World Order (27 page)

There is not, and never was an India
, or even any country of India possessing, according to any European ideas, any sort of unity, physical, political, social or religious … You might with as much reason and probability look forward to a time when a single nation will have taken the place of the various nations of Europe.

By deciding after the mutiny to administer India as a single imperial unit, Britain did much to bring such an India into being. The diverse regions were connected by rail lines and a common language, English. The glories of India’s ancient civilization were researched and catalogued and India’s elite trained in British thought and institutions. In the process, Britain reawakened in India the consciousness that it was a single entity under foreign rule and inspired a sentiment that to defeat the foreign influence it had to constitute itself as a nation. Britain’s impact on India was thus similar to Napoleon’s on a Germany whose multiple states had been treated previously only as a geographic, not a national, entity.

The manner in which India achieved its independence and charted its world role reflected these diverse legacies. India had survived through the centuries by combining cultural imperviousness with extraordinary psychological skill in dealing with occupiers. Mohandas Gandhi’s passive resistance to British rule was made possible in the first instance by the spiritual uplift of the Mahatma, but it also proved to be the most effective way to fight the imperial power because of its appeal to the core values of freedom of liberal British society. Like
Americans two centuries earlier, Indians vindicated their independence by invoking against their colonial rulers concepts of liberty they had studied in British schools (including at the London School of Economics, where India’s future leaders absorbed many of their quasi-socialist ideas).

Modern India conceived of its independence as a triumph not only of a nation but of universal moral principles. And like America’s Founding Fathers, India’s early leaders equated the national interest with moral rectitude. But India’s leaders have acted on Westphalian principles with respect to spreading their domestic institutions, with little interest in promoting democracy and human rights practices internationally.

As Prime Minister of a newly independent state, Jawaharlal Nehru argued that the basis of India’s foreign policy would be India’s national interests, not international amity per se or the cultivation of compatible domestic systems. In a speech in 1947, shortly after independence, he explained,

Whatever policy you may lay down
, the art of conducting the foreign affairs of a country lies in finding out what is most advantageous to the country. We may talk about international goodwill and mean what we say. But in the ultimate analysis, a government functions for the good of the country it governs and no government dare do anything which in the short or long run is manifestly to the disadvantage of that country.

Kautilya (and Machiavelli) could not have said it better.

Nehru and subsequent prime ministers, including his daughter, the formidable Indira Gandhi, proceeded to buttress India’s position as part of the global equilibrium by elevating their foreign policy into an expression of India’s superior moral authority. India presented the vindication of its own national interest as a uniquely enlightened
enterprise—much as America had nearly two centuries earlier. And Nehru and later Indira Gandhi, Prime Minister from 1966 to 1977 and 1980 to 1984, succeeded in establishing their fledgling nation as one of the principal elements of the post–World War II international order.

The content of nonalignment was different from the policy undertaken by a “balancer” in a balance-of-power system. India was not prepared to move toward the weaker side—as a balancer would. It was not interested in operating an international system. Its overriding impulse was not to be found formally in either camp, and it measured its success by not being drawn into conflicts that did not affect its national interests.

Emerging into a world of established powers and the Cold War, independent India subtly elevated freedom of maneuver from a bargaining tactic into an ethical principle. Blending righteous moralism with a shrewd assessment of the balance of forces and the major powers’ psychologies, Nehru announced India to be a global power that would chart a course maneuvering between the major blocs. In 1947, he stated in a message to the
New Republic,

We propose to avoid entanglement
in any blocs or groups of Powers realizing that only thus can we serve not only [the] cause of India but of world peace. This policy sometimes leads partisans of one group to imagine that we are supporting the other group. Every nation places its own interests first in developing foreign policy. Fortunately India’s interests coincide with peaceful foreign policy and co-operation with all progressive nations. Inevitably India will be drawn closer to those countries which are friendly and cooperative to her.

In other words, India was neutral and above power politics, partly as a matter of principle in the interest of world peace, but equally on
the grounds of national interest. During the Soviet ultimatums on Berlin between 1957 and 1962, two American administrations, especially John F. Kennedy’s, had sought Indian support on behalf of an isolated city seeking to maintain its free status. But India took the position that any attempt to impose on it the norms of a Cold War bloc would deprive it of its freedom of action and therefore of its bargaining position. Short-term moral neutrality would be the means toward long-term moral influence. As Nehru told his aides,

It would have been absurd
and impolitic for the Indian delegation to avoid the Soviet bloc for fear of irritating the Americans. A time may come when we may say clearly and definitely to the Americans or others that if their attitude continues to be unfriendly we shall necessarily seek friends elsewhere.

The essence of this strategy was that it allowed India to draw support from both Cold War camps—securing the military aid and diplomatic cooperation of the Soviet bloc, even while courting American development assistance and the moral support of the U.S. intellectual establishment. However irritating to Cold War America, it was a wise course for an emerging nation. With a then-nascent military establishment and underdeveloped economy, India would have been a respected but secondary ally. As a free agent, it could exercise a much-wider-reaching influence.

In pursuit of such a role, India set out to build a bloc of like-minded states—in effect, an alignment of the nonaligned. As Nehru told the delegates of the 1955 Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung, Indonesia,

Are we, the countries of Asia and Africa
, devoid of any positive position except being pro-communist or anti-communist? Has it come to this, that the leaders of thought who have given religions and all kinds of things to the world have to tag
on to this kind of group or that and be hangers-on of this party or the other carrying out their wishes and occasionally giving an idea? It is most degrading and humiliating to any self-respecting people or nation. It is an intolerable thought to me that the great countries of Asia and Africa should come out of bondage into freedom only to degrade themselves or humiliate themselves in this way.

