Is India's celebrated strategic autonomy real, or a myth sustained by domestic politics? Pravin Sawhney, director of the Force Research Institute, joins me to dismantle the popular narrative around Modi's foreign policy. According to Pravin, the world became multipolar in 2013, when Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin outlined a new international order built on sovereign equality, only for the Modi government to reject China's rise and hitch India's fortunes to Washington instead. We examine why India refused to accept China as a major power despite an unbridgeable gap in military, economic, and technological strength, how this refusal shaped India's recent four-day war with Pakistan, in which, by Western assessment, the Pakistani military performed better. Even more so, Pakistan's ties to all three major powers now position it closer to the new order  ...