The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh (29 page)

Talking about foreign policies, the House must remember that these are not just empty struggles on a chessboard. Behind them lie all manner of things. Ultimately, foreign policy is the outcome of economic policy, and until India has properly evolved her economic policy, her foreign policy will be rather vague, rather inchoate, and will be groping . . . A vague statement that we stand for peace and freedom by itself has no particular meaning, because every country is prepared to say the same thing, whether it means it or not. What then do we stand for? Well, you have to develop this argument in the economic field. As it happens today, in spite of the fact that we have been for some time in authority as a government, I regret that we have not produced any constructive economic scheme or economic policy so far . . . When we do so, that will govern our foreign policy more than all the speeches in this House.

 

He then went on to add what can be regarded as an early exposition of ‘Nehruvian realism’ and said, ‘Whatever policy we may lay down, the art of conducting the foreign affairs of a country lies in finding out what is most advantageous to the country.’

Dr Singh was guided by this perspective in defining his own worldview. That was the worldview he chose to express publicly when he addressed the Hindustan Times Leadership Initiative Conference on 5 November 2004. He repeated many of the ideas in that speech at the India Today Conclave on 25 February 2005. Taken together, the two were seminal speeches that defined Dr Singh’s view of Indian foreign policy. Much thought went into their drafting. I had several sessions with Dr Singh and he devoted considerable time to reworking successive drafts.

These speeches made six significant statements:

First, that India’s relations with the world—both major powers and Asian neighbours—would be shaped by its own developmental priorities. The single most important objective of Indian foreign policy has to be to ‘create a global environment conducive to her economic development and the well-being of the people of India’.

Second, that India would benefit from greater integration with the world economy—’the world wants India to do well . . . our challenges are at home’—and that India should be more closely integrated with other Asian economies as an active member of a future ‘Asian Economic Community’.

Third, that India’s relations with ‘major powers, especially the United States, and more recently China, have increasingly been shaped by economic factors’, and that ‘our concern for energy security has become an important element of our diplomacy’.

Fourth, that South Asia’s shared destiny required greater regional cooperation and that this would be facilitated by better physical ‘connectivity’ across the region.

Fifth, that India’s experiment of pursuing economic development within the framework of a plural, secular and liberal democracy held lessons for the world. As the prime minister put it, ‘Economists quantify our engagement with the world in terms of our share of world trade and capital flows; strategic analysts look at military and political alliances. I submit to you for your consideration the idea that the most enduring engagement of a people with the world is in the realm of ideas and the idea we must engage the world through is the “idea of India”—the idea of
Vasudhaiva
Kutumbakam.
The idea that even as nations may clash, cultures and civilizations can coexist.’

Finally, that as a democracy India had a global responsibility to assist ‘societies in transition’—’Just as many developed industrial economies assisted the so-called “economies in transition” to make the transition from centrally planned economies to open market economies, the experience of a democracy like India can be of some help in enabling “societies in transition” to evolve into open, inclusive, plural, democratic societies.’

In an early comment on Dr Singh’s foreign policy initiatives, the strategic affairs analyst C. Raja Mohan picked these elements and dubbed them the ‘Manmohan Singh Doctrine’.
¹

Each of these ‘early thoughts’ began to shape Dr Singh’s foreign policy in the months to come. He was probably the first Indian prime minister to unabashedly hold up India’s plural, secular and democratic credentials as worthy foreign policy principles for India’s international engagement. In the early post-colonial and the long Cold War years India was more comfortable touting its anti-colonial and ‘non-aligned’ and ‘socialist’ credentials rather than its democratic credentials. Dr Singh took the UPA’s idea of ‘inclusive growth’ at home to global forums where he spoke of ‘inclusive globalization’. This too was new. Rather than fulminate against globalization, as Indian leaders were wont to do, he chose to demand more inclusive structures, arguing that globalization could be a ‘win-win’ process.

His interest in regional economic integration with South and Southeast Asia found expression in the movement forward on the South Asian Free Trade Agreement (SAFTA) and the ASEAN-India FTA, while the focus on energy security opened the door to the discussion on the nuclear deal. His foreign policy priorities, driven by the emphasis on India’s own economic development and regional security, were defined fairly clearly. He sought to improve India’s relations with all major powers, especially the US and China, with all of India’s economic partners, especially East and Southeast Asian economies, and with India’s neighbours.

Draft speeches for the PM’s foreign visits coming from the ministry of external affairs invariably had a reference to India’s aspiration for UNSC membership. But Dr Singh’s view was that India’s economic rise and its regional and global profile would make it impossible for the world community to ignore its legitimate claim when the time would come for UNSC expansion. There was no need, he felt, for India to make a repeated claim each time the PM spoke somewhere. During the first three years of UPA-1 Dr Singh referred to the UNSC membership issue only on three occasions—when he addressed the UN General Assembly in 2004 and 2005, and when he addressed the US Congress in 2005. It became my job to delete any reference to India’s claim for membership of the UNSC each time a draft speech came to the PMO from the MEA.

