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India: Challenges of a rising
power
By Ehsan Ahrari
India's
role as a rising power is the outcome of a quiet
revolution that has been taking place in the thinking of
its various prime ministers - the virtual unsung heroes
- like Rajiv Gandhi, P V Narasimha Rao, I K Gujral, and
the current premier, Atal Bihari Vajpayee. The most
significant change was the decision taken under the
administration of Vajpayee in 1998 to take India's
nuclear program out of the closet. The rationale was
that once India bit that bullet, the world would be
forced to deal with it as a nuclear power. Risky though
that proposition was, Vajpayee took the risk. The rest,
as the expression goes, is history. There is little
doubt that becoming a nuclear power has brought a lot of
prestige to India, even from its staunchest critic, the
United States. However, India's emergence as a future
great power was also dependent on a number of other
decisions taken in the past 30 years. C Raja Mohan's
recent book, Crossing the Rubicon: The Shaping of
India's New Foreign Policy, is an excellent
narrative of those decisions.
During the entire
course of the Cold War years, India pursued a foreign
policy that was quite critical of the US and equally
friendly to the Soviet Union. There is no doubt that its
friendship with the Soviet Union was based primarily in
pursuit of its own national interests, but the
estrangement between New Delhi and Washington also was
driven by nonalignment. That was an ideology that was
unduly sympathetic of the Soviet Union since it had
championed itself as anti-colonial in its orientation.
Of course, all Third World nations of that era - and
especially India - conveniently overlooked the most
glaring nature of Soviet imperialism that had subjugated
Eastern European nations throughout the Cold War years.
Another important aspect of India's anti-Americanism
during those years was based on its intense rivalry with
Pakistan, an element that Mohan opted not to emphasize.
In the post-Cold war unipolar global system,
India decided to be on the side of the lone superpower,
the US, the celebrated winner of the Cold War. Rulers in
New Delhi did not enjoy being on the losing side when
their long-term ally, the Soviet Union, imploded.
Instead of spending another decade or so sulking or
finding excuses for their failure to be on the winning
side, the mandarins of foreign policy in India bounced
back. Of course, the fact that Bill Clinton's
administration was also in the process of changing its
mind about India - instead of continuing to punish it
for going nuclear, it entered into a meaningful dialogue
leading to the creation of a strategic partnership -
tremendously facilitated India's decision to start a new
and friendly phase of foreign policy toward the US.
When the new US administration under President
George W Bush started to promote its highly contentious
decision to develop national missile defense (NMD)
systems, India became one of the few major countries to
endorse it. Even though India made that decision to
complicate the nuclear calculations of China and
Pakistan, the Bush administration was quite appreciative
of India's new role from a moralizing drumbeater into a
thoughtful potential partner.
When the US became
a victim of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks,
those events created enormous empathy in India, since
the latter was a long-standing sufferer of similar
attacks in Indian-administered Kashmir. But Pakistan's
emergence as a frontline partner of the US in the then
ensuing global "war on terrorism" tremendously
disappointed the government of Vajpayee.
In the
post-Cold War-post-September 11 eras, India seems to be
moving toward another extreme. Mohan heavily emphasizes
this element when he describes the US and India as
"natural allies". As much as the author establishes his
predilection for realism and balance of power throughout
his book, on the issue of US-India ties, he is allowing
his emotions to take an upper hand. There is nothing
"natural" between two democratic countries impelling
themselves to become allies, unless that relationship is
driven by the commonality of interests. Even then, one
of the two allies has to accept the role of a diffident
partner and allow its dominant counterpart to remain in
the lead on a series of heady strategic issues. Even
then, assorted emphases attached to different foreign
policy issues are likely to cause tensions and serious
disagreements over a period of time.
India's
ties with Russia have gone through radical and nuanced
changes. Neither of these nations is anti-American
today. Aside from pursuing better ties with the US, both
nations are attempting to get their respective economies
integrated into the Western economies (including the
Japanese economy) in general. The best thing going for
India is that Russia still remains interested in
maintaining close strategic ties with it. Still,
tensions are likely to emerge on an intricate and a very
important subject to both of them: ties with China. But
the current challenge for Moscow and New Delhi is to
compartmentalize their respective relations with China
and to not allow those ties to become a hindrance in the
continuing evolution of Russo-Indian strategic
relations.
Mohan's treatment of Sino-Indian
relations is quite appealing. His theme in this chapter
is that, very early on, India decided to emulate China
on a number of issues of strategic significance. Like
China, India fully understood the necessity of having
nuclear weaponry in its arsenal of military power. The
nuclear policies of China and India emphasize minimal
credible deterrence and no first-use. Both Beijing and
New Delhi insist that their nuclear posture is
essentially defensive in nature. Even though realities
related to each of the preceding aspects of their
respective nuclear policies are quite contrary to its
declared versions - for instance, both China and India
have never stopped modernizing or building their nuclear
forces without worrying about not crossing the minimal
requirements of minimum credible deterrence - the fact
that they emphasize points of commonality underscores
Mohan's chief argument in the chapter on China. India's
rationale to emulate China also makes enormous sense.
