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Journalism of Courage
As India struggles to manage the historic political transition in Nepal and comes to terms with a collapsing peace process in Sri Lanka, two larger paradoxes confront its regional security strategy. The first, while it grows faster and makes a greater impact on world affairs, its neighbourhood is spinning out of control. India8217;s burning desire to become a great power stands in contrast to its growing reluctance to maintain peace and order in the subcontinent. A great power, by definition, is a nation that maintains order in its own region and challenges the dominance of the other great powers elsewhere. It is only rarely that a nation has acquired significance on the world stage without successfully ensuring primacy in its own region.
That brings us to the second paradox about India8217;s search for hegemony on the cheap. It has always pretended that by mere proclamation, its claims to primacy would be accepted by its neighbours. But the history of the last six decades is the story of a steady erosion of Indian primacy in the subcontinent. Despite its objections, the influence of other powers in the subcontinent has only grown. In the Cold War it was the US and Russia which contested Indian primacy. Now it is Beijing that is emerging as an important partner of all our neighbours. On the security front, too, our smaller neighbours have turned to China, even Pakistan. India cannot expect to gain primacy by giving nothing. Acting strategically in the region, would first demand that India solve its own many problems with its neighbours. Instead of defending to death old intransigent positions on a range of disputes, it needs to demonstrate political wisdom and economic generosity to transform the regional landscape. As nuclear weapons rule out the prospect of a large scale conventional war with Pakistan and China, India needs to focus a lot more on the many internal conflicts in the neighbourhood 8212; from the struggle for democracy to the quest for minority rights 8212; that threaten to spill over across the borders and undermine regional stability.
