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

by Shashi Tharoor

  To turn to the core question, then: why do NRIs matter to India?

  Simple: as a source of pride, as a source of support, and as a source of investments. It is entirely natural for Indians to take pride in the successes of their erstwhile compatriots abroad. I once remarked rather cruelly to an interviewer that the only country where Indians as a whole did not succeed was India. That is fortunately no longer the case, as signs of Indians’ increasing prosperity are evident everywhere one travels in India, but Indians abroad have certainly given us all a great deal to be proud of. One recent statistic from the United States shows that the Indian-American family’s median income is nearly $75,000 a year, slightly more than Japanese-Americans’, but some $20,000 higher than the figure for all American families. That kind of success is not merely at the elite end of the scale: in England today, Indian curry houses employ more people than the iron and steel, coal and shipbuilding industries combined.

  So we can be proud of the impact Indians have made on foreign societies. But pride is not merely an intangible asset. Living in the United States, I have been struck by the extent to which the success of our NRIs has transformed the public perception of India in the United States. A generation ago, when I first travelled to the United States as a graduate student in 1975, India was widely seen as a land of snake-charmers and begging bowls—poverty marginally leavened by exotica. Today, if there is a stereotypical view of India, it is that of a country of fast-talking high-achievers who are wizards at maths and who are capable of doing most Americans’ jobs better, faster and more cheaply in Bangalore. Today IIT is a brand name as respected in certain American circles as MIT or Caltech. If Indians are treated with more respect as a result, so is India, as the land which produces them. Let us not underestimate its importance in our globalizing world.

  The presence of successful and influential NRIs in so many countries also becomes a source of direct support for India, as they influence not just popular attitudes, but governmental policies, to the benefit of the mother country. That two right-wing Governors of US states (Piyush ‘Bobby’ Jindal of Louisiana and Namrata ‘Nikki’ Randhawa Haley of South Carolina) are of Indian descent ought not really to make many liberal-minded Indians proud, but it does, because it adds to Indians’ sense of self-worth when they see ‘people like us’ in positions of international prominence. A Canadian provincial premier, Ujjal Dosanjh, several British Lords and lower-house parliamentarians, and even some members of the European Parliament hail from India and are no longer embarrassed to admit to their origins. One feisty former Canadian MP, Ruby Dhalla, is particularly popular in Indian political circles, which she frequents at least as often as her former ‘riding’.* They are welcomed in India as people who have achieved power abroad, which makes them all the more worthy of adulation here. And the role of Indians in their adopted countries’ politics goes beyond the handful who have achieved election to the many who stuff envelopes, run campaigns and especially raise funds for non-Indian politicians, which makes their views impossible to ignore. The contribution of well-heeled and politically active Indian-Americans to the shift in US policy from indifference to pro-Indianness in recent years simply cannot be overestimated.

  But the idea of NRIs as a resource for India goes beyond whatever influence the elected leaders among them can exercise. I haven’t even mentioned NRI investments in India—from the remittances of working-class Indians in West Asia that have transformed the Kerala countryside to the millions poured into cutting-edge high-tech businesses in Bangalore or Gurgaon by investors from Silicon Valley. The remittances have been lifesavers for India during the global recession, because they kept increasing even as FDI nosedived. While FDI plummeted to just $19 billion in 2011, NRI remittances went steadily up from $25 billion in 2006 to over $46 billion in 2008–09, the first year of the recession, to $55 billion in 2009–10 and $57 billion in 2010–11. The faith of Indian expatriates in India has kept their money flowing homeward; the NRIs have become, in effect, the National Reserve of India.

