The US-led West has to understand that India’s strategic concerns are not in the generalised terms as they would wish it to be. That works for nations that are either too big or too small
In New Delhi recently, the new German envoy, Ambassador Philipp Ackermann compared and contrasted China’s claims over Arunachal Pradesh and the ongoing Russian war on Ukraine. While terming the Chinese claims as ‘outrageous’, he said (even) their violation of the Line of Actual Control (LAC) cannot be likened to the Ukraine War.
“We are aware of the Indian problem at the northern border…” Ackermann said. But the “Russian attack on Ukraine is by dimension completely different than what we see at the border (India-China border) at an abstract level. I think the Indian side very well recognises the violation of international law (by Russia),” he added.
Of course, Ackermann forgot to mention Jammu and Kashmir in the same vein, as the West/Europe’s attention is only on China vis-?-vis India, that too in the backdrop of Russia’s Ukraine War. Though successive governments in Pakistan have labelled Kashmir issue as the ‘unfinished task of Partition’, in its entirety, it an ‘unfinished task’ for the Indian Union.
As a reality check, the Indian Constitution, at inception in 1950, owned up the whole of what was then Jammu and Kashmir very much a part of the Indian Union. That included what still remains the PoK, Gligit-Baltistan, and the PoK areas that Pakistan gifted away to China. Even the relatively recent abrogation of Article 370 flowed from such an articulation over the past several decades. The Indian Parliament has repeatedly asserted the fact, without contestation from Pakistan until recently.
Against this at no time in the past did Pakistan question the Indian constitutional position. Islamabad recognised PoK as a state in the nation relatively recently, and ‘illegally annexed Gilgit-Baltistan’, in its immoral possession, even later. Keeping aside the 1971 Bangladesh War, whose purpose was different, Pakistan has engaged India only in border wars of the 1965 kind and 1999 kind, limiting its claims mostly to military engagements and terrorist attacks.
For the rulers in Islamabad, whether with a military background or not, war with India provided a domestic political diversion, when faced with political and economic collapse. War with India has come to be the raison d’etre for Pakistan’s continued existence as a nation-State. It has helped the ‘artificial union’ from collapsing under its own weight — or, so has some Pakistani analysts too have argued.
Self-reliant, self-sufficient
The US-led West, of which Germany is a part, has to understand that India’s strategic concerns are not in the generalised terms as they would wish it to be. That works for nations that are too big in their company in terms of economic and military power. It also works also for nations that are too small that they cannot secure themselves, or even feed and clothe themselves without Western gratis all the time.
India is not big in economic terms when compared to some larger nations, starting with the US and including its major European allies. The list also includes the common adversary, China. India is also not too small. It has a robust economy. From what the West once liked to ridicule as a ‘bullock-cart economy’ with a ‘Hindu rate of growth, today, India is among the fastest growing large economies.
McKinsey boss Bob Stenfels has flattered India by declaring that it is ‘not India’s decade, but India’s century’. Nearer home, some analysts say that India does not have to bother too much about the immediate term, because it is the only big economy that is doing good. These contrast with the official claims that indicate cautious optimism of the traditional Indian kind, nothing more.
The truth is that India is not anywhere being self-reliant and self-sufficient in a lot of areas, especially defence equipment manufacturing, which is a determinant in global superiority. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s rephrasing of the forgotten slogan of ‘self-reliance’ as ‘Aatmanirbhar Bharat’, cannot produce the proverbial rabbit out of the magician’s hat. India is going to be self-reliant, yes, but it is going to take time. How much of it will also depend on a variety of other factors, including the increasing socio-economic divide that could have multiple consequences, electoral and otherwise.
Real and realistic
The world was a peaceful place until Deng’s China grew exponentially but without thinking, talking and acting militarily. The world is now uncomfortable wherever China sets its sights first and feet next. The Soviet Union lost not when it lost the partner-States. It lost because with it went the legendary Soviet military might, which was compared with the post-War United States.
Today, India has the technology and expertise to build an aircraft-carrier, of which a new one is required only once in 20-40 years. For the deadly flying machines on the deck of INS Vikrant that Prime Minister Modi dedicated to the nation at Kochi, India has to depend on imports, linked to the fanciful policies and third-nation sanctions of the of the exporter. India can build and equip space vehicles and missile-launcher and missiles, it also has home-made nuclear weapons, but it has to import its military drones still.
In this topsy-turvy kind of situation, India’s growth is real, but its growth story is not realistic. It applies to both domestic and overseas assessments, the latter, especially of the West. Both are political in form and content. The former is excusable, as it impacts mostly election-centric domestic politics. The latter drives policies, namely, of foreign and security policies. They flow from the policies of third nations, but concerns India and India’s security and defence policies.
India cannot take ideological positions, driven by some other nation’s agenda, which selectively derives from their perceptions and interpretations of concepts like democracy and liberalism. It cannot even afford to use such agendas for ‘external propaganda’, to run down and ridicule third nations. The US went to war with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, also in the name of democracy. In the immediate neighbourhood, it had condoned Shah’s Iran not long before, it could not displace the ayatollahs who displaced the Shah. It was not for want of trying.
Europe-centric
The German envoy’s reference to Europe’s ‘outrage’ as the Russian attack on Ukraine as the most serious aggression in the world in the past 70 years is understandable. It is Europe’s understanding of the world, as it stood before the two Great Wars, when the world was Europe-centric, in terms of trade and politics. Or, at least that is what western authors and historians had fed to the rest of the world.
