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India Surpasses Japan to Become the 3rd Most Powerful Nation in Asia, According to 2024 Asia Power Index
India Surpasses Japan to Become the 3rd Most Powerful Nation in Asia, According to 2024 Asia Power Index
The 2024 Asia Power Index (API) reveals that India has surpassed Japan to become the third most powerful country in Asia. Topping the list once again are the United States and China. Australia’s Lowy Institute ranks 27 countries and territories each year according to their power, with factors such as military capability and economic resources; these results provide a snapshot not just of who is strong today but how power is moving around regions like Southeast Asia—an area where Taiwan also features on mainland Chinese maps, albeit without full recognition from most other states thereabouts.
India has more global power than Japan now, but it is not doing as much with this power as it could. Even though the country still has loads of potential—look at all those resources!—you might not realize if you believed the world-conquering hype about “Incredible India.” (As one newspaper commentator put it recently: “There remains a gap between what one might expect from India’s rise and the reality.”) And when new figures from the Washington DC-based Asia Policy Institute are broken down further, they reveal an additional constraint on Delhi’s ability to act beyond immediate neighborhoods—it too has limits. For example, their data shows whether India can do things like exercise maritime influence across seas close to home, such as the Andaman Sea or Bay of Bengal.
India’s assets include having a large population, lots of land, and a strong economy. The report says that because India has such a young population, it might be able to take advantage of a demographic dividend in the future; this would set it apart from many other Asian countries whose workforces are getting older, including one key rival: China. After its economy picked up following the pandemic, India was able to increase its score for economic capability by more than four points. It also improved across various other measures of resources; for example, after gaining more than eight points, Future Resources saw the biggest increase.
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Even though India has shown increased diplomatic influence in the 2024 Asia Power Index (API), there is still a large gap between how it aspires to be seen—as a nation on the rise—and what is true: when it comes to exerting power within Asia, there are limits.One area where this tension becomes clear is economic relations. Here, things have not gone well for India: while the country was ranked fourth for economic relationships in last year’s API, this year it fell behind Indonesia and also saw its overall score drop.
Analysts point out that being passed by Southeast Asia’s largest economy is no small matter given how low India’s economic integration with other major regional players remains—along with limited involvement in key Asian trade forums. When we look specifically at defense networks (which include arms sales and security agreements, among other factors), an interesting pattern emerges. For the third year running, India has seen its score decrease; as a result of 2022 findings, it now ranks ninth on the table.
