Implosion (55 page)

– and India’. In consequence, India was invited to chair the three International Commissions for Supervision and Control set up to monitor the implementation of the accords on Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.
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India was at this time ‘punching above our weight, measured strictly in realist balance of power terms’, as Shivshankar Menon, India’s national security adviser from 2010 in the Manmohan Singh government, and a former foreign secretary, put it in August 2011 in a wide-ranging exposition on India’s foreign policy.
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‘This was possible because of the strategic space that the Cold War opened up for us, and because of the eminent good sense and reasonableness of what Nehru was doing and advocating. During the fifties, India stood higher in the world’s (and her own) estimation than her strength warranted’. Menon went on to admit rather elliptically what happened after that: ‘During the sixties the reverse was the case. After 1971 there has been a greater correlation between India’s strength and prestige, and this seems likely to continue for the foreseeable future’. This was a neat diplomatic way of saying (correctly) that India’s defeat by China in 1962 ended both its clout and Nehru’s international attempts at leadership. India then displayed regional strength when it helped Bangladesh to be carved out of Pakistan in 1971, but it has not been able to extend that on a wider international plane because of its relative economic and military weakness, despite the 1998 nuclear tests and economic growth in the 2000s.

After Nehru

In any case, India no longer has the will to be heard, nor does it seem confident, as it was in Nehru’s time, that it has something different to say, apart from believing in non-intervention in other countries’ affairs and therefore opposing the sort of regime change led by the US and UK in Iraq and elsewhere. Implicitly criticizing the West’s military intervention in Libya and support for Syrian rebels, Manmohan Singh said at the UN in September 2011: ‘The observance of the rule of law is as important in international affairs as it is within countries. Societies cannot be reordered from outside through military force. People in all countries have the right to choose their own destiny and define their own future’.
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That said, India is now much more focused on its own concerns, as Menon explained in his 2011 lecture: ‘Our primary task now and for the foreseeable future is to transform and improve the life of the unacceptably large number of our compatriots who live in poverty, with disease, hunger and illiteracy as their companions in life. This is our overriding priority, and must be the goal of our internal and external security policies. Our quest is the transformation of India, nothing less and nothing more.’ India had ‘sought the strategic autonomy that nuclear weapons bestow upon us’ so that it could pursue that goal ‘without distraction or external entanglement’, he added, diplomatically stopping short of naming China and Pakistan as the potentially distracting entanglements.

‘So, while India is already a major economy in terms of size and ability to influence prices and supply and demand in certain markets, it will still be a country of poor people with overwhelming domestic priorities for an extended period of time. This will certainly be true for the foreseeable future which is, at best, fifteen years,’ said Menon. ‘That is why it is important to peg our goals and use of power to our immediate and overriding interest in our domestic transformation. In other words, our condition and the state of the world require us not to seek hegemony, or domination, or expansion, or strategic depth. None of these serve our basic interest, even in a defensive sense. Being a bridging power, or a swing state might, in certain circumstances. Power is the ability to create and sustain outcomes. Weight we have, our influence is growing, but our power remains to grow and should first be used for our domestic transformation.’

From Nehru to the present day (with Menon presumably reflecting the views of Manmohan Singh), it can be presented as a noble, well-honed and gradually developing cause – though Menon admitted it could also be seen as a ‘very selfish policy’. In this view of history, India has moved logically and coherently from being an independent opinion-leader under Nehru, to a pragmatic domestic-oriented player in the twenty-first century’s era of globalization, guarding and promoting its internal interests and staying out of trouble abroad when it does not need to be involved. This means that it does not think it should seek alliances with other countries (for example, as the UK does with the US), and it should oppose interference in other nation’s affairs, especially interference that is aimed at regime change. If it is sometimes as selfishly hypocritical in choosing whom it supports as the West is when it goes for regime change in unfriendly oil-rich states while ignoring the lack of democracy in Bahrain or Sudan, so be it!

A Narrow Focus

Indian officials define the country’s foreign focus as primarily on the neighbourhood, stretching from the Middle East across South Asia to China and Southeast Asia and, further away and to a lesser extent, the US. The actual focus is really much narrower and is driven by a sometimes proactive (and more often reactive) policy in relation to Pakistan, which stems from post-partition border disputes and tensions, plus the threats and reality of cross-border terrorism. In South Asia generally, India has failed so badly to get onto co-operative terms with any of its neighbours (apart from Bhutan) that China has seduced them and, in so doing, has gradually encircled India.

With the US, it has in recent years become an almost-partner (though not an ally), but it is Washington, not Delhi, that drives the relationship or allows it to drift. With China, which is its biggest and potentially most threatening neighbour, India is constantly on the back foot and allows Beijing to set the agenda. With the Gulf states and the rest of West Asia (broadly the Middle East), India only showed what some officials admit was ‘benign neglect’ till the late 2000s. This was despite the presence there of some six million Indians who send home $35bn remittances annually, and the fact that the region supplies about 60 per cent of India’s oil and gas.
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The same applied to Southeast Asia. Elsewhere, India is beginning to take more notice of Africa (with $5bn three-year aid and other initiatives announced in May 2011), the Gulf and eastern Asia, especially as it searches abroad for sources of energy and other essential supplies, realizing the need to counter China’s growing international influence. It has also begun to develop an important relationship with Japan that was marked by the first-ever visit to India by an emperor and empress at the end of 2013. Japan is interested because it is attempting to counter aggressive diplomacy from Beijing, and there are potentially big gains for India in terms of development finance and other assistance.

India has always felt comfortable with the old Soviet Union, its ally in the Cold War; Indira Gandhi and other top leaders used to say that Moscow ‘has never let us down’. India was directly affected when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1990–91 because the economic support it had been receiving stopped. But the relationship has continued with Russia, certainly on international affairs, though Moscow is uneasy about India’s growing defence and other links with the US, and there have been problems with Russian defence contract delays and cost over-runs.

