South Asian Voices spoke with Dr. Srinath Raghavan on September 3 about the pivotal moment in Indian foreign policy—in the second of two parts, we discussed the trajectory of Indian foreign policy from nonalignment to multialignment and New Delhi’s approach to its neighborhood, including Pakistan. Dr. Raghavan is a celebrated historian currently serving as Visiting Senior Research Fellow at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy. He is also Professor of International Relations & History at Ashoka University; his latest book is Indira Gandhi and the Years that Transformed India.
Under the current government, India has pursued a foreign policy of multialignment. This strategy seems to have had benefits and detriments, allowing India on the one hand to bolster engagement with China and Russia amid a downturn in U.S. ties but on the other hand perhaps contributing to the lack of (especially Western) support for India during the crisis with Pakistan. As an historian, how do you evaluate India’s multialignment policy and how does it compare and contrast with nonalignment?
Firstly, non-alignment as a stance during the Cold War had its own particular dynamic: that dynamic was a desire to avoid alliances. And that desire to avoid alliances was coming from the fact that India during British rule, especially in the first half of the 20th century, was effectively the strategic reserve of the British Empire in Asia. And India was called upon to expend its resources in terms of manpower and material throughout the period from the 1870s to 1945, the end of the Second World War, without ever being consulted.
At the end of the First World War, India, a poor country, made a gift of GBP £100 million to the British government. India then lent something to the tune of GBP £1.3 billion, that’s the equivalent of around USD $300 billion today, to the British government during the Second World War, a debt which was then run down over the next decade or so. These were all the formative experiences that led Indian politicians of that generation to say that real freedom means strategic freedom, that we should never find ourselves in a position where we are compelled to fight somebody else’s conflict, without our consent being taken. This is what a NATO Article 5 type situation would have done, for instance. Independent India wanted to avoid that vis-a-vis the United Kingdom, but also with the United States and other Western countries, and also with the Soviet Union.
Secondly, non-alignment was complemented by a certain kind of approach to economic development that meant that you needed somethings from the United States, but also somethings from the Communist countries like the Soviet Union. India needed to have an economic model that was open to flows of both these kinds, even though it got a lot more from the United States throughout that period.
I feel that nonalignment was a policy that had its time and place. Now, even though the fundamental issue is still the pursuit of strategic autonomy, I think both the reasons and the manner in which it is being pursued are quite different. I would say the starting point to understand Indian foreign policy over the last say 20 years, right around the time when U.S.-India relations start improving, is that in some aggregate sense, in terms of the size of its economy, in terms of its military capability, in terms of even something like carbon emissions, India is seen as a big player on the international stage. But if you think about India in terms of per capita indicators, it is still a country that only has a per capita income of about USD $2700.
What that means is there is a contradiction in the way India has to navigate its relationship with the world. It has to play the game of the big powers and wants to be in that club, while also recognizing that it cannot always bear the cost of being in that club. If someone says India should accept net zero emissions by 2040, it’s not even a realistic possibility, because that would mean India would have to cap its growth at a certain point. This fundamental contradiction, therefore, underlies the pursuit of what you call multialignment.
Because India needs certain kinds of relationships, it needs power and its capability and influence to grow on the international stage. India still wants to be a significant player in that realm. But at the same time, our interests may on different issues be aligned more closely with other countries. So even within a grouping like BRICS, India has its own peculiarity. And there are peculiarities about the Indian economy. The fact is that India has an economy which is one of the fastest growing large economies in the world today, 6.5 percent GDP growth looks very impressive. But about 85 percent of Indian workers are not in formal employment, which means they have no job security. They have no guarantee of any wage.
All of this means that India’s development challenges are of an order of magnitude very different, and very peculiar. For instance, India now has more women than men in tertiary education. But women are far fewer in terms of the number entering the workforce. And that number itself has been on a zigzag curve over the last decade. So, there are all these peculiar problems that need to be solved for, which means that it is very difficult for India to make clear choices in terms of who it wants to be on the world stage.
There are certain things on which you will have to go with others. For instance, if you were to ask me, what should be one of the things that India wants to get out of its relationship with China, I would say going forward it should be the import of cheap Chinese alternative energy sources into India. That’s going to be absolutely crucial for India to manage its energy transition in any significant way. We have pledged that we want to get to net zero by 2070. If you want to do that, you’ve got to get cheap solar panels, cheap wind turbines and technology from China. That’s just the way this is likely to work. So, these are the kinds of hard things that India will have to think about.
Multialignment “is the only path that India has. You have to navigate these tensions, you have to keep things in play, and you have to avoid making stark choices.”
It’s a bit like during the Second World War, Winston Churchill said that if in order to defeat Adolf Hitler, I have to make a favorable reference to the devil, I’ll do that: What is the problem in shaking hands with Mr. Stalin? You just have to do business with countries with whom you might otherwise have very serious problems, because those are the kinds of serious challenges that societies like ours confront. India’s policy of multialignment is very much driven by such considerations. As you say, rightly, it has been successful, but to some degree, it has led us to problems. But that is the only path that India has. You have to navigate these tensions, you have to keep things in play, and you have to avoid making stark choices.
Observers often argue that India needs a stable neighborhood to achieve its goals on the international stage. How would you characterize India’s neighborhood policy today? What can New Delhi do to improve or stabilize relations with its neighbors?