  But we shouldn’t get carried away—overseas Indians still invest a lower proportion of their resources in India than overseas Chinese do in China, and they complain vociferously about the non-tariff barriers occluding their entry into the Indian market. Encouraging them to do more—and giving them reasons and opportunities to do more—is certainly a worthwhile task for the Ministry for Overseas Indian Affairs in New Delhi. No doubt this will mean, in turn, putting up with new and repeated demands from NRIs. Expatriate extremism, a phenomenon I had anatomized in my book India: From Midnight to the Millennium, is now mercifully a rarity, especially with the eclipse of the Khalistan movement that had been financed by wealthy if misguided Sikhs in North America. But expatriate agitation for several worthwhile causes is entirely legitimate and surfaces quite audibly at the Pravasi gatherings. One issue is that of voting rights: India, shamefully, is one of the few democracies that denies absentee ballots to its own expatriate citizens, though they are now allowed the vote if they are willing to come home to cast it. Another is the perennial call for genuine dual citizenship, which the cynically misnamed Overseas Citizenship of India (OCI, essentially nothing more than a lifetime visa) most certainly is not. But so what? A government that seeks the allegiance, support and money of its diaspora should also be willing to be accountable to it. Hosting a forum once a year where the pravasis can make their views known seems to me a very small price to pay indeed.

  A larger question is one of the extent of India’s responsibility, if any, to the well-being of its diaspora in their new homelands. While the government has indeed stood up (somewhat ineffectually) for the rights of oppressed Indians in Fiji and acted (with somewhat better results) on the media outcry over violence directed against Indians in Australia, it has not consistently been able to defend the rights of its citizens or PIOs abroad. New Delhi’s chronic reluctance to interfere in the internal affairs of sovereign states is an inhibiting factor; so also is the tension, for instance, between needing to maintain good political and economic relations with a country and seeking to protect the welfare of Indian workers in it, which has hamstrung India’s ability to protect pravasis in places as far apart as Uganda, Saudi Arabia, Malaysia and Fiji. This leaves New Delhi in the somewhat paradoxical position of not making the problems of NRIs a foreign policy priority, while treating their successes as a national achievement and seeking to benefit from their resources and remittances.

  As this broad overview of what Germans might call India’s Weltanschauung suggests, India already bestrides the world in important ways, engages with it at several levels and has developed a stake in safeguarding and promoting interests that go beyond the strictly national. As it contemplates enhanced responsibilities across the globe in the twenty-first century, it fulfils one essential requirement: India is at home in the world.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  ‘Multi-Alignment’: Towards a ‘Grand Strategy’ for India in the Twenty-first Century

  When researching in 1977 the doctoral dissertation that became my first book, Reasons of State, I was told by a (then already retired) Indian diplomat that ‘Indian diplomacy is like the love-making of an elephant: it is conducted at a very high level, accompanied by much bellowing, and the results are not known for two years.’ Indian diplomacy has become somewhat sprightlier since those days, but the gentle indictment of a style of foreign policy-making that was widely considered to be long on rhetoric and short of hard-headed substance still echoes through the corridors of New Delhi’s South Block.

  At the time, I lamented the low correlation between foreign policy as conceived and articulated by decision-makers and national interests in security and geopolitical terms. This point was obviously a rather contentious one. It was presumptuous of me, in my early twenties, to decry the lack, as I saw it, of a strategic vision on the part of India’s policy-makers beyond the bromides of non-alignment. I wrote passionately about the failure to define a conception of the Indian national interest
in other than universalist-ideological terms—itself a manifestation, no doubt, of my academic over-reliance on public declarations and official statements, albeit supplemented by several astonishingly candid interviews (Mrs Gandhi’s government had just fallen in the elections of 1977 after her disastrous experiment with Emergency rule, and every one of her key advisers and foreign ministers was available and willing to talk freely, never expecting her to come back to power). India’s declaratory effulgences about non-alignment featured rather too many references to ‘peace’ and ‘friendship’ as cardinal motivations and attributes of foreign policy, which I argued were scarcely adequate substitutes for a clear conception of the nation’s specific goals in foreign policy, their realizability and the tasks to be performed in order to attain them. In Nehru’s time, I averred, the Sino-Indian war was the most dramatic, but not the only, demonstration of this failure; and yet just nine years later, India’s masterly handling of its foreign policy objectives in the 1971 Bangladesh crisis offered a convincing counternarrative.

