‘The question is whether India’s dynamism of economic growth is matched by equivalent dynamism in political extroversion’

Let me make a general remark about historically what great powers do. Good great powers are seen as custodians of an international system from which they benefit. So they are interested in global commerce, security, and more recently, the environment. Bad great powers suffer from the strategic entrepreneurship of misguided leaders who have eccentric ideologies. Indifferent great powers suffer from strategic arthritis. Their leaders’ well-meaning attitude makes them reluctant to advance either principles or interest in international affairs.

I am sure India would be a unique great power. But India will need to develop a certain idea of what it wants to do in international affairs. At present it remains, at the highest level of formality, committed to the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). But in practice it is interested in multiple alignments. It has a foreign policy that sees it want to maintain very good links with a number of different societies, cultures, countries, and people. Eventually these things bump into each other and choices need to be made. At present the Indian leadership is interested in progressing, deepening, and managing those multiple alignments outside of its neighborhood. And yet it would not be easy to deal with a neighborhood like the one you find yourself in and at the same time conduct an extrovert foreign policy. The Indian leadership is now caught between the requirement of its neighbourhood and the ambition of being seen as a global player.

•C. JAYANTHI: British and US academia have always talked about India as a sleeping giant. What do you think about it?

I don’t think India can be called sleeping. As for giant, maybe that’s a more neutral term. But India is not asleep, it’s dynamic, it’s moving. The question is if the dynamism of the economic growth is matched by an equivalent dynamism in political extroversion and, I think, that’s where there is still a question mark.

•MANU PUBBY: How do you see India’s relation with China working out in the future while it tries to project itself as a military power in the region?

Both India and China are investing substantially in defence. China more spectacularly so — 18 per cent (of GDP), by its own admission, last year. China wants to have capacities that will take it outside of its own region. India is doing the same. One sees in India’s defence diplomacy real activism towards two areas where it had little engagement before — South East Asia, where there is a great deal of interest in helping in the security of Malacca Strait; and the Persian Gulf, where India has large and expanding economic interests and where the security of Hormuz could affect its interests. It’s an objective fact that when you have three Asian powers rising at the same time, there will be competition. It will not be a competition that any of the three powers will want openly to talk about, because the nature of Asian diplomacy doesn’t permit that. But you have Japan wanting to be a more normal power. You have China wanting to be a global power and India wanting this role, too. Other countries in Asia will be playing these countries off against each other. The invitation to India to join the East Asia summit came from ASEAN states that wanted to have a diplomatic balance to Chinese presence at the summit. So it’s not only the case that India and China have border disputes and parallel ambitions but also that other regional countries perceive that and conduct their diplomacy with that perception.

•ZEENAT NAZIR: India has often been accused of having a big brother approach towards neighbouring SAARC countries. Do you think we need to change our approach towards our neighbours?

India will be competing with China in this area. But that will be a competition which will not speak its voice very publicly. This is perhaps an area where soft power becomes interesting — whether the magnetic attraction of India’s soft power is paradoxically greater or lesser than China’s will determine these dynamics.

•ESHA ROY: Do you think there is any solution to the China-Tibet stand-off?

It looks like the Chinese intelligence services did not do their job as well as they might have done. Protests across Tibet seem to have taken them by surprise and yet seem to be rather coordinated and fairly significant. There seems to have been a decision to present the Chinese official position in the face of the types of NGO and media concerns they are confronted by. The response of the Chinese authorities cannot be a mere reinstatement of their official position of the territorial integrity of China or the amount of economic development they have put into Tibet. It needs to be a more dynamic response. The opinion outside is that lines of communication with the Dalai Lama have to be established in some way. There are indications that China is trying to find a method which is, to use a classic agent phrase — face saving — and doesn’t derogate from their very official positions. What this recent crisis has showed is the tension between the government in Beijing and the legitimacy in public opinion of nationalistic sentiment.

•ANUBHUTI VISHNOI: There are three growing powers in Asia and then you have a Pakistan and an Afghanistan which have been identified as the hotbed of Islamic jihad. How do you see Asia in such a situation?

You have in Pakistan and Afghanistan, states that are either failing or not succeeding at all. There is a great deal of concern that in Pakistan we are increasingly seeing an awful lot of intellectual vigour behind the current international Islamic Jihadist sentiment. The Al Qaeda’s Internet operation in Pakistan Al-Sahab is sophisticated, post-modern, effective and itself is testament to the reality that in today’s Internet world, cyberspace chat rooms can affect the radicalisation of Islamic youth far beyond the territory of the place from which they come. In the West, people see some form of stabilization in Pakistan and Afghanistan as probably the top international security priority now — higher even than the stabilisation of Iraq itself.