The ultimate rationale for India’s rejection of what it described as the power politics of the Cold War was that it saw no national interest in the disputes at issue. For the sake of disputes along the dividing lines in Europe, India would not challenge the Soviet Union only a few hundred miles away, which it wished to give no incentive to join up with Pakistan. Nor would it risk Muslim hostility on behalf of Middle East controversies. India refrained from judgment of North Korea’s invasion of South Korea and North Vietnam’s subversion of South Vietnam. India’s leaders were determined not to isolate themselves from what they identified as the progressive trends in the developing world or risk the hostility of the Soviet superpower.

Nevertheless, India found itself involved in a war with China in 1962 and four wars with Pakistan (one of which, in 1971, was carried out under the protection of a freshly signed Soviet defense treaty and ended with the division of India’s principal adversary into two separate states, Pakistan and Bangladesh—greatly improving India’s overall strategic position).

In quest of a leading role among the nonaligned, India was adhering to a concept of international order compatible with the inherited one on both the global and regional level. Its formal articulation was classically Westphalian and congruent with historical European analyses of the balance of power. Nehru defined India’s approach in terms of “five principles of peaceful coexistence.” Though given the name of an Indian philosophical concept,
Pancha Shila
(Five Principles of
Coexistence), these were in effect a more high-minded recapitulation of the Westphalian model for a multipolar order of sovereign states:

India’s advocacy of abstract principles of world order was accompanied by a doctrine for Indian security on the regional level. Just as the early American leaders developed in the Monroe Doctrine a concept for America’s special role in the Western Hemisphere, so India has established in practice a special position in the Indian Ocean region between the East Indies and the Horn of Africa. Like Britain with respect to Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, India strives to prevent the emergence of a dominant power in this vast portion of the globe. Just as early American leaders did not seek the approval of the countries of the Western Hemisphere with respect to the Monroe Doctrine, so India in the region of its special strategic interests conducts its policy on the basis of its own definition of a South Asian order. And while American and Indian views often clashed on the conduct of the Cold War, they have, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, been largely parallel for the Indian Ocean region and its peripheries.

With the end of the Cold War, India was freed from many conflicting pressures and some of its socialist infatuations. It engaged in economic reform, triggered by a balance-of-payments crisis in 1991 and assisted by an IMF program. Indian companies now lead some of the world’s major industries. This new direction is reflected in India’s diplomatic posture, with new partnerships globally and in particular
throughout Africa and Asia and with a heightened regard around the world for India’s role in multilateral economic and financial institutions. In addition to its growing economic and diplomatic influence, India has considerably enhanced its military power, including its navy and stockpile of nuclear weapons. And in a few decades, it will surpass China as Asia’s most populous country.

India’s role in world order is complicated by structural factors related to its founding. Among the most complex will be its relations with its closest neighbors, particularly Pakistan, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, and China. Their ambivalent ties and antagonisms reflect a legacy of a millennium of competing invasions and migrations into the subcontinent, of Britain’s forays on the fringes of its Indian realm, and of the rapid end of British colonial rule in the immediate aftermath of World War II. No successor state has accepted the boundaries of the 1947 partition of the subcontinent in full.
Treated as provisional
by one party or another, the disputed borders have ever since been the cause of sporadic communal violence, military clashes, and terrorist infiltration.

The borders with Pakistan, which roughly traced the concentrations of Islam on the subcontinent, cut across ethnic boundaries. They brought into being a state based on the Muslim religion in two noncontiguous parts of what had been British India divided by thousands of miles of Indian territory, setting the stage for multiple subsequent wars. Borders with Afghanistan and China were proclaimed based on lines drawn by nineteenth-century British colonial administrators, later disclaimed by the opposite parties and to this day disputed. India and Pakistan have each invested heavily in a nuclear weapons arsenal and regional military postures. Pakistan also tolerates, when it does not abet, violent extremism, including terrorism in Afghanistan and in India itself.

A particular complicating factor will be India’s relations with
the larger Muslim world
, of which it forms an integral part. India is often
classified as an East Asian or South Asian country. But it has deeper historical links with the Middle East and a larger Muslim population than Pakistan itself, indeed than any Muslim country except Indonesia. India has thus far been able to wall itself off from the harshest currents of political turmoil and sectarian violence, partly through enlightened treatment of its minorities and a fostering of common Indian domestic principles—including democracy and nationalism—transcending communal differences. Yet this outcome is not foreordained, and maintaining it will require concerted efforts. A further radicalization of the Arab world or heightened civil conflict in Pakistan could expose India to significant internal pressures.

Today India pursues a foreign policy in many ways similar to the quest of the former British Raj as it seeks to base a regional order on a balance of power in an arc stretching halfway across the world, from the Middle East to Singapore, and then north to Afghanistan. Its relations with China, Japan, and Southeast Asia follow a pattern akin to the nineteenth-century European equilibrium. Like China, it does not hesitate to use distant “barbarians” like the United States to help achieve its regional aims—though in describing their policies, both countries would use more elegant terms. In the administration of George W. Bush, a strategic coordination between India and America on a global scale was occasionally discussed. It remained confined to the South Asia region because India’s traditional nonalignment stood in the way of a global arrangement and because neither country was willing to adopt confrontation with China as a permanent principle of national policy.