Tag Archives: Non-Alignment 2.0

Mr. Modi Goes To Washington

01 Wed Oct 2014

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Even before the wheels of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Air India One left American soil, commentators have dismissed his meeting with US businessmen, senators, and president Barack Obama as more pageantry than substance. This impetuous judgment, however, is either terribly naïve or deliberately pessimistic.

Indeed, Modi did not return with a Percentages Agreement or a trillion-dollar aid package – one wonders if even those would have satisfied his critics – but to pass off the Indian prime minister’s trip as pageantry entirely misses the history of Indo-US relations and the situation the two democracies find themselves in. For that matter, no Indian prime ministerial visit to any country comes to mind wherein agreements were made that altered the course of history; the announcement of the Indo-US nuclear deal during Manmohan Singh’s visit in July 2005 is perhaps the sole exception and that was arguably an entirely American initiative.

The unseen agenda of Modi’s meeting with Obama after his visit to the United Nations was damage control. After a positive start to better relations under President George W Bush and Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, relations between India and the United States began to fray during the tenure of the United Progressive Alliance. Over the decade of UPA rule, India-US relations sank to their lowest since the end of the Cold War despite the resumption of civil nuclear cooperation by the international community with India.

It is easy to hold the Indo-US nuclear deal up as a shining example of close strategic relations between the world’s two largest democracies now but the negotiations over the path-breaking agreement were a trying period. The treaty was ratified by the Indian parliament with great difficulty and only after a cash-for-votes scandal rocked the UPA.

Since then, India’s nuclear civil liability law (2010) has effectively blocked the expansion of nuclear energy in the country as no firm, including India’s own Nuclear Power Corporation of India, was willing to bear the burden of supplier’s liability. The United States, who had strongly supported India in the Nuclear Suppliers Group and the International Atomic Energy Agency, was left out in the cold as their hopes for an abiding nuclear relationship with India faltered.

Indian defence purchases from the United States was also thought to be a sign of warming relations. Although an improvement from the days of the Cold War, Delhi’s defence equipment procurement has been ad hoc and was initially hindered by the lack of an adequate legal and operational framework between the two countries. The United States lost out on the Indian Air Force’s tender for 126 medium multi-role combat aircraft and Washington was hesitant to sell India its Javelin anti-tank missile until Delhi began considering the Israeli Spike. A few deals were indeed signed, giving India the F414 engine for its quasi-indigenously manufactured Light Combat Aircraft,  the C-17 Globemaster III, the C-130J Super Hercules, the AH-64 Apache assault helicopter, the P-8I Neptune, and other weapons systems and missiles. However, despite their high dollar value, these purchases were seen as merely transactional and did little to reverse the drift that was increasingly being felt by officials in Washington and Delhi.

The Obama White House has always been accused of allowing US relations with India to slide after the previous administration’s persistent wooing of Delhi. Whether there is some merit to Delhi’s complaint or whether the urgent crowded out the important in Washington, the optimism and energy in the US-India relationship waned rapidly during Manmohan Singh’s second term as prime minister. Several crises around the world – the South China Sea, the Caucasus, North Africa, and the Middle East – captured the US mind share while India boosted its welfare spending, failed to deliver on economic reforms, neglected its infrastructure, was mired in corruption, and instituted bizarre tax policies that chased business away from its shores. There was little reason for the United States to look to India as a valuable partner except for the hope that the South Asian country would get its act together and arrest its descent into chaos.

In February 2012, the Centre for Policy Research released a document titled, Non-Alignment 2.0. The report, put together by a small team of former government officials, retired military men, academics, businessmen, and journalists, was unfortunately titled in that it recast Indian foreign policy in the same old Nehruvian mould widely considered to be a failure. Furthermore, Nehru’s non-alignment was usually soft on Moscow and made Washington the target of its ire. The release of Non-Alignment 2.0 was hardly a sensible move, especially at a time when the United States and India were trying to move past casual indifference and towards a strategic relationship.

