14-04-2015
As anecdotes go, this one’s as good as any: An Indian woman sporting a bindi walked up to the checkout counter of a store in London. The sales girl looked at the bindi, smiled, and said: “Good job in Yemen.”
India’s rescue mission in Yemen was front page news in Japan for two consecutive days, reported senior journalist Ayaz Memon on a visit there. Media worldwide – television, newspapers, the internet – are still full of stories of how India’s navy and airforce, backed by Air India, rescued more than 6,000 people belonging to more than 40 nationalities in Yemen.
Enough has been written, spoken and filmed about India’s Yemen operation and this piece is not intended to add to that. More crucially, events of the past week in Yemen raise two questions: One, why has India over the years never punched at its true geopolitical weight? And two, does Yemen represent an inflection point in India’s growing geopolitical clout?
In 2011, we created the Geopolitical Power Index (GPI). The index ranks countries on 11 parameters: economy, military, development and so on. Each parameter is further based on five quantitative and qualitative sub-criteria. For example, the economy parameter has these five sub-criteria: per capita income, GDP, competitiveness, forex reserves and fiscal deficit.
The chart below shows rankings for the period January-June 2014 based on each nation’s global projection of hard and soft power.
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