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

by Shashi Tharoor

  Indians have an allergy to being lectured to, and one of the great failings in the EU–India partnership has been the tendency of Europe to preach to India on matters it considers itself quite competent to handle on its own. As a democracy for over six decades (somewhat longer than several member states of the EU), India sees human rights as a vital domestic issue. There is not a single human rights problem about India that has been exposed by Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch or any European institution, which has not been revealed first by Indian citizens, journalists and NGOs and handled within the democratic Indian political space. So for the EU to try to write in human rights provisions into a free trade agreement, as if they were automobile emissions standards, gets Indian backs up. Trade should not be held hostage to internal European politics about human rights declarations; the substance of human rights is far more important than the language or the form. On the substance, India and the EU are on the same side and have the same aspirations.

  Once this irritant is overcome, the negotiations for an FTA, which has been long in its ‘final’ stages, should be concluded and should transform trade.

  Of course there are structural impediments that will not disappear. Ironically, given its human rights professions, the EU has long favoured China over India, and China is clearly the preferred investment destination: for every euro invested in India from the EU, 20 euros is invested in China. (This is partly India’s fault, in not creating a comparably congenial climate for foreign investment.) An EU ambassador to India, quoted by Malone, observed that ‘each has a tendency to look to the most powerful poles in international relations rather than towards each other, and each spends more time deploring the shortcomings of the other rather than building the foundations of future partnership’.

  A major element in the equation is India’s well-advertised preference for bilateral arrangements with individual member states of the EU, over dealing with the collectivity. This is arguably necessary, given the lack of cohesion in European institutions on strategic questions. Since Maastricht in 1992, Europe has claimed to have a ‘common foreign policy’, but it is not a ‘single’ foreign policy. (If it were, EU member states would not need two of the five permanent seats on the UN Security Council, and be clamouring for a third.)

  The case for India–EU cooperation could be strongly made, since the bulk of the problem areas in the world lie between India and Europe (or, as Sweden’s Foreign Minister Carl Bildt once put it, between the Indus and the Nile). To take two examples: more people have been killed in Europe by drugs coming in from Afghanistan than the total number killed in two decades of fighting in that country. India’s security interests in Afghanistan and its greater proximity to that country offer important intersections with Europe’s interests. India’s increasing salience in the geopolitics of the Indian Ocean, and especially in the security of the Gulf, the source of much of Europe’s energy, suggests another area of cooperation.

  And yet the prospects for institutional cooperation between India and the EU—despite all that they have in common, the long history of contact between the Old Continent and the subcontinent, and the contemporary relevance of the challenges and opportunities they confront—remain negligible. India–EU relations currently lack substance and strategic weight, despite the conclusion of a strategic partnership in 2004. The oxymoronic lack of European unity undermines the credibility of the collectivity; policy-makers in New Delhi will not be able to find many instances of the EU, rather than its individual member states, engaging with or standing up to the United States, Russia or China on any major issue. The ongoing eurozone crisis has also not served to enhance India’s confidence in Europe. So New Delhi strengthens relationships with a number of individual European countries that it considers reliable partners, but fails to think of Europe collectively as one of the potential poles in the evolving multipolar world. A European observer, Karine Lisbonne de Vergeron, characterizes the thinking of the Indian elite as follows: ‘Europe lacks a strategic vision and ranks at the bottom of the list of partners in India’s multipolar understanding of the future geometry of world affairs.’ This assessment is not far off the mark.

  Conceptually, the foreign policy establishment in independent India sees the nation as a modern state founded on and sustained by strong ideas of sovereignty, territoriality and raison d’état. In contrast, the EU is a post-modern construct, with diminishing regard for sovereignty within its territorial space and a growing desire for extraterritoriality in its aspirations. This basic difference between the conceptual outlook of India and that of the EU might help explain the inherent discomfort of modern India in engaging with a post-modern entity like the EU. In principle and in practice, too, India is wedded to non-interference in the internal affairs of states, whereas the EU is the land on which Bernard Kouchner propounded his theory of a ‘droit d’ingerence’ and its soil has offered fertile ground for initiatives revealing a penchant for intervention beyond sovereign boundaries. India and the EU may have democracy and diversity in common, but in their basic orientation towards statecraft, they diverge fundamentally.

  For all these reasons, India has consistently revealed a greater sense of comfort in dealing with individual European nation states; New Delhi sees an affinity with London, Berlin or Paris that it cannot bring itself to imagine with Brussels or Strasbourg. As a result, as my former colleague, the Indian diplomat Sandeep Chakravorty, has observed about Europe, ‘it may not be an exaggeration to state that India’s relationship with the parts is more substantive than with the whole’. It does not help that India also considers Europe with its multiplicity of complex organizations to be over-institutionalized and over-bureaucratized and, therefore, far more complicated and less attractive to engage with than national capitals.

