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

by Shashi Tharoor

  As India proceeds along the path of carving out a role for itself in the global multilateral space, there are some tasks from which it must not shrink. India’s is a culture which values modesty in conduct and speech, but one boast we have not been shy of making is that we are proud of being the world’s largest democracy. It is India’s conviction, from its experience in maintaining this distinction, that democracy is the only form of governance that gives each citizen of a country a strong sense that her destiny and that of her nation is determined only with full respect for her own wishes. India should therefore be proud of being able to demonstrate, in a world riven by ethnic conflict and notions of clashing civilizations, that democracy is not only compatible with diversity, but preserves and protects it, even while serving as a tool to manage the processes of political change and economic transformation so necessary for development.

  This is an obvious repudiation of the argument that democracy is incompatible with development, but India has nonetheless been reticent on advertising its own experience and quite unwilling to use it as a calling card in its international relations. For many years India was a reluctant and rather minor participant in the work of the US-inspired Community of Democracies, not wanting to promote an affinity with the West at the expense of its traditional image as the leading trade unionist of Third Worldism. I changed that when I led the Indian delegation to the community’s conference in Lisbon in 2009, proclaiming India’s commitment to the democratic principle while at the same time using the same forum to push for greater democracy in global governance (‘We hope that our common ideals of democratic inclusiveness and a level playing field will guide members of this community in supporting reform of the international governance system,’ I suggested somewhat self-servingly) and to seek the support of the world’s democracies in India’s fight against terrorism. I could not forget India’s bureaucratic preference to keep a discreet distance from Bush-era democratic proselytization around the world, but I believed it was necessary for India to help square the circle. ‘Let us cherish and value what we have in common as democracies,’ I suggested, ‘but let us also respect what makes us different from each other, and appreciate that it is in the nature of democracies to be responsive to the very different preoccupations of their own internal constituencies.’

  Democracy is, of course, a process and not just an event; it is the product of the exchange of hopes and promises, commitments and compromises which underpins the sacred compact between governments and the governed. But it makes no sense for India to abjure, on grounds of non-aligned principle or developing-country solidarity, its own democracy on the international stage. The Non-Aligned Movement, in any case, is, in the words of the Indian analyst C. Raja Mohan, ‘politically divided, economically differentiated and ideologically exhausted’. It cannot be the be-all and end-all of India’s international posture. The last century has, despite many horrors along the way, given us, in the famous phrase, a ‘world safe for democracy’. India has every reason to work, in the twenty-first century, to establish a world safe for diversity.

  This raises broader questions about India’s positions on international issues of democracy and human rights, where for a variety of reasons (mainly to do with the inadmissibility of external interference in a newly independent country’s internal affairs) India has more often found itself on the side of developing-country violators of human rights than of First World democracies. Hard-headed calculations also often come in: as our discussion in Chapter Three on Myanmar reveals, India accepted the capacity of the junta in Naypyidaw to stifle dissent, jettisoning its own sympathies of Aung San Suu Kyi and her party in favour of an amoral realpolitik that enhanced India’s security in its ‘soft underbelly’ and opened up access to Myanmar’s natural resources. India’s temporizing responses to repression in Myanmar and elsewhere have raised an uncomfortable question we all need to face: can India afford an ethical foreign policy?

  For many years after independence, the answer to that question seemed an obvious one: we couldn’t afford a foreign policy that was anything else. Having fought for our freedom against colonial oppression, Pandit Nehru and his colleagues saw themselves as voices for democracy, justice and fairness in the world, and they did not hesitate to express an Indian view of world affairs steeped in these values. Nehru and Krishna Menon, in particular, relished doing so: on issues like Indo-China, South African apartheid and the Suez, they saw themselves as giving a voice to the voiceless and the marginalized of the developing world, often against the great-power hegemons of the day. Indian foreign policy pronouncements were regularly couched in the language of transcendent moral principle. Nehruvian New Delhi spoke often, and our government, for decades, seemed to take greater satisfaction in being right than in being diplomatic.

  Few challenged India’s right to do so: the land of Ashoka, Akbar and Mahatma Gandhi seemed, to many, to have earned the authority to speak from an elevated ethical podium. But even in those early years there were those who wondered whether it was wise to transform the conduct of international relations into a kind of moralistic running commentary on world affairs. Our moral superiority began to grate on many otherwise well-disposed foreigners even when our positions were unexceptionable; but when we strayed from our own professions of virtue at home, such as over Kashmir or Goa, our critics found it easy to dismiss our foreign policy as posturing humbug.

  As time began to tarnish the glow of our independence struggle and the hard realities of national interest became the principal yardstick for both the conduct and the expression of our foreign policy, we quietly abandoned many of our ethical formulations. The gap between profession and practice was in any case becoming more and more glaring. Silence, or at least discretion, was clearly preferable to moralizing—at least in a world in which the inventors of non-alignment had signed a treaty with the Soviet Union, the advocates of democracy had suspended it in a state of Emergency, the vocal opponents of international capitalism had gained the most from globalization, and the leading advocate of disarmament had become a nuclear power. We were now less ethical in our pronouncements, but we were also less hypocritical.