  My argument was all the more sustainable because of the widely prevalent view of Nehru’s foreign policy as a value in itself, as (in one Indian scholar’s formulation) an ‘imperative’ not to be judged by the ‘mundane criteria of success’. Indeed, after 1962, success was an inappropriate criterion to apply to Nehru’s foreign policy. As a global stratagem, non-alignment might initially have gained India some freedom of manoeuvre between the superpowers and brought it a prestige and influence out of proportion to India’s true strength, but it did not serve Nehru well in his hour of crisis. No wonder non-aligned scruples were quietly jettisoned by his own daughter in 1971, when realpolitik, rather than woolly declarations of non-aligned solidarity, was needed and pursued, and India rushed willingly into the Soviet embrace as a shield against a possible Pakistani–Chinese alliance. Though New Delhi proceeded gently to distance itself from Moscow thereafter (including concluding defence deals with France, the United States and the United Kingdom in the 1980s), the lingering effects of that embrace remained apparent in Indian policies on Cambodia and Afghanistan, and it was only with the end of the Cold War in 1991 that India once again became truly non-aligned—at a time when there no longer were two powers to be non-aligned between.

  It should go without saying that every country needs a foreign policy that is linked to national interests concretely defined. To meet this test, the Indian government should have been able to develop and possess a view of the national interest in regional and international affairs, and to apply it in practice; the ‘national interest’, in this formulation, should be a concept transcending the mere enunciation of foreign policy principles. It is worthwhile to advocate peace and good neighbourliness as a national principle, for instance, but such advocacy becomes irrelevant if there is a belligerent army marching across one’s borders; national interests then demand capable military self-defence. This may seem self-evident, but the distinction has been blurred in less clear-cut situations over the years by the makers and articulators of India’s foreign policy. Indian diplomacy has often been seen by close observers as more concerned with principles than interests—a tendency that infects Indian negotiating strategies as well, making New Delhi less likely to compromise since principles are usually immutable while interests can be negotiable.

  Even India’s diplomatic style, it has been suggested, often privileges intellect over interest and process over outcome. Our diplomats combine brilliance, hard work and flair with a talent for winning debates that can sometimes be counterproductive. David Malone has noted that Indian diplomats’ ‘perceived need to outflank all potential or actual rivals and impress all comers sometimes leads Indian practitioners to monopolize attention through rhetorical brilliance and to spend as much time on impressing the gallery as on tending effectively to Indian interests. The cleverest person in the room may win many arguments, but still not win the game.’ The tendency to get carried away by the sheer momentum of diplomatic argument, he suggests, leads ‘Indian officials, when in international forums … to pursue outcomes or adopt positions that are contrary to the objectives of Indian foreign policy set at the political level.’ This has led a sympathetic observer, Edward Luce, to suggest that ‘India is rising in spite of its diplomacy.’ Such a view may be harsher than justified, but it does suggest that a gentler and more accommodative tone should be developed that accords better with the demands of the multilateral high table at which India expects to be seated.

  In defining the Indian national interest, there are fundamental domestic verities that foreign policy must either promote or at least not undermine: India’s liberal democracy; its religious, ethnic and cultural pluralism (a term I prefer to the more traditional Nehruvian ‘secularism’); and its overriding priority of pulling its people out of poverty and ensuring their economic well-being. These are as fundamental to our national interest as preserving an effective, well-trained and non-political military that will secure and protect our borders, as well as security forces that will deal with domestic sources of conflict, from misguided Maoists to secessionist insurgencies. If all of these elements and objectives constitute India’s core national interests, New Delhi must maintain the domestic structures and capacities to pursue them, as well as strive to ensure the shaping of a world order that permits, and ideally facilitates, their fulfilment.