In December 2013, the arrest of India’s Acting Consul General in New York, Devyani Khobragade, sparked a heated diplomatic tit-for-tat between the United States and India. After the strip search of the Indian diplomat was explained away as “procedure,” Delhi similarly enforced Indian law strictly and removed concrete barricades around the US embassy that were encroaching on a public roadway. In the wake of a recent deadly assault on the US embassy in Tripoli, Washington was incensed at what it saw as Indian petulance putting its officials in danger. Ultimately, the US ambassador to India, Nancy Powell resigned and the post remains vacant (though a new appointee has just been nominated and awaiting Congressional confirmation).

For all the newspaper columns painting a rosy picture of US-India relations, the reality was far more dreary. If anything, it was the potential of a genuine relationship that kept the idea on life support until sunnier days. The new prime minister had the difficult task of rekindling a relationship that had accumulated more than its fair share of cynicism in both capitals over the past five years.

There is, of course, Modi’s personal baggage – the refusal of a visa to him by the United States in 2005. This was compounded by the issuance of a summons by a federal court in New York for his role in the Gujarat riots of 2002 – was the United States serious about a flowering relationship with India or not? Admirably, the Indian prime minister has not allowed these personal slights to obstruct national interest; he has gone to Washington and delivered the loud and clear message that India is open for business again.

During Modi’s stay in the United States, he took the time to meet with business leaders as well as elected officials. This was a smart move, given that the United States does not hold sovereign wealth the way Japan or China do and the president himself would not be able to do much more than encourage American business to invest in India. Modi has promised to push forward on economic reforms and eased the visa norms for Americans to come to India. This small step will have a greater footfall in terms of investments than is apparent immediately.

On top of the moribund relationship Modi inherited from the previous administration, there are indeed disagreements of substance between India and the United States – nuclear proliferation, Iran, Pakistan, food stockpiling, intellectual property rights, and the environment to name a few. Not all of these require the highest executive attention and will be hopefully handled at their appropriate levels over the next five years. Modi’s mission, however, was far simpler and yet more difficult – to convince the world’s largest economy and greatest military power that India was ready to talk turkey once again. If pageantry was what would sell the message, then that was what was to be done.

This post appeared on Daily News & Analysis on October 02, 2014.

Modi’s Pivot to Asia?

02 Wed Apr 2014

Posted by in India, South Asia

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First, it was the Americans who spoke of a “pivot” to Asia; then, it was the Russians’ turn to consider a pivot to Asia. The Europeans, not to be left far behind, also debated a pivot to Asia. Now, it seems Narendra Modi, the Bharatiya Janata Party’s prime ministerial candidate for India’s general elections next week, is also hinting at a pivot to Asia.

Much has already been written about how Modi should order his international relations were he to become prime minister but much less has been said on what he has indicated in his dozens of public addresses so far. While assumptions have been made about Modi’s possible weltanschauung based on his criticism of the Congress’ policies over the past couple of years, they only reinforce stereotypes about the BJP and right-wing politics (though calling the BJP right-wing is problematic).

However, Modi’s speeches – to the public at large as well as to specialised audiences – indicate a different mode of thinking and potentially a new direction for India’s foreign policy. The net effect of Modi’s ideas on how India should conduct itself in the international community may well be considered an Indian pivot to Asia.

At first glance, describing Modi’s foreign policy as a pivot to Asia might seem dramatic, especially in the backdrop of talk of an American, Russian, and European pivot to Asia. Besides, India is already in Asia! However, there are several factors that make “pivot” the most apt term to describe what may most likely be India’s new approach to international affairs.

India has seen itself essentially as a Western power; despite its Indic heritage and historical influence in Asia, Indians tend to study, vacation, and do business far more in the West than in the East. Westerners also feel less alienated in India than they do further east – familiarity with cricket, curry, and Bollywood has made the country more comprehensible to Western sensibilities.

Yet the importance of Asia to India has been expounded from the very beginning. Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, declared that with independence, the former colonised countries of Asia would rise again and take their rightful place in world affairs. Despite the rhetoric, however, Nehru and the next half-century of governments after his death did little to realise this prognostication. Perhaps because of his own education or by virtue of India being a British colony, Nehru led his newly independent country into the Anglosphere which was then defined by the titanic struggle between the communist Soviet Union and the capitalist United States even though India had no quarrel with either power.

