India as an Emerging Power

Sumit Ganguly

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135761752
• Subtopic: Development Economics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

These essays examine India's relations with key powers including the Russian Federation, China and the USA and with key adversaries in the global arena in the aftermath of the Cold War. One positive relationship is that of India's relations with Israel since 1992.

1 Introduction

SUMIT GANGULY

Issues of regional security in South Asia have received considerably greater attention since the September 11, 2002 terrorist attacks on the United States. Such a focus on the region is hardly unwarranted. Even though the majority of the perpetrators of the acts of terror were Saudi nationals, it is all but certain that the infrastructure of terror that supported and abetted them was located athwart South Asia, in the dens of the Taliban regime of Afghanistan.

Despite the renewed focus on South Asian regional security, knowledge of and interest in the principal player in the region, India, still remains limited in the Western world. Yet India’s role is of paramount significance for the long-term security and stability of the region. It is not merely the most populous state in the region but also has a number of other important attributes that undergird its strategic significance in the region and beyond. It has a substantial military apparatus,¹ a growing economy with some world-class sectors,² and democratic political institutions that have withstood countless vicissitudes.³ Consequently, India’s place in the global order at the Cold War’s end merits careful scrutiny.

The end of the Cold War necessitated fundamental changes in India’s security and foreign policies. In the initial years of its independence, India’s leadership propounded and promoted the doctrine of nonalignment. This doctrine, among other matters, sought to steer India away from the emergent, titanic superpower struggle.

In keeping with the expectations of this doctrine, its principal proponent, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, sought to dramatically limit defense expenditures. His interests in limiting the scope and dimensions of India’s military were manifold. Domestically, he was acutely cognizant of India’s endemic poverty and also feared of possible Bonapartist ambitions on the part of the Indian military.⁴ Internationally, he was determined to forge a world order that eschewed, or at least hobbled, the use of force in international politics.

Nehru’s stature in the Indian political arena enabled him to pursue these ends despite criticism and opposition from some quarters. But Nehru’s hopes were dealt a devastating blow in 1962 with the Chinese attack on India’s northern frontiers. The Indian military, largely unprepared for this onslaught, was easily routed.⁵ This military debacle led to a fundamental shift in India’s security policies as the country lurched forward with a major program of military modernization.

Although Nehru’s successors continued to invoke the precepts of nonalignment, Indian defense policy increasingly came to embrace a Realist outlook. In the absence of reliable, powerful patrons, India, its decision-makers came to realize, would have to resort to strategy of self-help to protect its security interests. Even though the United States was keen on protecting India from Chinese military pressures, its support was not forthcoming. The American military dependence on Pakistan for bases, coupled with India’s neuralgic insistence on nonalignment, foreclosed the prospects of an Indo-US security relationship.⁶ The considerations of nonalignment also inhibited the emergence of an Indo-Soviet security nexus.

India’s costly commitment to the principles of nonalignment became more diluted as it perceived a growing threat from China in the wake of the Sino-American rapprochement. Accordingly, India forged an alliance of convenience with the Soviet Union in 1971. This relationship held India in good stead for nearly three decades. Soviet intransigence toward China dovetailed with India’s misgivings about a renewed Chinese threat.⁷ The Indo-Soviet relationship was not without cost, however. India’s ties to the Soviet Union, coupled with its feckless anti-American rhetoric, stunted the any meaningful improvement in Indo-American relations.

The Cold War’s end, however, also brought an end to the Indo-Soviet relationship, forcing India’s decision-makers to find new means to assure their country’s security. To this end, India assigned greater significance to its nuclear weapons program as a hedge against strategic uncertainty and the possibilities of future Chinese nuclear blackmail. The inexorable progress of its nuclear weapons program was demonstrated to the world by the controversial tests of May 1998. Ashley Tellis’ article in this special issue sketches the likely evolution of the Indian nuclear weapons program in the foreseeable future. Tellis persuasively argues that the program will evolve in an incremental, cautious, and circumscribed fashion.

India’s decision to forthrightly challenge the existing global nuclear order initially led to a significant setback in its relations with the United States. This relationship had seen some limited improvements in the 1990s as a consequence of India’s hesitant embrace of the free market, the abandonment of its reflexive anti-American rhetoric and the end of its close ties to the Soviet Union. Adroit diplomacy enabled India’s leadership over the course of the next year to repair much of the rift that the nuclear tests had generated.

As Robert Hathaway’s article argues, the relationship has gathered greater strength under the George W.Bush administration. The administration’s willingness to adopt a less rigid policy on the question of India’s acquisition of nuclear weapons, among other matters, removed a key irritant in the relationship.

