Pax Indica: India and the World of the Twenty-first Century

by Shashi Tharoor

  Former foreign secretary Nirupama Rao told Indian reporters after visiting US President Barack Obama publicly chastised New Delhi in November 2010 for its indulgence of the Burmese junta in Naypyidaw (the new Burmese capital created by the military): ‘Myanmar is not a country on the dark side of the moon but a country on our borders with which we have to deal.’ It is telling that India’s tri-services command on the Andaman Islands abuts Myanmar’s maritime boundaries and is just about 20 kilometres away from Myanmar’s Coco Islands, where China is believed to be building naval infrastructure. These are not considerations a responsible government overlooks.

  In turn, by cancelling a $3.6-billion hydroelectric project (90 per cent of its electricity would have been exported to China), the Burmese government surprised most observers, even though Chinese analysts were quick to express understanding of Naypyidaw’s desire not to be seen as wholly subservient to a much more powerful neighbour. But the signal is clear: Myanmar is not a vassal state of China, and is willing to diversify its foreign relations.

  It is in Myanmar’s interests to have more than one suitor wooing it; offsetting one neighbour against another is a time-honoured practice. Though China’s engagement dwarfs India’s, Myanmar–India bilateral trade reached $1.071 billion in 2010–11, including India’s purchase of 70 per cent of Myanmar’s exported agricultural produce, and India is now Myanmar’s fourth largest trading partner after Thailand, Singapore and China. (India’s privileged relationship with the junta in Naypyidaw also allowed it quicker humanitarian access than the United Nations and other international relief agencies enjoyed following the devastation caused by Cyclone Nargis in May 2008.)

  Economics can always open the door to politics. ‘That Myanmar could defy the Chinese [by cancelling the hydroelectric project],’ wrote the Indian scholar Sreeram Chaulia, ‘is being seen as a sign that political space exists for the United States to work as a facilitator of the democratisation process in Myanmar.’ The November 2011 visit of US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Myanmar and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s visit in May 2012 brought confirmation that India has been playing a quiet but effective role in promoting greater engagement with Naypyidaw.

  India cannot and should not seek to outdo China in appeasing the military junta. Its natural instincts lie with the Burmese democrats, Aung San Suu Kyi and the former students for whom it has, over the years, shown its support. With Washington signalling a willingness to take Naypyidaw’s political openness at face value, the stage is set for the region’s democracies, especially India, to open Myanmar’s windows to the world. China will be watching closely.

  On the whole, therefore, India’s engagement with its neighbours is, as it emerges from the foregoing narrative, both multi-pronged and less negative than many, even within India, assume. It is an engagement that is at the same time conducted bilaterally, regionally under the ambit of SAARC, and through what one might call subregional or even trans-regional mechanisms such as the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation (BIMSTEC), which includes some SAARC members and some ASEAN ones, or the Indian Ocean Rim Association for Regional Co-operation (IOR-ARC), which pulls together eighteen countries whose shores are washed by the Indian Ocean, including some South Asian nations and several on other continents. Since I have focused so far on the bilateral relationships, I will briefly discuss SAARC, leaving our cooperation within each of the other two multilateral frameworks to Chapter Five.

  SAARC is an organization which has been quietly working to touch the lives of the people in South Asia without many Indians knowing much about it. Its most significant attribute is arguably what is increasingly being accepted as the asymmetric participation by India, as SAARC’s largest member. New Delhi’s increasing willingness to give far more than it takes from SAARC has also been the most important factor in strengthening intra-regional cooperation. SAARC’s most significant shortcoming, on the other hand, is Pakistan’s continuing hostility to India, which has often held progress on South Asian cooperation hostage to the bitter resentment of Islamabad. While this did, for several years, severely limit SAARC’s potential, the other members have grown progressively impatient with Pakistani intransigence on some issues, and there is increasing talk of certain initiatives (such as a possible South Asian Free Trade Area, which Pakistan has resolutely opposed) proceeding with the involvement of just those members who are keen, rather than awaiting a consensus of all.

