Comment: Information Technology – an element of national power. (2000, 20 Marks)
Information technology (IT) was absent from Hans J. Morgenthau‘s classical inventory of national power. Alvin Toffler (Powershift, 1990) called knowledge the highest-quality source of power. Robert O. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye (Foreign Affairs, 1998) argued that the information revolution changes who holds power and how it is exercised. Today IT is both an element in its own right and a multiplier of every other element.
How IT generates power
- Economic: software, services and digital platforms are a leading source of growth and exports. India’s Unified Payments Interface processed a record 24.51 billion transactions in August 2026 (NPCI), close to half of the world’s real-time payments by industry estimates.
- Military: network-centric warfare links sensors, commanders and precision weapons. The drone war in Ukraine and the drone and air-defence duels of Operation Sindoor (May 2025) show that software and data now decide what platforms are worth.
- Cyber power: Nye’s cyber power (The Future of Power, 2011) is the ability to obtain outcomes through the cyber domain. The Stuxnet sabotage of Iran’s centrifuges, revealed in 2010, showed that code can achieve physical effects.
- Structural power: Susan Strange placed the knowledge structure beside security, production and finance. Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman‘s weaponised interdependence (2019) shows that states hosting network hubs (semiconductor tools, cloud, financial messaging) can watch and choke others. US semiconductor export controls are the leading case.
- Informational and soft power: control of narratives, platforms and attention shapes preferences, and sharp power turns disinformation against open societies.
- Rule-setting: power increasingly lies in writing the norms. The New Delhi Declaration on AI Impact (February 2026), endorsed by some ninety countries and organisations including both the US and China, framed AI governance around access and development and took note of a charter for the “democratic diffusion” of AI. India also promotes digital public infrastructure as a Global South public good, a framework the G20 adopted under its 2023 presidency.
Limits and vulnerabilities
- Exposure grows with dependence: the more digitised a state, the larger its attack surface. The ransomware attack on AIIMS Delhi in 2022 exposed India’s critical-information gaps.
- Hardware dependence: software strength without chip-fabrication capacity leaves a state open to others’ export controls. This is why India launched its Semiconductor Mission in 2021.
- Diffusion to non-state actors: Nye notes that IT spreads power to firms, hackers and terrorist networks. Platform companies, not governments, hold much of the data.
- Limited coercive yield: Thomas Rid (Cyber War Will Not Take Place, 2013) argues that cyber operations are mostly espionage, sabotage and subversion, and seldom compel by themselves. Attribution is slow and deterrence is uncertain.
- The digital divide: a core–periphery hierarchy reappears in compute, data and standards, which the realist reading of IT as just another capability overlooks.
Perspectives
Realists treat IT as a new capability in the old competition, visible in the US–China contest over chips and AI. Liberals stress interdependence and the shared stakes in an open internet. Constructivists see narratives and categories (“trusted vendor”, “responsible AI”) as power in themselves. Dependency theorists warn of digital colonialism.
Conclusion
IT is now a genuine element of national power: it functions as the nervous system through which the other elements are mobilised. Like every element it is potential, not outcome. It rewards states that combine scale with control of hubs and standards, and it punishes dependence. India’s comparative advantage in services and digital public infrastructure is real, but its reliance on imported hardware shows how much ground remains to be covered.