  The boot is not entirely on one foot. Where Europe and India have divergent approaches to addressing security issues, for instance, Indian deficiencies are arguably to blame. For instance, the EU has formalized an elaborate Common Foreign and Security Policy, a European Security and Defence Policy, and even a European Security Strategy (by the European Council in 2003), while India has not yet even formally articulated a national security strategy. While Europe may desire closer security cooperation with India, India is really in no position to reciprocate except in terms of generalities. On the other hand, of course, Indian decision-makers could point out that there is no European defence ministry, army headquarters or intelligence service, and so security cooperation is in any case better conducted with individual states.

  It could also be argued that the EU adds very little value to India’s efforts to overcome its principal security challenges. In the immediate priority areas of strategic interest to India—its own neighbourhood, the Gulf region, the United States and China—the EU is almost irrelevant, and the story does not get better if one extends India’s areas of security interest to Central and Southeast Asia. On the big global security issues—nuclear proliferation, civil conflict and terrorism—the problem is the same, while the EU has almost nothing to contribute to India’s search for energy security. Even in India’s quest to be part of the global decision-making architecture, including a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, it is not the EU but the existing European permanent members, the United Kingdom and France, which bring more value to the table for India. India certainly needs European cooperation in counterterrorism and European remote surveillance technology, but it would obtain these from European nation states, not from the EU.

  If security is therefore a marginal area for EU–India cooperation, there certainly is scope in the fields of food security, the response to climate change and the protection of the environment, where Europe could share with India its advances in ‘green technology’. In the sphere of science and technology, India’s participation in both the International Thermonuclear Reactor Project (ITER) and the GALILEO satellite programmes came through the EU. But beyond these, there are few visible ‘wins’ in India–EU cooperation. Th
ere is certainly room for enhanced technological cooperation, where India’s abundant and inexpensive scientifically savvy brainpower and its burgeoning record in ‘frugal innovation’ offer interesting synergies with Europe’s unmatched engineering traditions and capacity. But the Arcelor-Mittal affair, in which a takeover bid by an Indian steel firm of a European one was challenged in a manner that can only be described as racist (‘Europeans are like a delicate perfume, Indians a cheap eau de toilette’ was only one of the many unpleasantries bandied about) showed India the limits of doing business with and in Europe.

  The notion that Europe could collectively emerge as a new ‘pole’ in a multipolar world order has its adherents, but progress in this direction is difficult to discern, especially given the choice of low-profile leaders for the principal European institutional positions, the presidency and the high representative for foreign and security policy. The danger remains that New Delhi will write Europe off as a charming but irrelevant continent, ideal for a summer holiday but not for serious business. The world would be poorer if the Old Continent and the rising new subcontinent did not build on their democracy and their common interests to offer a genuine alternative to the blandishments of the United States and China.

  And yet, within Europe, some bilateral relationships have never been stronger. That with France, for instance, has witnessed increasingly close military cooperation and intelligence sharing, creating a level of trust that may also have played a role in the decision to award Dassault’s Rafale the multi-billion-dollar fighter plane contract. France’s willingness to offer India an unprecedentedly generous level of ‘offsets’ in exchange for its decision, as well as to transfer technology, suggests the basis for the kind of close partnership that India is yet to enjoy with the United States. There is active bilateral engagement on specialized defence-related fields such as counterterrorism—the Indo-French Working Group on Terrorism has met every year since 2001—as well as on nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament.

  France has also developed an important level of energy cooperation with India, especially following a 2008 agreement between the two countries that has paved the way for the sale of nuclear reactors to India. French interest in Indian culture and a sustained level of scholarship on the country, as reflected by the impressive work of its Centre de Sciences Humaines in New Delhi and the prestigious Institut Français de Pondichéry, testify to the intellectual depth of the engagement. (This has only modestly been reciprocated by India, which has posted a succession of non-Francophone ambassadors to Paris.)

  France enjoys a limited historical basis for its relationship with India, since its colonial presence was limited to a few enclaves and left no lasting mark on society as a whole. The opposite, of course, is true of Britain, India’s colonial master for two centuries and the source of both its Westminster-style parliamentary democracy and its obsession with cricket, not to mention the provenance of the English language that has been India’s calling card to the world. India’s relations with Britain come with an extraordinary amount of historical baggage, compounded by the presence of some 3 million immigrants of Indian origin in the United Kingdom (numbers comparable to those of Indians in the United States, but representing both a higher proportion of the population—some 5 per cent, as against 1 per cent in the US—and a very different demographic profile). Recent developments appear, however, to have reversed the historical pattern; it is now Britain that is seen as the supplicant, seeking to please an often-indifferent India.

  The importance given to India in the foreign policy priorities of British Prime Minister David Cameron is striking: he visited the country to burnish his international credentials soon after being elected leader of the Conservative Party, and India became the second country (after the United States) that he made an official visit to upon becoming prime minister. Barely eight weeks after taking office, Cameron travelled to India with an unusually large delegation of key ministers, including the Chancellor of the Exchequer, several well-heeled businessmen and a motley crew of MPs and academics in his entourage. His homage to the new India began with his arrival in Bangalore, at the headquarters of Infosys Technologies, the shining example of India’s success in conquering world markets, where he also took the opportunity to lecture Pakistan on the need to abjure terrorism against India. Apart from pleasing his hosts, Cameron was signalling a departure from what Indians had too often seen in the past as a patronizing and arrogant tone about India from British political leaders. He could not have begun his journey better.

