Beyond South Asia

India's Strategic Evolution and the Reintegration of the Subcontinent

Neil Padukone

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781628922523
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781628922547
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Asian Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Republic of India occupies a key geopolitical and strategic space at the center of the Indian Ocean. How it interacts with the rest of the world will have profound consequences in the 21st century.

Beyond South Asia follows the evolution of India's strategic thinking since 1947, providing a comprehensive analysis of its foreign policy worldview. It begins with India's failed attempt to unite and dominate the subcontinent following independence, a strategy that resulted in conflict as its smaller neighbors invited the U.S. and China to the region, resisted intra-regional cooperation, and even violently opposed New Delhi. It then explores how this worldview has shifted as India, needing markets, energy resources, and ways to balance against China, has developed economic and military ties in Central and Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Africa, the southern Indian Ocean, and beyond. To do so has required more stability in South Asia, making India more conciliatory toward other countries of the subcontinent. This is in turn leading to a lessening of tensions, enhanced cooperation, and an economic reintegration of the subcontinent, including a burgeoning détente with Pakistan.

This in-depth analysis provides a comprehensive look at the domestic and regional factors that drive India, a key actor in global politics. Written in an accessible manner, it will be of use to students and specialists of Indian foreign policy, South Asian politics, international relations, and security studies and to anyone interested in the future of AfPak, the Indian Ocean region, and America's "strategic pivot."

PART ONE

Introduction

1

Introduction

In the years since 11 September 2001, American-led wars have flared in Afghanistan and Iraq. Energy and commodities trade have skyrocketed in the Persian Gulf. A political awakening has poured youth into the streets of the Arab world. Economic growth has changed the course of Southeast Asia, sectarian conflicts within Islam have spilled into the streets of the Muslim world and beyond, and China has become an economic heavyweight that threatens to challenge the US-led order in much of the world.

In a widely acclaimed book that made the rounds and influenced decision-makers in Washington, D.C., and other capitals, author Robert Kaplan refers to the Indian Ocean as the “nexus of world power and conflict in the coming years.” It is here, he writes, “where the five-hundred-year reign of Western power is slowly being replaced by the influence of indigenous nations . . . and where a tense dialogue is taking place between Islam and the United States.” It is the Indian Ocean where “the fight for democracy, energy independence, and religious freedom will be lost or won, and it is here that American foreign policy must concentrate if America is to remain dominant in an ever-changing world.”1 Perhaps paying Kaplan heed, the administration of US President Barack Obama announced, in late 2011, a “strategic pivot” of US armed forces to Asia.

At the very center of this meeting ground lies the Republic of India. With the world’s second largest population, India sits in the middle of the Indian Ocean, astride the Dharmic, Islamic, Western, and Confucian worlds, uniting thousands of languages and cultures within a single nation, while facing profound challenges reconciling the modern with the traditional in the largest democratic system of government on earth. Perhaps most consequentially for much of the rest of the world, India has come to be seen as a “rising power” in global politics, stemming from its massive economic growth after the 1990s, its detonation of a nuclear bomb in 1998, and military and strategic expansion since.

As Ashley Tellis of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and one of the key architects of the political realignment between the United States and India, writes, “The record thus far amply substantiates the claim that India will be one of Asia’s two major ascending powers. It is expected that the Indian economy could grow at a rate of 7 to 8 percent for the next two decades. If these expectations are borne out, there is little doubt that India will overtake current giants.”2 The United States’ National Intelligence Council writes, in its Global Trends: 2025, that “No other countries are projected to rise to the level of China or India . . . and none is likely to match their individual global clout.”3