•ZEENAT NAZIR: In that context, what do you think of Washington’s desire to increase its oversight on Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal?

I think that, by and large, there still is enough confidence that the Pakistani military has sufficient control of its nuclear arsenal. Therefore, going in and grabbing it is an option that remains at the extreme end of military and diplomatic opinion in the United States. You’ll always hear this flutter of concern at uncertain times but I don’t think it’s THE established policy of US to go and try to secure them themselves.

•SANDEEP SINGH: How has diplomacy changed in the last 2-3 decades? Does international business now decide diplomacy?

There is one basic change in foreign policy over the last three decades: foreign policy was mainly about affecting the foreign policy of other states. So when states met at summit meetings, they would try and convince the foreign ministers of other states to adjust their foreign policy to make it more aligned to the states that were seeking that accommodation. The main purpose now is quite often to influence other governments to change domestic politics. When we talk to Russia or to China or Venezuela, it tends to be much more about their domestic politics than about their former foreign policy position.

•SHEKHAR GUPTA: So what was earlier internal is now becoming global?

What is happening is that domestic politics are commutable. The politics of one country can spill over into the politics of another country. So it is the responsibility of good foreign policy partly to be interventionist because that is the diplomatic equivalent of military pre-emption. It’s to discuss with other states how their domestic arrangements, good or ill, might have malign or benign effects outside. It’s an antiquated thought that one can engage in foreign policy without interfering in the internal affairs of other states. Any intervention of any kind, economic or otherwise, is an intervention in the domestic politics of that state.

•SUMN JHA: In the days, years and decades to come, how important do you think soft powers would be in defining great powers?

I think states now have less power than they used to because of the growing power of business, NGOs and the media, just as the monopoly of military powers is no longer uniquely held by states because there has been privatisation of violence — non-state groups have power, terrorist groups have power. Churchill’s famous phrase when asked what troubled him — ‘Events, dear, events’ — is all the more true now when events across the world are reported instantly. Soft power is most useful when there’s already a magnetic attraction to that soft power. For example, the Europeans are fond of talking about their soft power approach to eastern Europe, how the attractions to the EU made it possible for them to help the democratisation, modernisation of eastern European countries. But when your soft power isn’t attractive, then it isn’t a useful element of power. It’s not an easy distinction to make that military power is bad and soft power is good. You can use military power for humanitarian purposes as India has in helping tsunami hit areas and in many peace-keeping operations worldwide. Much of the power used by Islamic jihadists is in its first, second and third instances soft power: it’s influencing the minds of people to think in a certain way.

•MINI KAPOOR: How do you see Russia — as a diminishing power, as a more and more unpredictable power?

The person who has just been elected as the president of Russia is an English-speaking lawyer who has liberal economic tendencies with no special link to the Communist Party or the KGB. In theory, he should be the ideal president of Russia from the outsiders’ point of view and yet his arrival to power is being treated with the lowest of possible expectations by the outside world. The new president will be obliged to reform the Russian economy and to find ways to diversify it and to make certain that the economy does not persist well into the future as a petrol-economy which is genuinely unhealthy.

There has been a very great difficulty between the west and Russia over the last four years and a good deal of blame needs to be laid at the door of the west. Western policy has been to invite Russia to accept the enlargement of NATO, to accept its deployment of missiles in eastern European countries, to accept the sovereignty of Kosovo. This has emphasised the Russian sense of disappointment, the Russian sense of humiliation and therefore, the Russians’ emerging sense of nationalism that Putin has incarnated so well.

•PRANAB DHAL SAMANTA: The revival of nuclear disarmament is once again a major issue. Do you think it is one of those periodic things that come up before the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) review?

I think it is a genuine view that the stockpiles of the current nuclear powers go way beyond what the strategy underlining those stockpiles requires. There’s no need for the enormously large stockpiles that the US and Russia has even now. At the IISS, we are publishing a volume in September on the nuclear abolition debate and also on the technical question of how one actually moves to lower nuke holdings and eventual abolition. Eventual abolition is hard because people hold weapons for a wide variety of reasons, most of them political and resolving those political issues is not something that can be done around an NPT review conference.

(The transcript was prepared by Manu Pubby.)