Revision as of 17:22, 25 July 2017

NDA’s foreign policy

2014-17

Indrani Bagchi, Foreign policy takes an unconventional route, May 24, 2017: The Times of India 

India Keeps China, Pakistan Off Balance

By doing foreign policy differently -as the Modi government completes its third year in office -India has challenged conventional thinking even though the effects of these actions in the longer term still need to be assessed.

Working backwards chronologically , India's recent decision to skip the much-hyped `Belt & Road Forum' (BRF) in Beijing, was contrary to India's traditional reluctance to publicly confront China's hegemonic ambitions. India clearly articulated objections to OBOR and CPEC (China-Pakistan economic corridor) on the basis of sovereignty.

India laid out why it believed OBOR to be exploitative, colonial in its lack of transparency and the way it created unsustainable debt in “partner“ countries and caused environmental damage. While some nations were gearing up to praise China's massive utilisation of excess capacities, India's reaction proved to be a dampener for the Chinese.

For some in In ND dia, signing up for OBOR would have been less painful, @ and apparently pragmatic.The Modi government concluded its unusual reaction was in keeping with India's traditional opposition to China-Pakistan activities in POK. And that going by Sri Lanka's experience and perhaps even Pakistan's, the openly mercantilist policies of China need to be publicly opposed. As it turned out, the EU too backed away from a trade statement using similar arguments.

Political ties with China have gone steadily downhill in the past couple of years though interestingly FDI from China has risen significantly in the Modi years. China has emerged as one of the fastest-growing sources of FDI into India -it was 17th largest in 2016, up from the 28th in 2014 and 35th in 2011.

Matters have not been hel ped by China stymying India's bid for NSG membership and protecting Pakistan-based Jaish terrorist Masood Azhar from sanctions. Early this year, foreign secretary S Jaishankar promised China would get a lot more attention from India, in order to put the relationship back on the rails. The two countries continue working to gether on some areas, A but the promise held out when Chinese 3 President Xi Jinping and Modi swung gently on a Gujarati swing in 2014, has dissipated.

India has paid much greater attention to its near neighbourhood, sans Pakistan.Bangladesh has been the template for a new kind of engagement. While neighbours traditionally get a large chunk of Indian assistance, it was largely unstructured.India has now decided to focus on around 20 visible projects for Bangladesh, which will utilise the $4.5 billion in LOC assistance. India will follow a similar approach in Sri Lanka, which recently saw a second Modi visit.

India has also worked hard to create a Saarc minus Pakistan, in order to beat its clasp on India's neighborhood outreach. In 2016, the BRICS summit saw the revival of BIMSTEC, while a sub-regional cooperation initiative, BBIN, is slowly coming together, creating transport and power networks in the east. Earlier this month, India launched the south Asia satellite that signalled cooperation without a direct quid pro quo.

One of Modi's signature initiative has been westwards, in his new `Link West' policy , to mirror the `Act East'. As Modi prepares to travel to Israel, his visit comes as virtually the last stop after unexpectedly intense engagement with UAE, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Iran, in addition to Oman. Strong economic imperatives, infrastructure investment and India's desire to play a greater security role over shared concerns over threats like the terror group IS drive India's outreach. This is also intended to wean these nations away from Pakistan as India peddles a “better narrative“.

The India-Pakistan relationship is in deep freeze, with little daylight visible. Again, Modi used surprise as a tactical weapon. After a series of terror attacks against Indian defence installations from across the border, India retaliated with surgical strikes on terror launch-pads in POK. The upfront announcement of the strikes highlighted a “proactive“ stance on terror. To Pakistan, India signalled that the calculus of terror under a nuclear umbrella would not work. India made its response unpredictable and raised Pakistan's costs.

On August 15, from the Red Fort ramparts, Modi uttered the forbidden “B“-word, speaking of the “oppression“ of the people of Balochistan. Pakistan choked in anger and later arrested Kulbhushan Jadhav, a former Navy man, as an alleged spy . After a military court announced a death sentence on Jadhav, India adopted a creative and bold approach -upending decades of conventional wisdom yet again by going to the International Court of Justice and pulling off a vital win.

East Asia

Sachin Parashar, NDA @3 - Act East a mainstay of India's foreign policy, May 27 2017: The Times of India

In 2002, while delivering a lecture in Singapore, then PM Atal Bihari Vajpayee declared India's position in the Asia Pacific to be a geographical reality and a political fact. In many ways, the Modi government has worked to bring Vajpayee's perceptive declaration to fruition.

A few months into his term, PM Modi sought to start with a bang by renaming India's Look East policy as Act East policy . After it was launched in 1992, then finance minister Manmohan Singh had described the policy not just as an external engagement with Asean but also as marking a strategic shift in the way India viewed the world. Unlike Look East which was Asean-centric, Act East is an outreach to the wider Asia Pacific extending from Japan to countries in the South Pacific. Act East is also different in that it is not limited to economic ties but also focuses on enhancing defence and security ties barely veiled eye on China.