  But it has always been difficult for a pluralist democracy to entirely overcome its own instincts in favour of democratic pluralism. So in Nepal we worked to democratize the monarchy, and facilitated the country’s transition from a state of rebellion to one of constitutionalism under UN auspices. In Bangladesh we spoke up for democratically elected civilian rulers, even when they pursued policies that were inimical to us (and we have done so again when they were in jail). In Myanmar, when the generals suppressed the popular uprising of 1988, our government initially reacted as most Indians would have wanted it to: India gave asylum to fleeing students, allowed them to operate their resistance movement on our side of the border (with some financial help from New Delhi), and supported a newspaper and a radio station that propagated the democratic voice. For many years, we were on the side of democracy, freedom and human rights in Myanmar—until reality intruded. On Sri Lanka, we danced a complicated dance between supporting the legitimate government in a murderous civil war and standing up for the political rights of the beleaguered Tamil minority. Our vote in the UN Human Rights Council urging Sri Lanka to do more in that respect broke free of our self-imposed prohibitions on supporting country-specific resolutions (which had aligned us in the past on the side of several unsavoury regimes resisting censure by the international community for their abuses of human rights). It was, in a sense, a blow in favour of a more ethical foreign policy, but it remains to be seen whether a new pattern will evolve—one more in keeping with Nehru’s glorious invocations of India’s soul.

  The argument for India to be true to its soul in the multilateral arena ought not to be a controversial one, but New Delhi has been notoriously reluctant to preach to others. Centuries of having foreigners telling you what to do and speaking for you abroad, all the while justifying their enslavement of you as part of a ‘civilizing mission�
��, have created in India a chronic unwillingness to allow the former imperial powers ever to dictate terms to the rest of the world again. This deep-rooted streak (which sometimes comes across as bloody-mindedness to newer generations of Westerners untainted by first-hand experience of colonial domination) will never be entirely overcome until India arrives at a new default stance in favour of liberal democracy through its own internal processes. This may take a generation to occur, as the West needs to understand, but India is undoubtedly heading in that direction.

  There are also postmodern questions about nationhood and world order that may need to be confronted in the twenty-first century. The Treaty of Westphalia gave birth to the modern conception of the state, first adopted in Europe and more or less followed by the rest of the world in the post-colonial era. Yet in our increasingly interconnected world we are becoming more and more conscious of how our own ground realities seem to defy the hermetically sealed boundaries of the Westphalian nation state. We live in a region in which Pashtuns straddle Af-Pak, Punjabis and Kashmiris are found on both sides of the India–Pakistan divide, Bengalis across Bangladesh and India, and Tamils in both India and Sri Lanka, to take just a few examples. The time has come for us to think harder about how to deal with the interstices of modern states and pre-modern identities. India can help the world think more wisely about such matters, given that our whole country is a lattice work of interstices. Twentieth-century India was anchored in a dour defence of sovereignty; it is not inconceivable that twenty-first-century India might be better placed to think of connections transcending nation states. It will take imagination and creative diplomacy, two qualities which have not always gone together in New Delhi’s governmental circles. But the future is a different country, and Indians require no visa to go there …

  India has, in recent years, witnessed a sea change in the way it treats its diaspora. For some decades after independence, the Government of India kept its distance from the far-flung children of the motherland, making it clear that their obligations lay with their countries of adoption. Even when things went wrong for Indians settled in foreign countries, senior Indians were not averse to delivering lectures to the effect that these no-longer-Indians had made their beds abroad and should learn to lie in them. In the 1980s, however, as a serious cash crunch prompted the government to try and bring home some of the resources of Indians abroad, a new attitude dawned. The hands-off approach gave way to an all-enveloping embrace.

  India is now the only country that has an official acronym for its expatriates—NRIs, for ‘Non-Resident Indians’. In my book India: From Midnight to the Millennium, I jokingly suggested that the real debate was whether NRI stood for ‘Not Really Indian’ or ‘Never Relinquished India’. The nearly 25 million people of Indian descent who live abroad fall, of course, into both categories. But the 1600 to 2000 delegates who flock to India from some seventy different countries every year for the Pravasi Bharatiya Divas (Overseas Indian Day) celebrations are firmly in the latter camp. They come to India to affirm their claim to it.