Despite the warming trend, Hathaway appropriately cautions that the relationship is far from robust and important differences persist in such areas as global trade negotiations, the pace of economic reform within India and the question of India’s hoped-for membership on the United Nations Security Council.

India’s relationship with the principal successor state to the other former superpower, the Soviet Union, has also undergone profound changes. Nevertheless, as Deepa Ollapally argues, the bonds, though significantly attenuated, have not been entirely sundered. India can no longer rely on Russia to militarily pin down a recalcitrant China, nor can it count on Russian support on the Kashmir issue in the UN Security Council. Yet because India possesses a very substantial Soviet-made military arsenal, India maintains a substantial arms purchase relationship with Russia. India has, however, rebuffed Russian overtures for the formation of an Indo-Russian-Chinese diplomatic bloc as a bulwark against overweening American power. Given India’s recent efforts to court the United States, its reluctance to participate in such a dubious enterprise is hardly surprising.

In the absence of a post-Soviet security guarantee against future Chinese malfeasance, India’s decision-makers still remain wary of Chinese intentions and capabilities. More to the point, as John Garver’s contribution to this special issue reveals, a considerable gap exists between China’s public rhetoric and its internal assessments of India’s capabilities and intentions. Given the history of past mistrust, divergent regional security goals and interests, and the persistence of a border dispute between the two powers any improvements in Sino-Indian relations will be incremental.

India’s relations with its other contentious neighbor, Pakistan, are the subject of Stephen Cohen’s analysis. Cohen argues that the Indo-Pakistani relationship constitutes a ‘paired minority’ conflict, one in which both sides tend to see themselves a members of a besieged minority, the actual circumstances notwithstanding. Accordingly, they devise a range of strategies, from attempts at accommodation to assimilation to cope with the unique security problems that stem from this self-definition. After discussing a variety of possible scenarios of conflict resolution, Cohen argues that little progress is likely without the involvement of a powerful external actor, namely the United States.

Although the Cold War’s end has done little to ameliorate India’s relations with two of its fractious neighbors, it has opened opportunities for better ties with other states, such as France and Israel. During the Cold War, Indo-French relations, though hardly hostile, lacked diplomatic or cultural ballast. With the Cold War’s end and the seeming emergence of American unipolarity, as Jean-Luc Racine shows, India and France have drawn together.

One of the principal factors underlying this new convergence of interests is the common concern about American hegemony. Both sides have therefore repeatedly expressed an interest in the formation of a more multipolar world, one that would give greater weight to their interests and interests of other mid-level powers.

During much of the Cold War, fearful of offending its Muslim minority population and seeking nonaligned solidarity with the Arab world, India maintained the most limited diplomatic contacts with Israel. With nonalignment having lost all vestiges of vitality, and with Third World solidarity with the Muslim Arab world at bay, India’s leadership has chosen to enhance relations with Israel. As P.R.Kumaraswamy shows in his contribution, the long-feared backlash from India’s Muslim community failed to materialize. Since the initial decision to improve the Indo-Israeli relationship in 1992, it has flourished. Today, as Kumaraswamy demonstrates, robust bonds have been fashioned in areas ranging from trade to arms transfers.

This special issue would be incomplete without some discussion of India’s new economic trajectory. As is well known, India’s pathway of economic development after independence long led it down the road of import-substituting industrialization. This regime, despite some limited initial success, did little or nothing to ameliorate mass poverty or promote significant economic growth.

Since 1991, India has been involved in a fitful process of economic reform which triggered a severe economic crisis involving a deep balance of payments crisis. The subsequent progress of reform was in large part driven by the significant benefits that the efforts toward economic liberalization had already generated. Shortly after embarking upon its reforms, India’s growth rate climbed from about 5 per cent or less to about 7 per cent per annum.

This process of economic reform, as Sunila Kale shows, is still far from complete, and important barriers remain. At a material level, these bottlenecks involve weak infrastructure in the pivotal areas of transportation, telecommunications, and power. At the socio-political level, critical reforms, especially in the labor and financial sectors, remain in abeyance.

It remains to be seen if India’s political leadership can grasp these nettlesome issues and thereby complete the process started more than a decade ago. The ability to complete the reform process will, in considerable measure, shape India’s economic future. More to the point, unless India can achieve sustained economic growth at around 7 per cent annually for the next decade, it will not be able to make a significant dent on endemic poverty. Nor, for that matter, will it be able to sustain the defense expenditures commensurate with addressing its perceived security concerns.

NOTES

1. International Institute for Strategic Studies, The Military Balance, 2000–2001 (London: OUP for IISS 2001).

2. Joydeep Mukerji, ‘The Indian Economy: Pushing Ahead and Pulling Apart’, in Alyssa Ayres and Philip Oldenburg (eds.), India Briefing: Quickening the Pace of Change (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe 2002).

