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

by Shashi Tharoor

  The somewhat misty-eyed view of Russia born during the struggle against British imperialism was never wholly absent from Indian thinking, though. When India’s President Pratibha Patil visited Moscow in 2011, her then counterpart Dmitry Medvedev declared somewhat conventionally that ‘our mutual ties of friendship are filled with sympathy, and trust, and openness’, but his Indian visitor gushed: ‘We are confident that India lives in the hearts of every Russian. In the same way, I can assure you that Russia also lives in our souls as a Homeland, as people who share our emotions, our feelings of mutual respect and constant friendship.’ Such sentiments were never wholly absent in New Delhi’s attitudes, even though the nature of the Russian state had visibly undergone major changes since the Soviet era and the priorities of both sides meant that neither loomed quite as large in its foreign policy consciousness as before.

  Nonetheless, though bilateral trade (at just above $2 billion) remained insignificant, the fact that Russia (and the Soviet Union) had contributed to the creation of India’s capacity in the nuclear, defence, space and heavy industry sectors when no other country was willing to do so has not been forgotten. Partly as a result of this legacy, Russia’s current cooperation with India continues to occur in a number of vital strategic sectors (including nuclear development and space exploration, and the joint development of the highly sophisticated BrahMos missile), ensuring that Russia remains a factor in India’s contemporary weltpolitik.

  New Delhi also has, over the last two decades, actively pursued Russian sources of energy, both oil and gas and nuclear. Russia is a useful partner for India in its quest for energy security in its extended neighbourhood, since India hopes to work with Russia to secure greater influence in Central Asia (which comprises several former Soviet republics). As mentioned in Chapter Five, this region could well constitute the route for several major potential oil and natural gas pipelines which would, if built, terminate in India.

  It remains true that in every fundamental particular Russian and Indian interests do not clash. The two countries meet in the context of the trilateral Russia–India–China meetings of foreign ministers, at the East Asia Summit, in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and as members of the newly emerged BRICS grouping. The opportunities to share compatible views of the world also arose at the UN Security Council during India’s stint as a non-permanent member in 2011–12, even if the two countries did not always vote in sync (with New Delhi agreeing with Moscow on Libya but voting in favour of the Syria resolution that Russia vetoed).

  The changing global environment has had an inevitable impact on India–Russia relations. Russia’s startling opening to the NATO alliance, its warming relationship with China and its much-improved relations with Pakistan have all moved Moscow away significantly from the logic that had underlain its approach to New Delhi in the Cold War years. Indian policy-makers continue to see Russia as a friend whose sympathy and support for Indian objectives is time-tested, especially in India’s moments of need, such as in 1971 or in international discussions on Kashmir. Russia is the only country with which India maintains an institutionalized defence cooperation mechanism featuring annual meetings of defence ministers, and while Indo-US nuclear cooperation has been hamstrung over supplier liability issues, Russia is proceeding with the construction of two nuclear power reactors on Indian soil. And yet the absence of widespread people-to-people contacts, the barriers of language and the fact that each country has greatly diversified its global relations mean that talk of a ‘special relationship’ is sounding increasingly hollow. The two countries are much more equal than they ever were; India’s is the larger economy and Russia’s will not long remain the much more developed one. Finding a new logic for the ‘special relationship’ remains a task in progress, and not one pursued with any great energy or enthusiasm, it would seem, on either side. In David Malone’s trenchant words, ‘Russia will remain a trusted interlocutor, if only out of habit. Economic relations can be conducted unsentimentally on the basis of mutual interest. But the parties are definitely out of love, if they were ever smitten.’

  India shares a satisfactory relationship with Turkey but there is considerable scope for improvement, since neither side has reached out to the other fully. Military regimes in Turkey and Pakistan were close to each other, and Ankara made common cause with the supposedly kindred spirits in Islamabad, leading to a certain distance between New Delhi and Ankara. The volume of bilateral trade stands at a modest $7.6 billion. There has been an FTA deal in the offing for quite some time, but negotiations have dragged on for a while now and are far from nearing completion. High-level visits had not occurred for nearly a decade when President Abdullah Gül came calling in 2011; the last time a Turkish prime minister visited India was in 2003. Turkey is therefore undeniably a land of unexplored potential for India.

  As for the part of Europe rarely discussed these days in India—Eastern Europe—the tale can be briefly told. While a considerable amount of rhetoric was expended on celebrating ties with the states of Eastern Europe during the era of India’s special relationship with the Soviet Union, they are no longer a significant preoccupation for India today. This is especially true of India’s most important old friendship in East Europe, the old non-aligned affinity with Yugoslavia now lying in the rubble of the Yugoslav civil war, the collapse of Titoism and the dawning of what one might mischievously dub ‘the Brussels Consensus’ in the Balkans.