Nehru’s need to occupy centrestage in international politics meant that he framed his foreign policy – non-alignment – in terms of the Cold War. India participated in the peace talks over the Korean War, the International Control Commission for Vietnam, and opined on other proxy conflicts between the United States and the Soviet Union that had little to do with India. Even after the Cold War ended, India still follows the Western framework in conceptualising its region. In 2012, a quasi-governmental group in Delhi penned “Non-Alignment 2.0,” a foreign policy document that continued the Nehruvian legacy of a Western-focussed foreign policy.

Modi has so far shied away from commenting on most of the foreign policy issues observers are used to hearing from Indian politicians with ambition. Instead, Modi has repeatedly stressed the importance of trade to his foreign policy; each Indian province might have a trade representative to international partners and an economic delegation will be attached to every diplomatic mission. As Chief Minister of the western Indian state of Gujarat, Modi has made several trips to Australia, China, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand, reputedly developing particularly close relations with China, Japan and Singapore.

These relations are even more noteworthy when Modi’s other agenda is considered – infrastructure. The dilapidated state of Indian roads, railways, waterways, housing, and power have created a bottleneck around India’s economic growth and analysts have projected the need for at least a trillion dollars of investments in infrastructure over the next five years if the country is to continue growing. Modi’s response has been to challenge Indians to develop a hundred new smart cities, bullet trains, national broadband coverage, and other infrastructural improvements in the next few years.

To deliver on this vision, India will need large investments from foreign partners in terms of finance, machinery, and skilled labour. The most suited countries for such assistance are India’s Asian neighbours who have experience with similar mega-projects and are also able to extend financial aid. In addition to the vibrant Southeast Asian economies, China is India’s largest trading partner and Japan has been its largest aid donor since 1986.

Modi has also emphasised the development of manufacturing in the country to provide jobs as well as to spur exports and growth. Part of this strategy relies on better relations with the countries of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation and Association of Southeast Asian Nations. If Modi can address key bottlenecks such fear of India becoming an Asian Big Brother and trade protectionism, India can fuel a regional dynamo. Beyond trade, tourism, and education, the countries of the Indian Ocean rim naturally have a far greater convergence with Indian interests than others in terms of climate change, narcotics trafficking, regional security, and climate change.

The development of infrastructure and trade in the Indian Ocean Region will also ameliorate demographic problems at home. India has long talked about a Look East Policy but done little to deliver on it. An Indian pivot will develop links between the country’s troubled northeast and its southeast Asian neighbours, bringing development to the region and hopefully calming demographic friction between Muslims and tribals that erupted in 2012. This fits well with Modi’s strategy of development as panacea – in a country as impoverished as India, it just might be.

Traditional foreign policy analysts may worry that Modi’s approach ignores India’s three largest conundrums – China, Pakistan, and the United States. This is not the case. While Modi has made it no secret that he does not expect India’s relations with the United States to improve until the Obama administration, thought to be lukewarm towards India, leaves office, it is unlikely that he will ignore the world’s largest economy either.

However, Modi may be acting on what many South Asia analysts have realised but are afraid to accept – the road to Islamabad does not pass through Washington. Pakistan’s acquisition of nuclear weapons in the late 1980s forever changed power dynamics in South Asia. Since then, Islamabad has been waging asymmetric warfare from behind its nuclear shield. The United States has not only been unable to help curtail this cross-border terrorism by Pakistan but has even been selling Islamabad weapons for its fight against terrorism. India is forced to find a solution to Pakistan’s low intensity warfare on its own, potentially through improving its economic strength and defence manufacturing capabilities.

Similarly, India must face a rising China on its own – Southeast Asia and Japan may be of some assistance but demographics and geography dictate that any viable balance to Chinese power in the region must be provided by India. Given the massive disparity in military and economic power that exists between the two Asian giants, India’s defence must rely first, as Nehru realised, ironically, on its economy and ties in the neighbourhood. No doubt, Modi’s response to incursions into Indian territory or to terrorism may indeed be firmer than Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s but that would be tactics and not strategy.