  In this, Indian generosity is key, and in recent years New Delhi has not been found wanting. Not only has India’s manner of discharging our commitment to this grouping inspired other SAARC member states to take initiatives on regional projects, but it has helped transform SAARC from a declaratory phase to an implementation drive that is at last gathering momentum. India has contributed nearly $200 million for the SAARC Development Fund (several multiples of all other countries’ contributions put together) and enabled its operationalization. It is not yet widely known that India has also devoted considerable resources and political effort to setting up a world-class university as a direct SAARC project—the South Asia University in South Delhi, open to students from the eight SAARC members at an affordable (i.e., subsidized) cost. India is the largest contributor to the development of this university, chipping in over $230 million out of a total cost of some $300 million. The university has already started classes in temporary buildings pending the construction of its greenfield campus.

  With increasing regional engagement on core areas of development, especially health, education, energy, agriculture and infrastructure, awareness about the effectiveness of SAARC in delivering the fruits of development to South Asians at the grass roots has begun to increase. These regional activities have enabled a large constituency of South Asians to be connected and benefit from basic infrastructure in health, education, food and infrastructure, hitherto unavailable to them. Consequently, there has been an exponential increase in intra-regional tourism and people-to-people exchanges, though there remains scope for very much more growth in these areas.

  SAARC’s transformation from declarations to actions has also generated interest among non-SAARC states, with nine observers—including, intriguingly, China—formally expressing their intent to engage with SAARC. Intra-regional cooperation has strengthened physical connectivity, helped overcome the challenges of the global economic crisis and the food crisis, and is encouraging greater cooperation in articulating a common SAARC position at many international forums.

  I would like to believe that SAARC’s evolutionary path towards economic prosperity in South Asia, though slow, is irreversible. Of course, we are all conscious that political setbacks can derail, or slow down, economic progress. But with increasing economic interdependence among member states, heading in the future towards a SAARC Customs Union, a South Asian free trade area or even, one day, a single SAARC currency no longer appears to be completely unrealistic.

  As this broad-brush survey of opportunities in India’s immediate neighbourhood suggests, it is time for New Delhi’s dealings with its neighbours to be driven by both self-interest and magnanimity. The cliché of ‘win-win’ solutions can easily apply in the situations I have described, particularly if India extends its economic dynamism beyond its own borders and shares its burgeoning prosperity with the lands around it.

  As India has benefited enormously from its own ability to participate in the global economy, so too will its neighbours benefit from access to and participation in India’s economy. It is shocking—no milder word will do—that just 5 per cent of South Asia’s trade is within the SAARC region, and that a region with 22 per cent of the world’s population produces barely 6 per cent of its GDP. (The World Bank has even declared South Asia to be the world’s least economically integrated region, with countries spending far more than they need to on goods they could have imported from within South Asia. A recent report titled ‘Cost of Economic Non-Cooperation to Consumers in South Asia’ contends that fur
ther trade integration among South Asian economies could yield $2 billion to consumers.) Changing this must be a priority; promoting regional prosperity will go a long way towards persuading India’s neighbours that they have a stake in its success. This will require giving India’s neighbourhood the same priority that Indian foreign policy has traditionally accorded to major powers like the United States and China, and balancing its understandable interest in global strategic issues with a regional focus on matters of trade, water resources, disaster management and cross-border movements of populations. The integration of India’s border states with their foreign neighbours’ economies would offer a win-win for both.

  Indeed part of the challenge is that what is involved is not just integration, but the reintegration of economies torn asunder by history and politics. It would be of historic and sentimental value, as well as practical, if increasing South Asian integration served to reverse the severe economic damage inflicted by Partition in 1947. At that time, the stroke of a British pen severed road, rail and river links that had flourished in united India under the British Raj. Natural ports were cut off from their hinterlands, as Kolkata was from East Pakistan (later Bangladesh) and as Bangladesh’s own Chittagong has been from India’s north-eastern states. Mumbai and Karachi were once siblings, twin commercial cities that mirrored each other; today they are estranged neighbours. Political developments on the subcontinent since 1947 and the eruption of conflict have made the new barriers all but impenetrable. Their gradual easing, initially through economic cooperation, could produce significant benefits, including eventually in the area of security. But it is far from easy to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.