  At the same time, the substance of the relationship had been stagnating for some time, with trade showing little improvement from a plateau of $11 billion in 2008–09. Cameron’s visit signalled a spurt of some 20 per cent in the next fiscal year, which has led to talk of bilateral trade heading to $20 billion by 2015. Other areas also show both progress and setbacks. Despite the signing, also in Bangalore, of an $800-million deal between British Aerospace and Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd for fifty-seven advanced jet trainers, the potential for stronger defence ties remains largely unexplored, as would become apparent a year and a half later in Britain’s dismay when it too (like the United States) was rejected in India’s choice of a fighter aircraft. The operationalization of the civilian nuclear agreement signed during Cameron’s visit also remains to be tested in practice.

  The media outcry in early 2012 over Britain’s modest development aid to India, which broke out when the fighter deal was announced, reflected many of the complexities that still bedevil the relationship. After two centuries of presiding over the systematic impoverishment of the Indian people, Britain arguably has a historical and moral responsibility towards the well-being of its former subjects, and it provides India annually with some $400 million of developmental assistance, mainly targeting beneficiaries in three of India’s poorest states. (This is perfectly reasonable: if the United Kingdom is to have an aid programme, it would make little sense not to aid poor Indians.) When India picked the Rafale over the British-backed Eurofighter, however, the British media resurrected a two-year-old statement by Indian Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee that British aid was ‘peanuts’ that New Delhi could do without, and created a national uproar over Indian ‘ingratitude’, not to mention profligacy. Even sober commentators saw the decision as a setback to Cameron’s efforts to establish Britain as a ‘partner of choice for India’. It did not help that India had dawdled for over six months in replacing its retiring high commissioner to the United Kingdom, suggesting that Britain figured low in New Delhi’s strategic priorities.

  This is where a distinction would be worth drawing. Don’t aid the Indian government—the cumulative aid it receives amounts to little over half of 1 per cent of the country’s GDP, and the finance minister is not alone in wishing it away. But do aid poor Indians; they need it, because however much the Government of India is doing for them, their poverty is so dire that it can never be enough. So don’t give the aid to the same people who are buying fighter aircraft; channel it instead through charitable NGOs, British or Indian, working directly with the poor. That would not only help people in need, it would avoid a revival of this invidious debate, and ease the journey towards a more equal, and less contentious, relationship between the two countries.

  A more recent but arguably closer European relationship that is undergoing reinvention is that of India with Russia. Beginning with the Indian nationalists’—and particularly Jawaharlal Nehru’s—fascination with an idealized Soviet state in the 1920s (though Nehru, in particular, had few illusions about the nastier excesses of Stalinism), Russia enjoyed a privileged place in the Indian imagination. A celebrated pair of visits in 1955—Nehru’s to Moscow in June and Khrushchev’s return trip in November—inaugurated a particularly warm phase in the relationship, with steadily increasing Soviet technical assistance to India’s public sector, peaking with the decision in 1962 to transfer technology to manufacture the MiG-21 fighter jet in India. In 1965 the Soviets were still seen as neutral e
nough to broker a ceasefire in Tashkent at the end of the India–Pakistan war; but when tensions arose with Pakistan in 1971 over what would become the secession of Bangladesh from that country, Moscow clearly chose sides. A letter from Chairman Mao implying support for Pakistan in the event of conflict prompted India to jettison its non-aligned principles and sign a treaty of friendship and cooperation with the Soviet Union in August 1971. During the remaining two decades of the Soviet Union, successive Indian governments relied heavily on Russian military supplies (which accounted for over 70 per cent of Indian defence imports) and were broadly sympathetic with Russian objectives in Afghanistan and in Southeast Asia.

  The collapse of the Soviet Union helped prompt the significant reorientation of Indian foreign policy already described in earlier chapters—the advent of the ‘Look East’ policy, the new opening to Israel and a much more serious engagement with the United States. Despite this, Russia and India remained important foreign policy partners for each other, as the continued frequency of high-level exchanges of visits demonstrated. The economic relationship underwent a downturn as India opened up its trade with China and the West, but the defence and security relationship continued, with Russia remaining India’s top military supplier well into the first decade of the twenty-first century (when, in some accountings, it was overtaken by Israel). India is still Russia’s second largest customer for conventional weapons exports, after China. Russia continues to be seen by India as a faithful and reliable supplier of sophisticated, yet relatively inexpensive, weapons systems. Indians were conscious (and grateful) that Russian military cooperation did not merely constitute a buyer–seller relationship but included joint research and development, servicing contracts, and training, including joint exercises. But the abrupt cancellation of a pair of scheduled exercises in 2011 (in the wake of India’s rejection of the Mikoyan MiG-35 as a suitable combat aircraft, the same decision that also dismayed the United States and the United Kingdom), and continued delays and cost escalations in the refurbishing of the aircraft carrier Gorshkov for the Indian Navy, did not suggest that all has remained quite well in the military relationship.