Narratives, Pretensions and Reality
Why Read This
What Makes This Article Worth Your Time
Summary
What This Article Is About
Makarand R Paranjape, a professor and public intellectual, opens with withering irony about India’s self-image as a vishwaguru and emerging superpower — before widening his lens to dissect the global phenomenon of narrative management: the use of propaganda and self-serving storytelling by powers that are losing on the ground. He traces this pattern across the Soviet Union’s defeat and its aftermath in Western academia, Russia’s entrapment in Ukraine, China’s infiltration of Western civil society, and the media ecosystem that declares the US a declining power despite Iran’s decimated military infrastructure.
The article’s sharpest move is to turn this critique inward: Paranjape argues that India is itself guilty of the same narrative inflation it mocks in others. Claims of civilisational grandeur and global leadership ring hollow unless India builds the intellectual capital, institutional excellence, and hard power — including projecting force far from home — that genuine great-power status demands. Dismissing constructive criticism as anti-national, tolerating mediocrity in public education, and substituting mantra for investment, he warns, will prevent India from reaching the “next level” of its manifest destiny.
Key Points
Main Takeaways
Narratives Are the Loser’s Opiate
Powers that lose — militarily or geopolitically — compensate with propaganda, reframing defeat as victory to preserve domestic morale and international relevance.
The US Decline Story Is a Propaganda Project
China, Russia, and their aligned commentators have relentlessly promoted US decline as “foregone conclusion” — but the US is visibly reasserting its superpower status rather than receding.
India Is Guilty of the Same Inflation
India’s vishwaguru self-image and civilisational pride mirror the very narrative management it can identify in others — without the hard power, institutional depth, or intellectual capacity to back the claim.
Criticism Branded as Anti-National
Any constructive critique of India’s governance failures or entrenched mediocrity is quickly labelled anti-national — suppressing the very intellectual self-examination that great-power aspiration requires.
Hard Power Has Concrete Requirements
Genuine superpower status, Paranjape argues, demands boots on the ground far from home, policing ocean trade routes, and building deep intellectual and strategic capacity — not just a compelling cultural narrative.
Mantra Cannot Replace Investment
Repeating the mantra of India’s imminent greatness — while neglecting talent development, allowing education to be consumed by caste politics, and ignoring the roots of economic competitiveness — will not produce real ascent.
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Article Analysis
Breaking Down the Elements
Main Idea
Narrative Cannot Substitute for Hard Power — in India or Anywhere
Across every major power — Russia, China, Iran, and India — the gap between self-promotional narrative and measurable geopolitical reality is growing. Paranjape’s central warning is that India’s rush to claim greatness through storytelling, while suppressing internal criticism and neglecting institutional capacity, mirrors the very propaganda it scorns in adversaries.
Purpose
To Puncture Both Global and Domestic Geopolitical Illusions
Paranjape writes to discomfort partisans on multiple sides simultaneously. He deflates anti-Western narratives about US decline, but also turns the same unsentimental gaze on India’s civilisational self-congratulation — refusing to let any side off the hook and demanding intellectual honesty as the price of genuine power.
Structure
Ironic Opening → Global Survey → Mirror Turned Inward → Challenge
The essay opens with barbed mockery of India’s self-image, pivots to a rapid global survey of narrative versus reality (Soviet defeat, Russia in Ukraine, China’s propaganda, Iran’s losses), then — in its most important move — redirects the same analytical weapon at India’s own institutional failures, closing with an open challenge about manifest destiny.
Tone
Sardonic, Iconoclastic & Urgently Prescriptive
Paranjape writes with sustained irony that can sting — his opening paragraphs are barely disguised mockery. But the tone shifts from satirical detachment to genuine concern as he turns to India’s domestic failures, ending in a prescriptive register that is more warning than critique.
Key Terms
Vocabulary from the Article
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Tough Words
Challenging Vocabulary
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Caught or entangled in a difficult situation from which escape is very hard; trapped as if in a net — used to describe Russia’s inability to exit its prolonged war in Ukraine.
“Russia, too, far from a swift victory in Ukraine, is entrammelled in a four-plus year war, from which it finds it very hard to extricate itself.”
In an insistent, commanding manner that allows no refusal or discussion; brusquely assertive — used to describe India’s declaration of great-power status as premature and overbearing rather than earned.
“We, too, have ratcheted up our information and influence machine, asserting somewhat peremptorily, if not prematurely, that we are a great power.”
