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

by Shashi Tharoor

  The cooperation has been assessed on both sides as excellent, even though for some years India has had a defence minister who is notably wary of Israel. Inevitably relations with Israel get a boost when tensions between India and Pakistan erupt; it is said that Pakistan’s unexpected incursion into Kargil in 1999, which thrust on India a war for which it was unprepared, was partly resisted thanks to an emergency infusion of artillery shells from Israel. At the same time, India is not ready to adopt Israeli methods to deal with terrorism in its own borderlands; it has consistently been critical of Israeli attacks on Gaza and Lebanon, and is unlikely to see Israel as a tutor for its own approaches to similar problems in its neighbourhood.

  Non-military commerce has also progressed, with India–Israel trade reaching just under $5 billion in 2010. (Interestingly, India’s trade with Egypt is comparable in figures to its trade with Israel.) India is the second largest export market for Israel and Israel is India’s seventh largest trading partner. There is talk of a bilateral free trade agreement, though India’s turbulent domestic politics will continue to prompt New Delhi to proceed with caution. Israel’s advances in agriculture have not escaped the attention of even India’s state governments, several of which have sent agricultural delegations to Israel, and there is perennial interest—increasing as India contemplates serious water scarcity—in learning from Israel’s ability to make its deserts bloom. Opportunities for collaboration in high-technology aspects of information technology, space technology, nanotechnology and biotechnology are being explored by the private sector as well as by the two governments.

  India–Israel relations have been acquiring significant dimensions in a number of less utilitarian areas. Israeli tourism to India has increased significantly in the last two decades, and Hebrew signboards are visible in places like the Kullu valley and Dharamsala in northern India, and in Goa, whose beaches have become a particular favourite for young Israeli vacationers. Some 40,000 tourists from each country travel annually in both directions. There are increasing instances of inter-faith dialogue, including even, on one occasion, a delegation of Indian Muslims travelling to Israel. Indian Jewry is no longer significant enough in numbers to play a part in altering New Delhi’s domestic political calculations about the relationship, but interest in diaspora history has grown on both sides, and the success of the Bene Israel community from India, numbering some 25,000 in today’s Israel, has given a fillip to Israel’s awareness of their original homeland (including in the establishment of some Indian restaurants). The recent migration of some 1500 members of a ‘lost tribe’ from India’s North-East, the Beni Menashe, identified somewhat controversially as a Jewish group that had lost its links to the mother faith but rediscovered them, has added to the connection. Public opinion polls consistently show high regard in each nation for the other, with India often emerging as the world’s most pro-Israeli country after the United States in such surveys (and in one 2009 survey conducted by the Israeli foreign ministry, the single most pro-Israeli nation).

  Nonetheless, political visits at the highest levels have been relatively infrequent, and the Indian government has tended to treat its Israeli connection with circumspection, both to avoid antagonizing its domestic voter base and to reduce the risk of alienating its important Arab trading partners. The visit to Israel in January 2012 by Indian Foreign Minister S.M. Krishna, more than a decade after his BJP predecessor Jaswant Singh, came after several years during which Israeli ambassadors in New Delhi wondered privately if theirs was ‘the love that dare not speak its name’. Invitations to prominent Israeli political personalities have been noticeably infrequent, for fear of a domestic backlash. And yet Israel’s willingness to sell India weapons technology it cannot obtain elsewhere, the two countries’ shared concerns about Islamist terrorism and largely (though not wholly) compatible strategic interests make this an indispensable relationship for both sides. The Congress party–led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government has been careful not to repeat the rhetoric of its National Democratic Alliance (NDA) predecessors that spoke of a potential ‘alliance of democracies’ among the United States, India and Israel. The national security adviser of the previous NDA government, Brajesh Mishra, had declared in a speech to the American Jewish Committee in Washington in May 2003 that democratic nations facing the menace of international terrorism should form a ‘viable alliance’ to counter this threat: ‘India, the United States and Israel have some fundamental similarities. We are all democracies, sharing a common vision of pluralism, tolerance and equal opportunity. Strong India–US relations and India–Israel relations have a natural logic.’ Though such an approach has not been explicitly evoked since, such views are never very far from the surface in some influential circles in all three countries.