  And they come in larger numbers than ever, their enthusiasm undampened by the grim news that litters the Indian newspapers they find upon arrival. Many are not, strictly speaking, NRIs, but PIOs—people of Indian origin now carrying other countries’ passports (both together are subsumed under the label Pravasis). Two presidents of Guyana, vice-presidents of Suriname and Mauritius, prime ministers of Fiji and Trinidad and Tobago, and a former governor-general of New Zealand, are all people of Indian origin who have attended the Pravasi gatherings; so have Malaysian politicians and Gulf-based entrepreneurs, tycoons from Hong Kong and titans from the United States, all united by the simple fact of shared heritage—the undeniable reality that even exiles cannot escape when they look into the mirror. They are united, too, in the words of a typically thoughtful and inspiring inaugural address by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh one year, by an ‘idea of Indianness’. It is an idea that enshrines the diversity and pluralism both of our country and of its diaspora. In a land that is home to Indians of every conceivable caste and creed, the Pravasi Bharatiya Divas celebration affords to Indians—including former Indians—of every conceivable caste and creed the welcome assurance that they are indeed at home.

  The Pravasi Bharatiya weekends usually fall on the anniversary of the return to India of the most famous NRI of them all, Mahatma Gandhi, who alighted from his South African ship at Mumbai’s Apollo Bunder port on 9 January 1915. It is curiously appropriate that the event, organized by the newly created Ministry for Overseas Indian Affairs, usually in cooperation with the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry, takes place in different cities each year, as if to embrace the whole country geographically the way in which India seeks to embrace the world with this jamboree.

  In his speech to the gathering in 2005, the prime minister traced what he characterized as four waves of Indian emigration: the first, in pre-colonial times, featured Indians leaving our shores as travellers, teachers and traders; the second involved the enforced migration of Indian labour as indentured servants of the British Empire; the third, the tragic displacement of millions by the horrors of Partition; and the fourth, the contemporary phenomenon of skilled Indians seeking opportunity and challenge in our globalized world.

  I would probably divide the fourth wave further into two distinct categories: one of highly educated Indians, often staying on after studies abroad in places like the United States, and the other of more modestly qualified but even harder-working migrants, from taxi drivers to shop assistants, who for the most part see their migration as temporary and who remit a larger proportion of their funds home to India than their higher-earning counterparts. But in today’s world both sets of ‘fourth wave’ migrants remain closely connected to the matrbhumi: the ease of communications and travel makes it possible for expatriates to be engaged with the country they left behind in a way that was simply not available to the plantation worker in Mauritius or Guyana a century ago. To tap into this sense of allegiance and loyalty through an organized public gathering was an inspired idea of the previous NDA government, one which the UPA government has built upon through its creation of a ‘one-stop shop’ in the form of a dedicated ministry.

  So I have been mildly surprised by the cynicism of the many desi journalists who thrust microphones into my face during these weekends and ask me if it isn’t all a waste of time. ‘What does a conference like this actually achieve?’ they want to know. ‘How is it useful?’ This is a remarkably utilitarian approach to the occasion, and I suppose I could have responded by pointing to the many parallel seminars being run by state governments to attract NRI investment, or the session on disaster management that was added one year in the wake of the tsunami. But I preferred to make a larger point: that sometimes the real value of a conference lies in the conferring. Perhaps it is time we realize that instead of counting how many new millions were raised for tourism in Rajasthan or pledged for reconstruction in Port Blair, we should appreciate how much it means to allow NRIs from sixty-one different lands the chance to share their experiences, celebrate their commonalities, offer their ideas and swap visiting cards. Because when India allows its pravasis to feel at home, it is India itself that is strengthened.

  This is why I strongly and publicly opposed a move some years ago to reduce the frequency of the annual Pravasi Bharatiya gatherings to one every other year. My argument was clear: this would be a mistake, since the occasion has clearly acquired a momentum that it would be a shame to disrupt. When a locomotive has been gathering steam, why apply the brakes? The dialogue between India and its diaspora has only just begun, I argued: let us not interrupt it.

  But it is fair to ask why NRIs matter to India and what would be gained by continuing what one critic called ‘a pointless jamboree’. ‘These NRIs have left the motherland and gone off to make their fortunes elsewhere,’ one Mr A. Mukesh wrote to me. ‘They have abandoned India. India does not owe them anything. Indeed, it is they who ow
e the country that has educated them and given them the opportunity to better their lives abroad.’ To Mukesh and others like him, the money spent on celebrating the Pravasi Bharatiya Divas would be better spent in the villages of India.

  But I am not suggesting that India ‘owes’ its NRIs anything, other than an occasion to affirm their Indianness. And of course, while it is a fact that many, perhaps most, of the recent wave of Indian emigrants have benefited from a subsidized education in India before going off to make their living elsewhere, that is not true of many of the pravasis in attendance, who are descended from earlier waves of (often forced) emigration to the far-flung outposts of the British Raj a century or more ago, and who return unburdened by any reason for guilt. Finally, the needs of India’s villages are great but the choice is a false one: the NRIs are as committed as any resident Indian to India’s development, and have raised and remitted a great deal of money home for the purpose. (Non-resident Gujaratis, for instance, are prominent bulwarks of the ‘Vibrant Gujarat’ business summits that have helped steer investments to that state.) The expenditure on the Pravasi Bharatiya Divas is not diverted from more worthwhile national causes, but is rather raised specifically for this purpose from sponsors, notably FICCI, which bears the organizational burden entirely.