Modi’s pivot to Asia would help India augment its internal and regional balancing before taking on greater international responsibility. In this, the Modi seems to have paid attention to Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin: 1. 冷靜觀察 – observe and analyse developments calmly; 2. 守住陣腳 – secure your own position; 3. 沈著應付 – deal with changes with confidence; 4. 韜光養晦 – conceal your capabilities; 5. 善於守拙 – keep a low profile; 6. 有所作为 – take action; 7. 把握机遇 – seize the opportunity; and 8. 因勢利導 – make the best use of the situation. Nehru’s Cold War-informed non-alignment had its limitations; it remains to be seen if Modi’s Asia-centric policy will pay India more dividends.

This post appeared on Fair Observer on April 07, 2014.

No[n-]Alignment or No Clue?

10 Fri Aug 2012

Posted by in India, Opinion and Response, Security, South Asia

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India’s lack of strategic thinking is quite perturbing (and terrifying, frankly): it has always aspired to great power status, seeing itself as a moral power than a superpower, bringing some sense and perspective to the world of machtpolitik. By virtue of its size, it is a de facto regional power. New Delhi has also entangled itself in Great Power politics on issues such as nuclear proliferation and missile technology, and borders what is in all probability, a central node in the next cold war. India also neighbours an annoyingly hostile and fairly lethal state that was carved out of it at the moment of a historical ‘tryst with destiny.’ Despite such strong motivations, New Delhi has maintained a pose of masterly equanimity – cowardice and impotence – in its dealings with the neighbourhood and the Great Powers.

The release of Non-Alignment 2.0 in late February this year, though to much fanfare from a small Delhi clique, was received with resignation and an anti-climactic sigh from most India watchers. The analysts were right – the much-hyped report merely reflected more of the same stodgy thinking that has marked India’s government apparatus for over six decades. Most opinion on the ill-advisedly named report has been negative, some analysts dubbing it Claptrap 2.0 and Failure 2.0. An interesting response on Non-Alignment 2.0, Non-Alignment Redux, has been a but-Brutus-is-an-honourable-man take from Ashley Tellis, arguably the foremost analyst of South Asia and known for his common-sense realism, who has strong reservations about the report despite praising it.

Non-Alignment 2.0 is, as Tellis notes, the first public effort to formulate a clear grand strategy for India. In essence, it identifies domestic weakness – infrastructure, economy, governance – as one of India’s greatest challenges in the coming decade, and China as the most worrisome external factor, though Pakistan makes the list due to its coupling of nuclear weapons with structural weakness and support of cross-border terrorism. Furthermore, Non-Alignment 2.0 reminds readers that India cannot emerge as a global power without calming the apprehensions its neighbours have of an increasingly muscular India.

If Non-Alignment 2.0 is meant to be a grand strategy, it would be an odd one for two reasons: 1. grand strategy usually entails the affairs of a state in interaction with the world system, rather than highlight its internal deficiencies, and 2. its predecessor was certainly a framework of addressing India’s relations with its neighbours, the superpowers with their attendant blocs, and other nations of the world and had little meaning internally. Indeed, non-alignment means little within the realm of India’s domestic politics, for who or what would one be non-aligned against? Thus, the internal issues Non-Alignment 2.0 raises are really general matters of state management rather than strategic considerations.

Reading Non-Alignment 2.0 and its recommendations on India’s foreign policy, one cannot help but be reminded of Thucydides famous line, “You are convinced by experience that very few things are brought to a successful issue by impetuous desire, but most by calm and prudent forethought.” Despite foreseeing the power differential between India and China widening in the immediate future, the authors suggest that India “develop a diversified network of relations with several major powers to compel China to exercise restraint in its dealings with India, while simultaneously avoiding relationships that go beyond conveying a certain threat threshold in Chinese perceptions” – in short, the original non-alignment, demanding all possible assistance without actually offering anything beyond platitudes. While it can be argued that such a policy would not risk alarming Beijing by ensuring that New Delhi treads softly, there are three questions left unanswered.

