Saturday, 09 April 2016 | Ashok Malik |
http://www.dailypioneer.com/columnists/edit/pakistan-is-not-the-core-of-indias-foreign-policy.html
Instead of getting all worked up over loose allegations that opposition parties are levelling against the Modi Government on engaging with Pakistan, it makes sense to understand India’s broader neighbourhood policy
Rather than jump at every loose comment and respond to every new prime-time provocation, it makes sense to place India’s Pakistan conundrum in the context of a broader neighbourhood policy. This indicates the challenges that successive Governments have wrestled with, and point to a trend that all parties deny in opposition but all Governments in some manner endorse.
Economic reform and liberalisation in 1991 had an immediate impact on India’s external outlook. However, its effect on neighbourhood policy was not instant. The initial outreach was to stronger economies and investment sources in Southeast Asia (‘Look East’) and in the West, encompassing early efforts at a post-Cold War rapprochement with the United States. However, the insurgency in Kashmir valley, the dispersal of pan-Islamist jihadis from Afghanistan and the final chapter in Punjab’s decade of terror meant no meaningful engagement with Pakistan, and by extension no meaningful South Asian compact, was possible.
It was only by the late 1990s that the impetus to improve India’s relations with the neighbourhood was felt. As the economy gradually became more integrated with the global system, there was the realisation that India couldn’t really bypass South Asia, and that its ability to reach its potential as an economic actor, a safe and credible business destination and a regional and Asian power was to a substantial extent dependent on establishing a certain equanimity in its near neighbourhood. Of course, this had to be done without compromising the ability to anticipate and deter terrorism resulting from growing religious radicalism in Pakistan and Afghanistan and to a degree Bangladesh as well.
Most important, both India and Pakistan had crossed a critical nuclear threshold and even before the Pokhran and Chagai tests of 1998, it was clear that the autonomy of action (or inaction) that India had enjoyed in its bilateral relationship with Pakistan would be circumscribed by global concerns about the arrival of two putative nuclear powers in the subcontinent. India needed to take the initiative, because that was expected of it as the region’s obvious leader.
How exactly would such an initiative be packaged? The first response came in 1996-98, in the two years of the United Front Government, with IK Gujral as External Affairs Minister and then Prime Minister. His ‘Gujral doctrine’, as it came to be known, saw India make a series of unilateral concessions to its neighbours without any expectation of reciprocity. Generous as this was, it was not viable as it did not have an adequate domestic political constituency.
Having said that, elements of the Gujral doctrine and of an India that is less stand-offish and more forthcoming towards its smaller neighbours have survived the short and accidental prime ministry of the man the policy is named for. In different ways, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Manmohan Singh and Narendra Modi have picked and chosen grains from the Gujral doctrine, without either publicly accepting its essential argument or buying into it in entirety.
In the Vajpayee and Singh years, particularly after Pokhran and then with the arrival of the US in the region following 9/11 — and as a consequence of India’s rising prosperity, giving the Prime Minister of the day political room for foreign policy innovation — the relationship with Pakistan steadily improved. Even so, despite promise, it stopped short of a breakthrough agreement on Jammu & Kashmir. The primary debilitating factor was the trust gap caused by the presence of Islamist terror camps and facilities in Pakistan, run with support and approbation of segments of the Pakistani military and state.
In this post-Pokhran period, and most saliently in the 10 years of the Singh Government (2004-14), disproportionate political capital was invested on Pakistan, in the belief that a composite and effective South Asian community could only emerge as a by-product of an India-Pakistan détente. This caused India to neglect or optimise some of the other relationships.
This allowed China the opportunity to make inroads into South Asia and challenge India’s monopoly in the region. Chinese infrastructure projects or proposals in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal, Myanmar, the Maldives and most recently Pakistan (including Pakistan-occupied Kashmir) made it more of a South Asian power than India cared to recognise in the first decade of the century.
How has the Narendra Modi Government responded? With sub-optimal results within the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation framework, the Modi Government has promoted a sub-regional BBIN (Bangladesh, Bhutan, India and Nepal) energy and connectivity network. To be fair, this was not just a snub delivered at Pakistan. In prioritising economic engagement with the neighbourhood, India was only doing itself a favour, most so in the eastern part of the country, where Modi’s deepest developmental challenges lay.
