India Must Stop Seeking Foreign Validation: PM's Adviser Sanjeev Sanyal

As the tricolour rose across the country on Independence Day, the conversation around India's journey ended up, as always, in a debate. On one side, restless Gen Z people chasing start-ups and global opportunity. On the other, a louder, more insistent national debate about shedding the country's colonial hangover. Sanjeev Sanyal, a member of the Prime Minister's Economic Advisory Council and a historian, believes these are not two separate conversations at all.

"The issues you have raised are actually not unconnected," Sanyal said. 

"They are the same issue - a nation with decades of survival behind it, sitting on enormous unrealised potential, trying to find its footing in a world where the old certainties have certainly broken down," he added.

That uncertainty, he argued, isn't limited to the geopolitical flashpoints next door in Iran and the Gulf. It runs through everything -- artificial intelligence upending supply chains and entire industries, and a demographic bulge India will ride for the next 25 to 30 years, with a narrowing window to make the most of it before the clock runs out.

No Grand Plan, By Design

Sanyal's central argument is that there is no master plan, and there shouldn't be one. "Anybody who wants a grand plan, where we know exactly how things are going to play out. I'm afraid you can't do that," he said, pointing to how comprehensively COVID-19 upended every projection made in January 2020.

His prescription, instead, is what he called flexibility and optionality -- building a system resilient enough to absorb shocks, whichever way they come. He extended this logic to India's foreign policy, where the country sits simultaneously in the G20, the Quad, at G7 tables as an invitee, and within BRICS. The same principle, he said, drives India's expanding web of free-trade agreements.

On the numbers, Sanyal noted India is now the third-largest economy in the world by purchasing power parity, contributing close to 8 per cent of global output, and the fifth-largest in current dollar terms at roughly $4.2 trillion -- just behind Japan, and currently the fastest-growing major economy. But he was quick to temper the optimism: divide that economy by the world's largest population, and India remains, in per capita terms, a fairly poor country -- which is why, he said, safety nets have to be built even as the country tries to climb. Asked what single policy shift could unlock the scale of wealth creation India aspires to -- tracing the arc from the scarcity of the post-1947 decades, through the licence raj of the 1970s and 80s, to today's top-three global economy ambitions -- Sanyal was unequivocal that no such single lever exists.

The Many Faces Of Colonial Hangover

Where Sanyal turned most animated was on decolonisation -- a subject he has long argued extends well beyond textbooks, though he was clear that the battle is largely won. School textbooks up to Class 9, he said, have already shed the colonial and Marxist framing that dominated Indian education for decades, and he was directly involved in rewriting the economics portions.

But he flagged three areas where the hangover persists, often invisibly. The first is academia: Indian professors, he said, are effectively forced to publish in international journals -- specifically those on the ABDC list, an index issued by an Australian body -- to get promoted, regardless of the quality of work published in Indian journals. "We have consequently colonised ourselves," he said, "by perpetuating a system where we seek foreign validation."

The second is certification. Sanyal pointed out that Indian industry -- and even the Indian government itself -- routinely demands foreign certification for products and processes where India has never built its own equivalent systems, something even Thailand, he noted pointedly, has managed to do.

The third, and perhaps the most charged, is language. Sanyal objected to the framing of Indian languages as "vernacular" altogether, calling it a marker of the very colonisation being discussed. But his critique cut both ways -- he was equally unsparing about the absence of contemporary literary output in Indian languages. Reminding that Rabindranath Tagore was already a celebrated writer by the age of 40, Sanyal challenged: "Where is today's Tagore in Bengali? Where is today's Premchand in Hindi?" He argued Indian languages will only truly move forward when they generate new ideas and new literature -- not when they are simply preserved as inheritance. English, he said, remains a great language not because of Shakespeare, but because it has continuously produced great new writing ever since.

He did offer one note of optimism: Bollywood and popular culture, where gatekeeping is comparatively lighter, continue to produce fresh trends -- a sign, he suggested, of what might be possible elsewhere if Indian languages are treated as living systems rather than museum pieces.

Is Gen Z India's First Decolonised Generation?

Turning to Gen Z -- increasingly framed as unapologetic celebrants of Indian roots, from bhajan clubbing to reviving interest in Indian attire and history -- Sanyal was quick to push back on the label itself.

"I have difficulty with this term, Gen Z, as a catch-all," he said, arguing that every generation, including his own Gen X, contains people with wildly different worldviews, sometimes within the same family.

That said, he acknowledged the trend is real. He pointed to a growing movement to revive ancient Indian martial arts and traditional games, and a surge of interest in Indian history -- one he said he personally benefits from, since much of his own reading list now comes from younger readers. But he was careful not to overstate it into a grand narrative: Gen Z, like every generation before and after it, will simply "find their own way through the world," with some going on to do more for India's decolonisation than previous generations managed.

Rewriting The Freedom Struggle - And India's Forgotten Maritime Past

Sanyal reserved some of his sharpest criticism for how India's independence movement itself has been told. The dominant narrative, he argued, presents Indians as passive figures with "no agency" who ought to be grateful that successive invaders arrived to civilise them -- and frames the freedom struggle itself as almost entirely non-violent, built around Gandhi politely asking the British to leave.

"The reality is that the history of our freedom struggle was absolutely brutal," he said, pointing to the scale of armed resistance - executions, hangings, imprisonment in institutions like the Cellular Jail - culminating in events such as the naval mutiny. He was clear this isn't a rejection of everything from the colonial period - he said he can admire the Taj Mahal or enjoy an English breakfast without that extending to "celebrating the occupation of my country."

He extended the same critique to India's maritime history, calling the popular notion that Indians were historically fearful of the sea "completely bunkum." Citing evidence of Indian seafaring dating to the Bronze Age -- trade routes reaching Oman and Sumeria, and later voyages east to Indonesia and Vietnam -- he noted this history explains why the world's largest Hindu temple stands in Cambodia, not India, and why countries like Indonesia carry India's name in their own. None of this, he said, features meaningfully in textbooks or popular culture - though that, too, is beginning to change.

Looking Ahead To 2047

Asked what an India that had fully shed these inherited frameworks might look like by 2047 -- a century after independence -- Sanyal turned notably optimistic. The demographic dividend matters, he said, but the bigger shift is a new national confidence that didn't exist even a decade ago. Today, he said, it's normal for Indian multinationals to compete globally, for Indian startups to scale, and for the country to tell its own history in its own way "without anything to be defensive about."

"This alone is big progress," Sanyal said, adding that this shift in confidence is why he remains convinced the next two decades will see India take its rightful place in the world.