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Chaturanga

~ statecraft, strategy, society, and Σοφíα

Chaturanga

Tag Archives: non-alignment

Indic Diplomacy

14 Sat Jan 2017

Posted by Jaideep A. Prabhu in Book Review

≈ Comments Off on Indic Diplomacy

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Arthashastra, Condoleezza Rice, Deep Datta-Ray, diplomacy, ethics, foreign policy, Great Power, IFS, India, Indian Foreign Service, Indira Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Krishna, kutayuddha, Mahabharata, modernity, non-alignment, nuclear, Rajiv Sikri, realism, Shivshankar Menon, Union Public Service Commission, UPSC, vasudhaiva kutumbakam

making-of-indian-diplomacyDatta-Ray, Deep. The Making of Indian Diplomacy: A Critique of Eurocentrism. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2015. 380 pp.

Indian diplomacy has long vexed its observers, occidental and oriental alike. Lacking in a culture of periodical declassification and easy access to past and present practitioners, the workings of South Block remain impervious to methodical scholarship. In this environment, a book that promises to reveal not only how Indian diplomacy is conducted but also why it is such an enigma is a welcome arrival. As the title avers, The Making of Indian Diplomacy: A Critique of Eurocentrism seeks to properly establish the functioning of the members of the Indian Foreign Service in the culture and traditions of their homeland rather than in Christendom’s theories of statecraft.

Several things are of note in this project: first, Deep Datta-Ray, the author, is making a cultural approach to the study of diplomacy and foreign policy. While this may seem perfectly normal to most, it is a method that has had few takers in the historical profession. Though it has become more popular over the last decade, international relations remains firmly in the grip of abstract theories such as realism, constructivism, or Marxism. And yet, diplomats and their political masters do not leave their values and biases at home each day as they come in for work; they are enmeshed in a cultural web which cannot but inform their policies.

Second, Datta-Ray criticises scholars who complain that Indian foreign policy makes little sense for judging it by Western customs of politics, governance, and power. Despite nearly two centuries of British rule – between Crown and Company – over India, cultural transfer from metropole to periphery remained superficial at best. In other words, Thomas Macaulay failed to create brown Englishmen; Indians remain rooted in their traditions and understanding of the world.

Macaulay’s failure would not be a startling revelation in itself but Datta-Ray goes on to argue that the entire modern project in Europe is deeply rooted in its Christian heritage and incompatible to the Indian ethos. The binarism of exclusivist monotheistic cults transcends mere theology and permeates all aspects of culture, resulting in a fundamentally different understanding of the cosmos and man’s place in it. Islam, being an Abrahamic offspring, literally, meshes better with European notions of power relations and the state than dharmic religions do. Again, this is not a new argument: originally put forward in academic circles in the mid-1970s, it has percolated into the awareness of ordinary Indians perhaps a decade ago. However, Datta-Ray’s systematic application of this idea to foreign policy is a first and deserves careful consideration.

Unfortunately, The Making of Indian Diplomacy is filled with turgid prose that could impress only dissertation committees. Such jargon-laden, impenetrable language, the hallmark of cultural studies, is one of the reasons the humanities has lost respect in society. Datta-Ray commits such perversions upon the English language – the Queen was never meant to sound like this – that it would make Guillaume Apollinaire proud! Yet those who brave the presentation are rewarded with some fascinating insights into the workings of India’s Ministry of External Affairs.

Indian history remains, disappointingly, strongly entangled to privileged access and Datta-Ray, son of Sunanda K Datta-Ray, seems to have it. This project needed the personal intervention of then prime minister Manmohan Singh, such was the resistance of the bureaucracy against an interloper. Even then, one MEA mandarin asked the author, “What do you want with our documents? They only reveal process, not intent.” This gives an insight into Indian bureaucratic thinking that marks it different from Western practice. Fortunately, Datta-Ray has used his opportunity well – embedded with the Indian Foreign Service allowed him to observe, talk informally, and interview officially dozens of young aspirants, serving officials, and retired civil servants. The resulting monograph can be understood as discussing the structural and intellectual differences between Western and Indic diplomacy.

