The Republic and the World

January 25, 2005
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By C. Rajamohan

Why does India, despite its potential, continue to think small?

As the nation celebrates the 55th anniversary of the Republic, the external environment has never been as favourable to independent India as it is today. Yet the nation’s foreign policy discourse is troubled by tentativeness. While India has an increasingly confident younger generation that views the world with optimism, the political class and intelligentsia are gripped by an enduring Indo-pessimism. Barring the ’50s, when India under Nehru addressed the world with confidence, pessimism has been hallmark of national discourse on foreign relations. This pessimism was coupled with defensive posturing on major issues. Thinking small became an enduring intellectual fashion. While Rajiv Gandhi, P.V. Narasimha Rao and Atal Bihari Vajpayee occasionally broke away from this norm, ingrained risk aversion prevented India from persisting with new approaches to international relations.

Today, five major trends on the world scene demand a confident national strategy built around internal reform and external initiative. The first trend is about India’s relative rise in the international system. Despite the impressive growth in the first four decades of the Republic, it was a period of relative decline for India; in that period the world grew much faster than India. The economic reforms launched in the early ’90s, however, helped arrest the relative decline for the first time since independence.

Within a decade, India has emerged as the fourth largest economy of the world in purchasing power parity terms. In more absolute terms, as the National Intelligence Council (NIC) in the US underlined recently, India will begin to overtake all the Western nations except the US by 2020 in economic size. More fundamentally, the NIC report argued that the rise of China and India will begin to transform the nature of global politics and reorder international institutions. If India continues to grow at reasonably high growth rates, it will inevitably become a force to reckon with. Yet there is nothing to suggest that the establishment is preparing itself for this. Second, for the first time again since the founding of the Republic, India is simultaneously expanding relations with all the great powers.

uring the first four decades of the Republic, India’s foreign policy options were constrained by Cold War rivalry between Washington and Moscow and that between Russia and China. Today all the great powers are at peace with each other. While they continue to play the game of balance of power, the prospect for a major confrontation among any of them has dimmed. When India’s ally the Soviet Union fell off the map in ’91, India’s ties with all the other powers including the US, Europe, and China, were underdeveloped. Over the last decade, it has managed to reinvigorate ties with Russia even while engaging with the others. India no longer has to look over its shoulder in engaging any one power. Yet Cold War inertia seems to hold it back.

Third, traditionally, the problems within the subcontinent have constituted one of the biggest constraints. Today, thanks to globalisation and the pressure on countries in our neighbourhood to open up their economies, it has become possible to promote regional economic integration of the subcontinent under Indian leadership. On the ground, this would mean ending the economic consequences of the Partition in ’47. Yet, India remains niggardly in its approach to trade and opening its market to the neighbours. Instead of leading the charge towards a rapid reintegration of the South Asian economic space, India remains hesitant in its approach. Security arguments are drummed up to prevent closer economic cooperation, like on energy pipelines.

Fourth, globalisation has also opened the prospects of reconnecting India’s frontier regions with the markets in Yunnan, Tibet, Xinjiang, Central Asia, Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf. The commercial opportunities in these regions are being squandered in the name of a narrow approach to security and the fear that others will come into India’s protected regions. The mindset in New Delhi remains defensive. It would rather protect its own territory from competition rather than seeking to re-establish national profile in frontiers beyond our borders.

Finally, India has a huge opportunity to break out of its main security challenge: the persistence of a two-front problem since independence. The unwillingness to resolve the boundary dispute with China and the problem of J&K with Pakistan have sapped India’s military and strategic energies since the Republic’s founding. The nuclearisation of the subcontinent, however, has given us an extraordinary opportunity to rethink these disputes. The nuclear factor has meant that conventional wars will become less feasible. The experience of the ’90s and its military confrontations have revealed that the international community will move heaven and earth to prevent a recurrence of a conventional war in the region.

While Pakistan’s low-intensity conflict against India has caused many problems, the effectiveness of that strategy in prising territory out of India are under a huge cloud. Yet our armed forces have been condemned to defend every square inch of territory rather than consciously adapt to the new military threats that face the nation. And on the diplomatic front, despite launching historic negotiations with both China and Pakistan on resolving the boundary dispute and the Kashmir question respectively, caution again appears to have overtaken the imperatives of political imagination.

While it is clear that resolving the political dispute on either of the two frontiers would dramatically alter India’s security condition, defensive arguments are mounted to avoid the exploration of innovative solutions. When India should be focusing like a laser beam on its great power potential and reforming its security sector to take on new regional and global challenges, strategic timidity dressed up in hardline rhetoric has begun to again cloud India’s prospects. While India is acquiring greater economic, diplomatic and military muscle, its mind has remained small. Default options are once again becoming more attractive than strategic experimentation.

What India now needs is a bold vision on foreign and national security policies, whether in dealing with the great powers or its smaller neighbours. And that can only come from the prime minister. Fragmenting his authority and power over national security, in the name of strengthening other institutions, is the worst thing we could do to ourselves at this moment.

(A columnist with The Indian Express, C. Rajamohan is a leading strategic analyst of India. We reproduce this article courtesy The Indian Express dated Jan. 25, 2005—Ed.)