence in terms the region sets.
• That is why the term travelled.
  • It was adopted not only by India, the United States, Japan and Australia but by ASEAN, in its own outlook, and by France, Germany, the Netherlands, the European Union, the United Kingdom and Canada, each with a separate Indo-Pacific strategy — an unusually rapid conceptual convergence.

India’s own version: the Shangri-La address of 1 June 2018

India’s fullest public statement of its conception of order was delivered as the keynote to the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore on 1 June 2018, and its elements are worth setting out because they are the vision in compressed form.

• Geographic breadth. India’s engagement runs across the Indo-Pacific “from the shores of Africa to that of the Americas” — a definition far wider than the American one, and deliberately so.
• ASEAN centrality.“Southeast Asia is at its centre. And, ASEAN has been and will be central to its future.”
  • This is not courtesy; it is the mechanism by which India avoids the region becoming a great-power condominium.
• Inclusiveness, stated as a negative.

“India does not see the Indo-Pacific Region as a strategy or as a club of limited members. Nor as a grouping that seeks to dominate. And by no means do we consider it as directed against any country.”

— Narendra Modi

• A common rules-based order, to be evolved through dialogue and to apply equally to states and to the global commons — the qualifier that distinguishes the Indian formulation from the Western one.
• Equal access to the commons as a right under international law — freedom of navigation, unimpeded commerce, and peaceful settlement of disputes.
• An open, balanced and stable trade regime, with the Southern concern about unfair competition attached to it.
• Connectivity built on trust.
  • Infrastructure must rest on respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity, consultation, transparency, viability and sustainability, and “must empower nations, not place them under impossible debt burden” — an unmistakable reference, made without naming anyone.
• Competition is normal; contests must not become conflict. The address closes on the proposition that gives the vision its shape.

“Asia of rivalry will hold us all back. Asia of cooperation will shape this century.”

— Narendra Modi

The instruments that followed

• SAGAR — Security and Growth for All in the Region — announced in Mauritius in 2015, was the Indian Ocean framework: safeguarding Indian interests, deepening security cooperation with littoral states, collective action against maritime threats, sustainable development, and engagement with extra-regional powers on the basis of shared interest.
• MAHASAGAR — Mutual and Holistic Advancement for Security and Growth Across Regions — announced in Mauritius in March 2025, superseded it in framing: the same logic extended from the Indian Ocean to a global maritime vision with the Global South at its centre.
  • The upgrade of the acronym is a statement about scope.
• The Indo-Pacific Oceans Initiative, announced at the East Asia Summit in Bangkok in November 2019, organises cooperation into seven pillars — maritime security; maritime ecology; maritime resources; capacity building and resource sharing; disaster risk reduction and management; science, technology and academic cooperation; and trade connectivity and maritime transport — with different partners leading each.
  • Its design is the vision in miniature: open membership, functional cooperation, no alliance obligation.

The honest counter-argument

• The term is also an American strategic construct, and India has adapted it rather than invented it.
  • It entered wide usage through American, Japanese and Australian strategy before India embraced it, and the suspicion that India borrowed a frame built for containment is not unreasonable.
• China reads the term as containment and says so.
  • Beijing’s standard objection is that the Indo-Pacific is a device for assembling a coalition against it under geographic cover — and the presence of the Quad inside the same conceptual space gives the objection some purchase.
• India’s version is deliberately more inclusive than Washington’s, and the differences are specific: it names no adversary; it insists the region is not a club of limited members; it makes ASEAN rather than the alliance system the centre; and it includes economic and ecological pillars alongside security.
• Whether that difference survives contact with events is the open question.
  • Every time the grouping’s security content grows, the Indian formulation’s distinctiveness shrinks, and the gap between what India says the Indo-Pacific is and what others use it for is the vision’s main point of strain.
• A definitional problem also persists. No two Indo-Pacific strategies draw the same boundary, and a strategic concept whose geography is contested is a weaker organising device than its popularity suggests.

The change of label moved India from the edge of someone else’s map to the centre of its own.

Minilateralism: why a champion of multilateralism builds small groups

There is an apparent contradiction at the centre of Indian practice. A state that argues for universal institutions spends most of its diplomatic energy on groupings of three or four. The contradiction is only apparent, and resolving it is the most interesting question in this topic.