Nowhere is this more manifest than in the way in which India has sought to deepen security links with Japan and Vietnam. Defence cooperation is now seen as a major pillar of India's strategic partnership with Vietnam with Indian naval ships making frequent friendly port calls to the country .

After it announced a $500 million line of credit for Vietnam to boost defence cooperation between the countries, India was also said to have discussed supply of Akash surface-to-air missiles earlier this year. China's Global missiles earlier this year.China's Global Times responded by declaring that Beijing would not sit arms crossed if India went ahead with supply of missiles to Vietnam.

Similarly , India's fast growing relationship with Japan, with special focus on defence and security , is central to India's Act East policy.

According to strategic affairs expert Brahma Chella ney, Act East has helped India to be seen internationally as being integral to the Indo-Pacific region and the Asian neighbourhood and add greater strategic content to its warming relationship with Vietnam. It also must build closer ties with Indonesia, with which it shares a sea frontier, he said.

With India seeking to raise its profile in the region, the government has also sought to internationalise the South China Sea disputes by namechecking SCS in bilateral documents with bilateral partners like the US and Japan.

With the Trump administration mired in internal conflict, and its foreign policy still being deciphered, the government may be faced with its toughest challenge in executing its Asia Pacific outreach.Until now, Act East converged almost seamlessly with the US Rebalance to Asia as both sought sustainable balance of power in the region.

Any dilution under Trump could change all that, leaving India, as some believe, to plough a lonely furrow. As former foreign secretary Kanwal Sibal warned, a US withdrawal from the region would mark the end of the US as the world's pre-eminent power and India needed to hedge its bets by deepening its ties with Japan. Other assessments hold the US will remain a factor despite any recalibration.

India's strained ties with China will continue to be further exacerbated by Beijing's intransigence on three issues in the near future, namely Pakistan-based terrorist Masood Azhar, CPEC and NSG. With China still seeing India as acting in cahoots with the US, Beijing is unlikely to relent on any of these issues.

India's Act East policy rightly seeks to realign Indian foreign policy along its historical axis. As Chellaney said, historically , invaders and plunderers came from the west but India never faced

Indo - US relationship

India's greater prominence on the world stage over the past two decades has spawned a wealth of material originating in Washington analysing its foreign policy, global orientation and strategic culture. The latest in this long list is India at the Global High Table: The Quest for Regional Primacy and Strategic Autonomy by two veteran US diplomats, Teresita and Howard Schaffer.

The volume does not lack ambition. In just over 300 pages, it attempts to dissect the many facets of India's foreign policy-making-its core principles and rival schools of thought, its multiple foreign policy institutions, Indian negotiating strategies in defence, nuclear weapons, trade and climate change and bilateral relationships with China, Pakistan and smaller South Asian states. Each of these topics is deserving of a book-length treatment in itself, but the authors tackle them largely successfully without losing sight of the common thread that forms the core of their argument.

The volume's grounding in practice rather than theory and its disproportionate focus on the Indo-US relationship as permeating almost all chapters is but natural given the authors' background and expertise. Therefore, it is not altogether surprising that the most insightful sections of the book relate to India's foreign policy institutions, the analysis of Indian negotiating culture and a blow-by-blow account of the tortuous negotiations over the Indo-US nuclear deal. The latter chapter, in particular, provides an excellent window on how political will at the highest levels can overcome even the most daunting structural barriers in crafting an agreement of strategic import.

Except for an inexplicably essentialist foray (p. 121) on the lack of a culture of sin and forgiveness in Hinduism and Buddhism, the authors' description of Indian negotiation styles is illuminating and largely on the mark. They illustrate in detail how Indian negotiators are meticulously prepared and demonstrate a mastery over their subject matter, thrive on symbolism, are deeply hierarchical and prize loyalty and personal ties.

The Schaffers' central thesis is that Indian foreign policy is marked by three core elements, namely strategic autonomy, regional primacy and economic diplomacy. Undergirding these elements is a strong belief in the uniqueness of Indian civilisation. This civilisational identity lends a certain exceptionalism to Indian attitudes to world affairs. Indian exceptionalism, in turn, leads to a negotiating style that is highly sensitive to sovereignty, abhors the perception of being a supplicant and often takes a moral rather than a bargaining approach to key disputes.

The three core elements are all common to the three schools of foreign policy thought identified by the authors, namely the non-alignment firsters, broad power realists and hard power hawks. As the authors acknowledge, this classification is essentially a variant on scholar Kanti Bajpai's definition of Nehruvians, neoliberals and hyperrealists.