  A more promising narrative emerges from India’s relationship with an older continent—albeit one made up of newer states—Africa. Africa is increasingly emerging as a central plank in Indian foreign policy. The India–Africa partnership has deep roots in history. Linked across the Indian Ocean, Indians have been neighbours and partners of East Africans for thousands of years. There was regular interaction between communities and traders, especially from the West coast of Gujarat and parts of South India with Abyssinia, Somalia, Mombasa, Zanzibar and even as far south as Mozambique. These communities and groups played significant roles in the histories of both India and Africa; an Abyssinian warlord rose to political prominence in medieval India, and groups of African descent still populate parts of western India. The advent of the Europeans and the era of colonial rule disturbed these interactions but could not disrupt them: indeed they added to them the painful experience of indentured labour, shipped from India to work on African plantations.

  In many ways Indians and Africans trod a common path. As colonization came, our contacts acquired different dimensions, some of which remain with us. Both India and Africa shared the pain of subjugation and the joys of freedom and liberation. In the period of decolonization and the struggle against apartheid, we stood shoulder to shoulder in the fight against apartheid and racial discrimination; India godfathered the entry of an increasing number of African countries into the international comity of nations. Satyagraha, non-violence and active opposition to injustice and discrimination were first devised by Mahatma Gandhi on the continent of Africa. The Mahatma always believed that so long as Africa was not free, India’s own freedom would be incomplete. Our first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, was also a firm believer and practitioner of the principle of Afro-Asian solidarity and of support to the struggles of the people of Africa against discrimination and apartheid.

  After India achieved independence, we embarked on a path of close cooperation with the newly independent nations of Africa that shared similar problems of underdevelopment, poverty and disease. India’s cooperation with Africa was based on the principle of South–South cooperation, on similarities of circumstances and experiences. India believes that Africa holds the key to its own development but it needs support, facilitation and durable partnerships. We have always been willing to share our development experience with Africa. In India we have sought to empower our people by investing in their capabilities and widening their development options, and we are happy to help apply that approach to Africa. Transfer of knowledge and human skills, going beyond government-to-g
overnment interactions and embracing civil society, will help strengthen our mutual capabilities. India is always open to sharing its strengths, its democratic model of development and its appropriate technologies, which many Africans found are low cost, resource efficient, adaptive and suitable to help identify local solutions to local problems.

  There was also a continuous high level of interaction between the political leaderships of India and African nations, with scarcely a year going by without some African head of state or government visiting New Delhi. A startling number of African leaders, particularly but not exclusively from former British colonies, have studied in some Indian university, among the tens of thousands of African students who then returned home to contribute to the economic and social development of their respective countries. Indian officials visiting Africa have often been pleasantly surprised to discover that their interlocutors in high positions shared an alma mater with them.

  Mahatma Gandhi also expressed the belief that ‘commerce between India and Africa will be of ideas and services, not of manufactured goods against raw materials after the fashion of the western exploiter’. Here, though, the Mahatma cannot be credited with great prescience, since ideas and services play only a modest role in the growing Indian– African relationship, while manufactured goods and raw materials still dominate their trade links. Western-style colonial exploitation is, however, mercifully absent.

  In the first few decades of our independence, Africa became the largest beneficiary of India’s technical assistance and capacity building programmes. India extended over $3 billion worth of concessional lines of credit to be used in those infrastructure and other development projects that were determined by African countries, a welcome change from the more top-down assistance extended by other donors, whether Western or communist. These cooperation programmes laid the foundation of the political and economic partnership between India and Africa in the twentieth century. It was against this background that India sought to re-engage in the twenty-first century, by redrawing our framework of cooperation and devising new parameters for an enhanced and enlarged relationship commensurate with our new role in a changing world. The challenge of globalization and the need to identify new opportunities for mutually beneficial cooperation led to a renewed vigour in the India– Africa relationship.

  On the old foundations, a new architecture for structured engagement and cooperation for the twenty-first century was designed and launched at the first India-Africa Forum Summit hosted by India in April 2008 in New Delhi. The summit provided an occasion for the leaderships of India and Africa to come together to chart out the roadmap for a systematic engagement. As Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said in his address to the summit, ‘Africa is our Mother Continent. The dynamics of geology may have led our lands to drift apart, but history, culture and the processes of post-colonial development have brought us together once again.’ The India-Africa Forum Summit adopted two historic documents, the Delhi Declaration and the India-Africa Framework for Cooperation—the first a political document covering bilateral, regional and international issues (such as common positions on UN reforms, climate change, WTO and international terrorism) and the second spelling out the agreed areas of cooperation, from human resources and institutional capacity building to agricultural productivity and food security, and (perhaps inevitably) information and communications technology. These were all areas in which African countries had great interest in what India had to offer.

