Foreign policy: India
This is a collection of articles archived for the excellence of their content. |
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
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