At the same time, the Indian Ocean and South Asian regions are and, for decades, have been mired in conflict. As the 2011 killing of Osama bin Laden in the Pakistani town of Abbottabad demonstrated, the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region that has come to be called “AfPak” is also the epicenter of global Islamist terrorism.4 With over 1.13 billion people—which include a third of the world’s poor, the population that lives on less than one dollar a day—living in a tropical, equatorial region, India is ground zero for the consequences of climate change. Arguably a third of both Indian and Pakistani territory is “stateless,” outside the direct reign of national capitals and often under the control of local militants or insurgents that oppose those capitals. In Pakistan, this is due to various Islamist militants affiliated with the Taliban movement; in India, the Naxalite or Left-Wing Extremist (LWE) movement has afflicted nearly a third of the country’s administrative districts. Meanwhile, India and Pakistan have been locked in a decades-long cycle of nuclear-tipped conflict; four hot wars and dozens if not hundreds of skirmishes between the two South Asian countries have captured the world’s attention, leading many to refer to the Indian subcontinent as “the world’s most dangerous place.”

How New Delhi interacts with this geographic and emerging political space will have profound consequences for the twenty-first-century world, not to mention India and South Asia themselves. Yet, while much has been said of the world’s view of India, there is little in the public domain on India’s view of the world. In fact, many Indians lament about what they see as their country’s lack of strategic vision or culture.5 Foreign observers, particularly in the United States, have also spoken of a lack of a strategic or planning culture in India, including a reactivism in strategic, military, and economic matters. Some attribute this to institutional squabbles within and inertia among the bureaucracies of the Indian state, particularly those responsible for national defense and security policy: the Ministry of External Affairs, Ministry of Defense, the Home Ministry and Ministry of Finance, and even technocratic institutions such as the Defense Research and Development Organization.6

The key, path-breaking study of Indian strategic culture since India’s independence from Great Britain in 1947, George Tanham’s “Indian Strategic Thought,” argued that this deficit was partly because of a uniquely Indian worldview rooted in the legacy of Hinduism and Vedic philosophy.7 Tanham argued that, in contrast to many western traditions that emphasize a Manichean (good vs. evil) and messianic (linear) perspective, the Indian worldview was rooted in Dharmic philosophy, which emphasizes fatalism, the cyclical evolution of events, and nonlinearity. Given this idea of nonlinearity, despite a long history of intellectual and scientific exploration, Indian empires and civilizations rarely kept written documents of their own history, seeing it as inconsequential to an unpredictable future. The effect of this, Tanham argued, was a discounting of strategic vision and planning even in modern Indian governance.8

Yet this critique is based largely on the paucity of official Government of India documents that specifically articulate the country’s strategic interests, vision, and tactics. In fact, the contours of India’s strategic evolution from the time of independence in 1947, as Tanham goes on to concede, have been shaped by a number of ideas, historical perceptions, and geostrategic factors, and continue to evolve in the face of global shifts.

This of course poses the question: if existing factors gave rise to goals, and goals gave way to strategies, why, then, hasn’t the Indian government publicly articulated these plans? Indeed this is a challenge that proponents of strategic planning face the world over: does planning require a single “grand” strategy to guide actions? As an Indian defense secretary once said before the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Defense, “all the elements of the doctrine are well known and have been incorporated from our constitution downwards. . . . There have been policy pronouncements by Ministers in Parliament. So, our national security doctrine is well known and the absence of a written document . . . does not create any confusion or lack of clarity in this matter. I . . . accept that we do not publish it as a document as such.”9

Official pronouncements or even articulation may have two key consequences. On the one hand, formal pronouncements make public one’s aims, setting a certain standard for what is to be expected from a country. This can be enabling, in that it provides a vision for ultimate goals and thus parameters on how those goals must be brought about, empowering those responsible for the execution of a strategy to work concertedly toward its realization.