The Body of the Beast

Before looking at policies and attitudes, Datta-Ray asks who populates the service. He finds that many of the applicants come from modest backgrounds in the hinterland, some not even aware of the IFS until they had cleared the Union Public Service Commission examination! Many come to government service as a means to mediate between it and their village, or enlist its assistance to protect their region from the state. There is less suspicion of the state compared to Western countries, for one primary reason – it is present in the villages, where private corporations find it unprofitable to venture. Ironically, the failure of the state to adequately provide basic necessities for its citizens is also its greatest strength. Many of the incoming civil service cadre seem to hold an organic view of society in which the state remains a place people can come together and lift themselves up through the opportunities it provides. While the cosmopolitan disenchanted may scoff at such idealism, Datta-Ray has revealed an interesting undercurrent that will last as long as a government job is seen as a guarantor of upward mobility. However, is it necessarily different from the West? One would assume that governments world over attract service-minded people, some more fortunate than others, however cynical it may leave them at the end. A quick comparison to a small sampling of other countries would have helped the argument along much better.

The Making of Indian Diplomacy praises how several IFS officers left lucrative careers in the corporate world to enter into government service. Some officers, ironically, do not want to leave home; others see a civil service job as a badge of status despite working conditions that are less than adequate. For example, at one point during the negotiations over the civil nuclear cooperation with the United States, the Indian delegation consisting of a Joint Secretary from the MEA and two lawyers found itself matched by an American official and his team of 55 lawyers! The Joint Secretary in question, S Jaishankar, when quizzed by his astounded counterpart, simply shrugged and replied that Indians make do. Jugaad, the popular term nowadays for making do, seems romantic only to those who never had to resort to it. MK Narayanan, the national security advisor from 2005 to 2011, glibly dismisses this as Indians not being a litigious society. However, the truth might simply be insufficient resources, poor recruiting power, and a deterring application process. Western foreign service departments are a lot more casual about lateral entry hires from industry, ensuring adequate manpower and expertise available to their ministers and senior bureaucrats at all times. These are certainly factors that make the IFS stand out from Western services but perhaps not in a way to be desired!

Datta-Ray reveals an interesting tidbit about promotions in the civil services: everyone gets positive reviews. As a result, personnel files are useless when it comes time to raise one above his peers. One officer confided in the author that this was because seniors were afraid that they would be accused of casteism if they marked anyone down. Datta-Ray uses this state of affairs to argue for a peculiarly Indian “total evaluation” process that goes beyond words on paper to assess the suitability of an officer for a higher position. It is this system that allowed Shivshankar Menon, former national security advisor to Manmohan Singh and successor to Narayanan, to supercede 16 positions to become the foreign secretary in October 2006. Of course, a less charitable view might be that “total evaluation” is making a virtue out of necessity and that it merely conceals an egregious problem in Indian institutions, namely, using caste victimisation as a weapon to conceal incompetence.

Intellectual Weltanshauung

Datta-Ray recounts when Menon explains the role of a diplomat to the incoming batch of IFS recruits as that played by Krishna in the udyoga parva of the Mahabharata. Rather than launch into a scholarly evolution of diplomacy a la Harold Nicolson, Keith Hamilton, Richard Langhorne, Martin Wight, or Ernest Satow, the former NSA latched onto a text most Indians are intimately familiar with. The great epic remains the backbone of Indian political thinking, Datta-Ray argues, because it avoids the pitfalls of viewing the world in false dichotomies just as Indian foreign policy has shown a tendency to avoid.

This is a limited reading of the Mahabharata, and indeed, Indic thought. There are several incidents in the great epic that run counter to Menon’s portrayal that can be recounted: one, Krishna’s urging Yudhishtira to perform the Rajasuya yaga; two, his advocacy of war within 13 days of the Pandavas’ exile; three, when Krishna intercepted the elephant goad thrown by the king of Pragjyotisha, Bhagadatta, at Arjuna despite a promise not to participate in the war in any way except as charioteer/advisor to the third son of Pandu; or four, the infamous manner in which Drona was made to lay down his weapons. These roles do not, strictly speaking, fit our modern imagination of a diplomat’s task. Yet to restrict foreign policy strictly to conference room machinations and champagne is too narrow an understanding of the profession. A diplomat must also provide wise counsel to his political masters, something Krishna unfailingly did for the Pandavas. If the IFS is indeed inspired by the Mahabharata, one wonders if any of them have ever truly engaged with the text. Similarly, the breathtakingly amoral Arthashastra does not shy away from advocating the use of kutayuddha if the national interest required it.