  This requires, as Jawaharlal Nehru presciently noted half a century ago, that priority be given to success on the domestic front: ‘I do not pretend to say that India, as she is, can make a vital difference to world affairs,’ he said. ‘So long as we have not solved most of our own problems, our voice cannot carry the weight that it normally will and should.’ His words remain true fifty years later, though India’s recent economic successes have already given its voice more weight than it has possessed for some time, and this process should continue unless India slips backward drastically at home.

  India’s basic approach in international affairs goes back to the days of the Constituent Assembly: as the doyen of Indian strategic studies, the late K. Subrahmanyam, put it, India’s grand strategy during the second half of the twentieth century ‘involved a policy of non-alignment to deal with external security problems, the adoption of the Indian Constitution to address governance challenges, and a partly centrally planned development strategy to accelerate growth’. This was fine in the initial years, but was clearly inadequate as a grand strategy by 1991 and seems very much in need of updating in the second decade of the twenty-first century.

  It was against this background that India’s National Security Annual Review in 2010 unnecessarily averred that India was now the world’s fifth most powerful country, outranking traditional powers such as the United Kingdom, France and Germany. Citing the country’s population, military capabilities and economic growth, the Review, issued by the MEA, placed India behind only the United States, China, Japan and Russia in a ranking of global power. For a country still excessively focused on problems in its own neighbourhood, distracted (if not obsessed) with Pakistan and kept off balance by China, this seemed a somewhat far-fetched claim.

  The three elements mentioned—population, military capabilities and economic growth—are worth examining in turn. Certainly, India’s huge population could be a huge asset. India is a remarkably young country, with an average age of twenty-eight, and 65 per cent of its population under thirty-five. We could have a great demographic advantage in 540 million young people under twenty-five, which means we should have a dynamic, youthful and productive workforce for the next forty years when the rest of the world, including China, is ageing. But we also have 60 million child labourers, and 72 per cent of the children in our government schools drop out by the eighth standard. We have trained the world’s second largest pool of scientists and engineers, but 400 million of our compatriots are illiterate, and we also have more children who have not seen the inside of a school than any other country in the world does. We celebrate India’s IT triumphs, but information technol
ogy has employed a grand total of 5 million people in the last twenty years, while 10 million are entering the workforce each year and we don’t have jobs for all of them. Many of our urban youth rightly say with confidence that their future will be better than their parents’ past, but this will only happen across the board if we are able to grow our economy to be able to provide employment opportunities for them, and if we can educate and train them to take advantage of these opportunities. The alternative is already starkly visible: there are Maoist insurgencies violently disturbing the peace in 165 of India’s 602 districts, and these are largely made up of unemployed young men. In other words, if we don’t get it right (and we still have a long way to go both in education and in vocational training), our demographic dividend could even become a demographic disaster.

  India’s military capabilities are real and their quality has been demonstrated time and again both on the battlefield and in a large number of challenging United Nations peacekeeping operations. But whether in terms of structure, equipment and training the Indian military establishment could yet measure up to the European powers the Review says it has supplanted remains to be proven.

  Security in the conventional sense is one area where success or failure at defining and applying national interests becomes most apparent. India has never been a belligerent or expansionist power, and its rise is largely seen by the world as non-threatening; the flip side of that is that it is also seen in some quarters as congenitally pacific and non-assertive. Domestic arrangements reflect some of this passivity. In Chapter Nine, we examined the extent to which the MEA is prepared and resourced to guide a credible role for India on the world stage. But the Ministry of Defence (MoD) is no better equipped to engage other countries on international security issues. As Ashley Tellis has pointed out, 90 per cent of the MoD’s personnel is focused on acquisition and there is only one joint secretary entrusted with the task of handling global security cooperation. The resultant lack of capacity has been embarrassing: as Tellis tells it, a number of training exercises scheduled in recent years between the Indian and foreign militaries have had to be called off at the last moment since India simply could not get its act together. This has, inevitably, led to a serious loss of credibility for the country.