 

 

Another phrase that never appeared in Dr Singh’s early foreign policy speeches was non-alignment. In fact, in September 2006, he actively considered skipping the Havana Summit of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) but came under pressure from his party not to do so. His reason for wanting to stay away from NAM jamborees was not what the Left and old-world Congressmen accused him of, namely a pro-US bias. The truth was that it was not in Manmohan Singh’s nature to be hypocritical. He was convinced by K. Subrahmanyam’s view that India’s ‘non-alignment’ was a tactical move by Nehru to avoid getting into Cold War alliances, while maintaining good relations with both sides, rather than a pillar of Indian ‘grand strategy’, as it came to be viewed after Indira Gandhi’s time. At critical moments when India’s own security was threatened, neither Nehru nor Indira hesitated to ally with one side or another. Nehru tilted towards the US to deal with China in 1962 and Indira entered into a formal alliance with the Soviet Union at the time of the Bangladesh war. So India’s non-alignment was tactical, not strategic.

The best realist interpretation of non-alignment came from a distinguished Polish Marxist economist, Michal Kalecki, who worked briefly at the Planning Commission in the 1960s and wrote extensively on Third-World development. In his famous essay ‘Observations on Social and Economic Aspects of Intermediate Regimes’,
²
an essay that spawned a most fascinating debate between Dr Singh’s friend and mentor Professor K.N. Raj, and the communist party leader E.M.S. Namboodiripad in the columns of the
Economic
and
Political
Weekly,
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Kalecki called the non-aligned countries ‘the proverbial clever calves that suck two cows’. The simultaneous suckling of two udders, the US and the USSR, was a tactical response to an opportunity that presented itself. Given the existing geo-political environment, a group of countries that Kalecki called ‘intermediate regimes’—neither capitalist nor socialist in a bipolar world—grabbed this opportunity to further their own developmental possibilities.

In response to criticism at home that Dr Singh’s strategic initiatives with the US constituted a departure from the ‘national consensus’ on foreign policy, and in an effort to outline how India should respond to American overtures, the PM invited K. Subrahmanyam to head a multidisciplinary task force on US Global Strategy: Emerging Trends and Long-Term Implications. The task force submitted its report in June 2006. Among the many issues his report considered was the question of how India should respond to the dynamics of post-Cold War balance of power politics. The report’s message was simple: the time had come for India to advance its interests through greater integration with the global economy, making the best use of economic opportunities provided by developed economies, especially the US.

At a ceremony where he laid the foundation stone of the Jawaharlal Nehru Bhavan, the new home of the external affairs ministry, in February 2006, Dr Singh stated the core principle of his foreign policy outlook when he said the objective of Indian foreign policy was to ‘create the space needed to have the freedom to make policy choices in an increasingly interdependent world’ and that policy must evolve from time to time ‘in response to the changing realities of an ever-changing world’. The emphasis on India’s economic interests, its economic relations with other Asian economies, other developing and developed economies, in shaping Indian foreign policy became the leitmotif of the ‘Manmohan Singh Doctrine’.

In October 2005 he told the Combined Commanders’ Conference,

Our strategy has to be based on three broad pillars: First, to strengthen ourselves economically and technologically; second, to acquire adequate defence capability to counter and rebut threats to our security; and, third, to seek partnerships, both on the strategic front and on the economic and technological front, that widen our policy and developmental options.

 

The following year, he returned to the Combined Commanders’ Conference with a formulation relating his thinking on defence policy to this grand strategy:

Our lines of communication which need to be protected are today not just the maritime links that carry our foreign trade and vital imports, but include our other forms of connectivity with the world. None of this is possible without an active process of security cooperation with like-minded nations and littoral countries. When we look at our extended neighbourhood we cannot but be struck by the fact that India is the only open pluralistic democratic society and rapidly modernizing market economy between the Mediterranean and the Pacific. This places a special responsibility upon us not only in the defence of our values but also in the search for a peaceful periphery. We have traditionally conceived our security in extending circles of engagement. Today, whether it is West Asia, the Gulf, Central Asia or the Indian Ocean region, there is increasing demand for our political, economic and defence engagement.

 

Dr Singh consistently defined India’s maritime strategy in terms of growing economic links with its major trading partners spanning the rim countries of the Indian and Pacific oceans. The idea that the Indian and Pacific oceans, and the region connecting them, was an important strategic space for India, given the flow of goods and energy, was implicit in Dr Singh’s view of Indian maritime strategy. India had, after all, created the Andaman and Nicobar naval command to keep an eye on this region and to police it. This thinking, which Dr Singh strongly endorsed, predated the talk of the ‘Indo-Pacific’ as a region in US strategic discourse. The idea’s clearest exposition was, however, made by Japan’s prime minister Shinzo Abe, in an address to the Indian Parliament in 2007, when he spoke of’the confluence of the two seas’.

Abe’s short-lived tenure delayed the launch of a new strategic engagement with Japan that Dr Singh wanted to pursue even in UPA-1. Abe’s return to power in 2012 revived that agenda and the building of closer economic and defence ties with Japan became the only significant foreign policy achievement of UPA-2.