The Making of Indian Diplomacy gets to the crux of the matter when it asks why India should become a Great Power. Datta-Ray asks this in the context of Menon’s meteoric elevation and an internal memorandum by Rajiv Sikri, one of the bypassed officers. Sikri, he finds, has fallen into the trap of Western modernity and advocates Great Power status for India for its own sake. This does not satisfy Datta-Ray, who declares such a quest as un-Indian. In support, he quotes former external affairs minister, Natwar Singh’s response – that India’s goal is to remove poverty, not become a Great Power – when US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice declared that the United States intended to help India become a major power in the 21st century. According to Datta-Ray, Indian diplomacy avoids the anarchic and binary world of power politics by understanding the international community and India’s place within it as a unified cosmos. All states are interlinked and, therefore, foreign relations is not a zero-sum game. This explains why India continues to deal with Pakistan despite the constant terrorist attacks Islamabad supports against India, or why Delhi de-links its territorial dispute with China from other facets of its relationship. In essence, the view that vasudhaiva kutumbakam, or, the world is one family, guides Indian diplomacy.

This, continues, Datta-Ray, is seen even in India’s nuclear weapons policy – Nehru and Indira Gandhi both rejected Western rationality even at the risk of appearing irrational to pursue their own reasoning. In this, they did not even trust their senior-most bureaucrats for fear that they would push India into the same anarchic-binary world Nehru had avoided through his non-alignment. Finally pushed into crossing the nuclear rubicon, India refrained from weaponisation until 1998 when circumstances forced it to take the next step. Even then, Indian diplomacy maintained its traditional roots. K Subrahmanyam, one of the architects of India’s nuclear doctrine, echoed Nehru and his daughter when he reasoned that in the nuclear age, the main purpose of foreign policy should be to prevent wars; humanity must unite and cooperate to survive.

There are a host of problems with this interpretation of Indian foreign policy. The first is to use Nehru as the yardstick of Indianness. The first prime minister, influenced on the one hand by Mohandas Gandhi’s asceticism and on the other by British notions of progress, can hardly be an example of the traditional Indian values Datta-Ray has deployed throughout his argument. Nehru certainly did not view himself the way Datta-Ray seems to. As he himself wrote in The Discovery of India that he came to India as a foreigner; Nehru had also remarked to John Galbraith, the US ambassador to India, that he was the last Englishman to rule in India. In fact, the question arises that if the IFS really is imbued with the Nehruvian spirit, is it relying on the corpus of Indic works and experiences or on a Leftist, perhaps Christian socialist version of Western thinking?

It is unfortunate that public perception of India has been captured by Gandhi’s misinterpretation of dharmic values. Vasudhaiva kutumbakam was not, as Sarvesh Tiwari has ably shown, a recommendation but an admonition. Ashoka, the great renouncer became so only after he had conquered his enemies. Ahimsa, fashionably misappropriated by Gandhi against the British, was described in a very different context by Buddha and Mahavira. In fact, Indic ethics, which are carried more in the works of literature than philosophy, speak very much in a language of realism – about proportion, balance, alliances, caution, and strength.

If anything, the examples Datta-Ray gives shows the Indian diplomatic establishment in its worst light: not trusted even by prime ministers, animated by the values of an ingabanga leader, wracked by  the low quality of its recruits, unable to attract fresh talent, and riven by its own politics and demons, it mirrors much of what is wrong with Indian institutions and its polity. With decision-making centred around the prime minister’s office, foreign policy resembles more a fiefdom and India a flailing state rather than a robust and rising democracy. Did the Mahabharata, the text that informs so many IFS officers, not have counsel on governance, the limits of authority, and power?

Despite his questionable choice of examples, Datta-Ray does convince, with just his anecdote about Menon and the Mahabharata, that there is indeed an Indic way of thinking about foreign policy, even if the wrong lessons seem to have been drawn here. However, he must be cautious in making the jump from the IFS knowing about the epic, to actually following its precepts. Indeed, there is much folk wisdom and rhetoric on how Indians view themselves as part of a bigger cosmic whole; Man does not stand above nature but is a part of it. Yet it is unclear how much this thinking dictates everyday function. Despite such concerns about the environment, for example, the Ganga has turned into toxic sludge, tree cover is receding, and the air in urban centres is unbreathable. To know or to have read Aristotle is not to do as he advises.

