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

by Shashi Tharoor

  As K. Subrahmanyam observed, ‘India has lacked an ability to formulate future-oriented defence policies, managing only because of short-term measures, blunders by its adversaries, and force superiority in its favour.’ The structure of the armed forces and the nature of defence policy making, planning and training leave much to be desired; there is little coordination among the three services, and proposals to create either a chief of defence staff or a US-style position of chairman of a joint chiefs of staff committee have never been implemented. (It has been suggested that this is because the political class is wary of giving the military too much power, but if true, the country’s long record of military subordination to civilian authority makes that concern seem somewhat far-fetched.) There are both a national security council and national security advisory board, but neither can point to a stellar record in promoting policy coherence and strengthening strategic planning. The services lack serious intelligence capacity and world-class area studies expertise; even issues of nuclear policy and strategy do not bear a significant military stamp, partly a reflection of the strong civilian desire to keep the armed forces out of the nuclear area.

  It does not help that India’s defence bureaucracy is largely unprofessional, a result of the generalist culture that pervades the IAS. In most other countries, the civilian officials of the ministries of defence are security professionals with training and experience in strategic thinking and defence policy. In India, however, they are mostly IAS or Central Civil Services officers who have been assigned to the MoD after running districts or family planning programmes; as one bureaucrat sardonically told me, ‘They have been doing other things that have no relevance to defence, and then one day they are put in a place where they are supposed to be strategic thinkers and have to deal with officers of Indian armed forces, who are thorough professionals. How can you not expect a disconnect?’

  Few countries face quite the range and variety of security threats that India does—from the ever-present risk, however far-fetched, of nuclear war with Pakistan or China, with both of whom we have unresolved territorial disputes, to Maoist movements in 165 of our 602 districts, secessionist insurgency in the North-East, and terrorist bombs set off by Islamist militants in metropolitan markets. And yet we have not yet evolved a comprehensive national security strategy to cover this entire spectrum of threats. As a democracy, India needs to undertake a strategic defence review that brings in all elements of the security services, the public at large and elected representatives in Parliament, to produce a national security strategy. But such an exercise has not even been attempted.

  With the government not yet having formally approved the long-term integrated perspective plan (LTIPP 2007–22) formulated by the military’s headquarters integrated defence staff, there is little effort to align India’s defence expenditure and purchases with any systematic strategy to modernize and enhance India’s combat capacity. Instead, defence procurement—when it is not delayed by a political reluctance to make potentially controversial decisions involving large sums of money—is being undertaken through ad hoc annual procurement plans, in the absence of long-term policy. Whereas China spends 3.5 per cent of its GDP on defence and Pakistan officially spends 4.5 per cent (an estimate that omits counting US military aid and the vast sums allotted to intelligence and counterterrorism operations, which would take the figure well above 6 per cent of GDP), India’s defence budget clocks in at the very modest level of below 2 per cent of GDP. At these levels, any meaningful modernization that will substantially enhance India’s combat capabilities remains a chimera, and the money at the disposal of the military remains inadequate to upgrade and replace the ageing and obsolete weapons systems with which the Indian defence services, armed police and paramilitary forces are replete.

  The absence of a chief of defence staff or a permanent chairman of the joint chiefs—which means there is no single point of military advice to the government on defence strategy—is compounded by the lack of any tri-service integrated theatre commands in such vital emerging areas as the management of aerospace and cyber warfare. The same is true in the maritime arena, where there is a crying need to integrate Indian Ocean policy, naval development and deployment, coastal infrastructure and security, the coast guard and civilian shipping, all of which currently report to different masters and do little to coordinate with each other. Serious morale issues have also arisen over such issues as the welfare of ex-servicemen, whose campaign for ‘one rank-one pension’ has not met with a satisfactory response; the embarrassing continuing absence of a national war memorial to honour the many sacrifices of India’s military men and women; and the needless controversy over the date of birth of the army chief, who in 2012 even went to the Supreme Court against his own government and showed up the bureaucratic incompetence that afflicts even such basic military record-keeping.

  Among India’s most important strategic challenges is that relating to nuclear strategy. India has had to acquire its nuclear literacy the hard way: it is confronted on two of its borders by nuclear-armed states, China and Pakistan, with which it has fought several wars; both still maintain claims against Indian territory and both have a history of nuclear cooperation with each other. At the same time, India has been described by K. Subrahmanyam as ‘a reluctant nuclear power’. Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru were horrified by Hiroshima; both wanted India to strive for a world free of nuclear weaponry. But despite several Indian initiatives for nuclear disarmament, that goal proved a chimera, and India gradually came to the conclusion that as long as some states possessed nuclear weapons, India could not afford not to, especially once it became clear in the late 1970s that Pakistan was well on the way to acquiring nuclear weapons. India’s doctrine of no-first-use, and its principled opposition to nuclear proliferation, is consistent with its view that nuclear weapons are an abomination and their possession is intended only to deter. However, Pakistan’s refusal to sign on to a similar pledge means that the threat remains of Islamabad resorting to the use of nuclear weapons if it found itself emerging second best in a conventional conflict. This has undoubtedly inhibited India’s possible responses to terrorist acts emanating from Pakistan, for instance. The need to develop an assured second-strike capability is immense and vital. This should be allied to a significant maritime nuclear capacity and the possession of an effective missile defence system. It is by no means clear that all these are in place; instead it is widely believed that India has fallen seriously behind Pakistan in the race for nuclear credibility.