Post-War, that is over the ‘past 70 years’, as Amb Ackermann indicated, the US has ruled the world, nearly half of it as the sole super-power. American perceptions alone have mattered during this period, so have America’s actions, violations and also America’s most serious aggressions. India does not belong there. It does not acknowledge such interpretations. That is what External Affairs Minister (EAM) S Jaishankar has been driving at, over the past months.
Instead, through the past 70 years, India’s foreign and defence policies have centred on ‘specific strategic concerns’ that are India’s very own. That is China and Pakistan, though in chronological terms, the latter should become the former. The Americans have a name for it. They call it ‘supreme national self-interest’. India has always followed its instinct in this regard. Today, India has grown enough and well to pronounce its positions in clear and uncluttered terms. The hard work, experimentation and experiences of the past 70 years have served India well.
Energy-driven strategy
In this era of energy-driven economies, strategic concerns of nations are centred on such uncompromisable aspects as sovereignty and territorial integrity, as the European masters had defined and defended them in a bygone era. However, through the short and medium terms, strategic concerns of nations have come to be driven by demands and perceptions of ‘energy security. The verdict is not out if India has out-purchased Russian oil over China in these months of Ukraine War, or if Indian purchases from Russia have actually fallen. That is commerce up to a point, and after a point — but the fact remains that India needs to import oil, and the Russian oil in times of war came cheap and in abundance.
There are also those who want to argue that it’s India’s opportunity as China’s economy is going downhill. This contrasts with External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar’s recent assessment that the much talked-about ‘Asian Century’ can happen only if India and China co-operate with each other. That goes as far as trade, commerce and economy go. Together, the two nations provide the largest market. They produce the largest technical workforce. If they can gainfully employ that workforce, then we are talking about a different growth story for India and China, Asia and the world.
It is here that McKinsey now says that India would account for 20 per cent of the global workforce by 2047, and it would be an added asset. Some domestic studies have shown that against this kind of growth in workforce, the unemployment figures are the highest at present. If true, this kind of jobless growth or potential for growth can be problematic, as the rich-poor gap widens than already.
Yet, together, India and China can also produce/manufacture a host of goods and services that they now have the wherewithal to consume, too — that is there is gainful employment and expendable incomes for individuals and families in these two countries or even only in India. If they are going to continue competing with each other in the global economic/commercial arena, for political reasons and in strategic ways, then they will continue to promote the economic progress of their one-time colonial masters, or of the latter’s pro-active American mentor.
Deference, diffidence
Independent of the change in political leadership and consequent ideology, the 21st century India is not the same as the 20th century. The values and ethos that had governed the West, post-War, in terms of peace and prosperity, or peace with prosperity, applied to India, too, in the decades after the Second World War. India bound itself in, and so did the world sought to bind India accordingly, in the values associated with Mahatma Gandhi, the ‘Father of the Indian Nation’.
It worked for the post-colonial India in the previous century, or at least up to a point. Other erstwhile European colonies across the world were ready to confer their leadership on India. It was truer of those nations that too won freedom like India without the kind of blood-letting that the European colonial masters had caused, witnessed and suffered through the two Great Wars.
Since commencement, the 21st century world has treated India differently and with a certain amount of deference — again going by the realities of those times. India also learnt to shed some of its diffidence of the previous decades. Today, independent of the political leadership, India is in a position to tell the world what it thinks, and what it wants. The diction and phraseology may be different, they may also lent different characteristics, but the core still remains the same.
Looked at it differently, India continues to be a non-aligned nation, so to say, but it speaks from the full realisation and acceptance of geo-political realities that impinges on it. As an elected, two-year member of the UNSC, India refused to vote against Russia, but when it came to the Security Council letting Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy address them, New Delhi voted for allowing an online presentation — against Russia’s wish.
Likewise, India has had no hesitation in making a symbolic participation in Moscow’s periodic Vostok-2022 war gamesinvolving China and other member-nations of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) and the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organization of former Soviet Republics – defying American concerns. The West, especially the US, is learning the hard way that clearing ‘dual use’ equipment or expressing willingness to sell weapons and fighters to India is not going to end India’s Russia relations, as different from India’s greater dependence on Russian weapons.
Strategic autonomy, then and now
It is not going to be easy for India to balance the re-emerging West-East divide of the Cold War era, centred on Russia, especially when it comes to its core strategic concerns. Coinciding with G-7 decision to fix a price cap on Russian oil imports, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov spoke highly of EAM Jaishankar’s position on Western sanctions on Russian oil imports, and also about ‘confidential military-technical cooperation’.
Lavrov also spoke about how countries like China and India have ‘civilisational self-reliance’, of course in relation to the West. Yet, Moscow too is going to find it difficult to balance those two nations when it comes to their bilateral problems that have worsened now than any time in the past, post-war, 1962.
All along, India used to speak about ‘strategic autonomy’ without being in a position to do much about it. Today, it is in a position to demonstrate its perceptions better. Yet, at the centre of it is the nation’s immediate concerns in the immediate neighbourhood, namely, China and Pakistan. New Delhi has learnt to design its geo-strategic priorities accordingly, and pronounce them in geo-political terms that leaves nothing to imagination or interpretations.
And that is saying a lot. It is also guiding the future.
The writer is a Chennai-based policy analyst and commentator. Views expressed are personal.
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