• The resolution runs through the failure of reform.
  • If the universal bodies cannot be enlarged, cannot decide and cannot enforce, then a state with problems to solve either waits or works around them.
  • Minilaterals are what India does while reformed multilateralism does not arrive.
• The trade is explicit. Small purpose-built groupings exchange universality for effectiveness: they gain speed, cohesion and the ability to agree, and they lose legitimacy and the participation of those most affected.
• This is a claim about the shape of the order, not only about tactics.
  • A world organised through issue-based coalitions rather than through chartered institutions is a different world — one in which membership is variable, obligations are political rather than legal, and no forum has jurisdiction over everything.
• India’s portfolio is designed to be plural to the point of contradiction, and the contradiction is the point:
  • the Quad with the United States, Japan and Australia; I2U2 with Israel, the UAE and the United States;
  • trilaterals with France and the UAE and with France and Australia; selective pillars of the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework; the Supply Chain Resilience Initiative;
  • and simultaneously BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, whose members include states the first list is often read as balancing.
• The pattern is deliberate. Participation in formats with overlapping and opposed memberships is what allows India to be indispensable to several and captured by none.

The Quad as evidence about the order India prefers

The Quad’s institutional story — the 2007 formation and lapse, the 2017 revival at official level, elevation to foreign-minister level in 2019 and to leaders’ level in March 2021, the functional workstreams on vaccines, critical technology, climate, infrastructure, cyber, space and maritime domain awareness, and the Malabar exercise conducted outside the framework — belongs to the grouping’s own file and is treated there. What belongs here is what the Quad reveals about India’s conception of order.

• It is not an alliance, and India has been insistent on the point.
  • There is no mutual defence obligation, no treaty and no secretariat.
  • India has resisted the “Asian NATO” description and resisted militarisation of the agenda more firmly than Australia or Japan.
• Its output has been functional rather than strategic, which is the design: vaccine manufacture and delivery, maritime domain awareness data shared with regional partners, critical-technology standards, undersea cables and infrastructure.
  • These are public goods produced outside the institutions that were supposed to produce them.
• That is precisely the evidence.
  • India joins a grouping that does what the WHO, the WTO and the maritime bodies were expected to do, and does it with four members instead of a hundred and ninety-three.
  • The Quad is a working model of the order India would prefer not to need.
• The grouping’s own 2026 condition illustrates the model’s weakness.
  • The leaders’ summit India was to host has repeatedly not happened — deferred from 2024, then not held in 2025 or 2026 — and the chair has since passed to Australia,
  • with reporting suggesting future leaders’ meetings will be held on the margins of larger gatherings rather than as standalone events.
• A format without a charter has nothing to fall back on when attention wanders.
  • Minilaterals are fast when the members agree and simply stop when they do not, and there is no procedure that makes them resume.

	Universal institutions	Minilateral coalitions
Membership	Fixed, near-universal	Variable, chosen
Obligation	Legal, treaty-based	Political, reversible
Speed	Slow; consensus or veto	Fast; small numbers
Legitimacy	High in principle	Contested; excludes the affected
Enforcement	Weak but formal	None, but compliance is high while interest lasts
India’s stake	Demands reform and cannot obtain it	Participates freely and shapes the agenda

• The uncomfortable implication is the one the critics press.
  • A world of minilaterals is a world in which the powerful choose their company — which is the exclusion India objects to, reproduced in a newer form.
  • India is objecting to a club while building clubs.
• The Indian answer is that its own groupings are open, functional and directed against no one, and that the test is whether they deliver goods others can use.
  • That is a defensible answer and it is an empirical one, which means it can be checked and can fail.

Climate and development as elements of the order-vision

Climate is where the order’s inequality is least deniable, because the resource being allocated — the remaining carbon budget — was largely consumed by the states that industrialised first. India’s climate diplomacy therefore functions as a general argument about order conducted in a specific regime; the politics of the climate regime itself is treated elsewhere in this syllabus.

The Panchamrit at Glasgow, November 2021

At the twenty-sixth Conference of the Parties in Glasgow in November 2021, India announced five commitments — the Panchamrit, the five nectars — which remain the fullest statement of Indian climate ambition.

The commitment	Status by 2026
500 GW of non-fossil energy capacity by 2030	On track; capacity has expanded very rapidly, though the target remains demanding
50% of energy requirements from renewable energy by 2030	The related installed-capacity milestone — half of installed electricity capacity from non-fossil sources — was reached in June 2025, five years early
Reduction of total projected carbon emissions by one billion tonnes by 2030	Not carried into the formal pledge; no agreed accounting baseline exists
Reduction of the emissions intensity of GDP by 45% by 2030 against 2005	Carried into the formal pledge; intensity has fallen substantially
Net zero by 2070	Restated repeatedly; no interim binding pathway

• The most important fact about the Panchamrit is that the formal pledge did not carry all five.
  • The Nationally Determined Contribution India filed in August 2022 carried only the 50% non-fossil capacity and 45% intensity targets.
  • The billion-tonne reduction and the net-zero date were left as political announcements rather than treaty commitments.
• The gap is not a scandal but it is the honest reading: a state that announces five and pledges two has separated the diplomatic act from the legal one, and any assessment of Indian climate ambition has to say which of the two it is describing.
• The delivery record is nonetheless the strongest part of India’s development-diplomacy case. Alongside the June 2025 capacity milestone, India reached 20% ethanol blending in petrol in 2025, five years ahead of its own target.

