Reimagining India: Unlocking the Potential of Asia’s Next Superpower (43 page)
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Authors: McKinsey,Company Inc.
The leaders of India’s Olympic community must make some tough, unemotional choices about where to invest scarce resources. Archery, shooting, wrestling, boxing, track and field, and badminton are good starting points since there are more medals at stake in these disciplines, and India has a promising pool of talent. Athletes, coaches, officials, the government, and private benefactors all need to unite behind these priorities.
More broadly, India must develop a more supportive national attitude toward sports. The media—electronic and print alike—should pay greater heed to domestic sporting events. Outside of cricket, which has not been an Olympic sport since Britain defeated France in the Paris games of 1900, there has been a drastic decline in the coverage of Indian athletes, with even national championships drawing precious little attention. International figures from football, tennis, golf, and motorsports are household names across the country, while those Indians taking their first steps in competitive sport struggle to get even a mention in the media. Only after an athlete has become internationally known can he or she break through at home.
The government, at the central, state, and local levels, also needs to make sports a crucial part of the school and college curriculum. Interscholastic competitions need to become part of TV schedules. National
sports federations need to take college and university programs under their wing and reenergize them.
Throughout all these changes, we must keep the athletes at the forefront of our minds. Everything we do must be designed to reflect their interests and to encourage widespread participation in competitive sports. That’s how we’ll develop one of the biggest, best talent pools in the world. That’s how India will strike Olympic gold.
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Incredible India, Credible States
Bill Emmott
Bill Emmott is the author of
Rivals: How the Power Struggle Between China, India, and Japan Will Shape Our Next Decade.
He was editor of the
Economist
from 1993 to 2006
.
With independence from Britain still a few months away, one of the early foreign-policy acts of India’s first prime minister–designate, Jawaharlal Nehru, was to convene in March 1947 a big “Asian Relations Conference” in Delhi. It was a momentous gathering, bringing together official delegates from across the continent, ranging from the Arab world in West Asia to the very different far eastern and southern reaches of the shortly to be liberated continent. The implication of the event seemed clear: With the end of imperialism would come a new diplomacy, uniting the countries of Asia in a spirit of peace and prosperity. Free, democratic, and developing India would be at the heart of those diplomatic connections. But it never happened.
The dream today of a new, reimagined Indian place in the world over the next twenty or thirty years ought to be that Nehru’s original vision will at last be implemented. Not, for sure, in the form of regional hegemony, but rather with India forging for itself a central role in keeping Asia an open, peaceful, prosperous continental space in which nations agree to follow rules and pursue cooperation rather than unilateralism or conflict.
India’s traditions of democracy and the rule of law, its sheer size in economic and demographic terms, and its geographical location all combine to give it a natural potential role as one of Asia’s leaders. It could
serve as a vital bridge to West Asia—Iran and the Gulf—while also balancing the vast emerging power of China. And from such a role in Asia, as a leading preserver of regional security, stability, and economic progress, India would inevitably emerge as a global leader. After all, Asia is already half of the world’s population and by midcentury may well be producing half of the world’s economic output.
That dream can begin, as Nehru’s did, in a mood of idealism. But the best argument for translating Nehru’s dream into reality is that doing so is overwhelmingly in India’s national interest. The reasons involve both opportunity and danger.
Opportunity arises from the growth of India’s economy and the expanding role of trade and foreign investment in the country’s development. Just like China during the 1990s and the first decade of the twenty-first century, India over the next few decades will rapidly extend its sphere of economic influence, building an interconnected array of international interests both to foster and to protect. As with China, those interests are likely to be global, given India’s size, complexity, and sophistication, but geography, culture, regional economic dynamism, and cost advantages will assure that India’s deepest interests can and will be local to Asia.
Danger arises precisely because in this open, global economy, India is not the only country whose interests and exposure are expanding. So are those of China and of many smaller powers within the region. Moreover, India is fifteen to twenty years behind China in this process and is the weaker nation in economic and military terms.
In Asia, three great regional powers—India, China, and Japan—now have overlapping and often competing interests, with the United States standing alongside as a global power with extraordinarily strong regional interests and presence. As was demonstrated in Europe during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, competition among regional powers can help foster economic progress and technological innovation, but it can also foster military and strategic conflict.
It is tempting to believe that the desire for economic progress will forever trump military and strategic concerns. After the end of the wars surrounding Vietnam in the 1970s, peace across East Asia coincided
with regional prosperity—virtually everywhere except, unfortunately, the borders of India itself. But faith that this broader Asian peace will always and inevitably prevail has been destroyed by the friction during 2012 and 2013 between Asia’s two largest economic powers, China and Japan, over a group of small islands in the East China Sea, known as the Diaoyu to the Chinese, who claim them, and the Senkakus to the Japanese, who have sovereignty over them.
These barren and seemingly irrelevant rocks have become a foreign policy flashpoint both for strategic reasons (they potentially affect the control of important sea-lanes and access to the Chinese coast) and for reasons of national pride and memory. With military radars being locked on one another, and rival ships and aircraft patrolling the area, the chance of actual conflict, whether accidental or deliberate, cannot be discounted. The two countries are jeopardizing one of the world’s most critical trade relationships because each fears looking weak before the other.
