Pax Indica: India and the World of the Twenty-first Century (67 page)

Indeed India is coming of international prominence at a time when the world is moving, slowly but inexorably, into a post-superpower age. The days of the Cold War, when two hegemonic behemoths developed the capacity to destroy the world several times over, and flexed their muscles against each other by changing regimes in client states and fighting wars half a world away from their own borders, are now truly behind us. Instead we are witnessing a world of many rising (and some risen) powers, of various sizes and strengths but each with some significant capacity in its own region, each strong enough not to be pushed around by a hegemon, but not strong enough to become a hegemon itself. They coexist and cooperate with each other in a series of networked relationships, including bilateral and plurilateral strategic partnerships that often overlap with each other, rather than in fixed alliances or binary either/or antagonisms. The same is true of the great economic divide between developed and developing countries, a divide which is gradually dissolving; on many issues, India has more in common with countries of the North than of the global South for which it has so long been a spokesman. Neither in geopolitics nor in economics is the world locked into the kinds of permanent and immutable coalitions of interest that characterized the Cold War.

The new networked world welcomes every nation; it has little room for the domination of any superpower. (Mohamed Nasheed, the deposed president of the Maldives, said in a wonderful documentary about global warming and his efforts to save his country’s shorelines: ‘You cannot bully us. We are too small; you
will
be seen as a bully’!) We live in a more equal era. Relationships are contingent and overlap with others; friends and allies in one cause might be irrelevant to another (or even on opposite sides). The networked world is a more fluid place. Countries use such networks to promote common interests, to manage common issues rather than impose outcomes, and provide a common response to the challenges and opportunities they face. Some networks would be
principally economic in their orientation, some geopolitical, some issue specific. Contemporary examples of such networks range from the IORARC to the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group and from the BASIC negotiating alliance on climate change to the membership of the G20. Many more such networked alliances are clearly on the anvil (or, more appropriately, in the diplomatic Petri dish) of global cooperation.

In such a world, I once suggested, India would move beyond non-alignment to what I dubbed ‘multi-alignment’. This would be a world in which India would belong to, and play a prominent role in, both the United Nations and the G20; both the Non-Aligned Movement (reflecting its 200 years of colonial oppression) and the Community of Democracies (reflecting its sixty-five years of democratic development); both the G77 (the massive gathering of over 120 developing countries) and smaller organizations like IOR-ARC (as argued in
Chapter Four
); both SAARC and the Commonwealth; both RIC (Russia–India– China) and BRICS (adding Brazil and South Africa); as well as both IBSA (the South–South alliance of India, Brazil and South Africa) and BASIC (the partnership of Brazil, South Africa, India and China on climate change issues which emerged during the Copenhagen talks). India is the one country that is a member of them all, and not merely because its name begins with that indispensable element for all acronyms, a vowel!

‘Multi-alignment’, it is true, is at one level an amoral strategy: it would see India making common cause with liberal democracies when it suited India to do so, and dissenting from them when (as on Myanmar, Iran and on certain aspects of the Arab Spring) it was expedient for India to preserve relationships that the other democracies could afford to jettison. It is also a promiscuous strategy, since it exempts no country from its embrace; China, a potential adversary with which we have a long-standing frontier dispute that occasionally erupts into rhetorical unpleasantness, nonetheless is a crucial partner in several of these configurations. It is a strategy of making and running shifting coalitions of interests, which will require some skilful management of complicated relationships and opportunities—in policy environments that may themselves be unpredictable. That should not be excessively difficult for governments in New Delhi which, for more than two decades, have had to spend their time and energy on managing coalitions in Indian domestic politics.

Multi-alignment also constitutes an effective response to the new transnational challenges of the twenty-first century, to which neither autonomy nor alliance offer adequate answers in themselves. An obvious example is dealing with terrorism, which requires diplomatic and intelligence cooperation from a variety of countries facing comparable threats; but also shoring up failing states, combating piracy, controlling nuclear proliferation and battling organized crime. In addition to such issues there are the unconventional threats to the peace that also cross all borders (pandemics, for instance), and the need to preserve the global commons—keeping open the sea lanes of communication across international waters so that trade routes and energy supplies are safeguarded, ensuring maritime security from the Horn of Africa to the Straits of Malacca, protecting cyberspace from the depredations of hostile forces including non-governmental ones, and the management of outer space, which could increasingly become a new theatre for global competition.