  India’s rise is no threat to any of its neighbours, but that is not enough; it must also afford them opportunities for their own growth and advancement. If it fails to do so, weak and unstable neighbours will constitute a threat to India itself, as our experience with terrorism, extremism and cross-border insurgency has demonstrated. For India to help promote development and strengthen the states in its own neighbourhood is a ‘no-brainer’, even if this is more difficult than making speeches at the UN about global risks emanating from distant lands. We have a shared history to build upon, and cultural affinities with every one of our neighbours that should be a source of commonality rather than of division. SAARC deserves more attention today than the Non-Aligned Movement; a water treaty with Bangladesh, Nepal and Bhutan deserves as much political energy to be expended on it as the Indo-US nuclear deal received.

  India has a vital national responsibility to build its own infrastructure and extend it to our neighbourhood. Building more and better roads in the border areas and enhancing air, rail, river and sea connectivity with our neighbours must become more of a priority than they already are. This means devoting both resources and greater political attention to this objective. Pursuing economic integration with our neighbours is nothing less than a strategic goal, since the alternative is resentment at best and conflict at worst. The Chinese have made significant progress in building up their infrastructure up to their borders; there is a case for India to do the same and to connect the two together, to take advantage of the synergies that would result. (However, the atavistic fear remains, in some quarters, that this would facilitate a Chinese invasion, both metaphorically and literally.) Equally, India’s broader engagement with the region and the globe could benefit all countries in an integrated South Asia: they should be invited to share the opportunities that their association with India makes possible, while understanding that distancing themselves from India would also deprive them of wider possibilities.

  By the same logic, we must also cease insisting on bilateral solutions to our issues with our neighbours where they prefer regional ones. It is understandable that smaller countries sometimes feel that a purely bilateral negotiation with such a huge neighbour would place them at a disadvantage. Doing things with three or four neighbours at a time, or in the SAARC framework, would help even out the perception of Indian dominance, and should be welcomed by New Delhi for precisely that reason. Indian diplomacy in South Asia must evolve a new paradigm that suggests no hint of hegemonism but that is still capable of exercising leverage, no easy task but one well worth pursuing.

  Several specific ideas have been mentioned in the present chapter; many more exist or can easily be developed. In a March 2012 speech, India’s National Security Adviser Shivshankar Menon urged the region to ‘move forward much more rapidly on connectivity, including energy and grid connectivity, tourism, people-to-people, trade and economic links that can make such a major contribution to improving our future’. A regionwide energy market could be created, building upon the example already mentioned of cooperation with Bangladesh, Bhutan and Nepal on hydropower. (The politician Mani Shankar Aiyar has even called for an Asian Oil and Gas Union, going beyond South Asia to embrace West Asian suppliers and East Asian consumers.) The process given a fresh thrust by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s visit to Dhaka in September 2011 could result in reuniting Kolkata with its vast natural hinterland in Bangladesh, from which it has been cut off for decades. More trade and tourism among SAARC countries could help dispel misunderstandings which have led to major problems in the past. Easier availability of Indian visas, rather than insisting initially upon strict reciprocity, would facilitate people-to-people contact that could help dispel tensions. India’s ‘soft power’—Bollywood cinema, books and music, educational opportunities, health care (offering specialized treatment for South Asian nationals at discounted rates in Indian hospitals), sporting exchanges, tourism and cultural schemes built on shared history and heritage (like the joint celebration of the 1857 Revolt, which turned out to be a damp squib, or the more successful combined commemoration with Bangladesh of Tagore’s 150th birthday)—must be consciously leveraged in the subcontinent as a source of goodwill. And adding substance to ‘Look East’ will transform India’s own North-East as it drives its reach into the heartland of ASEAN, with which it has already signed a free trade agreement.

