C Raja Mohan writes: From Great Powers to Asia – India is raising its diplomatic game

Although the focus of India’s engagement with the US and France was on defence and advanced technologies, India’s neighbourhood figured prominently in both Washington and Paris. In Paris, for example, PM Modi and President Emmanuel Macron issued a declaration on the Indo-Pacific Roadmap for wide-ranging cooperation. The statement builds on the ambitious regional agenda in the Indian Ocean that Modi and Macron outlined when the French president visited India in 2018. That was the first time that India agreed to work together with a former European colonial power in the Indian Ocean. It involved discarding the near-sacred principle in the Indian foreign policy liturgy — that colonial and “extra-regional” powers should be kept out of the Indian Ocean.

Modi and Macron have expanded the Indian Ocean regional framework to include the Pacific. The Indo-Pacific Roadmap issued by the two leaders declared that Delhi and Paris will “continue to work together to extend development cooperation to countries in the region, including in Africa, the Indian Ocean Region, South Asia, Southeast Asia and the Pacific”. The two leaders also promised to boost cooperation with regional partners in bilateral, plurilateral and multilateral arrangements like the Indian Ocean Rim Association, the Indian Ocean Naval Symposium, the Indian Ocean Commission, the Djibouti Code of Conduct, and the ASEAN-led institutions.

India’s strategic partnership with Washington today is well-anchored in a specific regional context — the Indo-Pacific. The joint statement issued by Modi and US President Joe Biden last month included a section on strategic collaboration in the Indo-Pacific through the Quad. Modi and Biden also committed to working closely “with regional platforms such as the Indian Ocean Rim Association, Indo-Pacific Oceans Initiative, and ASEAN to achieve shared aspirations and address shared challenges in the Indo-Pacific Region”. The two leaders “welcomed the depth and pace of enhanced consultations between the two governments on regional issues including South Asia, the Indo-Pacific and East Asia and looked forward to our governments holding an inaugural Indian Ocean Dialogue in 2023.”

This certainly is not business as usual in Indian diplomacy. India’s relations with its Asian neighbourhood since independence were treated as separate from Delhi’s engagement with the great powers. At the root of it was the proposition that India must keep the major powers out of the region to create an “area of peace” in Asia.

It did not take long after independence to see that Delhi neither had the power to stop the great powers from coming into the region nor prevent its Asian neighbours from aligning with outside powers. But the grand delusion about insulating the region from great power influence endured. Ideas such as “Asia for Asians” and “Indian Ocean security without the Superpowers” continued to dominate Indian thinking. But these ideas repeatedly crashed against the contradictions among Asians themselves.

Delhi also insisted that the main criterion for membership in the non-aligned movement (NAM) is the absence of foreign military bases on national soil. In other words, NAM members, by definition, should not have deep military-strategic cooperation with great powers. But this violated the essence of international politics — the sovereign will protect himself with whatever resources he/she can mobilise and can’t put ideology ahead of survival. Delhi also ignored that most threats to a sovereign arise from problems with neighbours. India’s unrealistic principles of regional security were compounded by third-world economic radicalism under the NAM and G-77 forums that led India more steps away from the real world in Asia.

Matters changed for the better after the Cold War and the new compulsions on India to liberalise its economy. The absence of great power rivalry saw India return to the regions in a big way. Its regional engagement with different parts of Asia and the Indian Ocean acquired a higher priority than posturing about a ‘new international economic order’ in the UN and NAM forums. India’s new focus was on trade and investment and connectivity in relations with its neighbours in Asia that were long neglected.

Delhi also broke the unstated rule of keeping political distance from the major powers by joining hands with Moscow to promote a “multipolar world” through the Russia-India-China (RIC) forum and later via the BRICS grouping. The “multipolar quest” reflected India’s fears of the “unipolar moment” dominated by the US at the end of the Cold War. India also broke its rule on keeping the region and the world separate by pushing for the membership of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation promoted by two major powers — Russia and China — to keep a third, the US, out of their backyard.

As India’s problems with China mounted in recent years, Delhi embraced the Indo-Pacific framework and the Quad initiated by Japan and supported by the US in East Asia. To the West, India joined Israel, UAE, and the US to launch the so-called I2U2 forum. If India’s problems with China deepen, it is hard to imagine smooth sailing in the SCO and the BRICS. It is also evident that the salience of India’s strategic partnerships with the Western powers is rising compared to its engagement with Russia and China.

Delhi now takes an integrated view of its interests and pursues them through new and cross-cutting forums. As Jaishankar told the Southeast Asian leaders in Jakarta last week, the Quad is complementary to the efforts of the ASEAN and the institutions led by it. As India becomes a major economic entity with significant geopolitical heft, its ability to shape the intersection between its extended neighbourhood and the world will rapidly grow.

The writer is a Senior Fellow with the Asia Society Policy Institute, Delhi and a contributing editor on international affairs for The Indian Express