Page 2 of 4 SPEAKING
FREELY Security: India loses its grip By
Zorawar Daulet Singh
deter adversaries.
This is achieved by integrating other states with
the "home" economy, through economic aid or trade
or investment, thereby gaining varying degrees of
influence on their actions.
To be sure,
military power is the ultima ratio in
international politics. This is because unlike
domestic political systems, where
a
well-defined hierarchy exists and a state enjoys a
monopoly of power, the international system has no
comparable political arrangement. And in the
absence of an authoritative supranational
government to preserve order, states are driven to
meet their security needs by building their
military capabilities.
But it is meant to
serve as the last resort in the entire gamut of
national instruments available to a state to serve
its interests. This is particularly so in the
nuclear dimension. Geopolitical competition
between two nuclear-weapons states ensures that
the economic instrument assumes an even greater
role in foreign policy. India's own historical
experience is instructive here.
Despite
being a nuclear-weapons-capable state since 1998,
India has achieved almost nothing to advance its
core national interests. Again, this is not to
imply that nuclear weapons are not relevant to
national security - they are. But their utility is
limited and lies primarily in serving as a form of
deterrent vis-a-vis other adversaries with similar
capabilities. But below the nuclear threshold, or
more generally below conventional military power,
India's weakness becomes all the more glaring. And
it is because of deficiencies at these lower
thresholds of comprehensive national power that
India is unable to exercise meaningful influence
in its own back yard.
That Indian
strategists have been defining security in such
narrow terms rather than through a multi-faceted
paradigm is affirmed by their failure to
distinguish between the core and peripheral
aspects of Indian interests. The distinction
between these interests is driven by the scarcity
of resources available to a state. To blur
distinctions between them is a failure of
strategic perception - an inability to relate
short-term to long-term considerations. Arguably,
the core of Indian security should be premised on
developing strong interdependent relations with
all regional actors in the form of umbilical links
rather than on the periphery - naval expansion and
a blue-water navy - since it has an almost
negligible effect on comprehensive Indian
security.
According to the Asian
Development Bank, South Asia's intraregional trade
accounts for just 5% of its total trade or just $6
billion, while for East Asia the ratio is 55%,
indicating the high level of regional integration
in the latter region. This statistic reveals the
pivotal role of the Chinese economy for its East
Asian neighbors, while India is economically
almost irrelevant to its region.
While the
share of South Asia in foreign-direct-investment
inflows of developing countries is about 3%, its
share in the global FDI inflows is almost
negligible at 1.08%. In 2004, according to the
World Investment Report, FDI stocks as percent of
gross domestic product (GDP), a ratio adjusting
for economic size, ranks India below Sri Lanka,
Pakistan and Bangladesh. In the past five years,
only 17% of foreign inflows into India have taken
the shape of FDI, the remainder being
foreign-institutional-investor inflows. The
equivalent ratio for other emerging economies was
68%.
That India today has limited capacity
for influencing events in its own neighborhood is
as much a reflection of its own economic weakness
as it is to the new geopolitical pluralism in
South Asia. Consequently, outside actors,
particularly the United States and China, are
increasingly reorienting their policies to engage
economically with all South Asian states, which
have been consistently ignored and isolated from
India's economic expansion.
The reasons
for such a foreign-policy failure on India's part
are manifold: unwillingness to reshape its
external economic relations with key states on its
border, increasingly leaving such relationships
hostage to domestic political factors, but most
important, its own economic-development strategy,
which has failed to exploit the country's
comparative advantage - its vast labor surplus.
For instance, at a time when Nepal and
Myanmar could play pivotal roles as transit states
in a quest for inter-regional integration between
China and India, sections of New Delhi's security
elites continue to uphold obsolete notions such as
"buffer zones", in the process driving both the
regional neighbors and India's own border areas
deeper into penury.
Today, relations with
Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh and Myanmar are
examples of Indian ambivalence, where the
foreign-policy establishment has been unable to
transcend internal socio-political constraints to
integrate these economies with India's.
The result: the United States and China
have effortlessly established bilateral relations
with most of these states, which are themselves
seeking external investment and trade relations to
fulfill the needs of their economies. Indian
strategists are now gradually realizing that
India's neighbors are increasingly in a position
to make their own geopolitical choices in
establishing bilateral links with outside states.
Sinews of power There is no
such thing as "soft" power, a term often employed
by some commentators when alluding to India's
rise. Today, it has become a euphemism for Indian
weakness. There is only "hard" power, which stems
from a sound economic base and by extension an
autonomous technological and military capability.
To be sure, soft power, if defined as
ideological or cultural appeal, would matter, but
only if it represented a manifestation of hard