Full of danger or uncertainty; dangerously uncertain — used to describe the damaging and precarious consequences of India’s aversion to recognising and incentivising talent.
“We must ignore… the parlous fallout of our peculiar aversion to both recognising and incentivising talent.”
Shouts of praise, adoration, or fervent approval — originally a Hebrew expression of praise to God; used ironically here to describe the uncritical celebration of India’s trajectory even as real problems go unaddressed.
“We, the eternal India optimists, must look the other way, even sing hosannas rather than noticing the parlous fallout of our peculiar aversion to both recognising and incentivising talent.”
The act of formally giving up power, responsibility, or a position; here used to describe Europe’s voluntary surrender of global influence through colonial guilt and managed decline, which Paranjape expects to spread to the US.
“With Europe’s colonial guilt and managed decline well underway, a similar abdication, sooner than later, across the Atlantic is only to be expected.”
Something that numbs or dulls the critical faculties; a sedative influence that prevents people from perceiving or reacting to reality — a deliberate echo of Marx’s phrase “religion is the opium of the masses.”
“Narratives as the opiate of the masses. He who shall not be named said something similar, remember, but about religion?”
Reading Comprehension
Test Your Understanding
5 questions covering different RC question types
1Paranjape uses the opening paragraphs about India’s vishwaguru aspirations and international awards to sincerely celebrate India’s growing global stature and diplomatic achievements.
2When Paranjape writes “Narratives as the opiate of the masses” and immediately adds “He who shall not be named said something similar, remember, but about religion?”, he is primarily doing which of the following?
3Which of the following sentences most precisely states what Paranjape identifies as the real prerequisite for India achieving genuine great-power status?
4Evaluate each of the following statements about the geopolitical claims made or examined in the article.
Paranjape accepts the view of “an overwhelming section of the media and the commentariat” that the United States has lost its war with Iran and is a declining power.
The article acknowledges that both Ukraine and Iran involve proxy conflicts, but argues that the Western alliance appears to hold the upper hand in both.
According to Paranjape, India’s economic competitiveness is largely derived from labour arbitrage — a fact he says it is “politically incorrect” to acknowledge.
Select True or False for all three statements, then click “Check Answers”
5Throughout the article, Paranjape applies the same critical lens to India as he does to Russia, China, and Iran. What does this structural symmetry most strongly suggest about his overall argument?
FAQ
Frequently Asked Questions
The phrase echoes Marx’s famous claim that “religion is the opium of the people” — a tool that dulls suffering and prevents people from confronting their real conditions. Paranjape deliberately adapts this to argue that geopolitical narratives — stories of victorious resistance, civilisational greatness, or enemy decline — now perform the same sedating function. He pointedly attributes the original formulation to “He who shall not be named,” a wry joke at the expense of the left-leaning commentariat he is criticising.
He argues that when the Soviet Union lost the Cold War, its ideological supporters did not disappear — they repositioned themselves as post-colonial theorists within Western universities. Rather than acknowledging defeat, they found a new institutional base from which to continue promoting anti-Western frameworks under the respectable banner of critical theory. This is Paranjape’s first example of the pattern: a power loses, but its intellectual champions survive and even thrive, reshaping the narrative of defeat into a form of cultural victory.
Paranjape identifies several interlocking failures: the reflexive labelling of constructive criticism as anti-national, which shuts down necessary self-examination; an aversion to recognising and rewarding talent; public education consumed by caste-based conflict rather than excellence; private education driven by profit and fakery; and a reluctance to honestly acknowledge that India’s economic competitiveness rests primarily on low-cost labour rather than innovation. Together these constitute what he calls “institutionalised, deeply entrenched mediocrity.”
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This article is rated Advanced. It demands three distinct reading competencies simultaneously: recognising sustained irony in the opening (the praise is mockery), tracking a rapid multi-country geopolitical argument across a compressed text, and distinguishing between positions Paranjape reports, positions he ironises, and positions he actually holds. Vocabulary items like “entrammelled,” “peremptorily,” “parlous,” and “hosannas” add further linguistic challenge, as do allusions to Marx and the concept of manifest destiny repurposed in an Indian context.
Makarand R Paranjape is a professor of English at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi, and one of India’s prominent public intellectuals. He writes on culture, politics, and civilisation, and is known for a perspective that is broadly sympathetic to India’s civilisational heritage while remaining sharply critical of the gap between nationalist rhetoric and institutional reality. His willingness to critique both the establishment’s self-congratulation and the left’s geopolitical narrative makes him a genuinely iconoclastic voice in Indian opinion writing.
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