You’re absolutely right that coming into office in 2014, the rhetoric and the assumption of this government was very much “South Asia first,” “neighborhood first.” You would recall that for Mr. Modi’s swearing in ceremony he had invited all the leaders from the neighborhood and that sent a very strong signal. But since then, I think it’s fair to say that India’s policy in the entire region is a series of shambles. Hardly anything has proven to be a dependably improving relationship. Bangladesh was supposed to be the exception and that has also gone down the tube.
We can ask, why does that happen? Obviously, there are a series of specific problems that are there in each case. But there are broader underlying challenges that are affecting all countries of the region. Sputtering economic growth, growing economic inequality, a demographic bulge, which all of these societies are going through at this point of time. There is a certain kind of political turbulence which has come as a result of these combinations, such as in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, etc., where there’s been the rise of a different sort of mass politics. This has been quite difficult for India to navigate.
One of the underlying factors, I believe, is that the Modi government’s approach to thinking about the neighborhood has been very much driven by a law and order or security mindset. We failed to foresee what was happening in Sri Lanka. We failed to foresee what was happening in Bangladesh, despite the fact that we actually have pretty good ears on the ground.
That is because our national security apparatus, and here I mean specifically at the helm, is dominated by people with a policing or intelligence background. And their dominant framework always tends to see such issues as law and order problems rather than political ones. That has meant that India’s had a series of missteps, starting with Nepal but other countries as well.
Now with Pakistan, I would say that the initial outreach by the Modi government was very much driven by a wish to improve relations. But there’s one set of problems that comes from Pakistan’s continued reliance on terrorism to put pressure on India, allowing various kinds of groups to still be active. And most of the crises have been linked to those things.
But there has been a second problem, which is that this government in India has also sought to foreground its ideological politics, which makes any kind of sensible relationship with Pakistan difficult. Even if Pakistan were to, let’s say, miraculously stop using proxy warfare as a tool, I don’t think the political milieu exists with the ideological base of the ruling party in India that would allow for any significant degree of normalization.
So, any significant rapprochement between India and Pakistan is going to be a very difficult one to foresee. In fact, I’m hard pressed to see how any of that could be on the cards. And as long as Pakistan and India remain at loggerheads, and this is the long lesson of India-Pakistan relations that I think neither the Indians nor the Pakistanis ever want to recognize, it will give external players a handle to intervene in South Asia. It was the problem of Kashmir, which first gave a handle to the United Kingdom, the United States, then to China, then the Soviet Union, and others to get involved in the region.
“The simple but blunt lesson of history is that as long as we are going to keep South Asia as a fragmented strategic space, with all of these discords in play, we are always going to be open to various kinds of external involvement.”
As long as South Asia remains this fragmented strategic space, India will have to spend disproportionate amounts of its diplomatic and political energies in keeping such involvement at bay. You see that instinct coming to the fore, even with what happened in the recent crisis. Trump wants to claim credit for saying that he did something to bring an end to the crisis, the Pakistanis are lavish in heaping praise on him and his leadership, and then the Indians suddenly get into a lather with this whole debate over whether there is a re-hyphenation of India and Pakistan. All of that is just a symptom of the problem that we still haven’t recognized – the simple but blunt lesson of history is that as long as we are going to keep South Asia as a fragmented strategic space, with all of these discords in play, we are always going to be open to various kinds of external involvement and that includes China as well.
What are the pathways, if any, to a more stable relationship with Pakistan?
We have seen the threshold for conflict and retaliation going down steadily since 2016. And at some level, it was only to be expected, because once you make these issues objects of domestic politics, then those thresholds are going to go down. And what we’ve seen with the current crisis is that those thresholds have now dropped pretty significantly.
Nobody, in their right mind, should take it lightly that two nuclear armed countries can have these kinds of tit for tat exchanges going on for so long, and somehow assume that there is some miraculous logic of nuclear deterrence that is going to save us all at the end of the day.
Also, as a result of this crisis, we’ve seen that even things that were seen as somewhat stabilizing elements in the bilateral relationship, like the Indus Waters Treaty, have now been put on hold. I felt even at the time, and more now, that this will have all kinds of downstream consequences for India when it comes to dealing with China. If we, as the upper riparian state, are going to behave whichever way we think is right, that we can put treaties negotiated with third-party assistance on ice as we deem fit, then we are opening ourselves up to all kinds of challenges going forward.
The third thing is that the China-Pakistan relationship is getting tighter. It was always a predictable kind of relationship in some ways. We saw the BRI investments, and, as I said, Chinese assistance for Pakistan’s energy transition. And as the current crisis has shown, the use by Pakistan of Chinese military platforms, but more importantly, of Chinese operational concepts for deployment of air power, which has taken the Indians by surprise.
The India-Pakistan relationship now has too many points of tension. It is in everyone’s interest to realize that we are sitting on what is increasingly looking like a powder keg. I understand that it is difficult for the Indian government in the face of such provocations to carry on. But I still feel that India needs to seriously consider what can and cannot be done. We are now in a situation with multiple vulnerabilities and risks, which we should recognize in our own political interest.
This is the second part of the SAV Q&A with Srinath Raghavan. Read the first part here.
Views expressed are the interviewee’s own and do not necessarily reflect the positions of South Asian Voices, the Stimson Center, or our supporters.
Also Read: Can India and Bangladesh Clear the Slate a Year after Hasina?
***
Image 1: Russian Presidential Press and Information Office via Wikimedia Commons
Image 2: Rayhan9d via Wikimedia Commons