  India and Israel could conceivably develop additional areas of cooperation—nuclear policy, defence systems development and intelligence sharing, for instance. But strategic coordination is likely to be hamstrung by serious differences of perception on Iran, where India does not share Israeli views; by Israel’s widening of its options in relation to Pakistan and China, New Delhi’s major adversaries; and, perhaps above all, by India’s consciousness of its special relationship with the Arab world, including as a source of energy security, as a home for Indian migrant labour and as a potential fount of investments. It is clear that India values its relationship with Israel, but not at the expense of its friendships with Arab and other Muslim states.

  A brief look at Iran is necessary before we leave the region. Iran’s natural resources, particularly its oil and natural gas, have been increasingly important for India for decades. Many Indian refineries are in fact devised to process the quality of crude oil that Iran supplies, and its gas would be cheaper than most alternatives available. This makes the proposed Iran–Pakistan–India pipeline a serious attraction, despite huge pressure from Washington to resist such an arrangement and India’s understandable reluctance to place any portion of its energy security in the hands of Pakistan, through whose territory much of the pipeline would run. India’s Iran policy today, however, has to take account of not only its energy dependence, but India’s own concerns about nuclear proliferation in its subregion, and the increasing international isolation of the Iranian regime, with resultant pressures on India to reduce or even end its dependence on energy from a reviled government. The United States’ increasing exasperation with Iran’s attempts to develop a nuclear weapons capacity (if not a bomb itself) has also added to the stress on India, at a time when New Delhi is building an improved and revived relationship with Washington centred on nuclear cooperation. India is anxious to avoid Iran becoming an irritant in its strengthening relations with the United States. On the other hand, India feels the United States is being unreasonable in not recognizing that trade sanctions on Iran are far easier to impose if you don’t need Iranian oil, and next to impossible if a large portion of your energy security is dependent on it. (Nonetheless, it was revealed in May 2012 that India had been quietly reducing the quantity of its oil imports from Iran.)

  India sees Iran as a significant partner for other reasons as well: Iran has been a kindred spirit of India’s on Pakistan and Afghanistan, where the two share a mistrust of the Sunni fanaticism of the Taliban and the sinister machinations of the Pakistani ISI. This point of convergence adds to Iran’s role as a vital source of usable hydrocarbons, a crucial link with Central Asia and the Gulf, and a ‘friend at court’ in the Islamic world. In turn, Iran sees a good relationship with India as helpful in escaping its diplomatic isolation, and it also sees in India an important trading partner, a useful source of high technology and a reliable customer for its energy exports. The two sets of considerations will ensure that the ‘civilizational relationship’ with Iran that India’s leaders speak regularly about will continue to have genuine substantive content, even as pressure to isolate and sanction Iran remains unrelenting.

  This helps explain why India has been noticeably unsympatheti
c to the rising clamour from the United States and Israel for action to dismantle the Iranian nuclear programme, even though New Delhi has made clear its disapproval of Iran developing a nuclear weapon. There is no doubt that India, while responsive to US and Israeli pressure (and angry about the apparent abuse of India’s friendship in an Iranian bomb attack in New Delhi in early 2012 on an Israeli military attaché’s car), will not want to be pushed beyond a point into rupturing relations with Tehran. India’s stand has been devoid of moralizing on either side of the issue, its pragmatism extending to such measures as bartering Indian gold for Iranian oil, and allowing Iran to trade with India in rupees (with the proceeds held in a Kolkata bank invulnerable to international sanctions because it has no overseas operations).