In places, it seems Datta-Ray has created a straw man out of Western civilisation; the notion of acting with purpose rather than for its own sake that the author sees in Indic ethics sounds similar to the value Niall Ferguson sees in his very Western, Kantian Henry Kissinger. There are, indeed, differences between how Indic and Abrahamic traditions view the world but as most critics of the West are prone to do, Datta-Ray exaggerates the divergences and homogenises the West in a manner he finds problematic for India or the East.

A book must be judged not only on its argument but also the questions it tickles in the readers’ minds; in the latter, Datta-Ray has succeeded spectacularly. He is among the first to try and apply Indic frameworks to modern challenges, ambitiously threatening to subvert the normative understanding of modernity. It is perhaps too much to expect perfect coherence in the first attempt.

 

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Reconsidering Nehru’s Foreign Policy Legacy

01 Sun Nov 2015

Posted by Jaideep A. Prabhu in India, Opinion and Response, South Asia

≈ Comments Off on Reconsidering Nehru’s Foreign Policy Legacy

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Burma, China, communism, foreign policy, India, Jawaharlal Nehru, non-alignment, Soviet Union, Thailand, United Nations Security Council, United States, UNSC

The birth of the Indian republic is not yet distant enough a memory for Indians for the hagiographies – or polemics – to stop. Few figures exemplify this more than Jawaharlal Nehru, perhaps the most iconic figure of the young republic. As the longest serving prime minister too, Nehru’s policies have left an indelible imprint on Indian politics. Although Nehru’s legacy has started to erode in some sectors like the economy, they remain a visible framework in others such as foreign policy – only recently did an Indian policy research group come out with a publication titled, Non-Alignment 2.0. Recollecting Hubert Humphrey’s characterisation of foreign policy as domestic policy with its hat on, the Nehruvian grip on Indian thinking is nowhere clearer.

Nehru began to shape India’s relations with the world even before independence. As the vice president in the Viceroy’s Executive Council, formed in September 1946, Nehru was responsible for India’s foreign affairs. The future prime minister – and foreign minister, for Nehru held that portfolio too – outlined his worldview as the head of the interim government of India. The September 26, 1946 edition of The Statesman reported Nehru as saying, “India will follow an independent policy, avoiding power politics.” In an interview given to the Hindustan Times around the same time, Nehru asserted, “we shall be friends and we intend cooperation with America. We intend cooperation fully with the Soviet Union.” Friendship towards the Communist powers was essential as was friendship towards all powers, but it is not a friendship that springs from mutual understanding through sympathetic ideologies.

Morality

Whether by design or accident, Nehru’s non-alignment was cast as moralpolitik in a world of atompolitik: here was a brave, new India refusing to prioritise the great global struggle over the fundamental needs of her own impoverished masses. Many hailed India’s foreign policy principles as a powerful moral force for peace within the United Nations. As Nehru reported to the Constituent Assembly, “they respected us much more, because they realised that we had some kind of an independent policy and that we were not going to be dragooned this way or that way.” India’s focus on diplomacy rather than military strength was showcased as a different approach to the chaotic machtpolitik world of international relations. Initially, it seemed that India was practicing what it preached. Nehru referred the crisis with Pakistan to a newly formed international organisation known as the United Nations, and it became the second non-communist country to recognise the Communist takeover of China. However, this morality on Nehru’s part might have been nothing more than pragmatism. As Henry Kissinger once stated, moderation is a virtue only in those who are thought to have an alternative. The Indian prime minister was a man without options: in a letter to the Burmese prime minister, Thakin Nu, Nehru explained, “there [was] not much choice left in the matter and the facts of the situation [led] only to one conclusion,” that the government of Communist China must be recognised…of course, however friendly we may be outwardly, there are inner conflicts and frictions and suspicion of each other.” As he explained to his friends in London, “Recognition does not involve approval of [China’s] policy…it is only a recognition of a political…fact, to ignore which is only to court embarrassment.” After the Chinese annexation of Tibet, Nehru observed with regret, “We cannot be happy to have a strong, centralised and Communist government in control of the Tibetan border with India and yet there are no obvious means of stopping this.”

