Does India have a foreign policy? Harsh Pant, a professor of international relations at King's College London, claims that "India does not have a foreign policy, period". Pant's thundering judgement appears early in his new book, a slender volume entitled Indian Foreign Policy: An Overview.
It’s a declaration that can immediately dissuade the reader from persisting with the rest of the book: how can the author examine what he says does not exist? India cannot be said to lack an interest in the world; what it seems to lack, as Pant clarifies, is a coherent set of principles – a “grand vision” – informing its policy towards the world.
The blueprint for republican India’s initial approach to foreign affairs was a resolution passed by the Congress Party, engine of the freedom movement, in 1938. It committed India to an internationalism centred on disarmament, peaceful coexistence and the abolition of imperialism.
As Roger Trumbull, one of the most astute foreign observers of India, wrote in the 1950s, the foreign policy posturing under Jawaharlal Nehru, the nation’s first prime minister, in the immediate aftermath of independence was more or less consistent with that resolution.
Nehru’s impatience with western imperialism was matched only by his typhlotic indulgence of Chinese revanchism. When Portugal’s Salazar dictatorship refused to vacate its Indian possessions in Goa, Nehru sent in the troops and annexed the territory. But on the eastern front, he remained inexplicably serene. Not only did he neglect warnings about China’s territorial ambitions from his colleagues; he had recommended Mao’s pariah state for a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council that had first been offered to India in the 1950s.
But the perforated idealism that characterised India’s foreign policy under Nehru cracked when China, eager to assert itself as the predominant power in Asia, invaded in 1962. The Non-Aligned Movement, co-founded and led by Nehru, was of no use. It was the United States, repeatedly spurned by Nehru, that came to India’s aid in its moment of humiliation.
The collapse of Nehru’s idealism gave rise to the hardened realism of his daughter, Indira Gandhi. Her foreign policy was dominated by two urgent ambitions: the preservation of India’s territorial integrity and the attenuation of security challenges in its vicinity. She intensified the rhetoric of non-alignment while deepening India’s relationship with the Soviet Union.
Pakistan, an emergent client of China, had territory on each flank of the subcontinent; it was, moreover, armed by the US. India had successfully repelled an invasion by Pakistan in 1965 under Nehru’s successor, Lal Bahadur Shastri. But when Pakistan struck again in 1971, on Gandhi’s watch, India responded by punching deep into East Pakistan.
The US, Pakistan's major ally, sent a 75,000-ton nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, USS Enterprise, to the Bay of Bengal to intimidate New Delhi. India immediately invoked its friendship treaty with the Soviet Union, prompting Moscow to dispatch a flotilla of nuclear-powered ships to defend India.
At the height of the Cold War, India, an avowedly non-aligned nation, nearly brought the two superpowers into direct collision. India’s military intervention in East Pakistan, swift and decisive, halted a genocide and resulted in the birth of Bangladesh.
For a generation of Indians, the Soviet Union’s demise in 1991 upended the certitudes of a lifetime. PV Narasimha Rao, India’s unlikeliest prime minister, saw this as an opportunity and devised a foreign policy dictated above all by pragmatism. Rao aggressively renewed India’s lapsed relations with East Asian states. He upgraded India’s relations with Israel and was welcomed in the United States as a revolutionary for diluting the state’s role in the economy.
Rao placed India on a pro-western path. But it was a move necessitated by circumstance, not ideology. He discerned that rigidity, be it in the form of idealism or ideology, held India back.
India’s foreign policy, always responsive to the stimuli of international currents, is replete with contradictions. India was a democracy that rejected the overtures of the US and secured the protection of the Soviet Union during the Cold War; deplored nuclear proliferation while pursuing a nuclear programme; denounced foreign intervention in the internal affairs of nations but dealt a near-fatal blow to Pakistan by intervening in its internal affairs; obtained military help from Israel even as it publicly distanced itself from the Jewish state; and maintained its stature in Palestine and the Arab world even after it enhanced its relations with Israel. It did all this with the help of a brilliant diplomatic corps roughly the size of Singapore’s.
New Delhi’s ambitions over the past quarter-century have broadened, but the critical problems remain the same. China and Pakistan still pose the greatest threat to India. The former, resented intensely by its neighbours, is riven by enormous internal troubles. India’s task is to manage Beijing without provoking it – while remaining vigilant and wholly prepared for a confrontation. Pakistan – a nuclear state imploding under the weight of its own radicalism – is a pressing security problem. In dealing with it, Narendra Modi, whose foreign policy Pant appears highly enamoured of, has been a catastrophe.
Modi has managed to compress into two years the gravest mistakes made by his predecessors over many decades. Unable to cope with bad headlines at home, he decided to make a surprise visit to Pakistan in December. He embarrassed his own cabinet, which was kept in the dark about his travel; provoked the extremists within Pakistan’s military-intelligence camorra, whose price for tolerance of democracy in Pakistan has always been hostility with New Delhi; and invited an attack on India, which materialised within weeks of his return from Pakistan. Far from jumpstarting a peace process, Modi’s recklessness has aggravated the enmity between the two nations.
India’s engagement with the world has no doubt been energised by Modi. But in the most important area – national security – his itinerant diplomacy has failed to make India any safer. His capricious temperament – consider his impulse purchase last April of three dozen Rafale jets from France, without consulting his own defence minister, for no reason other than he was pleased with French hospitality – is proving unbearably costly for India.
Pant’s argument that India’s foreign policy needs urgently to be insulated from the whims of the prime minister’s office seems highly pertinent to the age of Modi. Yet, oddly, Modi is the one prime minister whose erratic tinkering with foreign policy is charitably glossed over by Pant.
Pant has written a highly accessible survey of India’s foreign policy, covering New Delhi’s relations with all the major powers in the world. But the assumptions that steer Pant’s arguments are of a recent vintage, infected by the brash confidence of India’s new elite. The “world”, Pant writes, “is looking to India to shape the emerging international order”.
Anyone who has actually travelled in this world and interacted with people outside of the self-venerating circles of academia and think tanks will find this absurd. Pant exhorts India to “behave” like a “great power”. But what might such behaviour entail? Meddling in other countries’ affairs? Bullying smaller states? Embracing the role envisaged for India by Washington as a democratic “counterweight” to China?
At any rate, for India to seek to become a great power without first resolving its formidable domestic woes is a hollow pursuit. And even then, the ambition not simply to remain secure and content in one’s own country but to project power internationally and strong-arm weaker states with their own intractable misfortunes – the praxis of great power – is profoundly at odds with India’s history and ethos.
Fortunately, at least for now, the obsession with acquiring global power is as limited within India as the clamour abroad for it to shape the world order.
Kapil Komireddi is a regular contributor to The Review.