But this public articulation can also be restrictive. If these aims, particularly in the arena of national security and statecraft, go against those of another party or country, they (perhaps unnecessarily) set the stage for adversarial relations with that party. If one country’s strategy, for example, aims for the weakness of another country, the latter would certainly not be pleased to hear it. In the realm of diplomacy and statecraft, in which the goal is to maintain security and stability within one’s own borders, public and even official antagonism—which may result from public pronouncements of intentions—may be unnecessary and even counterproductive. Indeed, a key tenet of statecraft, as defined as far back as the Maurya Empire of 250 B.C.E., whose key strategist was Kautilya, the author of the famed Indian text on strategic thought, the Arthashastra (science of administration), is secrecy (gupti).10

Meanwhile, any ostensible disconnect between internal vision and aims, and what is professed, can be a source of power in national affairs: India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, was widely perceived as an idealist in world affairs, advocating non-alignment, global disarmament, and international cooperation—a perception that earned him many supporters around the world. But in reality, Nehru “practiced hard realpolitik,” seeing morality as nothing more than “an instrument of state policy. He . . . had little compunction in saying one thing and doing another,” according to senior Indian defense analyst Bharat Karnad.11

On the other hand, public articulation of one’s strategic interests reduces flexibility—particularly in cases in which it is better that the parameters of a strategic doctrine not be followed precisely or rigidly. By prioritizing certain goals or tactics over others, a strategy can neglect some of the negative ramifications of following the decided course, as well as sacrificing the benefits of alternative courses of action. One of the paramount global goals of our era, economic growth through industrialization, for example, often comes at the expense of environmental security.

Yet, spoken or unspoken, flexible or rigid, there are always goals, visions, and assumptions that undergird the actions of people and nations. This was the case with ancient Indian empires—as the existence of the Arthashastra attests—all the way through to the British Raj, and particularly during the life of the Indian Republic, the largest nation-state that was formed in the wake of the independence of the subcontinent from Britain. Understanding this worldview and its underlying assumptions will enable observers to make sense of and manage the emerging changes in what has come to be called the “Asian century.”

This book follows the course of India’s strategic evolution from independence to the present day. It aims to represent the author’s understandings of New Delhi’s strategic worldview, particularly that emanating from the Prime Minister’s Office, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Defense, the Indian Armed Forces, business community, and research institutions that host scholars, former officials, and others affiliated or formerly affiliated with these governing institutions.

At times the analysis follows a “realist” perspective, at others a more “liberalist” and even “constructivist” perspective; at certain points, culture, individuals, history, and governing institutions are emphasized, at others geography, military balance, or economics are emphasized. This is not owed to a lack of analytical rigor or intellectual consistency, but because of an effort to stay true to the factors that drive and have driven India’s strategic perspective at different junctures in history. This is done with the foremost intention of conveying and relaying, while also providing a critical analysis.

The Strategy of a Nation

Of course, the strategic worldview of a “country” necessarily follows a statist perspective—one that emanates from a country’s capital whose sovereignty extends to certain defined, though possibly contested, national borders. Such a perspective may clash not only with other countries, but also with other parties within the same country. The revisionist historian Howard Zinn, for example, argued that “there is a pretense that there really is such a thing as a” nation-state,

subject to occasional conflicts and quarrels, but fundamentally a community of people with common interests. . . . Nations are not communities and have never been. The history of any country, presented as the history of a family, conceals fierce conflicts of interest (sometime exploding, most often repressed) between conquerors and conquered, masters and slaves, capitalists and workers, dominators and dominated in race and sex.12

This is a dilemma of the modern disciplines of political science, government, and international relations, which, even as they acknowledge additional super-state and substate entities and processes, their first point of reference remains the nation-state. Even revisionist historians who deride the notion and hegemony of the nation-state affirm its importance in analysis. This in turn comes down to a question of the “legitimacy” of the governing authority.

India’s process of nation building in the twentieth century, and the development of New Delhi’s “legitimacy” over that geographic space, was a...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of Acronyms
• PART ONE Introduction
• PART TWO India’s Monroe Doctrine
• PART THREE Looking Beyond
• PART FOUR South Asian Threat Perceptions and Regional Integration
• PART FIVE Conclusion
• Index
• Copyright