Another important contribution of Mohan is the
masterful way he describes the Sino-Indian competition
as it involves the US, Russia and Pakistan. The ups and
downs that the US has been inserting in its own China
policy keep the element of uncertainty very much alive
in India, for India's own significance to the US
witnesses its ebb and flow emanating from that policy.
An equally frustrating reality for India is that it
finds itself without many options in its regular
endeavors to decouple the seemingly unyieldingly close
Sino-Pakistani ties. The trouble in this instance is not
that India's diplomacy is flawed. Rather, it is the very
nature of Sino-Indian strategic competition that is so
important to China that it is not about to give up any
advantages, especially now that India has become a
nuclear power, and its economic and technological
evolution, as witnessed in its emergence as one of the
world-class actors in the realm of information
technology, promises to add more prestige to its already
heightened status. From its perspective, China must
exploit all avenues to ensure its strategic dominance in
the region. And Sino-Pakistani strategic partnership is
one card that India has not yet learned how to trump.
The obdurate Indo-Pak rivalry is uppermost on
Raja Mohan's mind, as it is in the thinking of the
entire strategic community and the leadership of India.
In my own conversations with Indian officials I recall
an element of envy when they described how difficult it
has been for India to manage its tie with its prickly
and contentious neighbor. The element of envy stemmed
from the observation that Pakistan never allowed the
smallness of its size to become an obstacle in its
incessant attempts to frustrate and undermine India's
regional advantage and global visibility. Even the title
of Mohan's chapter on Pakistan, "Containing Pakistan",
is a reflection of that frustration. Incidentally,
despite the title, the thrust of that chapter is not
about containing Pakistan. It is only in the concluding
two pages of that chapter that the author addresses the
issue of containment.
In the post-Cold
War-post-September 11 era, India's emergence as a
nuclear power, terrorist attacks on the US and India's
eager condemnation of those attacks and willingness to
cooperate with Washington in its global war on terrorism
did promote New Delhi's strategic interests. However, by
deciding to cooperate with the US in its military
campaign against Afghanistan, Pakistan pulled its own
coup de grace against India. There is little doubt that
President General Pervez Musharraf's decision to abandon
Pakistan's ally, the Taliban, was substantially driven
by his own calculations of how far India was intending
to go in harming Pakistan by cooperating with the US in
the post-September 11 era. But those calculations are
not part of Mohan's analysis.
The chapter
"Rediscovering Lord Curzon" is a thoughtful contribution
of the author to the growing scholarly writing on
India's foreign policy. The thesis is disarmingly simple
but persuasive. In essence, it is an argument about
India's emergence as a hegemonic power. India's
strategic thinkers are usually allergic to such a
labeling of their country, as if being a hegemon is some
sort of malady. However, if one agrees with the premise
that all great powers (or wanna-be great powers) must
operate to promote their regional dominance, the notion
of being a hegemon is not at all controversial. Even
Jawaharlal Nehru operated on that premise.
As
useful as the Curzonian argument is for India's
emergence as a hegemon, it is also likely to be an
uphill endeavor, with almost insurmountable challenges
from China, from Pakistan, and, above all, from the US.
Of the three actors, challenges from the US appear
benign in the sense that Washington does not discern a
rising India as a threat to its own strategic dominance
in the Asia-Pacific. However, given the fact that the US
strategic objectives in that locale are enormously
intricate, more often than not, its maneuvers to attain
them do not take into consideration how they will impact
the strategic objectives of other major regional actors,
especially those who are friendly toward the US.
The Sino-Pakistani partnership has been and is
likely to be a major obstacle in India's pursuit of its
Curzonian vision and regional dominance. Even a
rapprochement between Beijing and New Delhi - that is
brewing in the aftermath of Vajpayee's trip to China in
July - is not likely to lessen China's predilections for
using that nexus to promote its strategic interests.
Similarly, even a potential political solution of the
Kashmir conflict - the chances of which are minimal at
best - will not keep Pakistan from continuing to compete
with India in pursuit of its own aspirations for
regional influence and dominance. Today Pakistan is weak
in the realm of economic power; however, that reality
can change if it can overcome its maladies related to
the jihadi culture. That is a difficult challenge,
though it is not at all insurmountable.
India is
a rising power that has indeed introduced noteworthy
changes in its strategic thinking and then effectively
and continually implementing that thinking into its
foreign policy. However, it is not out of the woods by
any stretch of the imagination. Its worse enemies still
are: the resurgence of Hindu fanaticism that could bring
to an end its venerable practice of secularism; a
potential collapse of its economy, the chances of which
are terribly slim at this time; or its inability to
resolve its obdurate conflicts with Pakistan and China.
Ehsan Ahrari, PhD, is an Alexandria,
Virginia, US-based independent strategic analyst.
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times Online Ltd. All
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