  The role of the Indian armed forces is principally to constitute a credible deterrent in itself; in K. Subrahmanyam’s words, ‘preventing wars from breaking out through appropriate weapons acquisitions, force deployment patterns, the development of infrastructure, military exercises, and defence diplomacy’. This is a far more demanding task than conducting routine peacetime operations would normally have been, because with unsettled borders on two sides, the security of the country lies in a credible conventional military capacity that can serve as a deterrent against any adventurism from a possible adversary across the borders. We can be proud of our armed forces, which have distinguished themselves in a number of conflict situations, but we still have a long way to go before we can boast of the kind of integrated and well-resourced defence structure that warrants the National Security Review’s claim of great-power status for India.

  As for economic growth, it is real and impressive. As the IMF predicted, India overtook Japan in 2012 in PPP terms to become the world’s third largest economy. (Japan’s GDP of $4.3 trillion did not grow in 2011 after its trifecta of earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster, whereas India’s $1.3 trillion GDP, which converts to $4.06 trillion in PPP, went up by at least 6.2 per cent.) In addition, India’s GDP growth in its Twelfth Five Year Plan (2012–17) is projected at 9 per cent, up from 8.2 per cent in the Eleventh Plan (2007–12). But these figures mask a number of genuine problems, from falling FDI inflows ($19 billion in the 2010–11 fiscal ye
ar, one-third the size of inward remittances), widespread corruption which exacts high social and political costs in addition to the obvious economic ones, and high inflation, especially as a result of rampaging fuel and food prices. India’s political environment has not proved conducive to fast-tracking the next generation of much-needed reforms, such as opening FDI in retail (floated and then ‘suspended’ by the government in the face of vociferous opposition, including from within its coalition’s own ranks) or reforming labour laws (which currently do more to protect the jobs of those who have them rather than encourage investment to create new jobs). For India to assert itself credibly as a global, and not merely an emerging, power will still require a longer track record of savvy international and domestic policy making, effective economic management and solid progress on the ground in infrastructure, especially roads, ports and power generation.

  Nonetheless, there is little doubt that India’s leadership since 1991, and particularly under Prime Minister Manmohan Singh since 2004, has shrewdly played its international cards well in the midst of the changing global environment. A foreign policy that ensures friendly relations with countries that are sources of investment, of technology, of energy or (potentially) of food security has been put in place, and a number of previously problematic relationships, from the United States to Israel, have been improved dramatically. Problems on India’s borders have been dealt with reasonably effectively and sources of serious trouble adroitly kept at bay.

  The question remains, however, of whether all this is taking place within the framework of a credible ‘grand strategy’ to replace the be-all and end-all carapace of non-alignment that had previously dominated India’s strategic approach to the world. To conceive of a grand strategy one needs a vision of the kind of world that could best secure and promote India’s national interests. Should India work, for instance, for a multi-polar world order, as repeatedly advocated by Russia and China? The Indian-American scholar Sumit Ganguly is sceptical: ‘Would a multi-polar world order, with a number of powerful states which are either indifferent to or implacably hostile toward India’s key national security interests,’ he asks, ‘be necessarily preferable to American dominance?’ The answer perhaps seems more obvious in a New Delhi allergic to any kind of foreign dominance than it does in Professor Ganguly’s Washington, but the question is a pertinent one.

  So is my earlier focus on the definition of the Indian national interest. This would require grappling, for instance, with the question of whether India sees itself firmly in the camp of liberal democracies besieged by Islamist terrorism and critical of Chinese authoritarianism, and led, for all intents and purposes, by the United States. In a posthumously published essay, K. Subrahmanyam argued:

  The real question about the future world order is whether it is to be democratic and pluralistic, or dominated by one-party oligarchies that prioritise social harmony over individual rights. If the US remains the world’s predominant power, and China is second, India will be the swing power. It will therefore have three options: partnering with the US and other pluralistic, secular and democratic countries; joining hands with China at the risk of betraying the values of its Constitution and freedom struggle; and remaining both politically and ideologically non-aligned, even if against its own ideals.

  He left no doubt about which choice he would make: ‘The emerging Indo-US partnership,’ he argued, ‘is not about containing China. It is about defending Indian values from the challenges of both one-party rule and jehadism, and realising a future in which poverty and illiteracy are alleviated.’