  The 2008 summit received a commitment by the Government of India for up to $5.4 billion in new lines of credit in a five-year period—a quantum leap in governmental commitment to support the economic growth of Africa, which helped act as a stimulus package when the global financial crisis erupted shortly thereafter. Under this programme, India has committed about $1 billion every year, mainly in the form of soft loans at extremely low interest rates (around 0.75 per cent in most cases) that barely cover the costs of servicing the loans. The loans are ‘tied’, in that 80 per cent has to be spent on purchasing Indian goods and services, though it is the African country itself that will decide on the choice of Indian supplier. The lines of credit lead to asset creation in Africa and help catalyse confidence in the Indian economic partnership.

  The model of cooperation emerging from the first India-Africa Forum Summit has governed India’s approach since. The Delhi Declaration made clear that:

  This partnership will be based on the fundamental principles of equality, mutual respect, and understanding between our peoples for our mutual benefit. It will also be guided by the following principles: respect for the independence, sovereignty, territorial integrity of states and commitment to deepen the process of African integration; collective action and cooperation for the common good of our states and peoples; dialogue among our civilizations to promote a culture of peace, tolerance and respect for religious, cultural, linguistic and racial diversities as well as gender equality with the view to strengthening the trust and understanding between our peoples; the positive development of intra-regional/sub-regional integration by complementing and building upon existing/sub-regional initiatives in Africa; recognition of diversity between and within regions, including different social and economic systems and levels of development; and further consolidation and development of plural democracy.

  Beyond the diplomatic rhetoric, the strength of the Indian model of cooperation with Africa has lain in its non-prescriptive nature. India has made it clear throughout that it seeks mutual benefit through a consultative process. Indian diplomats do not instruct, impose or even demand certain approaches or projects in Africa, but offer to contribute to the achievement of Africa’s development objectives as they have been set by our African partners. Besides the consultative process and the spirit of friendship, both of which are clearly linked to our desire to fulfil the developmental aspirations of African countries rather than to prescribe them ourselves, there is also the element of a sharing of knowledge and experience for which many African countries often want to relate to us. India’s multicultural, multi-ethnic, multiparty pluralistic democracy has emerged as an attraction to many African countries moving in the same direction. So are our parliamentary institutions and procedures, and our manner of conducting free and fair elections. Our ability to work with the non-governmental sector and civil society in our quest for inclusive growth is also an important lesson which many African countries have wanted to share with us. This sharing of experiences on political cooperation is, therefore, another aspect of our non-intrusive support to the development of democratic institutions in our partner countries.

  Similarly, areas of human resource development and capacity building have been at the forefront of our partnership with Africa. Both India and Africa are blessed with young populations. At the first India-Africa Forum Summit, India announced a grant of $500 million specifically to undertake projects in human resource development and capacity building. It is only by investing in the creative energies of our youth that the potential of our partnership will be fulfilled. Tens of thousands of African students have received education and training in Indian institutions; at any time there are at least 10,000 to 15,000 African students studying in various parts of India. The African students at present in India, nearly 1000 of them on Government of India scholarships but a larger number on a self-financing basis, add to the experience of many African countries with Indian teachers and professors. Long-term scholarships for undergraduates, postgraduates and higher courses have been doubled and the number of slots under the Indian Technical and Economic Cooperation (ITEC) programme has increased to 1600 every year. This partnership in human resource development has been augmented by the tele-education component of the Pan African e-Network project which is visionary in its appeal and impact. The role of information and communications technology (ICT), science and technology, and research and development has contributed to the enhancement of our engagement with Africa in this important area of human resource development.

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p; The 1600 training positions offered under India’s technical cooperation programme to Africa have also become important avenues of capacity building. India is in the process of establishing nineteen institutions on African soil jointly with the African Union Commission and the member states, including an India-Africa Institute of Information Technology, an India-Africa Institute of Foreign Trade, an India-Africa Institute of Educational Planning and Administration, an India-Africa Diamond Institute, ten vocational training centres and five human settlement institutes in Africa to contribute to capacity building. Such endeavours to invest in human capital and sustainable political systems have made human resource development a vital aspect of India’s model of cooperation with Africa.

  Technology has of course been a particularly valuable Indian calling card. The Pan African e-Network project that seeks to bridge the ‘digital divide’ between Africa and the rest of the world is one of the most far-reaching initiatives undertaken by India anywhere in the world. Already nearly fifty countries have joined this programme, which is intended to provide e-services (with priority for tele-education and telemedicine services) and VVIP connectivity by satellite and fibre optic network among the heads of state of all fifty-three countries. The project would give major benefits to Africa in capacity building through skill and knowledge development of students, medical specialists and for medical consultation.