Page 4 of 4 SPEAKING
FREELY
Security: India loses its grip
By Zorawar Daulet Singh
manufacturing and technology sectors that have created their own captive
sources of "public goods". But such corporate enclaves are yet insignificant in
the larger economic story.
Revisiting Hu's trip
China views India as just another "middle-ranked" power, albeit one with
great-power aspirations, and is no longer concerned
about balancing against it. Its true strategic competitor lies to its east -
the US. And its engagement in South Asia is partially driven by its
geopolitical competition with the United States in an emerging strategic
region.
Despite that, China has sensibly sought not to antagonize India lest it
completely turns to the Western orbit, which explains its magnanimity in at
least rhetorically equating India with China in public statements, a hilarious
proposition given the true geopolitical and geo-economic realities. It may also
be reiterated that, except for Sri Lanka, China is contiguous to or
geographically very near to all South Asian states. China therefore is
extremely interested in regional stability lest it is drawn into a future
conflict.
India's weakness stems from its internal political economy - lack of a cohesive
polity and a consequent rise of regionalism over any notion of national
interest - to a point where the Indian state is gradually losing its
"infrastructural capacity".
This has severely impacted the trajectory of its economic development - where
growth has occurred in small pockets where governance still prevails and has
largely benefited from Western portfolio capital (as opposed to FDI, which as
alluded to earlier would require state-driven macroeconomic direction and
allocation effort), and a select group of Indian business houses.
The UN's Human Development Index, which looks beyond GDP to a broader
definition of well-being, ranks India 126th out of 177 countries. The World
Economic Forum's competitiveness report for 2005 ranked India as No 111 of 117
countries. The foremost issue then becomes transforming India into a "hard"
industrial powerhouse, as opposed to a "soft" service-based trading economy,
that would offer its South Asian neighbors an irresistible choice to integrate
their economies with India, in a similar way that China has served as a
"magnet" to Southeast and Northeast Asia and more recently even South Asia.
Therefore, until New Delhi eschews the traditional and now outdated zero-sum
premise of national-security policy and recognizes the importance of economic
relations as an integral component of foreign policy, its relative position in
both the regional subsystem and the larger international system will continue
to deteriorate.
Moreover, its reliance on primarily military instruments to ameliorate its
relative position is likely to be in vain. On the other hand, a transformation
in thinking would lead to new initiatives, not least of which is a complete
reassessment of the country's economic development strategy, and gradually
bring about subcontinental connectivity and integration of India's border
states with the "home" economy.
But this vision of creating an Indian-led South Asian union would require an
internal systemic socio-political-economic change, and not through foreign
policy alone.
Zorawar Daulet Singh, who has a master's degree in international
relations from the School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins
University, is a strategic-affairs analyst with a focus on Eurasian
geopolitics, India's energy security, and Indian foreign policy, based in New
Delhi. Email zorawar.dauletsingh@gmail.com
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