Nonalignment 2.0’ was not born a year ago in the fertile minds of Khilnani, Kumar, Mehta, Menon, Nilekani, Raghavan, Saran and Varadarajan, the authors of a Centre for Policy Research (CPR) paper, but in a conference room in Accra, Ghana in 1991. At a ministerial conference of the NAM there, the movement abandoned rejection of blocs as its central pillar and embraced development, human rights and environment as their testaments of faith. Politics, it was decided, would not be the preoccupation of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). It was agreed that the new generation of non-alignment should focus on equity and justice in the economic order, human rights and the environment.
The argument that the NAM was still relevant even in a unipolar configuration and that it should remain the voice of the developing world had no takers, but it was allowed to remain dormant except when Cuba, Venezuela or Iran revived it for US bashing purposes. India’s own involvement with the NAM became ritualistic. The G20, IBSA, BRICS and ASEAN took precedence over the NAM and even the SAARC. Non-alignment became part of our political heritage, partly glorious, partly embarrassing, not in play in our big game for global status.
Now, many years later, the CPR has christened their paper on search for strategic autonomy ‘Nonalignment 2.0’, much to the consternation of the rest of the strategic community. A thoughtful and important policy paper has, consequently, got embroiled in controversy over its title. How could India embrace the very word that the Americans have just used in describing India’s attitudes in the United Nations Security Council? A commentator called it ‘Failure 2.0’. The apparent blessings that the exercise received from Shiv Shankar Menon and his deputies added more mystery to the rebirth of non-alignment as the instrument of Indian foreign policy in the near term of 10-15 years, the report says, is the narrow window for India to succeed. The authors are hard at work to disown their own title and, therefore, it should be set aside. They assert that strategic autonomy was the defining value and continuous goal of non-alignment and that they are merely renovating it.
The report is descriptive in its political sections and prescriptive when it comes to economic issues. In politics, there is an eagerness to have continuity, but in the more successful area of economic policy much remains to be done. The economic writers have been more distant from policy-making than the contributors of the political sections. The former have asserted right from the beginning that India’s global goals are limitless if it can maintain high growth and maintain democratic institutions. Diplomacy is secondary in their calculations, but deficiencies in minor things too should be avoided. That the kingdom can be lost for want of a horseshoe nail is not just a nursery rhyme, it is a parable about the nature of power, they assert.
The report concedes, for the first time in Indian strategic writing, that China is already a superpower together with the US. When have we begun considering ourselves one of the ‘other centres and hubs of power that will be relevant, particularly in regional context’? We should aspire only to achieve a situation where no other state is in a position to exercise undue influence on us. Is that the be-all and end-all of foreign policy?
The report claims that India is not seen as a threatening power except in our neighbourhood and that the rest of the world wants India to succeed. In the same breath, the writers tell us that India is viewed as passive — India can neither hurt nor help anyone, not a particularly happy situation for a potentially powerful nation.
The threat from China is covered in subdued terms, but its power differential with India, the unlikelihood of the border issue being resolved swiftly, the asymmetry of our capabilities and deployments on the border, the projection of Chinese power in the Indian Ocean, the complex and ambiguous economic relations, the growing trade surplus, etc, figure prominently in the report, but with inadequate analysis of these developments. Characterising Sino-Indian relations as the single most important challenge for Indian strategy in the years ahead, the only suggestion made is that India’s China strategy should strike a balance between cooperation and competition, economic and political interests, bilateral and regional contexts. It is left to the imagination as to what can be done if such a balance cannot be achieved.
India’s challenges in South Asia are described in starker terms in the report. The nature of politics and perceptions of India in our immediate neighbourhood not only make it hard for the countries in the region to act on policies of mutual benefit, but also place fetters on India’s global ambitions. The report echoes the Gujral doctrine of giving unilateral concessions to its neighbours. Deepening economic engagement is the answer, even to counter China in the region. The Indian dilemmas in the neighbourhood cannot be resolved with any amount of strategic autonomy. Opportunities abound, but the challenges are equally formidable.
With Pakistan, the report rules out a breakthrough and expects incremental improvement as a result of constructive engagement. In West Asia, the suggestion is that India should engage with the lawfully constituted authority and the democratic forces. How much can strategic autonomy help India to prevent external intervention? Equally hard will be for India to avoid sharp choices, like steering clear of the rivalry between Iran and Saudi Arabia.
The elaborate treatment in the report of the international institutions, hard power, internal security, non-conventional security issues, knowledge and information, etc, must be studied separately. We should set new standards for what the most powerful must do.
The passion for strategic autonomy or a new generation of non-alignment should not be the priority of the powerful. They hire and fire allies to suit their objectives. India has already moved away from a pathological attachment to non-alignment and opted for selective alignments on the basis of mutual benefit. To harp on the primacy of autonomy, to the exclusion of finding common cause with others is a sign of weakness and lack of self-confidence. The authors themselves have not been able to link every solution they suggest to strategic autonomy. Strategic autonomy comes automatically to the powerful. In the pursuit of power, selective alignments are more crucial than non-alignment.
(Views expressed in the column are the author’s own)
T P Sreenivasan is a former ambassador of India and governor for India of the IAEA. E-mail: tpsreenivasan@gmail.com