  It is a pity, though, that neither New Delhi nor Washington has seen fit to use India’s continuing Iranian connections diplomatically. A still-engaged India might have proved a more useful mediator in Iran’s row with the West than the European Union (EU) countries currently engaged in the task, but no such initiative has been pursued.

  A different set of conditions explains India’s policy on Syria, which has seen New Delhi simultaneously affirm its friendship and regard for the secular regime in Damascus, with which it has long enjoyed good relations, in preference to any likely Islamist alternative. But without comparable economic incentives at stake, India, while opposing any military intervention against the regime, has voted with the West in the UN Security Council to call for the Assad government to negotiate a peaceful transition. In this it differs from Syria’s neighbour Turkey, another secular regime in the region, which openly condemned Assad’s repression of dissent, the sort of position India has been chronically reluctant to take (both because of its respect for Syrian sovereignty and for fear that such condemnation could be used to justify foreign military intervention, as happened in Libya).

  Turkey itself represents an underexploited opportunity for India: a secular democracy with a fast-growing economy, it ought to be a close ally, but has been locked for decades in a pro-Pakistan policy crafted under successive military regimes in both those countries. This is gradually changing, and with burgeoning trade (currently over $7.6 billion and growing), a distinct note of warmth has been creeping into the relationship. This is a story only beginning to unfold, but I see New Delhi’s relations with Ankara as having immense potential in the immediate future. The question that comes to mind, as BRICS emerges as a body with an alternative view of the world, is: could Turkey, a NATO member with a mind of its own, join them? There are no signs yet, but no country offers a more natural fit with the incipient new grouping than Turkey. BRICST won’t be easy to pronounce, but the entry of Turkey would fill a hole in the geographical centre and enhance the group’s geopolitical centre and enhance its potential. It’s well worth thinking about.

  India’s closer ties with the countries of Southeast and East Asia are the result of our ‘Look East’ policy, first enunciated by the government of Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao at the end of the Cold War in 1991 and pursued faithfully by all his successors. Jawaharlal Nehru had referred, in his classic The Discovery of India, to Southeast Asia as ‘Greater India’, but that heady romanticism foundered amid mutual suspicions during the Cold War, and relations remained sparse. The end of the superpower standoff—and thus of the obligation of states to determine their international allegiances in relation to Cold War loyalties and commitments—widened India’s foreign policy options, permitting New Delhi to look beyond the conventional wisdom of its non-aligned years. ‘Look East’ followed.

  Initially aimed at improving relations with the member states of the ASEAN at a time when India had embarked upon economic liberalization, and indirectly at enhancing strategic cooperation with the United States (‘looking East to look West’, as the author Sunanda Datta-Ray termed it), the policy has succeeded beyond the vision of its initiator. ‘Look East’ has not just become an end in itself, cementing enhanced economic cooperation with a long-neglected region, but it has signalled India’s return—some might say arrival—in a part of the world increasingly anxious about China’s overweening influence. That the policy continues to bear fruit two decades after it was launched is reflected in such recent developments as India’s admission as a full dialogue partner of ASEAN, its acceptance as a member of the ASEAN Regional Forum and as a full participant in the East Asia Summit (even though by no stretch of the geographical imagination can India be said to be an East Asian power). In 2003 Yashwant Sinha, then India’s minister of external affairs, described the ‘Look East’ policy as having evolved through two phases, the first ‘ASEAN-centred and focused primarily on trade and investment linkages’ and the second ‘characterized by an expanded definition of “East”, extending from Australia to East Asia, with ASEAN at its core’. The latter phase, Sinha explained, ‘also marks a shift from trade to wider economic and security issues, including joint efforts to protect the sea-lanes and coordinate counter-terrorism activities’.

