The Interface of Domestic and International Factors in India's Foreign Policy

Johannes Dragsbaek Schmidt, Shantanu Chakrabarti, Johannes Dragsbaek Schmidt, Shantanu Chakrabarti

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000368857
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Business allgemein

This book investigates the interplay of internal and external constraints, challenges and possibilities regarding foreign policy in India.

It is the first attempt to systematically analyse and focus on the different actors and institutions in the domestic and international contexts who impose and push for various directions in India's foreign policy. Rather than focusing on any one particular theme, the book explores the myriad aspects of foreign policymaking and the close interface between the domestic and external aspects in Indian policymaking. In turn, this relates to the structural issues shaping and reshaping the Asian regional dynamics and India's connectivity within a globalized world.

This book will be of great interest to postgraduate students; scholars of Asian Studies, development, and political science and international relations; and all those involved in policy – especially foreign policy– within India and South Asia. It will also be useful for people working in professional branches of consultancy and the private sector dealing with India and with South Asia in general.

1The interface of domestic and international factors in India’s foreign policy

Introducing the issues^*

Johannes Dragsbæk Schmidt and Shantanu Chakrabarti

Introduction

Foreign policy-making is inherently dynamic and determined by external geo-political and geo-economic challenges but in most cases it is the result of internal societal contradictions and power politics. The multi-polar setting of the globalized world with rising incidences of intra-state conflicts and growing convergence between security and development issues has generated fresh as well as severely mutated old challenges confronting unipolar hegemony in the post-Cold War period. While there is a growing scholarly consensus on the long-term decline of the United States, China and India, on the other hand, have been marked by observers as re-emerging key entities setting the course of the new ‘Asian century’. In this context, as a rising power, foreign policy-makers in India have also had to make significant changes in their old style as well as substance of policy-making in order to cope with the evolving challenges.

With the contours of a new multi-polar world polity and a fading US hegemony, India’s diplomacy and foreign policy has been taking a number of sharp U-turns in recent years. As 2020 fades out, the world faces a multitude of unprecedented challenges mainly in the form of non-traditional security issues (climate change, economic recession and global economic meltdowns along with the spreading of the coronavirus pandemic) which have generated new points of conflict as well as opportunities for co-operation. Overall, a new discernible trend is reduction in global interactions and a visible trend towards autarchy and nationalism. This has affected democracies as well, as the popular trend indicates emergence of popularly elected conservative/authoritarian leadership capable of making ‘tough’ decisions and initiating hard action. While there has been a lot of criticism (Eichengreen 2018; Germani 1978; Chacko 2018a) on the emergence of authoritarianism and disappearance of ‘consensus-building’ approaches in democracies, there is yet no indication of waning of popular support for authoritarianism yet perceived to be ‘effective’ leadership. Historians may record these times as the era of muscular political leaders who symbolize a renewed focus on nationalism and antidemocratic populism. ‘Make in India’, ‘China-first’ and not least ‘America-first’ have become slogans signalling a spiralling away from multilateralism and interdependence towards brute power in geo-economic as well as geo-political relations. The questions boggling academia and commentators are whether we are entering a period with beggar-thy-neighbour policies, bilateralism and protectionism and erosion of the so-called US-led liberal world order (Parmar 2018).

Whither India?

India’s international positioning has for a long time been characterized by ‘strategic autonomy’¹ and shifting domestic configurations and complexities. Some analysts have argued that, acting under cross-pressure, India’s foreign policy appears to vacillate between appeasement and aggression, rather than converging onto the assertion of national self-interest (Mitra and Schöttli 2007, 21). According to yet another opinion, while India has been a mildly revisionist state at the level of the international system, its regional agenda for the past several decades has been to buttress the regional status quo for the simple reason that the current configuration of regional capabilities suits it (Sahni 2005, 219). The post-Cold War period and the onset of globalization during the 1990s have witnessed the phenomenon of India ‘crossing the Rubicon’ and the two major aspects of ‘rising India’ have been India’s economic growth since the onset of the liberalization process since 1991 and its expanding military links, particularly with new partners like the US and Israel. While policy-making has continued to suffer from a certain degree of inertia, a level of confidence about its historical position as a great power and the projection of its re-emergence are also discernible. Understanding the complexities involved in Indian policy-making requires one to remember the colonial legacy inherited by the new nation state, restricting her attempts to initiate foreign policy-making on a clean slate since 1947. The Indian nationalists, on the one hand, rejected the colonial state’s foreign and military policy-making as an ‘imperialist scheme’ which must be rejected after independence. On the other hand, the assertion that India would continue to play a leading role in global politics after decolonization, not as a military power, but as a benevolent leader of the developing countries, continued to be expressed in nationalist thinking on foreign policy which influenced Nehruvian thinking after independence.

