The Post-American World: Release 2.0 (19 page)

In the end, government matters. Even India’s great success, its private companies, could not flourish without a well-regulated stock market and a financial system that has transparency, adjudication, and enforcement—all government functions. The booming telecommunications industry was created by intelligent government deregulation and reregulation. The Indian Institutes of Technology were created by the state. The private sector cannot solve India’s AIDS crisis or its rural education shortfalls or its environmental problems. Most Indians, particularly the poor, have only miserable interactions with their government. They find it inefficient or corrupt, and often both. That might be why anti-incumbent sentiment has been the strongest force in Indian elections over the last three decades: Indians keep throwing the bums out, in the hope that government will get better. (One notable exception was the 2009 general election, which returned Manmohan Singh and the Congress Party to power—a vote of confidence in that government’s policies.) And voters have a point. If India’s governance does not improve, the country will never fully achieve its potential.

This is perhaps the central paradox of India today. Its society is open, eager, and confident, ready to take on the world. But its state—its ruling class—is hesitant, cautious, and suspicious of the changing realities around it. Nowhere is this tension more obvious than in the realm of foreign policy, the increasingly large and important task of determining how India should fit into the new world.

Blind and Toothless

After winning its independence, India was eager to play a large role on the world stage. This ambition was inherited from Britain, which ran a great deal of its empire from New Delhi. It was from India that Britain administered Iraq in the decades after the First World War. It was Indian soldiers who carried out Britain’s imperial crusades in the Middle East and elsewhere. The India Office was a critical center of world power, the most important extension of the British Empire, and Indians watched and learned the great-power game from the superpower of the age.

India’s first prime minister, Nehru, was comfortable in that tradition. He had been educated like an English gentleman, at Harrow and Cambridge, traveled and read widely, and written extensively about world affairs. His grasp of history was extraordinary. During one of many spells in the prisons of British India, this time from 1930 to 1933, he wrote a series of letters to his daughter that outlined the entire sweep of human history, from 6000 b.c. to the present day, detailing the rise and fall of empires, explaining wars and revolutions, and profiling kings and democrats—all without any access to a library. In 1934, the letters were collected and released as a book,
Glimpses of World History
, to international acclaim. The
New York Times
described it as “one of the most remarkable books ever published.”

Not surprisingly, Nehru became the towering figure in Indian foreign policy. For his entire tenure as prime minister, from 1947 to 1964, he was his own foreign minister. One of India’s first foreign secretaries,
*
K. P. S. Menon, explains in his autobiography, “We had no precedents to fall back upon, because India had no foreign policy of her own until she became independent. We did not even have a section for historical research until I created one. . . . Our policy therefore necessarily rested on the intuition of one man, who was Foreign Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru.” This meant that India’s early foreign policy was driven by Nehru’s principles and prejudices, which were distinctive. Nehru was an idealist, even a moralist. He was for nonalignment and against the Cold War. His mentor, Mahatma Gandhi, was an unyielding pacifist. “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,” Gandhi used to say, “and soon the world will be blind and toothless.” The mahatma was revered in India almost like a god, and his strategy of nonviolence had brought down an empire. Like many of his followers, Nehru was determined to chart a new course in international affairs that lived up to those ideals.

Nehru rooted India’s foreign policy in abstract ideas rather than a strategic conception of national interests. He disdained alliances, pacts, and treaties, seeing them as part of the old rules of realpolitik, and was uninterested in military matters. He asked his friend Lord Mountbatten, the last British viceroy (who briefly served as India’s first head of state), to organize the defense bureaucracy and intervened only to resist any recommendation that would give the uniformed military too much power, which reminded Nehru too much of Britain’s imperial structure. When Mountbatten suggested that there be a powerful chief of defense staff, Nehru turned down the recommendation, since he wanted to have a civilian minister as the unrivaled boss. A week into his new government, he walked over to the defense ministry and was furious to find military officers working there (as they do in every defense ministry in the world). Since then, all armed service personnel who work in New Delhi’s “South Block” wear civilian clothes. For much of Nehru’s tenure, his defense minister was a close political confidant, V. K. Krishna Menon, who was even less interested in military matters, much preferring long-winded ideological combat in parliament to strategic planning.

Indian foreign policy in its early decades had an airy quality, full of rhetoric about peace and goodwill. Many Western observers believed these pieties to be a smoke screen behind which the nation was cannily pursuing its interests. But sometimes what you see is what you get. In many of his dealings, Nehru tended to put hope above calculation.
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When he was warned that Communist China would probably seek to annex Tibet, for example, he doubted it, arguing that it would be a foolish and impractical adventure. And even after Beijing did annex Tibet, in 1951, Nehru would not reassess the nature of Chinese interests along India’s northern border. Rather than negotiate the disputed boundary with China, he announced the Indian position unilaterally, convinced of its rightness. And so he was shattered when China invaded India in 1962, settling the dispute decisively in its favor. “We were getting out of touch with reality in the modern world and we were living in an artificial atmosphere of our creation,” Nehru said in a national address. He was never the same again, and two years later died in office.

Although the rhetoric often remained sanctimonious, India’s policies have become more realistic over the years. Ironically, they were especially tough-minded and shrewd during the reign of Nehru’s daughter, Indira Gandhi. There was a quiet maturation of the country’s foreign policy elite. And yet New Delhi was still not able to play a larger role in the world. Nehru and Indira Gandhi were international figures, but India operated under severe constraints. Conflict in the neighborhood—with Pakistan, China, Sri Lanka—kept it tied down and limited in its scope. In the Cold War, it ended up loosely allied with the Soviet Union and thus on the losing side of that long struggle. Finally and crucially, India’s economic performance went from bad to worse, which placed deep limits on its resources, attractiveness, stature, and influence.