Nehru was greatly disturbed at the developments in China, Burma, Tibet, Malaya, and even South Asia. India even supplied what financial and material support it could to the Burmese government against communist-supported groups such as the Red Flag Communist Party, the Communist Party of Burma, the People’s Volunteer Organization, and the Karen National Union. However, he was also aware that much of the communist insurgency in the region was anti-imperialist rather than anti-Western. The Marshall Plan, for example, was helping the French and Dutch maintain their control over Indochina and Indonesia, only strengthening the Communist cause. For a country that had just shrugged off the chains of imperialism, India could not countenance Western policies in Asia either. Finally, when India did recognise China, it was in close coordination with the governments of the United Kingdom, Canada, and other Commonwealth countries.

Serendipitously for Nehru, the United States and Britain saw India as a vital piece on the global chessboard board and did not want to write the South Asian country off just yet. It was perhaps this Western attitude more than non-alignment that enabled India to obtain developmental assistance from both, the Western and Communist blocs. Although the Soviet Union set up the steel plants at Bhilai and Bokaro, it was West German assistance behind the Rourkela Steel and Fertilizer Plant and the Durgapur Power Sation. The British tried to persuade the Americans that Nehru’s orientation was essentially pro-Western and urged that he should gain economic and military aid from the United States. In Sir Archibald Nye’s view, American aid was crucial to India, “for without it, the development of this impoverished sub-continent into an effective bastion against Communism [was] impossible.” Washington, however, was not pleased that “India was making no contribution to the solution of world problems…and that Nehru displayed little sense of the practical realm.” Similarly, India played an important role in the Soviet plan to foster good will in the newly liberated countries of the Third World.

Capability

Nehru’s morality was triggered by yet another stark reality: capability. This was primarily exhibited in India’s reluctance to use force in her immediate neighbourhood or even in international policing action such as in Korea. However much an idealist and a dreamer Nehru was, he was under no illusion of his new country’s capabilities. He sought to stay out of military pacts because he did not wish to incur an excessive burden of militarisation upon a fragile economy. If India had to “make full provision for [an attack],” Nehru wrote to his chief ministers, “this would cast an intolerable burden on us, financial and otherwise, and it would weaken our general defence position. There are limits beyond which we cannot go at least for some years.” In a meeting with his intelligence staff in 1952, Nehru said, “a hostile frontier with China alone would mean expenditure of all Indian resources just to defend it.” In a speech to Parliament in March 1954, Nehru admitted candidly that “India is backward in…industries, modern weaponry, etc. [India] cannot compete…in these areas.” In the late 1950s as tensions with China ran high, when a bombastic Jan Sangh Member of Parliament declared that he could have over a hundred thousand men on the border overnight, Nehru scathingly asked with what the honourable member intended to clothe or arm the men. Nehru also surmised that the United States and the United Kingdom were only interested in embarrassing China in the international community and did not truly care about the interests of Asians in Tibet, Burma, Korea, or India. Therefore, any appeal in the United Nations might fail, and India would not want to challenge China if it could not hope to win the challenge.

Critics have always been suspicious about Nehru’s motives for non-alignment, especially since it dovetailed with his Fabian socialist views and a condescension towards the American way. Nehru’s own predilections followed him into his job, of course. As one US ambassador to India wrote of the Indian Prime Minister, “Nehru has had an anti-American bias since his school days in England. There he obtained the idea that the United Sates was an overgrown, blundering, uncultured, and somewhat crass nation, and that Americans in general were an ill-mannered and immature people, more interested in such toys as could be produced by modern technique and in satisfaction of their creature comforts than in endeavouring to understanding great moral and social trends of this age.” More damning is Nehru’s unequal application of non-alignment – as the United States was quick to point out, Nehru leapt to condemn Britain and France when they invaded Egypt in coordination with Israel during the Suez Crisis of 1956 but failed to bring the same vigour to its delayed reprobation of the Soviet Union’s invasion of Hungary almost simultaneously.

