The Multipolar Myth: What Vijay Gokhale's Framework Tells Us About India's Strategic Crossroads

In a filmed interview published on 27 May 2026, Vijay Gokhale offered a blunt reassessment of the geopolitical vocabulary that has dominated strategic discussion in New Delhi and beyond for the past several years. The idea of an emerging multipolar world order, he argued, was always partly aspirational, partly premature — and the last twelve months have exposed the gap between the description and the reality.

"There is no multipolar world," Gokhale told The Print's Swasti Rao and Shekhar Gupta. "It was a myth. The last twelve months tell us that. It is a multilateral world with sharp bipolar features." The distinction is not semantic. A multipolar world implies multiple centres of roughly equivalent power capable of setting the agenda. What Gokhale describes instead is a system in which formal multilateral institutions — the United Nations, the WTO, the multilateral trading architecture — persist, but in which the gravitational pull of two great powers shapes almost every bilateral relationship, every alliance calculation, and every economic decision in between.

The Architecture of a Bipolar Overlay

The practical consequence of Gokhale's framing is that middle powers — and India occupies precisely that category — find their strategic autonomy more constrained than the multipolar narrative suggested. Under genuine multipolarity, New Delhi could, in theory, triangulate between Washington and Beijing with enough room to extract concessions from both. Under the bipolar-overlay model Gokhale describes, every move toward one pole has a more immediate structural consequence than it would in a genuinely distributed system.

That is not a comfortable position for a country whose stated doctrine — strategic autonomy, or atmanirbharta in its current political vernacular — is premised on maintaining independent leverage. The question Gokhale forces is not whether India should pursue that doctrine, but whether the operating environment still permits it in the form its advocates imagine.

What makes the framing analytically serviceable rather than merely rhetorical is that it maps onto observable behaviour by the great powers themselves. The Biden-era attempt to construct a coalition of democracies as an alternative economic architecture — the G7-led response to Chinese infrastructure lending through the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment — has not produced the gravitational shift its architects hoped. China has deepened its trade relationships across the Global South, using bilateral mechanisms, yuan-denominated swap lines, and the Belt and Road's evolved financial instruments to embed itself in supply chains that were supposed to diversify away from Beijing. The multilateral forums where middle-power influence might be exercised — the WTO's appellate body, the IMF's quota review process — remain structurally resistant to reform.

India's Defence Wake-Up Call

The second significant dimension of Gokhale's remarks concerns India's own defensive posture. Speaking about the deterioration in India-China relations that crystallised in the 2020 Galwan valley clash, he offered an assessment that is unlikely to comfort those who set defence budgets in New Delhi. "India has only now begun to invest in defence infrastructure and industry," Gokhale said. "This should have started forty years ago. Galwan was a wake-up call."

The timeline matters here. India's defence modernisation programme has been a subject of sustained commentary for decades — the persistent equipment gaps across all three services, the chronic delays in procurement, the underfunded state of border infrastructure in the Himalayan theatre. The Galwan incident did not create those deficiencies; it exposed them at the precise moment they had become operationally consequential. That New Delhi is now accelerating defence industrial investment is, in Gokhale's reading, evidence of a late and reactive policy shift rather than the product of proactive strategic planning.

Whether the current pace of investment — and the domestic manufacturing programmes associated with atmanirbharta in the defence sector — will close the gap in time is a separate question the sources do not resolve. What is measurable is that the gap existed at the worst possible moment, and that the structural conditions which produced it have not been fully dismantled.

The Trade Imbalance Question

The third thread in Gokhale's interview addressed the India-China trade relationship directly, and in terms that complicate the dominant political narrative in New Delhi. Bilateral trade figures show a persistent and widening Indian trade deficit with China — a source of regular parliamentary and media criticism of Beijing's trade practices. Gokhale did not dispute the imbalance's existence. His argument was about attribution.

"India-China trade imbalance is worsening," he acknowledged. "Both countries approach it differently. But simply putting the blame on China is not proper." The sources do not elaborate on what Gokhale regards as the Indian side of the causal picture — whether he is referring to structural features of the Indian economy, import dependence that predates the current political friction, or policy choices in New Delhi that have limited the domestic manufacturing base. But the framing itself is notable: a former foreign secretary and ambassador to Beijing, with no political incentive to spare China criticism, is pushing back on a narrative that is otherwise politically convenient in New Delhi.

What Gokhale appears to be pointing toward is a more uncomfortable domestic reckoning — the recognition that the trade structure India inherited from decades of relatively open engagement with Chinese industry has built dependencies that cannot be reversed quickly by tariff adjustments alone. Whether that reckoning will translate into specific policy adjustments in the current Indian government's industrial strategy is a question the sources leave open.

The Stakes for a Country in Between

The structural frame that connects all three threads — the nature of the global order, the state of Indian defence readiness, and the dynamics of the China trade — is India's persistent position as a major power without a fully matured strategic identity. The multipolar moment that many in New Delhi's foreign policy establishment believed they were entering around 2020-2022 has not arrived on schedule. The bipolar pressures Gokhale identifies are, if anything, intensifying.

That creates a specific set of risks. The most immediate is that India finds itself pressed from both sides of a relationship whose management requires more strategic clarity than the current framing provides. Engaging economically with China while competing with it militarily along a disputed border is not a contradiction — it is the actual condition of Indian policy. But it requires a level of institutional coherence, particularly in defence procurement and industrial policy, that has historically been elusive.

Gokhale's three observations do not add up to a policy programme. They add up to a diagnosis — one that suggests the comfortable vocabulary of strategic autonomy is running ahead of the structural conditions that would make it operable. Whether the current Indian government has the institutional will and the time horizon to address that gap is the question that remains unanswered.

This publication's coverage of India-China dynamics foregrounds the assessments of Indian practitioners and regional specialists rather than defaulting to Washington or Beijing-centric analytical frames.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://t.me/theprintindia/17842
• https://t.me/theprintindia/17840
• https://t.me/theprintindia/17839