  Shared management of the region’s ecological resources is another possibility. Our environment is shared blessing and its future our shared destiny. The South Asian countries partake of a common geography, and the subcontinent’s glaciers, mountains, river systems, rainfall patterns and even forests recognize no man-made boundaries. Managing these cooperatively could bring benefits vastly exceeding the costs of the diplomatic efforts required.

  One of the most important challenges for Indian diplomacy in the subcontinent is to persuade its neighbours that India is an opportunity, not a threat. Far from feeling in any way besieged by India, they should be able to see it as offering access to a vast market and to a dynamic, growing economy which would provide their own economies with far greater opportunities than more distant partners (or even their own domestic markets) could provide. This would go beyond economic benefits: as David Malone argues, ‘Economic cooperation represents the easiest “sell” to various constituencies within the countries of the region. Were this to prove successful, cooperation on more divisive and sensitive issues, such as terrorism, separatism, insurgency, religious fundamentalism, and ethnic strife, could be attempted with greater chances of success.’ For these reasons, Delhi clearly should do more to make greater economic integration politically attractive and administratively feasible. Imaginative and major new projects to integrate India’s north-eastern region with neighbouring countries—such as building efficient rail and road connectivity with Nepal, with and through Bangladesh, into Myanmar and on to Southeast Asia—will help create the physical integration from which economic integration will flow. (We will return to this in Chapter Five.) Winds of change are blowing in South Asia. There is a definite consolidation of democracy in all the countries of the region, every one of which has held elections within the last three years. Some of our neighbours have made significant strides in surmounting internal conflict and others are in the process of doing so. A subcontinent no longer bedevil
led by mutual suspicion and distrust, and committed to democracy, economic cooperation and improved regional integration, is no longer a pipe-dream. If India has to fulfil its potential in the world, we have no choice but to live in peace with our neighbours, in mutual security, harmony and cooperation. Our stellar economic growth has added to the confidence with which we can approach our neighbours; the insecure are always less magnanimous. We have entered an era in which India can see borders not as barriers but as portals, and border areas not as buffer zones but as gateways of opportunity.

  As Malone puts it: ‘Indian policy in South Asia has improved in tone and quality in recent years. But it is not yet such as to induce either awe or affection amongst those neighbours who matter. India cannot aspire to be a truly convincing “great power” until it achieves a better handle on its region without the support and active involvement of outsiders. Indeed, India faces a circular challenge: unless its region becomes more cooperative (and prosperous), India is unlikely to develop into more than a regional power, but it is true as well that it cannot be a global power unless it reaches beyond its neighbourhood.’

  It is a truth that we in India hold to be self-evident that it is in India’s interest to be generous to its neighbours on the subcontinent (just as, as I have argued in the previous chapter, it is in India’s interest, as the stronger country, to offer generous gestures to Pakistan in order to improve the atmosphere within which peace and progress are to be sought). Perhaps the best metaphor for India’s most appropriate attitude to the countries on its periphery in this regard comes not from the soaring vision of Jawaharlal Nehru, whom I have often quoted, but from the more down-to-earth perspective of his successor as prime minister, the modest Lal Bahadur Shastri. Just as Nehru left Robert Frost’s immortal lines—‘Miles to go before I sleep’—on his bedside table when he died, Shastri kept some lines of the founder of the Sikh faith, Guru Nanak, on his desk. When translated into English they read: ‘O Nanak! Be tiny like the grass, for other plants will wither away, but grass will remain ever green.’ Shastri was seen by many Indians of exalted ambition as a tiny man, but he had the mind and heart of a giant. His vision of peaceful coexistence with our neighbours, through adopting the demeanour, the modesty and the freshness of grass, may well be the best way for India to ensure that its dreams remain evergreen in its own backyard. In this era of competing global powers seeking to influence South Asia in their own interests, India will do well if, like Shastri, it heeds Guru Nanak’s wisdom.