Common but differentiated responsibilities, and what India actually argues

• The principle is that all states share responsibility for the climate but not equally, because contributions to the problem and capacities to address it differ.
  • India’s version adds respective capabilities and in the light of different national circumstances, and treats the formula as the regime’s foundational bargain rather than as a negotiating position.
• The substantive claim is historical.
  • Cumulative emissions, not current flows, caused the accumulated stock; per-capita emissions, not national totals, measure how much any population is actually consuming.
  • On both measures India’s claim to further carbon space is strong.
• The instrumental claim is about finance.
  • At COP30 in Belém in November 2025 India pressed for a dedicated work programme on Article 9.1 of the Paris Agreement — the provision under which developed countries shall provide climate finance — and secured a two-year programme covering the whole of Article 9 as a compromise.
• The defensive claim is about trade.
  • India has consistently opposed unilateral trade measures justified on climate grounds, of which carbon border adjustment is the leading example, on the argument that they convert climate policy into protection and shift the burden onto exporters who did not create the stock.
  • The final Belém texts removed trade language from the just-transition stream.
• The Belém outcome itself illustrates the order’s condition.
  • The “global mutirão” decision produced no fossil-fuel phase-out roadmap — deferred to the following conference — and only a call for efforts to triple adaptation finance by 2035, with the deadline pushed back and the baseline left unclear.
• The American withdrawal from the UNFCCC, the Green Climate Fund and the International Solar Alliance in January 2026 removed the largest historical emitter from the bargaining table altogether, which strengthens India’s moral argument and weakens the prospect of anyone paying for it.
• India’s own vulnerability is coal.
  • Continued expansion of coal capacity for baseload security is defensible on development grounds and is nonetheless the fact that critics of India’s climate leadership reach for first.
  • Both things are true, and the note is not improved by suppressing either.

The critiques, stated at their strongest

A vision this expansive attracts serious objections, and the ones worth answering are not the cheap ones. Each is stated below in its strongest form and then either answered or conceded, because a critique that is only rebutted has not been taken seriously.

One: a demand for admission, not a design for a different order

• The strongest form. India’s programme is exhausted by a list of memberships it wants — a permanent seat, a larger quota, entry to the export-control regimes.
  • Nothing in it would change how the order works for a state that is not India.
  • Shruti Kapila has argued that what defines India’s new global posture is national self-interest rather than any grand vision of harmony; the sharper version is simply that India wants a bigger chair at the same table.
• The evidence is uncomfortable.
  • India has never proposed abolishing the veto — only sharing it. It has never proposed weighted voting reform in principle — only realignment in its own favour.
  • Ikenberry’s observation that rising powers want more authority within the order rather than different rules describes Indian practice with unpleasant precision.
• The answer, such as it is, has two parts.
  • First, that admitting the excluded is a structural change when the excluded are half of humanity: representation is not a favour to India but a condition of the institution’s legitimacy.
  • Second, that India has in fact built institutions — the solar and disaster coalitions, the digital public goods model, the biofuels alliance — that exist independently of its own status.
• The concession that must be made is that these are small. They govern nothing that a great power would resist. The programme is reformist, and the honest word for it is reformist rather than transformative.

Two: reformed multilateralism has produced no reform

• The strongest form. India has advocated Security Council reform since the 1990s.
  • In more than three decades the Council has not changed.
  • The Intergovernmental Negotiations completed seventeen cycles by mid-2026 without producing a single negotiating text.
  • A doctrine whose central demand has failed for a generation is not a doctrine; it is a ritual.
• This one is largely conceded. There is no serious argument that the reform campaign has succeeded, and India’s own representative described the position in exactly those terms.
• The partial answer is that the doctrine has succeeded elsewhere.
  • The African Union’s G20 admission, the expansion of BRICS, the elevation of the G20 above the G7 as the principal economic forum, and the creation of new development banks all represent movement — none of it in the Council, all of it in the direction India argued for.
• The residual problem is that the movement has been in the informal and the new, not in the chartered and the old. That is a real result and it is not the result India asked for.