Jawaharlal Nehru, in fact, firmly believed that India’s destiny is to gain its rightful position among the world’s major powers. His ambition was for India to promote ‘real internationalism’ that enhanced global peace and shared prosperity. Much water has flown down the river Ganga since then and there has been a steady dilution of the Nehruvian focus on internationalism and Non-Alignment-led Third World solidarity. Though the Indian state continues to officially endorse the principle of Global South solidarity, keeping in with the evolving global dynamics and new intellectually dominant priorities today, the focus is almost entirely on domestic reforms of the economy and the pursuing of a pragmatic and realist approach to international affairs.

No Indian government has, historically speaking, produced a blueprint or a vision for its foreign policy though one of the most important constants in India’s foreign relations, as mentioned before, has been the promotion and preservation of ‘strategic autonomy’. Some analysts see foreign policy-makers tending to ‘split the difference’ by mouthing traditional nationalist rhetoric serving a perceived domestic constituency while at the same time pursuing a largely pragmatic course, which is also illustrated in policy shifts at both regional as well as international level. Domestic factors determining foreign policy is a well-established fact and Delhi’s options and choices in this regard have become increasingly impacted by a variety of actors, institutions and issues related to internal but also external affairs.

India’s foreign policy-making has in many cases clashed with other strands of public discourse. The media, influential business groups, think tanks, social movements and sub-national actors at local state level and external actors, institutions, norms and regulations to varying degrees affect the most important aspects of decision-making and goals of foreign policy. The internet, social media and television have become mobilizers for civil society movements’ influence on foreign policy, but also a tool and medium for the political class in Delhi and governments who reach out, leveraging their influence (Mohan 2009, 155). Since the launch of neo-liberal reforms at the beginning of the 1990s, the private sector has played a decisive role in shaping India’s relations with other countries as well as influencing domestic public opinion and media on a range of political issues including foreign policy.

As Jaishankar notes, media and especially television often view developments in isolation and are prone to preconceived notions and prejudices being reflected in their news presentation and analyses. Pakistan and more recently, after the Doklam issue and the Ladakh border clash between the Indian and the Chinese armed forces leading to casualties on both sides, China bashing, has become a full-time preoccupation with some media channels. There are more fractious and self-serving discourses on many areas despite the remarkable continuity and consensus. In this connection, Jaishankar stresses that “evaluating India’s advancement of its international interests will require a clearer assessment of its objectives, the progress made, and India’s continuing limitations. That challenge will be all the more difficult in a fast-evolving and unpredictable world” (Jaishankar 2016).

The number of think tanks in Delhi, Mumbai and elsewhere in India has exploded and many receive funds from abroad. They feed into the articulation of policies related to external affairs especially when the debate is about Pakistan and China. As commentator Bhadrakumar notes, some of these media ‘hawks’ advocating a more aggressive policy vis à vis the neighbours like China or Pakistan are also getting encouragement from foreign countries – if one were to examine the credentials of publications such as The National Interest or Nikki Asian Review or The Diplomat – which are known to be stakeholders in fuelling India–China tensions. It is unfortunate – even tragic – that some Indians could be so utterly delusional about India’s capacity at its present stage of development to sustain a confrontational policy towards China, which has an economy five times the size of India’s and is a formidable military power. Fortunately, Bhadrakumar notes, “the government can ignore these maverick opinions as there is a broad consensus of national opinion behind the government’s recent overtures to China” (Bhadrakumar 2018), although this may have changed lately due to recent border tensions and the clash at Doklam.

This essay starts out with a discussion about what defines the interface of domestic and external factors in theoretical terms followed by a specific case study of India’s policy-making process. It then concentrates on the debate about what defines ‘national interest’ and attempts to deconstruct the concept, which seems to be quite unclear in the evolving theoretical literature. The next section gives a brief assessment of the three phases of India’s foreign policy with focus on interlocking conflicts in historical perspective. Further, the next section discusses how domestic and international factors intermesh in foreign policy and how the articulation of national interest in itself becomes the core issue in defining and understanding how competing views clash. The last section introduces the chapters with a focus on the interface as the main denominator of foreign policy-making in India.