As the scholar C. Raja Mohan has pointed out, over the last decade, most of these conditions changed.
⁷
The Cold War ended, India began booming, and relations with its neighbors—from China to Pakistan to tiny Bhutan—improved markedly. The result is that India has begun to play a much larger role in the world. It is poised to become a great power at last. And at the center of its new role is a much closer relationship with the United States of America.

The Eagle and the Cow

Most Americans would probably be surprised to learn that India is, by at least one measure, the most pro-American country in the world. The Pew Global Attitudes Survey released in June 2005 asked people in sixteen countries whether they had a favorable impression of the United States. A stunning 71 percent of Indians said yes. Only Americans had a more favorable view of America (83 percent). The numbers are somewhat lower in more recent surveys, but the basic finding remains true: Indians are extremely comfortable with and well disposed toward America.

One reason for this may be that for decades India’s government tried to force anti-Americanism down its people’s throats. (When explaining away India’s miseries in the 1970s, politicians spoke so often of the “hidden hand”—by which they meant the CIA or American interference generally—that the cartoonist R. K. Laxman took to drawing an actual hand descending to cause all kinds of havoc.) But more important is the fact that Indians understand America. It is a noisy, open society with a chaotic democratic system, like theirs. Its capitalism looks distinctly like America’s free-for-all. Many urban Indians are familiar with America, speak its language, and actually know someone who lives there, possibly even a relative.

The Indian American community has been a bridge between the two cultures. The term often used to describe Indians leaving their country is “brain drain.” But it has been more like brain gain, for both sides. Indians abroad have played a crucial role in opening up the mother country. They return to India with money, investment ideas, global standards, and, most important, a sense that Indians can achieve anything. An Indian parliamentarian once famously asked the then prime minister Indira Gandhi, “Why is it that Indians seem to succeed everywhere except in their own country?” Stories of Indians scaling the highest peaks in America have generated pride and emulation in India. Americans, for their part, have more readily embraced India because they have had a positive experience with Indians in America.

If Indians understand America, Americans understand India. They are puzzled and disturbed by impenetrable decision-making elites like the Chinese Politburo or the Iranian Council of Guardians. But a quarrelsome democracy that keeps moving backward, forward, and sideways—that they understand. During negotiations on nuclear issues, Americans watched what was going on in New Delhi—people opposed to the deal leaking negative stories from inside the government, political adversaries using the issue to score points on unrelated matters—and found it all very familiar. Similar things happen every day in Washington.

Most countries have relationships that are almost exclusively between governments. Think of the links between the United States and Saudi Arabia, which exist almost solely among a few dozen high officials. But sometimes bonds develop not merely between states but also between societies. The United States has developed relationships that are much more than just strategic in two other cases: with Britain and later with Israel. In both, the ties were broad and deep, going well beyond government officials and diplomatic negotiations. The two countries knew each other and understood each other—and, as a result, became natural and almost permanent partners.

Such a relationship between the United States and India is, on some level, almost inevitable. Whether or not the two states sign new treaties, the two
societies
are becoming increasingly intertwined. A common language, a familiar worldview, and a growing fascination with each other are bringing together businessmen, nongovernmental activists, and writers. This doesn’t mean that the United States and India will agree on every policy issue. After all, Roosevelt and Churchill disagreed about several issues during their close wartime alliance, most notably India’s independence, and America broke with Britain over the Suez crisis in 1956. Ronald Reagan, a staunch supporter of Israel, condemned its invasion of Lebanon in 1978. Washington and New Delhi are big powers with complex foreign commitments and concerns. They have different interests and thus will inevitably have disputes over policy. Also, unlike Britain and America, they have different outlooks on the world. Indian history, religion, and culture will pull it away from a purely American view of the world.

The Hindu Worldview

Despite a growing sense of competition, India is actually moving closer to China in a certain respect, one that relates to the two countries’ entries onto the global stage. India has moved away from the self-righteousness of the Nehru era as well as the combativeness of Indira Gandhi’s years. It is instead making development its overriding national priority, informing its foreign affairs as well as its domestic policies. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has repeatedly articulated a goal for Indian foreign policy—peace and stability to allow for development—that sounds similar to the one articulated in Beijing. Indian politicians have become much more aware than ever before of the deep challenges of developing a vast society—especially a democratic one where domestic pressures are felt quickly and deeply—and so are focusing almost entirely on matters internal. External affairs are seen as a way to help with these paramount concerns. This tension—a country that is a world power and at the same time very poor—will tend to limit India’s activism abroad. It will especially mean that India will not want to be seen as actively involved in a balancing strategy against China, which is becoming its chief trading partner.

There is also Indian culture, which has its own fundamental perspective and outlook on the world. Hindus, like Confucians, don’t believe in God. They believe in
hundreds of thousands
of them. Every sect and subsect of Hinduism worships its own God, Goddess, or holy creature. Every family forges its own distinct version of Hinduism. You can pay your respects to some beliefs and not to others. You can believe in none at all. You can be a vegetarian or eat meat. You can pray or not pray. None of these choices determines whether you are a Hindu. There is no heresy or apostasy, because there is no core set of beliefs, no doctrine, and no commandments. Nothing is required, nothing is forbidden.