  In the first few decades after 1947, India’s establishment, shaped by the long colonial era, was inevitably Western in its orientation (if ‘orient’ation is not too paradoxical a term). This was ironic, since India had long had a major impact on Southeast and East Asia. Hinduism and Buddhism spread throughout the Asian continent from India, the former being carried by traders and missionaries across much of Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand, while Buddhism was taken to and through Tibet to China and Korea, whence it reached Japan and Vietnam (it also flourished, of course, in countries closer to India, such as Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Cambodia and Thailand). As Indian trade (and very limited military conquest) expanded the culture’s horizons, the religious message and Indian spiritual practices were not the only export: language (particularly Sanskrit), social customs (including reverence for Brahmins), styles of art and architecture, and dance, music and epic narrative, all travelled from India as well. The Ramayana became an Asian, not just Indian, epic, with versions being told and performed from Indonesia to the Philippines. This was a remarkably peaceful process: aside from the invasion of the Srivijaya kingdom in Sumatra by the South Indian raja Rajendra Chola in the eleventh century CE, India did not evince any imperialist ambitions in Southeast Asia. Instead, as David Malone describes it, ‘great Indianized kingdoms arose over the centuries throughout Asia and particularly Southeast Asia … [following] Indian court customs, administrative organization on the Indian pattern, and laws based on the Code of Manu, the Indian lawgiver. Indianization also included the alphabetical basis of Southeast Asian scripts, the incorporation of Sanskrit in vocabularies along with the adoption of the Hindu-Buddhist religious beliefs, and an Indian concept of royalty.’ The spread of Islam to the region was in its turn facilitated by Indian sources, including Indian Muslim traders and missionaries. Thus Indonesia underwent successive layers of Buddhist, Hindu and Muslim conversion, all intermediated by Indian influences. Even Japan was not immune to Indian cultural influence, having been taken over by the spread of Buddhism that had come from India, as evident in the absorption of the Hindu goddesses Lakshmi and Saraswati into Japanese Buddhism as guardian-deities.

  Given this history, it was not surprising that, even prior to independence, the interim government led by Nehru organized in March 1947 a ‘Conference on Asian Relations’, bringing to Delhi delegates from twenty-nine countries, some still under colonial rule, to promote cooperation among Asian countries and express solidarity with the freedom struggles in other parts of Asia. Nehru’s India saw itself as the leader of Asia’s progress towards independence, a self-image reflected in its leading roles in both the special Delhi ‘Conference on Indonesia’ in 1949 and the Bandung ‘Afro-Asian Solidarity Conference’ of 1955. But this emphasis was lost in Cold War politics. Nor did the Southeast Asia of the early post-independence years encourage much interest; for the most part, it was just as backward, diseased and conflict-ridden as the subcontinent itself, and slow to unveil its potential. India’s own economic
policies, shaped in reaction to the fact that the British East India Company had come to trade and stayed on to rule, were protectionist; looking for trade opportunities did not feature high on New Delhi’s list of priorities. It did not help either that India’s natural overland linkages to Southeast Asia were blocked by post-colonial politics: Myanmar shut itself off from the rest of the world in the early 1960s, while India’s natural land routes eastwards ran through the suddenly foreign—and hostile—territories of East Pakistan (later Bangladesh). Neither was particularly inclined to provide transit facilities to Indian goods. Global geopolitics also intervened, with the countries of Southeast Asia clearly choosing a side during the Cold War, while India remained non-aligned, with a pronounced tilt towards the Soviet Union that was looked at askance by much of the region. India’s closest Asian political relationship in the 1980s was with communist Vietnam rather than ASEAN.

  With all these factors in operation, it took New Delhi some time to recognize that India’s economic interests are best served by greater integration with Southeast and East Asia, whose countries are natural trading partners with whom links had flourished millennia ago. This is why ‘Look East’ took so long in coming into existence. But ‘Look East’ goes well beyond economics. As Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has declared, the ‘Look East’ policy is much more than an external economic policy; it reflects a changed understanding of India’s role in the world economy and signals a significant strategic shift in India’s vision of international affairs. It is instructive that no Indian political party—and several have had turns at government since Narasimha Rao—has questioned either the underpinnings or the manifestations of the ‘Look East’ policy.