The United States, of course, also possesses a sense of exceptionalism and moralism, though as a far stronger power, it operationalises it differently. The authors do identify this congruence on more than one occasion. However, they do not highlight it sufficiently in one critical case, namely US pressure on India to jettison its Iran relationship as a price for the Indo-US nuclear deal. The pointed language of the Hyde Act indicates that US lobbying in New Delhi on Iran was not simply a case of routine diplomatic 'advocacy' as the authors suggest (p. 63). Extra-territorial mandates may originate in the US Congress, but the US diplomatic corps is the frontline actor in ensuring their compliance. This forces Washington's partners to adopt a zero-sum approach to their relations with America's major adversaries, and militates against India's principle of strategic autonomy.

The authors lay great stress on strategic autonomy as a persistent principle of India's foreign engagements. They see strategic autonomy as the direct intellectual heir of non-alignment in the post-Cold War era. It is certainly true that the two share a core characteristic, namely maximising freedom of action. However, there are important differences. Non-alignment was a project aimed at fundamentally transforming the Cold War-era international system with its existential conflict between two nuclear-armed blocs and the North-South divide. By focusing mainly on foreign policy independence, the aims of the strategic autonomy doctrine are much more modest.

Another important difference lies in the revisionist nature of non-alignment. Strategic autonomy, while revisionist in terms of India's place at the global high table, in many ways reveals a status quoist bent towards the existing international system. India in the post-Cold War era does not seek a fundamental transformation of the system as much as being accepted into its elite core in order to enhance its own power and prestige. The Indo-US nuclear deal is a good example of this major shift in India's orientation. Instead of its traditional argument that the non-proliferation regime was fundamentally discriminatory in its entirety, India sought and obtained an 'India exception' to the regime, substantially admitting it into the club of legitimate nuclear powers. This, of course, may have been a practical adjustment to the contingencies of a new era. But it is an analytical oversight to not highlight the major discontinuity it represents from the much more ambitious doctrine of non-alignment.

India's strategic autonomy is, however, constrained by two major factors. First, its operationalisation in a world of economic interdependence presents a challenge, especially for a country running a persistent trade deficit. India's massive dependence on arms imports presents the second constraint. Defence indigenisation, a goal of every Indian government since Independence, seems no closer than it was several decades ago. It is, therefore, legitimate to ask, as it was for non-alignment post-1971, whether Indian strategic autonomy lies more in the realm of aspiration than practice. The authors take note of these complications, but do not explore them in sufficient detail.

Regional primacy, the second core Indian foreign policy element, is dissected more convincingly in the chapter summarising India's relations with smaller South Asian neighbours, particularly Nepal and Sri Lanka. The principle, with strong parallels to America's own Monroe Doctrine, looks unfavourably upon the entry of outside great powers into the region, with China being the most recent entrant. Moreover, as the authors note, the principle has had mixed success, failing most spectacularly with respect to Pakistan. The authors' analysis of the India-Pakistan relationship, however, covers little new ground in what is a well-trod topic in the literature.

The authors are relatively coy about analysing the India-US-China triangle and Indian and US motivations in this regard. At one point, they state that the Indo-US strategic convergence is motivated primarily by a common bond of democracy (p. 159). However, India has been a democracy since 1947 and that has not prevented a near-adversarial relationship with the US at some critical junctures such as 1971. Elsewhere, they speak of the drivers being "future contingencies" and "shared strategic interests" in the region (p. 136) and a move toward "implicit balancing" (p. 301). All these references are to China, but the authors do not develop their analysis much further. The reader's appetite is whetted for more. Going forward, what exactly could be the nature of Indo-US strategic coordination in Asia? What would be the costs and benefits to India and the United States? Could it fundamentally weaken India's strategic autonomy doctrine? In hindsight, these questions have become even more urgent in the wake of what appears to be a sharp departure in China policy under an incoming Trump administration.

The volume rightly spends considerable effort in analysing India's economic engagements, in bilateral settings with the US, multilateral settings at the WTO and in the use of Indian foreign aid as a tool in South Asia. Here, the third core element of Indian diplomacy, namely the use of its newfound economic power, comes into play. Case studies include Enron's Dabhol power plant project, agricultural trade and food subsidies at the WTO and the Indo-US bilateral investment treaty. The analysis of the Dabhol fiasco brings an insightful perspective of fragmented governance as a key barrier to the deal's realisation. Equally pertinent questions about the ethical practices of Enron and the Indian government that led to some of the controversies are delicately skipped over. The authors' narrative on climate negotiations is interesting but unfortunately stops short of the crucial Paris Agreement timeline.

There are a few other oversights in the book. For instance, there is virtually no reference to the vital India-Israel relationship, with all its sensitivities and implications for India's engagement with West Asia. Newer (though no less critical) global governance issues such as cybersecurity, internet governance, renewable energy and space are also omitted. With all its lacunae, however, India at the Global High Table is a cogent, insightful and original contribution to India's foreign policy discourse, and well worth a read.

Sarang Shidore is a researcher and consultant in international relations and energy/climate policy and currently Visiting Scholar at the LBJ School of Public Affairs, University of Texas, Austin