It has often been suggested, and Modi has said so himself, that the Indian Prime Minister’s ambition for Saarc is to become as internally cohesive as the European Union. While this may seem a romantic ideal, a more realisable template, especially for the BBIN bloc, is that of the Greater Mekong Subregion community. Since the early 1990s, well after Saarc was born, six countries — Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam and China (Yunnan Province) — have been part of the GMS. Supported by the Asian Development Bank, the GMS has galvanised a natural economic community on the banks of the Mekong river.
Are these models and precedents applicable to India and Saarc? Frankly, the security threat from Pakistan is of a different magnitude than the relatively predictable dispute between, say, China and Vietnam. Both of those countries have stable internal structures; in Pakistan power is much more diffused. The presumption of rational action by Pakistan, of not disrupting economic links if such disruption were to hurt the disrupting country itself, cannot be made.
For these and related reasons, the second year of Prime Minister Modi has seen the euphoria of his early neighbourhood policy giving way to sobriety. There are two reasons for this. One, while Modi has confronted Chinese influence in its backyard, the fact is, Beijing is here to stay. Its economic and composite-power capacities are not going to be overwhelmed by India for decades to come. As the Maldives and more recently Nepal show, the ability of smaller countries and clever political leaderships to play off one power against the other gives them tactical advantage that they will find too tempting to resist. Pakistan has been a pioneer at exploiting the China card, as the recent protection offered by Beijing to Jaish-e-Mohammed commander Masood Azhar makes apparent.
Second, South Asian countries are much more nationalistic today than in the 1960s or 1970s. Many of them define their sense of nationalism, especially when it comes to populist positioning at home, in terms of the ability to stand up to India, the big neighbour. Pakistan is an extreme and egregious example of this phenomenon but elements of it can be found in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and, as events surrounding the new Constitution made so apparent, Nepal.
How India responds to occasional provocations and bouts of rhetorical ill-temper in the polities of these other countries will determine how third countries in the region perceive it. Right-wing political traditions are coalitions of multiple imperatives. This is apparent too in the Modi Government’s neighbourhood policy toolkit, where the Prime Minister’s instinct for trade, transparency and openness is intersecting as well as competing with the new establishment’s impulse for securitisation. It is crucial to get the balance and the optics right.
http://www.dailypioneer.com/columnists/edit/pakistan-is-not-the-core-of-indias-foreign-policy.html
Instead of getting all worked up over loose allegations that opposition parties are levelling against the Modi Government on engaging with Pakistan, it makes sense to understand India’s broader neighbourhood policy
Rather than jump at every loose comment and respond to every new prime-time provocation, it makes sense to place India’s Pakistan conundrum in the context of a broader neighbourhood policy. This indicates the challenges that successive Governments have wrestled with, and point to a trend that all parties deny in opposition but all Governments in some manner endorse.
Economic reform and liberalisation in 1991 had an immediate impact on India’s external outlook. However, its effect on neighbourhood policy was not instant. The initial outreach was to stronger economies and investment sources in Southeast Asia (‘Look East’) and in the West, encompassing early efforts at a post-Cold War rapprochement with the United States. However, the insurgency in Kashmir valley, the dispersal of pan-Islamist jihadis from Afghanistan and the final chapter in Punjab’s decade of terror meant no meaningful engagement with Pakistan, and by extension no meaningful South Asian compact, was possible.
It was only by the late 1990s that the impetus to improve India’s relations with the neighbourhood was felt. As the economy gradually became more integrated with the global system, there was the realisation that India couldn’t really bypass South Asia, and that its ability to reach its potential as an economic actor, a safe and credible business destination and a regional and Asian power was to a substantial extent dependent on establishing a certain equanimity in its near neighbourhood. Of course, this had to be done without compromising the ability to anticipate and deter terrorism resulting from growing religious radicalism in Pakistan and Afghanistan and to a degree Bangladesh as well.
Most important, both India and Pakistan had crossed a critical nuclear threshold and even before the Pokhran and Chagai tests of 1998, it was clear that the autonomy of action (or inaction) that India had enjoyed in its bilateral relationship with Pakistan would be circumscribed by global concerns about the arrival of two putative nuclear powers in the subcontinent. India needed to take the initiative, because that was expected of it as the region’s obvious leader.