India has its own equivalents to this Sino-Japanese dispute, places of long-standing territorial disagreement of great strategic and historic significance. There are many flashpoints in the Himalayas, where India disputes borders with China in Kashmir and the Tibetan region of Aksai Chin, while China disputes Indian sovereignty over the vast northeastern state of Arunachal Pradesh.
India also has wider concerns over the actual and potential Chinese military presence in the Indian Ocean, especially thanks to Chinese aid for the building of new harbors in Pakistan and Sri Lanka that could become naval bases in the future. Indian defense strategists see China as laying a “string of pearls” around the subcontinent with which to encircle or contain India.
Far better for India than years of grinding, attritional competition with China in Asia, punctuated by friction over these territorial disputes, would be the development of a framework of regional cooperation—
one that deters all sides from aggression and provides incentives for the peaceful resolution of conflicts. The seeds of such a framework were sown in 2005 with the establishment of the curiously named “East Asia Summit”—curious because key participants included the non–East Asian countries of Australia, India, New Zealand, and the Southeast Asian nations, along with China, Japan, and South Korea. In 2011, summit membership was expanded to include the United States and Russia. So far, the group’s meetings have proved little more than photo opportunities. If the forum is to develop into a serious regional body—one commensurate with Nehru’s 1947 vision—two things must change.
First, China must be persuaded that consensual, multilateral decision-making and dispute resolution are more in its interest than dealing with issues bilaterally, or simply between China and other regional blocs such as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. For now, however, China’s leaders view the region very differently. They believe their nation’s rising economic power makes it a natural economic hegemon, a hub country for flows of trade and investment. They reckon that rising economic influence will provide political leverage over their regional neighbors, whose only alternatives for counterbalancing are unappealing: the outsider the United States, or the weakening, constitutionally constrained force of Japan.
The second requirement for the East Asian Summit to become a meaningful forum is that India emerge fully as the third balancing power of Asia—one with a much bigger Asian presence than it has today, and a much clearer policy of its own seeking such collective decision-making. The growth of India’s economy has made that plausible. Even so, India’s trade and investment connections to the rest of Asia remain relatively weak. Most of all, though, India’s foreign policy, both political and economic, has not shifted toward Asia or collective Asian solutions in a convincing or coherent way.
Such a policy wasn’t quite Nehru’s 1947 vision, of course. It was too soon after the Second World War for that, and independence for both India and other Asian nations was too new. Not even the European Coal and Steel Community had been founded by then, let alone the European
Union, so there was also no comparable supranational body elsewhere to take inspiration from—although, at the moment of shedding European colonialism, he might anyway have been disinclined to follow a European model. But he wanted unity, and did call for Asian countries to end their isolation from one another and meet together to carry out common tasks.
Nehru’s 1947 vision never had a chance. Like many postwar dreams, it was thwarted by the onset of the cold war and, more locally, by the Communist takeover in China in 1949. Despite paying initial lip service to their mutual interests as liberating leaders of great civilizations, Mao Zedong saw India and Nehru as standing in the way of China’s strategic interests: its desire to achieve sovereignty over Tibet and to secure its western frontiers in the Himalayas. The Chinese seizure of Tibet in 1949, the escape into exile in India of the Tibetan spiritual and political leader, the Dalai Lama, in 1959, and then a short border war with India over the Himalayan territory of Aksai Chin in 1962 all proved that any notions of an India-China rapprochement as coleaders of a new, liberated Asia were entirely fanciful.
India’s domestic policy choices further complicated Nehru’s Pan-Asian outlook. India’s decision to close its borders to most foreign investment and trade, adopting an import substitution model rather than the Japanese-style export-led development, guaranteed the country’s isolation. So, too, did India’s often bitter relationships with its South Asian neighbors Pakistan, Ceylon, Bangladesh, and even Nepal, Bhutan, and Burma.
Since the early 1990s, India has, of course, abandoned that isolationist, protectionist economic policy, becoming far more open to trade and foreign direct investment. The hope for 2030 must be that India will by then match China in its willingness to receive foreign capital and technology and to maintain tariff levels close to those of European countries. India already is on a path toward such an outcome. If it can stay the course, India will greatly increase its attractiveness to other Asian countries as a trading, cultural, and diplomatic partner. New Delhi’s foreign policy, on the other hand, has not yet shifted decisively toward Asia and toward collective Asian solutions. India’s main security preoccupations
remain domestic: preserving stability at home, guarding against internal terrorism, and girding for the risk of renewed conflict with Pakistan. This insularity has been exacerbated by Delhi’s unwillingness to expand its meager diplomatic corps, which remains roughly the size of that of Singapore.
Alas, there remains one region with which India’s relations have not improved and to which it is not especially attractive: that is the rest of South Asia. India’s poor relationships with its neighbors are, together, the biggest obstacle to its playing a bigger role in Asia.