The interface of India’s foreign policy – a conceptual framework

In substance, foreign policy, like the state itself, may be perceived as Janus-faced – full of contradictions and multi-layered complexities in its democratic basis and with a steady open space for contestation, and in the end based on a fluid discourse of ‘national interest’ and a pragmatic approach to global affairs. As mentioned before, domestic factors, to a very high degree, shape the modus operandi of external relations among international entities. As one analyst mentions,

In the literature of International Relations, it is fast becoming commonplace to assert the importance of domestic politics …Some even contend that realism’s dictum about the ‘primacy of foreign policy’ is wrong, and that the domestic politics of states are the key to understanding world events. Innenpolitik is in.

(Zakaria 1992, 177)

The entire decision-making structure of any given country is primarily, though not exclusively, shaped by the domestic political environment, and economic and ideological or political and cultural sentiments. External socialization and international dynamics may also affect the articulation of foreign policy by upholding it to international norms and rules and the way international institutions function.

Traditionally, the incorporation of foreign policy analysis into mainstream international relations theory has not taken place despite its focus on domestic decision-making factors. Carlsnaes convincingly notes, “The divide between domestic and international politics…is highly questionable as a feasible foundational baseline for a sub-discipline that needs to problematize this boundary” (Carlsnaes 2002, 342). This is why it is a daunting task to investigate the blurred lines between the domestic and the international levels as “FPA [foreign policy analysis] research has consistently shown the significance of domestic politics and decision making to issues central to international politics, including international interventions, state cooperation in financial crises, regional dynamics, and nuclear proliferation” (Kaarbo 2015, 195).

International and domestic variables such as culture, ethnicity and political and economic interests are complementary to each other and influence the process of policy formulation, planning and implementation together with geography, history and tradition, social structures and organizations. States take on different roles and actions relying on expectations and this affects the government’s responses. The interplay between these variables is in many cases additive in nature and directly and indirectly influences foreign policy-making, and is furthermore related to challenges to the legitimacy of the state and the unfinished state-building process in India. In sum, the relationship between internal and external ideational factors is complex, sometimes operating independently, pushing the state in opposite directions and sometimes in particular directions. At other instances, external factors provide the right conditions to manifest themselves in the foreign policy process and even feed into alterations in the domestic context, and thereby indirectly affect the planning and execution of foreign policy (Beasley et al. 2013, 333–336).

Examples of the blurring between domestic and international ideational factors are legion. What starts as a domestic issue quickly escalates into a foreign relations issue. The conflict in Kashmir has been an example of this since 5 August 2019, when the autonomous status of the state was lost when the central government of Modi brought in a parliamentary resolution revoking Article 370 and 35A of the Indian constitution and suspended the Jammu and Kashmir constitution. Interestingly, in spite of criticism coming from the opposition parties, the government managed to carry through the resolution with sufficient majority in both houses of the parliament indicating that many members of the parliament, belonging to opposition parties, had voted independently, defying party lines on the issue. This happened despite the possible international ramifications as critics mainly highlighted the Indian promise of a plebiscite in Jammu and Kashmir to allow the local population to determine their own future as per the UN Security Council Resolution 47 in 1948. Also, article 370 of the Indian Constitution had provided special status for Jammu and Kashmir, with a degree of autonomy which came to an end through the new legislation. To many analysts, however, the promise of plebiscite was also associated with the question of the exercise being undertaken in the entire state. The division of the state, with one portion under Pakistan’s control and supervision and a section being leased to China by Pakistan, had ended the prospects of holding any plebiscite for all practical purposes. This is particularly true as there is increasing anti-Chinese and anti-Pakistani ferment among the residents of Gilgit and Baltistan. An article in The New York Times reporting on a demonstration of over five thousand people in Azad Kashmir (Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir) quoted a demonstrator mentioning that “We want freedom on this side and we want freedom on the other side”, and “Foreign oppressors, leave us alone” (Habib et al. 2019). On 5 August 2019 a bill was passed in the Indian parliament stripping the state of Jammu and Kashmir of its autonomy and special status enshrined in the Indian constitution. It was stripped of statehood, and converted into two union territories, Ladakh, and Jammu and Kashmir. Ladakh has no legislature and is now governed directly by New Delhi while Jammu and Kashmir has a legislature. The Indian government has maintaine...