How exactly would such an initiative be packaged? The first response came in 1996-98, in the two years of the United Front Government, with IK Gujral as External Affairs Minister and then Prime Minister. His ‘Gujral doctrine’, as it came to be known, saw India make a series of unilateral concessions to its neighbours without any expectation of reciprocity. Generous as this was, it was not viable as it did not have an adequate domestic political constituency.
Having said that, elements of the Gujral doctrine and of an India that is less stand-offish and more forthcoming towards its smaller neighbours have survived the short and accidental prime ministry of the man the policy is named for. In different ways, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Manmohan Singh and Narendra Modi have picked and chosen grains from the Gujral doctrine, without either publicly accepting its essential argument or buying into it in entirety.
In the Vajpayee and Singh years, particularly after Pokhran and then with the arrival of the US in the region following 9/11 — and as a consequence of India’s rising prosperity, giving the Prime Minister of the day political room for foreign policy innovation — the relationship with Pakistan steadily improved. Even so, despite promise, it stopped short of a breakthrough agreement on Jammu & Kashmir. The primary debilitating factor was the trust gap caused by the presence of Islamist terror camps and facilities in Pakistan, run with support and approbation of segments of the Pakistani military and state.
In this post-Pokhran period, and most saliently in the 10 years of the Singh Government (2004-14), disproportionate political capital was invested on Pakistan, in the belief that a composite and effective South Asian community could only emerge as a by-product of an India-Pakistan détente. This caused India to neglect or optimise some of the other relationships.
This allowed China the opportunity to make inroads into South Asia and challenge India’s monopoly in the region. Chinese infrastructure projects or proposals in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal, Myanmar, the Maldives and most recently Pakistan (including Pakistan-occupied Kashmir) made it more of a South Asian power than India cared to recognise in the first decade of the century.
How has the Narendra Modi Government responded? With sub-optimal results within the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation framework, the Modi Government has promoted a sub-regional BBIN (Bangladesh, Bhutan, India and Nepal) energy and connectivity network. To be fair, this was not just a snub delivered at Pakistan. In prioritising economic engagement with the neighbourhood, India was only doing itself a favour, most so in the eastern part of the country, where Modi’s deepest developmental challenges lay.
It has often been suggested, and Modi has said so himself, that the Indian Prime Minister’s ambition for Saarc is to become as internally cohesive as the European Union. While this may seem a romantic ideal, a more realisable template, especially for the BBIN bloc, is that of the Greater Mekong Subregion community. Since the early 1990s, well after Saarc was born, six countries — Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam and China (Yunnan Province) — have been part of the GMS. Supported by the Asian Development Bank, the GMS has galvanised a natural economic community on the banks of the Mekong river.
Are these models and precedents applicable to India and Saarc? Frankly, the security threat from Pakistan is of a different magnitude than the relatively predictable dispute between, say, China and Vietnam. Both of those countries have stable internal structures; in Pakistan power is much more diffused. The presumption of rational action by Pakistan, of not disrupting economic links if such disruption were to hurt the disrupting country itself, cannot be made.
For these and related reasons, the second year of Prime Minister Modi has seen the euphoria of his early neighbourhood policy giving way to sobriety. There are two reasons for this. One, while Modi has confronted Chinese influence in its backyard, the fact is, Beijing is here to stay. Its economic and composite-power capacities are not going to be overwhelmed by India for decades to come. As the Maldives and more recently Nepal show, the ability of smaller countries and clever political leaderships to play off one power against the other gives them tactical advantage that they will find too tempting to resist. Pakistan has been a pioneer at exploiting the China card, as the recent protection offered by Beijing to Jaish-e-Mohammed commander Masood Azhar makes apparent.
Second, South Asian countries are much more nationalistic today than in the 1960s or 1970s. Many of them define their sense of nationalism, especially when it comes to populist positioning at home, in terms of the ability to stand up to India, the big neighbour. Pakistan is an extreme and egregious example of this phenomenon but elements of it can be found in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and, as events surrounding the new Constitution made so apparent, Nepal.
How India responds to occasional provocations and bouts of rhetorical ill-temper in the polities of these other countries will determine how third countries in the region perceive it. Right-wing political traditions are coalitions of multiple imperatives. This is apparent too in the Modi Government’s neighbourhood policy toolkit, where the Prime Minister’s instinct for trade, transparency and openness is intersecting as well as competing with the new establishment’s impulse for securitisation. It is crucial to get the balance and the optics right.
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