The first is whether any amount of leverage would work on China. Beijing has repeatedly thumbed its nose at the world, right since 1949. First, Mao disregarded Stalin and crossed the Yantze river; in 1950, they took on the might of the United States in the Korean peninsula and crossed the Yalu river; twice they challenged the sovereignty of Taiwan in 1954 and 1958; Beijing practically ignored the Eighteen Nation Disarmament Committee and the talks surround the Limited Test Ban Treaty and the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Ignoring international opinion with impunity, China has supplied Pakistan with nuclear weapons designs and reactors, and probably N. Korea with missile technology. China’s brinkmanship was again on display in 2001 when a Chinese jet “bumped” into a US EP-3, sparking the Hainan Island incident. Presently, Beijing is flexing its muscles in the South China Sea at its tiny Southeast Asian neighbours, making all sorts of spurious territorial claims and resorting to gunboat diplomacy rather than well-intentioned negotiations. China has received much criticism for its domestic policies too, not the least of which was for the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. For India, China has been an ulcer on the northeastern border, first in 1962 but constantly since then with threats of opening a second front in 1965 and 1971, supplying of arms to separatist elements in the North East, hundreds of border skirmishes every year, and its claim on Arunachal Pradesh. None of this indicates in the slightest that China is a state upon which leverage will work – they have repeatedly called their opponents’ bluffs and won.

The second question is if India can defend herself, even minimally, in a significant border skirmish. While China’s military modernisation and investment in infrastructure in the border regions is well known, equally well known is the lack of preparedness, deficient infrastructure, and a questionable defence procurement policy on the Indian side. Furthermore, as the authors of Non-Alignment 2.0 themselves admit, the gap between India and China is “likely to widen” in the near future. Poor civil-military relations, civilian stranglehold on strategic planning, poor talent pool of premier defence research institutes, and opacity of the entire process has so far ensured a poor output in terms of defence technologies, and this will continue to plague India. While even a rudimentary nuclear deterrent may serve as the guarantor against total destruction and occupation, India lacks sorely in tactical battlefield technologies such as advanced assault helicopters, artillery, missile systems, stealth, protective gear, night vision, etc. which are far more likely to be used in patrolling India’s borders. Much of this, if not all, is still imported from Russia, Israel, Europe, and now the US, creating strategic dependency on external forces.

The third question is, even if India can manage to retain her honour in Siachen and Aksai Chin, who are the powers the authors of Non-Alignment 2.0 are thinking of developing “diversified network of relations” with that can or would want to leverage China? Russia is not interested because they are upset with the United States over missile defence in Eastern Europe; besides, they are wary of a strong American presence in their backyard. Japan is too small and lacks the strategic depth to serve as a counterweight to China; the same is true Australia demographically. Europe has its own woes and is looking to China to help them ride out the present economic crisis; furthermore, its military spending and Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) leaves much to be desired. As much as Indian thinkers try to ignore it, the fact remains that the United States is the only country that has the military, demographic, and technological wherewithal to balance China. Of course, all this assumes that India can even put together a network of countries willing to balance China, for many have reasons, however shortsightedly, to desire the rise of China as a counterweight to American unilateralism. Critically, it is not clear why any of these states should assist India in balancing China without any inkling of a serious commitment to the effort on India’s part.

On the section that deals with Pakistan, Non-Alignment 2.0 reads like a government press briefing, suggesting that talks are essential, that India must take a firm but reasonable stance on Kashmir and terrorism, and that it must also foster better cultural and economic ties so that they may ease the political rigor mortis. These are all policies that India has followed flawlessly over the last decade (if not more), and as Appu Soman argues in “Through the Looking Glass,” have met with little to no reciprocity from the Pakistani side. While Pakistan has successfully delinked terrorism from Kashmir (even claimed itself a victim of terrorism!) and terrorists roam their land freely, this side of the border has seen little progress on terrorist infiltration, the Mumbai case, or a host of other pinpricks to national security. However, Non-Alignment 2.0 blithely suggests that India continue more of the same.

In short, Non-Alignment 2.0 has little to offer in terms of original thinking and suffers from much wishful thinking and few practical suggestions. No doubt, it is useful to pontificate on the direction a state is heading once in a while, and as Tellis informs us, the report is certainly a good analysis of the structural problems, both internal and external, that India faces. However, a strategy has to ultimately make recommendations for an entity to get from point A to point B, and in this, sadly, Non-Alignment 2.0 only offers more of the same platitudes that landed India in this sorry state in the first place.