In a manner, Nehru’s heterogeneous non-aligned principles exculpate his own understanding of the concept. To him, non-alignment was a way of putting Indian interests above those of the Soviet Union or the Western alliance. Non-alignment was neither neutral nor an abdication from responsibility, and Nehru bristled at the implication that his neutrality was a desire to escape world obligations: “We are not going to join a war if we can help it,” Nehru told the Lok Sabha, “and we are going to join the side which is to our interest when the time comes to make the choice.” Under domestic moral pressure from Jayaprakash Narayan, when Nehru did criticise the Soviet Union on its heavy handedness in Hungary, Moscow promptly abstained from a UN Security Council resolution that declared the results of elections in Indian-administered Kashmir as null and void instead of vetoing it. India’s non-aligned tilt towards Moscow, then, was possibly more pragmatic than ideological. As Kissinger wrote in a 1994 essay in Foreign Affairs, “A country that demands moral perfection in its foreign policy will achieve neither perfection nor security.”

Circumstance

Nehru also pushed the development of science and technology in his foreign policy in a manner that has not been seen until only very recently. He reached out to developed countries for assistance in nuclear, space, and industrial technology. The Thumba Equatorial Rocket Launching Station (TERLS) was set up with American help and the hundreds of launches from the site by the Russia, United States, and European countries provided India valuable expertise in telemetry, tracking, and other ballistic operations. India also embraced US president Dwight Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace programme, absorbing whatever expertise was available from a growingly taciturn international nuclear environment for its own purposes. India also played a constructive role in disarmament negotiations and nuclear proliferation control. Although Indian fears on these issues were brushed aside in the 1960s, those same problems continue to plague international relations to this day. In some ways, Nehru was a man ahead of his time – or perhaps, as a leader of a lesser power, he could afford to listen to scientists’ warnings.

The defeat to China in the Himalayas in 1962 threw all of Nehru’s grand theories and gestures into question. Then, as now, the prime minister’s critics simply wanted to know what use Nehru’s diplomacy had been when it could not protect India in its most critical hour. This is a fair question but one that has no easy answers. Nehru’s foreign policy gave India stature on the world stage, as the country was invited to participate in fora such as the Neutral Nations Repatriation Commission to supervise the truce and facilitate prisoner exchange after the Korean War and the International Control Commission set similar tasks after the First Indochina War. India’s mediatory role in the Suez Crisis and its prominence at the Bandung conference of new Asian and African states gave the country an international presence. After Bandung, John Foster Dulles had even remarked that “it was better to lose an ally like Thailand than a neutral like India.” However, it is not clear how this soft power helped India where it mattered – the economy and national security. The non-aligned states were mostly too poor themselves to contribute to the Indian economy, and more harshly, did not even utter a word in support of India during the 1962 Himalayan war; not even the Soviet Union came to India’s defence. Even granting the nobility of the main planks of Nehruvian foreign policy – anti-imperialism, disarmament, and peace – it was of no avail to India in the final reckoning.

The Chinese debacle occurred towards the end of Nehru’s premiership and it left him a broken man. Sadly, the geopolitical winds had not favoured the prime minister. Nearly two centuries under British rule had left India economically, socially, and militarily weak. Nor were any of India’s leaders relentless dictators, willing to subject her citizens to even more privation in order to rapidly build a powerful military. When invasion came, it was not even because Nehru had failed in his strategy but because of something entirely unrelated: documents declassified over the past decade in Chinese and Eastern European archives indicate that Beijing’s primary purpose for bringing India to heel was to establish its primacy in the Sino-Soviet struggle for the leadership of world communism. By humiliating a Soviet ally, China would be able to subtly demonstrate to other communist countries that the Soviet Union was more intent on detente with the Americans than being a revolutionary power. Nehru’s correspondence with American officials show that he had foreseen this wrinkle in Sino-Soviet relations in the mid-1950s but had not expected it to be so severe, come so quickly, or, indeed, be its innocent victim. Without the Soviet catalyst, disputes over the MacMahon Line would have continued to plague Indo-Chinese relations but might not have come to a boil so soon, if at all. In fact, relations between the two Asian giants had genuinely seemed to hold potential until the late 1950s – China had even sent India a million tonnes of foodgrains in 1951 to help stave off famine.