3. Stephen P.Cohen, India: Emerging Power (Washington DC: The Brookings Institution 2001).

4. Sumit Ganguly, ‘From the Defense of the Nation to Aid to the Civil: The Army in Contemporary India’, in Charles H.Kennedy and David J.Louscher (eds.), Civil-Military Interactions in Asia and Africa (Leiden: E.J.Brill 1991).

5. Steven A.Hoffmann, India and the China Crisis (Berkeley: University of California Press 1990).

6. Dennis Kux, Estranged Democracies: India and the United States (Washington DC: National Defense University Press 1993).

7. Linda Racioppi, Soviet Policy Towards South Asia Since 1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1994).

2 The US-India Courtship: From Clinton to Bush

ROBERT M.HATHAWAY

‘It’s like boy meets girl. We have tried to hold hands but the kissing hasn’t started.’¹

Former Indian foreign secretary S.K.Singh, on the US-India relationship

Preparing to take up his duties as the new American ambassador in India a quarter century ago, William Saxbe met with the US secretary of state for final instructions. Henry Kissinger’s directive, Saxbe would later recall, was simple and to the point: ‘The less I hear from you and the less I hear about India, the happier I will be.’²

How times have changed. In early April 2001, two months into the administration of George W.Bush, India’s external affairs and defense minister journeyed to Washington. During his one-day visit, Jaswant Singh met with the US secretaries of state and defense and the national security advisor, Condoleezza Rice, all of whom emphasized that the new administration had high expectations for US-India relations. During Singh’s meeting with Rice, President Bush dropped by and, in a gesture accorded signal importance by Indian analysts, invited the minister for a stroll in the Rose Garden and further discussion in the Oval Office. The president asked his Indian visitor to brief him on the situation throughout Asia. New Delhi was elated: Washington, at last, now regarded India as a country whose power and influence extended beyond the subcontinent, and whose cooperation and advice were being sought on issues far removed from South Asia.

Five months later, New Delhi repaid the compliment. Following the September 11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, the Indian government stepped forward with remarkable speed to extend, in the words of one New Delhi official, ‘unconditional and unambivalent support’ to the United States.³ Going well beyond the perfunctory offer to share intelligence with Washington, India volunteered its military bases as a staging ground for US forces preparing to strike targets in Afghanistan. Such an offer would have been unthinkable a few years earlier. It was even more extraordinary when one recalled how during the Persian Gulf war, New Delhi retracted its permission for American warplanes to refuel at Indian airfields just as soon as the public got wind of such activities.

The contrast with past practices and patterns of Indo-American interaction could not have been more stark. Moral indignation and mutual incomprehension, even at times a sense of betrayal, have been the defining characteristics of relations between India and the United States over the past half century. Historians exploring this troubled relationship have written of Estranged Democracies, Comrades at Odds, and The Cold Peace.⁴ Although seemingly linked by common values and a shared commitment to democratic pluralism, the two countries frequently found more reason to quarrel than to collaborate. Even on those relatively rare occasions when the two worked in tandem, bruised sensibilities and bitter recriminations soon regained the upper hand in the relationship.

The Clinton Legacy

Only in the mid-1990s did this depressing pattern begin to change. Over the course of the decade, the end of the Cold War (and its confining bipolar world view that led Americans to lump India in the Soviet camp), a new commitment to economic reform in India, and the growing political clout of the Indian-American community combined to shift American thinking about India and gave Indo-American relations a new importance in Washington. By the time Bill Clinton started his second presidential term, the administration had resolved to seek a healthier US-India relationship.

In late 1997, Madeleine Albright became the first US secretary of state in fourteen years to visit India. Planning for a presidential trip to India—the first since Jimmy Carter visited in 1978—also got underway. These plans were thwarted, however, first by political instability and a change of governments in New Delhi, and then, more seriously, by India’s decision to conduct five nuclear tests in May 1998. The Indian detonations were followed ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Of Related Interest
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements and Dedication
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The US-India Courtship: From Clinton to Bush
• 3 India, Pakistan and Kashmir
• 4 Toward a ‘Force-in-Being’: The Logic, Structure, and Utility of India’s Emerging Nuclear Posture
• 5 Asymmetrical Indian and Chinese Threat Perceptions
• 6 Indo-Russian Strategic Relations: New Choices and Constraints
• 7 The Indo-French Strategic Dialogue: Bilateralism and World Perceptions
• 8 India and Israel: Emerging Partnership
• 9 The Political Economy of India’s Second-Generation Reforms
• Abstracts
• About the Contributors