Adrift on growth, and a hope

As India’s weight has grown in the international system in recent years, there is a perception that India is on the cusp of achieving ‘great power’ status. There is just one problem: Indian policymakers themselves are not clear as to what this status of a great power entails. At a time when the Indian foreign policy establishment should be vigorously debating the nature and scope of India’s engagement with the world, it is disappointingly silent.

There is clearly an appreciation in the Indian policymaking circles of India’s rising capabilities. It is reflected in a gradual expansion of Indian foreign policy activity in recent years, in India’s attempt to reshape its defence forces, in India’s desire to seek greater global influence. But all this is happening in an intellectual vacuum with the result that micro issues dominate the foreign policy discourse in the absence of an overarching framework. The recent debates on the US-India nuclear deal, on India’s role in the Middle East, on India’s engagements with Russia and China, on India’s policy towards its immediate neighbours are all important but ultimately of little value as they fail to clarify the singular issue facing India today: what should be the trajectory of Indian foreign policy at a time when India is emerging from the structural confines of the international system as a rising power on way to a possible great power status? Answering this question requires one big debate. However much Indians like to be argumentative, a major power’s foreign policy cannot be effective in the absence of a guiding framework of underlying principles that is a function of both the nation’s geopolitical requirements and its values.

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 a ‘strategic partnership’ by the Indian government.

More recently, Indian government has been accused of betraying its ‘time-tested friends’ such as Iran and Russia as if the only purpose of foreign policy is to make friends. A nation’s foreign policy cannot be geared towards trying to keep every other country in the world in good humour. 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 has given rise to some rather fantastic suggestions such as India being well-placed to be a ‘bridging power’, enjoying harmonious relations with all major powers — the US, Russia, China, and the EU. Such a suggestion not only implies that the major global powers are willing to be ‘bridged’ but also that India has the capabilities and influence to be such a ‘bridge’.

Moreover, the period of stable major power relations is rapidly coming to an end and soon difficult choices will have to be made, and Indian policymakers should have enough self-confidence to make those decisions even when they go against their long-held predilections.

India is being told that it is on the verge of becoming a great power. But no one is clear what India intends to do with the accretion of economic and military capabilities and with its purported great power status. 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.

The writer teaches at King’s College, London

harsh.pant@kcl.ac.uk