More substantially, India had nowhere else to turn. The United States, for all its wooing of India, was not interested in a strategic relationship. American officials posted to India were clearly instructed to persuade Delhi over to the Western cause but make no commitments in return. The United States would have been happy to enlist India as an ally but was willing to settle for the country not going over to the Communist bloc. According to US calculations, a Marshall Plan for India would have to be far larger than the one Europe was offered and Washington could not afford to make such an investment in a secondary theatre of the Cold War. Nehru’s prickliness towards Americans did not persuade them either to make any additional efforts to see if India could be accommodated.

Impact

None of this is to suggest that Nehru was merely the subject of world forces. He did make mistakes in his assessments of others, that the new countries of Asia and Africa might be driven not just by anti-imperialism as Nehru was but also by nationalism or other motives. Nehru repeatedly spoke of a shared Asian heritage, which, to him, meant ancient greatness, the trauma of colonialism, and a new nationalism. There was no room for renewed regional and ethnic rivalries to surface. This led Nehru downplay the differences between the members of the coalition he tried to lead, leaving India alone in its greatest moment of crisis since independence.

Nehru also grievously underestimated the importance China attached to India’s support in diplomatic matters. India’s perceived political and moral power were seen by Nehru as promising protection from any hostile neighbour – it would be unthinkable to enrage the Soviet and American alliances, as well as the Third World. Additionally, since 1957, the Soviets had begun to support India on Kashmir in the United Nations. China had seemed least likely to risk global condemnation, and “common wisdom held that acceptance in the United Nations was essential for China.” Nehru had erroneously assumed that the existence of a Third World bloc with India in a position of leadership was in the interest of both major powers.

Another error on Nehru’s part was the refusal to accept a seat on the United Nations Security Council before one was offered to China. He wrote to his sister Vijayalakshmi Pandit, then the Indian ambassador to the United States, “India…is certainly entitled to a permanent seat in the Security Council, but we are not going in at the cost of China.” Nehru interpreted the offer from Washington as a stratagem to divide Asian countries and bring suspicion and rivalry between India and China. Although it is difficult to say how a place on the UNSC might have helped India in 1962, the position would have at least allowed India to act without fear of a veto – or lack thereof – on important resolutions in the Security Council. This strategic blunder cost India then and continues to do so to this day.

Though Washington did not approve of Nehru’s methods, they understood his game plan. A State Department communiqué in the mid-1950s observed that Nehru was pursuing a policy that would ring the periphery of China with a buffer of neutral states and that in was in the security interests of India that these states continue to remain outside the Communist Chinese sphere of influence. In early 1962, Thailand had approached India with a proposition – it would leave the US-led security pact in the region if India would guarantee her security against China. Bangkok was particularly worried about communist infiltration and the “Thai Autonomous Region” established in the Yunnan province of southern China. Delhi was evasive as Nehru was aware of the futility of such guarantees in the face of a preponderance of Chinese power in the region. After India’s defeat in the mountains, Bangkok rescinded its proposal, arguing that India cannot be expected to defend Thai interests if it cannot protect its own. India’s failure to emerge as a provider of economic and security benefits hastened the collapse of its foreign policy that had been until 1962 held together with only soft power.

In the final evaluation, Nehru emerges as neither hero nor villain…just human. Indian foreign policy could have undoubtedly been conducted better but it operated within the restraints of a weak military and economy, US unwillingness to make a serious commitment to Asian security, and Sino-Soviet rivalry. Of course, it also functioned within the parameters acceptable to the psychology of a newly decolonised nation and Nehru’s own social and economic inclinations. Yet Nehru’s foreign policy will be judged only by the outcome, and whether Nehru is guilty or not, it is only he who is responsible.


This article first appeared in the November 2015 print edition of Swarajya.

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Modi’s Travels

13 Mon Apr 2015

Posted by Jaideep A. Prabhu in India, South Asia

≈ Comments Off on Modi’s Travels

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Australia, Bhutan, Fiji, France, India, Japan, Mauritius, Narendra Modi, Nepal, non-alignment, Seychelles, Sri Lanka, United States

It has now been almost a year since Narendra Modi took office and by the time the year passes, he will have visited 15 countries, not counting attendance at the state funeral of former Singapore prime minister Lee Kuan Yew or the five multilateral summits he participated in. Modi is undoubtedly the most well-travelled prime minister in Indian history and this has been an unexpected yet interesting development, for he was known primarily for his clear domestic vision before the general elections of 2014. In addition to his own visits, Modi has also received several delegations and sent his external affairs minister, Sushma Swaraj, to meet with leaders from other countries. All this adds up to a substantial foreign policy effort on the part of India’s new government and points to what some had suggested before the elections as a programme for a potential Modi government.

