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2 India splitting atoms over nuclear
deal By Zorawar Daulet Singh
primary manager of the contemporary
system, the US, to alleviate its "status
discontent" with the prevailing reality.
Of course, negotiating the terms of such
an entry into the system of non-proliferation was
imperative too. Thus preserving the essence of
India's strategic weapons development and its
indigenous three-stage reactor program rightly
became a vital goal in itself. Indian political
and intellectual discourse over the past two years
has vividly reflected this imperative and has arguably
contributed to New Delhi
adopting appropriate negotiating positions.
That New Delhi was largely able to reach a
more or less acceptable bilateral agreement last
month was as much the result of internal checks
and balances as it was to Washington's larger
grand strategy (ie, India as the strategic prize),
extending the United States' maritime cordon
sanitaire around the East Asian landmass and
thus achieving dominant control over the vital sea
lanes from the Persian Gulf to the Sea of Japan.
Returning to domestic political events, it
should be clear that the nuclear deal was a means
to an end. That end was the much-belated
acknowledgment of India's nuclear status and, by
extension, its entry into an important
multilateral arena of great-power commerce, namely
the market for dual-use technologies that would
enable India to augment its socioeconomic and
military potential.
Up to this point, I
suspect there would be little bipartisan objection
in India for such a strategy, for it preserves the
fundamental premise of Indian foreign policy, one
that lays an exceptional premium on independence
and autonomy, and an aversion to extra-Indian
evaluations of Indian national interest. Suffice
it to say, only by the successful adherence to
these principles can India achieve its great-power
aspirations.
The ongoing discord, however,
arises from certain domestic political quarters
that have viewed or are now viewing the nuclear
deal as a stepping-stone to an open-ended
strategic alignment with the United States,
especially in the military sphere. For such
ideologues, the nuclear deal has paved the way for
the emergence of a natural relationship between
two great democracies that were separated only by
the contradictions of the Cold War. In many ways,
these ideologues are the mirror-image of the
Indian left, which is ideologically anti-American.
As usual, India's international salvation lies in
the middle path.
Again, it must be
emphasized that constructive engagement with the
US is in India's interest. As is evident from the
extraordinary record of Beijing's own open-door
policies since 1978, cultivating economic linkages
with the US offers enormous developmental
advantages.
At the geostrategic level,
too, with all major powers continuing to place a
premium on their relationship with the United
States, India by disengaging only loses out. Yet
the major powers are also adopting
omni-directional, non-exclusive relationships.
The patterns of interaction between
today's actors are a critical element of the
evolving order that deserves some elaboration. The
international political economy and its
globalizing forces are compelling actors to pursue
multi-vector foreign policies - the core thrust of
foreign policies of the major states is being
driven by non-exclusive engagement. It is useful
to recall that the bipolar division of the past
system was geopolitical and geo-economic. Both
blocs were self-sufficient and inter-bloc trade
and investment were irrelevant. Today's system is
clearly more interdependent than during the Cold
War.
To be sure, this interdependence is
state-driven, and the economic division of labor
is nowhere near as efficient as in national
economies. In an anarchic world, it never will be.
But certainly, trade and investment are becoming
both the means and ends of state power and
leverage. India's primary goal must be to assume a
growing share of this international division of
labor, one that is gradually decoupling from the
United States, as the industrial revolution across
the Eurasian geo-economic space attests to.
Thus India's US policy must operate in a
multi-vector framework. It is only by engaging all
major actors that India can achieve strategic
flexibility to leverage its foreign and economic
goals, and simultaneously preserve the ideational
foundations of Indian foreign policy.
The
ideological discord within Indian foreign policy
has also manifested recently in debates over New
Delhi's military diplomacy. India's decision to
participate in the quadrilateral - US, Japan,
Australia and India - naval exercises in the Bay
of Bengal next month, while remaining ambivalent
to developments in the Eurasian land space
exemplified by the recent Shanghai Cooperation
Organization military exercises, illustrates New
Delhi's inability to implement a multi-vector
policy, and indeed is a futile attempt at ignoring
its own geography.
Thus while naval
cooperation among the quadrilateral group would in
principle be defensible, when seen in conjunction
with India eschewing other multilateral
developments in its periphery, it certainly
arouses suspicion toward New Delhi's exclusive
outlook. Surely there's more to India's "Look
East" policy than naval cooperation? At a time
when China is rapidly integrating the 10-member
Association of Southeast Asian Nations into the
Chinese economy, New Delhi is engaging with
extra-regional actors in the military sphere, and
yet achieving little influence in its extended
neighborhood.
The geopolitical pluralism
today is heading one way - a multipolar world -
with the underlying fundamentals arguably already
in place. In such a scenario of systemic change,
and given that the redistribution of power is
accruing to the Eurasian geopolitical space, one
where India resides, is it wise to pursue an
uncritical path toward bandwagoning with an
offshore power in relative decline?
Zorawar Daulet Singh, who holds
a master's degree in international relations from
the School of Advanced International Studies,
Johns Hopkins University, is an
international-relations analyst based in New
Delhi. He can be contacted at
zorawar.dauletsingh@gmail.com.
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