The Asian side of the world - II
|Part One. Regional dynamics and globalization
Does India have a strategic doctrine for the 21st century?
Texte intégral
1July 2012
2In this period of international economic crises and uncertainty, India’s place among the emerging powers is not in question, in spite of some recent blips in its growth rate and the slow pace of its economic reforms. When some Indian leaders were recently asked about the central tenets of an Indian strategic doctrine in the economic, geostrategic and military spheres, they replied that India preferred to lead by example rather than outlining some grand ideological vision of the world with universalist pretensions, as has often been done by the great powers in history.
- 1 Menon, R., Rajiv, K., 2010; Khilnani et al., 2012
3Two recent publications1, however, bring together some well-known experts from the think-tank milieu in India, and several of them are sufficiently close to the corridors of power in New Delhi for this publication to merit close attention. It presents what could be blueprints or alternative scenarios for an overall Indian strategic doctrine in the coming decades to buttress India’s search for power status. The major questions that are being asked are: what economic model should India choose, an increasingly liberal one or a mixed and regulated economy? What should the principal elements of economic and political relationships with developed countries be, especially the US and the European Union? What about neighbours, in particular Pakistan and China, with whom India has a long history of troubled relationships and which led India to develop nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles? What relationships should be developed with East and South-East Asia, referred to in India nowadays as the “Look East Policy’? And finally and not least, what about her relationships with the Middle East and with Central Asia, vital both for India’s energy security and also for her complex political and cultural relationships with the great Islamic nations?
4We won’t try to review all these questions here, nor will we take a precise position on India’s strategic choices. We will just try to present the Indian perception of opportunities and constraints with respect to the outside world since its independence and to highlight the fact that Indian democracy–and the practice of its democracy–link its internal political equilibrium and choices to questions of international relations. This will be an important element for understanding India’s current and future evolution.
5The choices of the years under Nehru (1950-1963) on questions of international economic and political relations were marked by two important elements. Firstly, the experience of British colonial and imperial domination led India’s political leaders, in particular Nehru, to reject capitalism as a model of development and to opt instead for a mixed economy dominated by a powerful economic role of the State. Second, the idea of nonalignment was developed as a strategic doctrine, which meant that India (and many other decolonized countries at that time) decided to maintain an equal political and ideological distance from the two major blocs of the Cold War. However, in the 1960s and 1970s, conflicts with China and Pakistan led India to make a strategic partnership with the Soviet Union, particularly in view of a marked, fairly realistic perception that the US had “tilted” towards Pakistan and was looking for a closer relationship with China, which would be to India’s detriment. This perception led to persistent anti-Americanism within the Indian political establishment during the years of Indira Gandhi’s leadership and the crisis over Bangladesh, in spite of the fascination of India’s middle classes with the prospect of migrating to the US. The world was perceived as a constraint, as a hostile environment, and the Indian attitude was reactive rather than proactive in the modern language of international relations.
6This perception was also seen in economic policy, where the choice of model of industrialization was based on the idea that India did not have the capacity to influence the international economic scenario in her favour, particularly as regards exports, and hence had to substitute her imports by a national production system. This led to intellectual closure on the idea of conceiving international economic exchanges as a motor of development–an idea that India finally accepted in 1991, but once again as a reaction to the most important balance of payments crisis of her existence. This opening up was piloted by Prime Minister Narasimha Rao, whose Finance Minister was Dr Manmohan Singh, India’s current Prime Minister. They finally succeeded in getting the Congress Party to accept, for the first time in its history, the idea of an open economic model, orienting India towards greater integration into the world economy. This change was accompanied, probably for the first time, by both ideological and psychological evolution of India’s elite and middle classes, marked by a willingness to compete with the developed countries on their own ground, in the economic sphere, and also to emulate the success of China and more generally the Asian dragons and tigers, through managed insertion into the world economy.
7With the choice of a more open economic model, the other major change in India’s strategic choices was undoubtedly its radically changed, closer relationship with the US. The new US-India partnership was, from India’s point of view, a necessity in order to access US technology and US markets, and was a response to pressure from the Indian diaspora in the US, which was very strong not only in American universities and companies but also increasingly in the US administration. Above all, the partnership was necessary for the influence America brought to bear in getting India out of its nuclear isolation, which prevented her from developing its nuclear energy sector. This new relationship also has important implications for India’s internal political equilibrium. Left-wing political parties and intellectuals in India and also certain regional political parties have traditionally been anti-American. India’s capacity to develop its relationship with the US further will depend on the electoral weight and the media impact of these parties. Often, the regional parties lack a strategic vision of the world, have populist leaders and give important blocking power in the Indian federal system to the states of India that they control. These are oft-cited reasons for the policy blockages in India, which exasperate both the Indian and the international business milieu. The stoppage of the policy for opening up India’s retail trade to international investment and joint ventures, in spite of the approval of the Indian Government, is the latest episode on the economic front.
8India also often strongly opposes American objectives and interests (and also sometimes those of the European Union) in international fora, to defend its legitimate commercial or strategic interests. The conflict with the US about Iran, a country that is important for India’s energy security and for its cultural and political relationships in West Asia, is an important example. These divergences of interest will certainly remain major bones of contention not only between India and the developed countries in the years to come but also more generally between the emerging countries and the developed countries, as demonstrated by the failure of the Doha round of trade negotiations and the post-Kyoto talks at Rio de Janeiro. More cooperation between developed and emerging nations in certain areas does not necessarily imply that the world is becoming less conflict-ridden; on the contrary, the strains on natural and energy resources, the protests and political conflict over unequal development both within and between nations, and the confrontations between different ideological visions of the world remain focal points of international relations.
9To conclude, India is slowly but surely becoming more confident about her ability to influence the world but has a distinct preference for the methods of “soft power’; negotiating sentences and commas in international treaties, diplomatic dialogue among senior bureaucrats, industrialists and academics, rather than grand policy declarations or universal principles. Is this approach likely to change over the coming decades? Maybe, but with a variable geometry.
Bibliographie
Bibliographical indications
Menon, Raja, Kumar, Rajiv, The Long view from Delhi, to Define the Indian Grand Strategy for Foreign Policy, New Delhi, Academic Foundation, 2010.
Khilnan, Sunil et al., Nonalignment 2.0, A foreign and Strategic Policy for India in the Twenty First Century, National Defence College-Centre for Policy Research Report, 2012.
Notes
1 Menon, R., Rajiv, K., 2010; Khilnani et al., 2012
Le texte et les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont sous Licence OpenEdition Books, sauf mention contraire.