Modi’s foreign policy so far views the world in elegantly simple terms – there are states that can help India and there are states that India can help. Both of these categories are, of course, mutual but the description marks the dominant flow of power. In essence, the prime minister understands that a key ingredient in India’s stability, security, and economic revival is its region. Yet to carry the region, India will need tremendous assistance from countries that have the technological and financial wherewithal to support its ambitious growth. As a result, India is courting countries in its region such as Nepal, Seychelles, Sri Lanka, and Mauritius with as much enthusiasm as it is reaching out to economic powers such as the United States, France, Japan, and Australia. There is an enamourment among scholars as well as the public for doctrines and though it may be tempting to term this emphasis on the region as the ‘Modi Doctrine,’ it is nothing but a common sensical approach to one’s neighbourhood that finds long precedence in history.

India has paid more attention to its neighborhood since Modi took office than it probably has in the past decade. Though Manmohan Singh had visited Mauritius in 2005 and Bhutan in 2008, the last visit by an Indian prime minister to Nepal was in 1997, to Sri Lanka was in 1987, to Fiji in 1981, and to Seychelles also in 1981. Modi’s state visits to these countries on its borders and in the ocean that bears its name all saw promises of increased trade, assistance with infrastructure development, cooperation in matters of mutual security, and the easing of travel restrictions. These relations build Indian influence in these countries as well as in regional fora where India might need more voices to support its agenda. For India, these links are not just about economics but also strategic assets as it seeks to modernise and expand its military capabilities while the states of the Indian Ocean Region gain by piggybacking on an expanding Indian economy. The trick is, for India, never to cause its neighbours to fear its expansion or they will resent it and seek to balance it with other powers within or without the region. If India’s neighbours feel that they too have a stake in her success, there will be little cause for suspicion as China experiences in Southeast Asia. To that end, missions like Operation Rahat – the rescue of civilians from war-torn Yemen – are valuable.

The rekindling of India’s ties with its neighbours depends to a large extent on the growth of the Indian economy. This requires a huge influx of capital as well as technology in almost all sectors of the Indian economy – infrastructure, education, industry, finance, security, and more. Modi has reached out to potential partners among the developed nations of the world who may have not only a financial interest to invest in India but strategic reasons as well. India has concluded or is close to concluding agreements on civil nuclear cooperation with Australia, France, Canada, and the United States; this will bring in reactors and fuel to power Modi’s ‘Make in India’ campaign that seeks to boost manufacturing in the country. Modi hopes to double India’s exports by the end of his first term. As companies like Airbus move parts of their operations to India, Modi is also taking his country militarily closer to the United States, Australia, Japan, and France with joint training exercises, intelligence sharing, and defence equipment procurements. A greater Indian role in the regional security commons is of interest to almost all parties in the region and beyond and Modi is capitalising on this sentiment to build India into a regional power.

There are undoubtedly domestic tasks that require the prime minister’s attention. Yet India’s needs cannot be met by domestic spring cleaning alone and requires international involvement, particularly if the country wants to leapfrog some of the technologies and learning of the second half of the 20th century. Modi’s moves on the international chessboard so far have not been merely formality but have begun to redefine Indian strategy and thinking. Most importantly, they are a distinct departure from Delhi’s policies during the Cold War as well as the quasi-governmental position of Non-Alignment 2.0. For such a momentous course correction, the visibility of the prime minister on the international stage is indispensable.

The fruits of Modi’s labours abroad will likely not be fully seen for at least a decade but there should be some signs of the results by the end of his term in 2019. For the first time in the history of independent India, the country seems to have a foreign policy that puts Indian ambitions at the centre. In the early years of independence, Jawaharlal Nehru’s non-alignment was structurally defined by a struggle that had little to do with India; later, foreign policy became subject to ad hocism and the personality of the prime minister rather than a coherent, cogent, and continuous programme. Now, under Modi, India is finally acting on the role that has been advised her and expected of her by her neighbours or decades.


This post appeared on Daily News & Analysis on April 13, 2015.

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