Wreckage of a Foreign Policy

By Harsh V Pant

Published: 29th April 2014

As one surveys the landscape of Indian foreign and security policy at the end of the UPA government’s 10 years in office, it appears strewn with wreckage on all sides. The Chinese have upped the ante on the border dispute, ties with Washington have plateaued, Russia is looking elsewhere, the European Union is disappointed, the morale of the defence forces is low, the Maoists are gaining ground in large parts of the nation, our neighbours are contemptuous, and the peace process with Pakistan is going nowhere. There is a whiff of fragility and underconfidence in the air, as if at any moment the entire façade of India as a rising power might simply blink out like a bad idea. National security adviser Shivshankar Menon himself thinks India “should not want to” emerge as a superpower. He need not worry; his government has done enough over the last few years to make sure that India’s emergence as a global power of any reckoning is not going to happen anytime soon.

Policy paralysis within the government, strategic diffidence of the Congress party’s leadership and the insistence of the BJP upon destroying its own credibility as a national party—all have ensured that the Indian foreign policy continues to drift without any real sense of direction. The diplomatic and political risk that the Manmohan Singh government took in signing the civilian nuclear energy cooperation pact with the US seems to have been a wasted effort as it was not followed by other auxiliary measures that would have made it all worth the effort. Even in areas where Indian foreign policy has shown some promise, such as the “Look East” policy, there are now grave doubts about the ability of New Delhi to emerge as a balancer in the region. In Afghanistan, where there were great hopes of an India living up to its potential as the regional power, its allies are disappointed and its adversaries feel emboldened.

And now, India’s external interlocutors are now looking to the formation of the new government next month, hoping that it would provide some clarity about New Delhi’s future foreign policy trajectory.

As India’s weight grew in the international system in recent years, a perception gained ground that India was on the cusp of achieving “great power” status. It was repeated ad nauseam in the Indian and often in global media and India is already being asked to behave like one. There was just one problem: Indian policy-makers themselves were not clear as to what the status of a great power entailed. At a time when the Indian foreign policy establishment should have been vigorously debating the nature and scope of India’s engagement with the world, it resorted to intellectual gimmickry by coming up with documents such as “Non-Alignment 2.0” which neither has anything new to say nor was credible in the context of dramatically evolving global realities. This intellectual vacuum allowed Indian foreign policy to drift without any sense of direction and the result was that as the world was looking to India to shape the emerging international order, it had little to offer except some platitudinous rhetoric that did great disservice to India’s rising global stature.

Bismarck famously remarked that political judgment was the ability to hear, before anyone else, the distant hoofbeats of the horse of history. In India’s case, everyone but the policy-makers it seems is hearing the hoofbeats of history’s horse. Indian policy-makers seem to have come to believe that just because their nation was experiencing robust economic growth, they didn’t really need a serious foreign policy, that they could afford to get by with ad hoc responses or grand finger-wagging. And once the economic growth faltered, there was hardly anything to anchor nation’s foreign policy to.

Indian foreign policy elite remains mired in the exigencies of day-to-day pressures emanating from the immediate challenges at hand rather than evolving a grand strategy that integrates the nation’s multiple policy strands into a cohesive whole to be able to preserve and enhance Indian interests in a rapidly changing global environment. The assertions, therefore, that India does not have a China policy or an Iran policy or a Pakistan policy are plain irrelevant. India does not have a foreign policy, period. It is this lack of strategic orientation in Indian foreign policy that often results in a paradoxical situation where on the one hand India is accused by various domestic constituencies of angering this or that country by its actions while on the other hand India’s relationship with almost all major powers is termed as a “strategic partnership” by the Indian government.

India has been extremely fortunate that it has encountered an incredibly benign international environment for the last several years, making it possible for it to expand its bilateral ties with all the major powers simultaneously. This period of stable major power relations is rapidly coming to an end and soon difficult choices will have to be made and Indian policy-makers should have enough self-confidence to make those decisions even when they go against their long-held predilections. But a foreign policy that lacks intellectual and strategic coherence will ensure that India will forever remain poised on the threshold of great power status but won’t be quite able to cross it.

Let not history describe today’s Indian policy-makers in the words Winston Churchill applied to those who ignored the changing strategic realities before the Second World War: “They go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent.”

India today, more than any other time in its history, needs a view of its role in the world quite removed from the shibboleths of the past. An intellectual renaissance in the realm of foreign policy that allows India to shed its defensive attitude in framing its interests and grand strategy is the need of the hour.

Despite enormous challenges that it continues to face, India is widely recognised today as a rising power with enormous potential. The portents are hopeful if only the Indian policy-makers have the imagination and courage to seize some of the opportunities. At crucial moments in its history, a nation needs leadership who can inspire, infuse its people with confidence and remind them that greatness is theirs if only they would push a bit harder. Sadly, Manmohan Singh and his government failed to provide such a leadership and there is a danger that India’s moment may have come and gone without anyone noticing.

The author is a reader in international relations, department of defence studies, King’s College, London.