NSG fiasco: Fault in India's foreign policy
From the fiasco with Nepal to the current denial of even the consideration of membership to the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG), it seems that Indian foreign policy is in trouble.
While it may be tempting to blame Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his deeply personalised style of conducting foreign relations, the problem is deeper and has little to do with one man or even one government.
Added to this is the fact that in India we seem to discuss foreign policy in moralistic terms - using terms such as being "stabbed in the back", betrayal, prestige and friendship - which have little currency in the realm of international relations.
Foreign policy is the pursuit of national interests with the tools at your disposal.
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| PM Narendra Modi with Chinese president Xi Jinping. |
India does a bad job of identifying these interests publicly, and therefore, the public discussion on foreign policy is full of empty rhetoric, grand statements, and - inevitably - embarrassment as we have to swallow our big talk when confronted with the reality of our capabilities.
The desperate need for economic growth
The primary goal of Indian foreign policy - stemming from our own needs - is the struggle for a dignified life for our citizens. This stems from our democracy.
India made the radical move of granting complete adult franchise to all of its citizens at a time when the US still deprived its African-American community of the vote, and parts of Europe still withheld voting rights from women.
This decision meant that domestic constraints would also be the main factor in our decision-making. We cannot go on a hare-brained pursuit of "great power status" unless it also results in well-being of our fellow citizens.
In other words, economic growth has to be the basic ingredient of all our aims. The best way of achieving such growth is an open, liberal international order.
Today, the closest approximation to this liberal international order is the one underpinned by the US, and defended by its military.
To some Indians - increasingly more in this day and age - it means that India should become part of the US international system, align itself to the most powerful actor in the system, and also the one most likely to deliver the goods for us.
An unfair international system
The reality, though, is that the international order headed by the US has always been an unfair one. We do not have to look further than the UN Security Council to see that.
While the US, Russia and China may have their seat at the high table, it seems amusing that France and the UK are there. Surely Germany and Japan are larger actors than both, and what about Brazil, South Africa, India and even Pakistan and Iran?
Not to mention the fact that the US has, throughout the history of this international order, supported regimes that are the obverse of liberal and open - the military dictatorship of Egypt and the theocratic monarchy of Saudi Arabia are two of America's key allies in West Asia. In our neighbourhood, of course, it has been the US support for Pakistan's military regimes that has always rankled.
Maybe, most importantly, though, at key points of Indian need, the US has chosen to undermine Indian sovereignty. As YD Gundevia, who served as counsellor in the Indian embassy in Moscow from 1950-'53, and as foreign secretary in the 1960s, recounts in his memoir, 'Outside the Archives', with India struggling with grain shortages, the US tried to negotiate rates and policy decisions.
Moscow unhesitatingly agreed to Indian requests. This meant that although the US supported an open, liberal order, it only did it to a certain extent, and for countries like India, the adoption of a non-aligned strategy actually allowed greater freedom - and promoted a more open, liberal order - than by aligning with the US.
The rise of China after the Cold War
Since 1991, and the fall of the Soviet Union, the idea of non-alignment has had fewer and fewer takers. And the rising power has been China. Although China has not established anything like an alternative international order the way the Soviet Union did - after all, its key allies are North Korea and Pakistan - it is at least in the position to deny the US on key issues - as it seemed to do with India's possible NSG admission.
Unfortunately for India, China is also hostile to India's rising power - unlike the Soviet Union (one of the main reasons that the Soviet Union built up India was to balance against China, after the Soviet-China split in the 1960s).
Over the last few decades, China has used its economic and political power to barge into the international system created by the US, but it does not favour a US-led system, and it does not favour a liberal or open system. It definitely does not favour a role for India as a key actor on Asian, or global affairs unless India aligns with Chinese interests, such as with the BRICS Bank or the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB).
So, the question is what does India do? Does it align with the US (possibly against China) to preserve a US-led international order which is unfair not just to India, but to much of the world?
Or does it align with China, in a much smaller system, which is China-led, completely opaque, and even more unfair?
In both cases, India has something to gain. With the US, it gets military technology to offset Chinese military power. From China it will receive investments and will be a part of the (potentially very rich) One Road, One Belt/ New Silk Route initiative. But overall, what India loses if there is no larger liberal order is of much greater magnitude. We will end up being trapped in small markets instead of being part of a larger economic and political system.
Ultimately it will slow down our growth, and make our task of ending poverty in India that much harder. (Ironically, China, which exploited the liberal economic order to aid its own growth and bring hundreds of millions of its own citizens out of poverty, is now undermining that economic-political order.)
Hugs with Barack, or a jhoola with Xi, or something else entirely?
So far, Indian policymakers have not come up with an appropriate response.
Non-alignment 2.0, which was discussed by senior policymakers under the last regime (although it must be noted that most of the discussants were not aligned with the UPA) came up with nothing much.
The current government seems to go from hugs with US president Barack Obama to swinging on a jhoola with Chinese president Xi Jinping. Both the UPA and the NDA consistently ignored the fact that India has another choice, which is to forcefully argue for an open and liberal order that is more just than the current US-led one.
In this regard, India has many potential allies, the Germans and the Japanese being two of the most important ones, both politically and economically. The vast number of the countries of the global south, who were playthings of both the US and the USSR during the Cold War, would also prefer a system that is more equitable.
Ultimately it is also in the interest of the US to have a system that reforms - and has greater participation - than to cling on to an old US/NATO-led order from which countries keep defecting - the UK rushing to join the AIIB despite the US objecting was just one example.
Let us be clear, this will not be an India-led order, but it can be an order in which India plays a critically important role, much like it did when the non-aligned movement began. Such an order will require vision, skill and a great deal of expertise on international affairs to create.
An India with a foreign service the size of Singapore's - as it now stands - will just not be able to do the job.
Unfortunately, there seems to be little thinking in the government on how to create this outcome, and considering that the latest move is to actually cut the budget of the ministry of external affairs, undermining its capabilities even further, it seems that the new foreign policy matrix, with ideas that would create a new liberal order, is further out of reach for India than ever before.