Three: the Global South leadership claim is contested

• The strongest form. The Global South is not a bloc awaiting a leader; it is a heterogeneous coalition that several states attempt to convene, and India is not the only or the largest convenor.
  • China’s material offer is larger by an order of magnitude, and other Southern states — Brazil, South Africa, Indonesia, Nigeria — advance their own claims and notice India’s.
• India’s simultaneous pursuit of great-power status is the specific irritant.
  • A state that campaigns for a permanent Council seat, for nuclear-supply access and for partnerships with the industrialised powers is visibly seeking to leave the constituency it claims to speak for.
• The scale problem is real and admitted.
  • India has not been able to match Chinese material resources, and the result is what one assessment calls a mismatch between role definition, expectation and delivery — symbolic action outrunning substantive outcome.
• India’s answer is that its offer is different in kind rather than smaller in degree: capacity building, affordable medicines, replicable digital systems and non-conditional partnership, in place of contractor-built assets and sovereign debt.
  • That answer is credible in specific sectors and does not scale to the whole claim.
• The most defensible Indian position is the one C. Raja Mohan has argued for: India as a bridge between North and South, translating between two constituencies rather than leading one against the other.
  • It is a smaller claim than leadership and a more sustainable one.

Four: India’s own record is selective

• The strongest form. A state arguing for rules that bind everyone applies them to itself when convenient. The list is specific and each item is real.
  • Trade. India withdrew from the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership in 2019 and negotiates defensively on agriculture and services — reasonable on domestic grounds, awkward for a state arguing for an open and balanced trade regime.
  • Migration. India is the world’s largest source of international migrants and the largest recipient of remittances, and is not a party to the 1951 Refugee Convention or its 1967 Protocol, hosting large refugee populations under executive discretion rather than legal obligation.
  • Adjudication. India’s acceptance of the International Court of Justice’s compulsory jurisdiction is hedged by unusually wide reservations, and India rejected the Indus Waters award of 31 August 2026.
• The answer available is that no large state’s record is clean, and that the reservations and refusals cluster around sovereignty and security questions where every major power behaves the same way.
• The concession is that this answer defends India’s conduct at the cost of India’s argument. A state that behaves like other great powers cannot claim to be proposing a different kind of great power.

Five: multipolarity may be a description, not an order

• The strongest form. Multipolarity is a condition, not an architecture.
  • It says how many centres of power exist; it says nothing about what rules govern them.
  • Historically, multipolar systems have not been notably peaceful, and Mearsheimer’s warning about unbalanced multipolarity is a warning about exactly this configuration.
• India’s role in a multipolar world may therefore be that of a beneficiary rather than an architect — courted by several, obliged to none, and dependent on the competition continuing.
• The answer is that India is not arguing for multipolarity alone but for multipolarity plus rules, which is why reformed multilateralism and multipolarity are always stated together in Indian formulations.
  • The two propositions are load-bearing only as a pair.
• The unresolved difficulty is that the rules half has not been delivered, which leaves India holding the half of the doctrine that requires nothing of anyone.

Six: the capability gap

• The strongest form. Ambition is outrunning means, and the gap is measurable.
  • India ranked sixth in the world by nominal GDP on the IMF’s April 2026 World Economic Outlook, having been fourth in 2025 — the fall driven by a national-accounts base-year revision and rupee depreciation rather than by contraction, with a return to fourth projected for 2027.
  • Defence spending was fifth globally, at about US$92.1 billion in 2025, a fraction of the leading two.
  • India placed 32nd on the Global Soft Power Index in 2026, down two places — a poor result for a state whose vision rests substantially on attraction.
  • Delivery is the recurring weakness: credit lines disbursed slowly, connectivity projects behind schedule, and a diplomatic service small relative to the ambition.
• The answer is about trajectory rather than level, and it is a weak answer while the trajectory is contested.
• The binding constraints are three and they should be named plainly: economic capability relative to China; a neighbourhood that has not consistently cooperated; and the delivery capacity behind the commitments India makes.

The most serious charge is not that India’s vision is wrong, but that it is a claim on the order rather than a design for one.

What India is actually asking for

Stripped to its load-bearing parts, the Indian vision is narrower than its vocabulary and more coherent than its critics allow. It asks that the institutions built in 1945 be enlarged rather than replaced; that the rules bind the strong; that development be treated as the central international question; and that universality be understood as something several traditions can build rather than one tradition can export.

• The diagnosis is stronger than the prescription. India’s account of what is wrong — unequal, discriminatory, unrepresentative — is accurate and widely shared. Its remedies are institutional, incremental and dependent on the consent of those they would dilute.
• The record is real and modest.
  • An African Union seat, a solar treaty body, a disaster coalition, a vaccine programme, a digital public-goods model and a summit on artificial intelligence are more than rhetoric and less than an order.
• The position India occupies is genuinely unusual and is its principal asset: a large economy outside every bloc, a democracy that is not Western, a claimant on reformed institutions rather than a defender of the existing ones or a builder of alternatives.
  • No other state currently occupies it.
• The open question of the decade is whether that position is a strategy or a phase — a durable role India has chosen, or a space that great-power competition has temporarily left vacant and may close again.