Formal links with Europe have not developed across a wide front since they were established in 1963 with the then European Economic Community (EEC), though they were given a boost in the 1990s and early 2000s.
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India prefers to deal with individual countries and does not rate the European Union as a top priority or vital entity
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even though, taken together, the countries involved are its major trading partner and it has been trying to negotiate a trade treaty. France is primarily seen as a useful and flexible supplier of defence and nuclear equipment. The UK is treated as a friendly, once-significant but now over-eager and occasionally condescending player. It is important at a business and people level – there are 1.5m residents of Indian origin in the UK along with substantial investments, including the Tata group, which is the largest private sector employer. Prime Minister David Cameron hopes unrealistically for a ‘very special partnership’ and for the two countries to be ‘inextricably linked’, as he spun it on a public relations-oriented trip to India.
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Losing the Argument

It is, of course, easy to take a negative view of India’s approach, and especially the sanctimonious way that its foreign affairs have often been conducted with attitudes of arrogant pomposity that have little clear end-purpose. I irritated the external affairs ministry with a column in the
Business Standard
in 2001 at a time when India was losing arguments internationally, especially in the US and UK, over its problems with Pakistan and the future of Kashmir. ‘India’s failure to get its message across internationally is, of course, not new. Pakistan has for years had more pro-active and effective diplomatic and public relations, especially in Washington and London,’ I wrote. ‘While India strutted pompously for years on the world stage, irritating other countries by self-defensively protesting its importance but failing to follow through with sound diplomacy, Pakistan has won hearts and minds’.
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When diplomats did get into negotiations, they characteristically became bogged down in agreement-defying detail.

My view was based partly on comments I had heard for a long time from many of the neighbouring countries’ diplomats about ineffectual posturing and personal arrogance – a word that has been picked up by Antonio Armellini, a former Italian ambassador to India in a book,
If The Elephant Flies.
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He wrote about India’s ‘arrogance – or the exaggerated self-confidence if one prefers – that can adversely affect the country’s decision-making and its overall ability to correctly assess opportunities and limitations’. He scathingly coupled that with ‘the tendency to take one’s expectations for facts’ which ‘influences political orientations and often leads to errors that are regularly ascribed to the hostility of others rather than one’s own misjudgements’.

Such a critique was harsh but, taken point by point, it was accurate and is borne out by others. Susan Rice, Obama’s national security adviser from June 2013, is reported to have said that she had become a ‘lot less patient’ with India after having a ‘tough relationship’ over votes on Libya and Syria with her Indian counterpart (Hardeep Singh Puri, a blunt Indian diplomat), when she was the US ambassador at the UN during the first Obama administration.
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Having watched Indian diplomats perform at the UN, David Malone, a former Canadian high commissioner in Delhi, has written, ‘The cleverest person in the room may win many arguments, but still not win the game’.
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A retired senior Indian diplomat admitted to me that ‘we have to give up our unrealistic pretensions that we have a monopoly of wisdom’.
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Adding to that, a retired British diplomat told me that India had ‘neither the will nor mechanisms to look at internal issues and pursue them’, adding wearily, ‘it takes offence at the slightest excuse and is slow to forgive and forget’.

In Washington, says a seasoned American foreign affairs expert and diplomat, Indian ambassadors rarely show the diplomatic and social aplomb of top European countries and the Israelis, and thus lack the access, opportunity and ability to influence decision-making.
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Even though India was by mid-2012 well established and popular in the American capital, he said that ‘it is hard to find an example of a US policy where India has had real influence – not on Pakistan, nor Afghanistan nor China’. Some foreign diplomats suggest that their Indian counterparts do not have a sense of direction or purpose and are reluctant to discuss issues, maybe because they are under-briefed and (or) are ambivalent about India’s role in the world. India has also disappointed countries in Southeast and eastern Asia by not doing enough to build relationships beyond routine diplomatic exchanges, despite a look-east policy adopted in the 1990s. In practice, India is drawn in different directions by its wish to be a player, as it has been, for example, on climate change, and still carry the non-involved tag.

There is also criticism inside India as well as outside that the country lacks internationally recognized foreign affairs think tanks that could produce consistent analysis comparable to America’s Brookings Institute and the Heritage Foundation. The importance of an occasional thematic speech like Menon’s in August 2011 illustrates the potential. There are many small policy institutes in Delhi on defence as well as foreign policy issues, happily headed by retired foreign secretaries and other diplomats and the occasional admiral or general, but none has the authority at home or abroad of a major centre of thought and analysis. The Observer Research Foundation in Delhi, founded and partially funded by the Reliance Industries of Mukesh Ambani, fills some gaps but it has a far wider remit than foreign affairs, while the long-established Centre for Policy Studies has small rooms housing bright experts but does not aspire to collective clout.

Brahma Chellaney, a Delhi-based strategic affairs specialist, criticizes India from a different angle, arguing that it ‘gives, and gets nothing in return’, and does not recognize that ‘reciprocity is the first principle of diplomacy’. He lists India’s generosity on land issues ranging from surrendering British-inherited extra-territorial rights in Tibet in 1954, to giving back strategic gains after the 1965 and 1971 Pakistan wars and, more recently, facing pressure to cede control on the Siachen Glacier where the two countries have had a high altitude confrontation since 1984. Chellaney is an expert on the region’s river water disputes and says that the ‘world’s most generous water-sharing pact is the 1960 Indus Waters Treaty, under which India agreed to set aside 80.52 per cent of the waters of the six-river Indus system for Pakistan, keeping for itself just the remaining 19.48 per cent share’.
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