  This is by no means a unanimously held view in New Delhi: if anything, the Indian strategic community tends to the almost consensual position that, despite common social and political systems with other democracies, and the fact that it has usually been more secure when surrounded by elected democracies in its own region, India should not actively promote democracy around the world. The Indian aversion to preaching our own virtues to the world is a reasonable one, but India has in fact been actively engaged in democracy promotion, having been for many years the largest single donor to the United Nations’ Democracy Fund. But as always, India does not want to see itself pre-committed to any bloc, even one of democracies, for that would infringe upon its freedom of decision-making; New Delhi would prefer, as always, to judge each issue for itself, on a case-by-case basis. The old obsession with strategic autonomy remains. The question is how to make that autonomy a springboard rather than a straitjacket.

  A similar question now arises: how should New Delhi balance its energy needs and its political values in its dealings with, say, Myanmar or Iran, where one set of interests (the need for energy security) contends with another (the upholding of democratic values in the former case and the maintenance of partnerships with major allies like the United States, in the latter)? Should the essential internal priority of doing whatever it takes to eliminate acute poverty at home prevail over all other considerations?

  A sweeping ‘yes’ is in fact not enough to cover all possible situations, because a nation, by definition, has more than one way of placing itself in the world and more than one point of interface with other major powers. Even if it were to take a hard-headed realpolitik position on national self-interests as China does, and refuse to be swayed by democratic scruple when direct and tangible economic benefits are at stake, it still has to weigh the consequences of the choices it makes on other relationships—for example, deciding whether it is willing to antagonize the United States as the price to pay for maintaining energy supplies from Iran.

  At the same time, much of what we are in the process of accomplishing at home—to pull our people out of poverty and to develop our nation—enables us to contribute to a better world. This is of value in itself, and it is also in our fundamental national interest. A world that is peaceful and prosperous, where trade is freer and universally agreed principles are observed, and in which democracy, the coexistence of civilizations and respect for human rights flourish, is a world of opportunity for India and for Indians to thrive.

  If this century has, in the famous phrase, made the world safe for democracy, the next challenge is to make a world safe for diversity. It is in India’s interest to ensure that the world as a whole must reflect the idea that is already familiar to all Indians—that it shouldn’t matter what the colour of your skin is, the kind of food you eat, the sounds you make when you speak, the God you choose to worship (or not), so long as you want to play by the same rules as everybody else, and dream the same dreams. It is not essential in a democratic world to agree all the time, as long as we agree on the ground rules of how we will disagree. These are the global principles we must strive to uphold if we are to be able to continue to uphold them securely at home.

  Because, as I have argued, the distinction between domestic and international is less and less meaningful in today’s world, when we think of foreign policy we must also think of its domestic implications. The ultimate purpose of any country’s foreign policy is to promote the security and well-being of its own citizens. We want a world that gives us the conditions of peace and security that will permit us to grow and flourish, safe from foreign depredations but open to external opportunities.

  Whether global institutions adapt and revive will be determined by whether those in charge are capable of showing the necessary leadership. Right now many of us would suggest that there is a global governance deficit. Reversing it would require strong leadership in the international community by a number of powers, including the emerging ones. India is an obvious contender to provide some of that leadership.

  In March 2012, the authors of a report entitled ‘Nonalignment 2.0’ put it well when they argued that ‘India must remain true to its aspiration of creating a new and alternative universality …. India already has enormous legitimacy because of the ideological legacies its nationalist movement bequeathed to it. But this legitimacy, once frittered away, cannot be easily recovered. India should aim not just at
being powerful: it should set new standards for what the powerful must do.’

  This is a huge challenge, and one to which India must rise. An analogy from another field is not encouraging; many would argue that India has not acquitted itself well when given the chance to have a global impact in one domain—that of the sport of cricket, where India accounts for more than 80 per cent of the game’s revenues and perhaps 90 per cent of its viewership, giving it an impact on the sport that no country can rival. According to Lawrence Booth, the editor of the ‘cricketers’ bible’, the Wisden Cricket Almanack, writing in its 2012 edition:

  India have ended up with a special gift: the clout to shape an entire sport …. But too often their game appears driven by the self-interest of the few…. Other countries run the game along self-serving lines too; cricket’s boardrooms are not awash with altruism. But none wields [India’s] power, nor shares their responsibility. The disintegration of India’s feted batting line-up has coincided with the rise of a Twenty20-based nationalism, the growth of private marketeers and high-level conflicts of interest. It is a perfect storm. And the global game sits unsteadily in the eye. India, your sport needs you.

  Clearly, international opinion does not believe that, in its domination of world cricket, India has set new standards for what the powerful must do. Broadening the analogy to global geopolitics, one could well say: India, your world needs you.