Strategic autonomy is all very well, but it cannot be the be-all and end-all of India’s attitude to the world. Our sovereignty is no longer under threat; there is no power on earth that can presume to dictate to India on any international issue. It is time for us to build on our much-vaunted independence of thought and action by treating our strategic autonomy as a platform from which to soar, not a ball and chain around our ankles. As a major power we can and must play a role in helping shape the global order. The international system of the twenty-first century, with its networked partnerships, will need to renegotiate its rules of the road; India is well qualified, along with others, to help write those rules and define the norms that will guide tomorrow’s world. Rather than confining itself to being a subject of others’ rule-making, or even a resister of others’ attempts, it is in India’s interests (and within India’s current and future capacity) to take the initiative to shape the evolution of these norms as well as to have a voice in the situations within which they are applied. That is what I have called Pax Indica: not global or regional domination along the lines of a Pax Romana or a Pax Britannica (in which military victory by the Romans and the Britons, respectively, ensured that peace prevailed because potential adversaries were too exhausted to resist), but a ‘Pax’ for the twenty-first century, a peace system which will help
promote and maintain a period of cooperative coexistence in its region and across the world.

This ‘Pax Indica’ must be built and sustained on the principles and norms that India holds dear at home and abroad. It would see a democratic and pluralist India working for a world order that sustains and defends democracy and pluralism; a ‘multi-aligned’ India serving as one of the principal fulcrums of a networked globe, in which countries pursue different interests in different configurations; an India free of poverty, growing and engaging in trade and investment in and with the rest of the world, and upholding arrangements that make such trade and investment relationships possible; an increasingly prosperous India, prepared to share the benefits of its prosperity with other nations on its periphery and its extended (land and maritime) neighbourhood; and a technologically savvy India, setting its sights on, and lending its expertise to, the management of outer space and cyberspace in the common interests of humanity.

The title of this chapter suggests that it offers thoughts ‘towards’ a grand strategy for India. My friend Keerthik Sasidharan asked me, ‘When the state is weak, or at best a wobbly or “jelly” state, can it project a “grand” strategy?’ I believe the Indian state is not as weak as its critics imply, and that the outlines of a grand strategy have been implicit in its approach to the world in recent years. The present volume has attempted to pull some of these strands together into a credible tapestry, but it is still a work in progress, with many weaves yet to emerge from the loom. Perhaps one of the readers of this book will take the argument further—if not today, then in twenty years, when many of the trends discerned in this book will have fructified, or withered on the vine.

In keeping with Nehru’s original vision, the ‘Pax Indica’ I have outlined would not even principally be about India at all, but about India’s sense of responsibility to the world of which it is such a crucial part—and whose destiny it has earned the right to help shape.

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Internet research
: Numerous articles, blogs and essays by Brahma Chellaney, Sumit Ganguly, Salman Haider, Amitabh Mattoo, A.G. Noorani, Nitin Pai, Kanwal Sibal, T.P. Sreenivasan, K. Subrahmanyam and Ashley Tellis. Statements and speeches by Indian foreign policy makers, from
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This book is a work of reflection, not scholarship, though it draws upon a variety of published and unpublished sources. As a harried member of Parliament attending to his own research and writing amid a number of other preoccupations, I consciously cast this work as an extended analytical essay, devoid of footnotes or reference material. However, most of the attributed quotations in this volume can be found in one or another of the handful of books and other sources cited in the Bibliography.

Though a number of friends inside and outside the diplomatic profession have contributed (sometimes unknowingly) to my appreciation of the issues analysed in this book, I would like to single out for gratitude my former MEA colleague Sandeep Chakravorty and my occasional op-ed collaborator Keerthik Sasidharan, who ploughed through the entire manuscript, for their invaluable comments and insights. To them, to my son Kanishk Tharoor and to my friends Virat Bhatia and Arun Kumar, who offered comments on specific portions of the book, as well as to my editors Jaishree Ram Mohan and Udayan Mitra of Penguin, I am most grateful. Nonetheless I remain solely responsible for the contents, arguments and conclusions of
Pax Indica
, and responsibility for any sins of omission or commission is mine alone.

Portions of the book have appeared, in different form, as articles or columns in the
Asian Age/Deccan Chronicle
,
Times of India
,
Guardian, The Hindu
,
Mail Today
,
Fortune India
, the journal
Ethics and International Affairs
and in my internationally syndicated column (issued through Project Syndicate), all of which publications are gratefully acknowledged.

It also bears stressing that though I am a member of the Indian National Congress party and a Member of Parliament, the opinions expressed in this book are strictly personal and engage neither the
Government of India, nor the political party of which I am a member, nor any other institution with which I may happen to be associated.

My wife Sunanda rightly forced me to devote the time necessary to complete the book when its writing, beset by too many other distractions, had been dragging on for far too long. For her determination, tenacity and love, I have no words that are adequate. I promised her that the book would be in her hands in time for her birthday, and I present it to her with gratitude as a humble offering—and a promise fulfilled.