This is an excerpt from the book – Aparna Pande. From Chanakya to Modi: The Evolution of India’s Foreign Policy.
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Soon after the election in 2014, a plethora of books appeared in the Indian market that purported to present his worldview and governance priorities to the public.
Shifting through the pile of tomes on Modi’s statecraft, a certain trend became clear. Most of these books portrayed Modi’s foreign policy as sui generis, a signal departure from the past. This proliferation of superlatives reinforced the newist mood in Indian politics that spin-masters, in turn, have exploited to the government’s advantage.
The problem with this convenient narrative is that it ignores the subterranean currents that have shaped how India engages with the world: the core unchanging assumptions of the strategic elite, the plodding caution of key institutions and their gatekeepers, and the unspoken consensus inside the political class on India’s national interests.
Aparna Pande’s new book From Chanakya to Modi: The Evolution of India’s Foreign Policy seeks to lay bare these currents.
Pande takes as her intellectual guide the American scholar Walter Russell Mead whose typology of American strategic thought forms the basis of her own for Indian foreign policy. In this typology, Indian thinking on foreign policy is categorised into four schools: the imperial/Curzonian, the idealist, the realist and the isolationist.
Pande rightly avers that Indian foreign policy since independence has been a combination of all four, the difference between governments being in their relative emphasis of one over the other three. In her telling, Nehru occupies a singular position among leaders who have sought to navigate India’s world. She accurately writes: “[m]ost of Nehru’s successors held on to his tradition, with minor changes, as a guarantee of India’s stability in dealing with the rest of the world.”
While it has become fashionable in certain quarters to advance a revisionist view of Nehru as a misguided idealist, the fact of the matter is that his foreign policy was a complex mix of idealism (drawing on Indian exceptionalism) and realpolitik. The historian Srinath Raghavan, in his classic study of foreign policy of the Nehru years, describes him as a “liberal realist”, deeply influenced by the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, patron-saint of classical realists. (Niebuhr continues to exercise tremendous influence over American politicians: Barack Obama once called him one of his favourite philosophers.)
From India’s nascent nuclear programme to how it sought to exert primacy in the subcontinent, Nehru’s realism shaped as much of Indian foreign policy as his high idealism around Afro-Asian solidarity and global disarmament. For example, when contemporary India seeks to shape Nepal’s foreign-policy preferences, there is a shade of Nehru who once famously said: “[M]uch as we appreciate the independence of Nepal, we cannot risk our own security by any happenings in Nepal which permit that barrier being crossed or which otherwise weaken our frontiers.”
Indeed the pursuit of national interest without sacrificing autonomy of action is what led Nehru to the grand strategy of non-alignment, on the one hand, and the pursuit of economic autarky on the other. It is hard to overestimate how efficacious the former was, as India leveraged Cold War schisms for its own benefit.
Pande quotes the late eminent strategist K Subhramanyam on non-alignment: “[I]t was a sound strategy in realpolitik sense and in terms of balance of power.” One can argue that India’s continued quest for a multipolar world also follows from its preference for a balance-of-power system, which – as classical realists like Kissinger would argue – is one way to keep revisionist powers in check.
Realism has also continued to shape India’s stance in multilateral institutions. Critics argue that it is indeed not a surfeit of idealism that drives India’s position in such institutions; it has been the Indian state’s innately Hobbesian view of the world that posits the ever-present possibility of these institutions becoming vehicles of great-power play.
As Pande writes, “Indians […] would argue that India fully supports multilateralism but seeks to keep in check the prospect of global institutions becoming instruments of renewed dominance of major powers.”
India’s conflicted view of international institutions such as the United Nations Security Council comes in sharp focus, for example, in former Indian diplomat (and now a minister in the central government) Hardeep Singh Puri’s recent book on the geopolitics of humanitarian interventions.
It is with India’s integration with the global economy and the end of autarky at home, following the reforms of 1991, that the Indian establishment’s realism began to be tempered with faith in interdependence as a strategic instrument. The reforms of 1991 saw Indian foreign policy starting to place a premium on economic and trade diplomacy.
New stakeholders such as business houses interested in transacting abroad started asserting themselves in Indian foreign-policy discourses – until then an exclusive preserve of trained diplomats and a few non-governmental experts. Resolution of the border dispute with China was put on the back burner as it emerged as a valuable economic partner of India’s. In other words, the key conditions for complex interdependence (a theory advanced by American academics Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye as a rival to realism) were put in place.
Twenty-five years later, interdependence as a strategy looks woefully inadequate in dealing with a resurgent China aspiring for hegemony in Asia. Realism as the guiding principle of Indian foreign policy is poised to make a comeback with vehemence; we only have to thank Xi Jinping for it.
Pande’s book is an excellent primer on how India has engaged with the world and will continue to do so – through realism with imperial hues, tempered by its civilisational responsibilities and grace. As such, it will be widely read by those who want to understand the neural roots of contemporary India’s strategic intent.
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Steve Ovett, the famous British middle-distance athlete, won the 800-metres gold medal at the Moscow Olympics of 1980. Just a few days later, he was about to win a 5,000-metres race at London’s Crystal Palace. Known for his burst of acceleration on the home stretch, he had supreme confidence in his ability to out-sprint rivals. With the final 100 metres remaining,
[wptelegram-join-channel link=”https://t.me/s/upsctree” text=”Join @upsctree on Telegram”]Ovett waved to the crowd and raised a hand in triumph. But he had celebrated a bit too early. At the finishing line, Ireland’s John Treacy edged past Ovett. For those few moments, Ovett had lost his sense of reality and ignored the possibility of a negative event.
This analogy works well for the India story and our policy failures , including during the ongoing covid pandemic. While we have never been as well prepared or had significant successes in terms of growth stability as Ovett did in his illustrious running career, we tend to celebrate too early. Indeed, we have done so many times before.
It is as if we’re convinced that India is destined for greater heights, come what may, and so we never run through the finish line. Do we and our policymakers suffer from a collective optimism bias, which, as the Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman once wrote, “may well be the most significant of the cognitive biases”? The optimism bias arises from mistaken beliefs which form expectations that are better than the reality. It makes us underestimate chances of a negative outcome and ignore warnings repeatedly.
The Indian economy had a dream run for five years from 2003-04 to 2007-08, with an average annual growth rate of around 9%. Many believed that India was on its way to clocking consistent double-digit growth and comparisons with China were rife. It was conveniently overlooked that this output expansion had come mainly came from a few sectors: automobiles, telecom and business services.
Indians were made to believe that we could sprint without high-quality education, healthcare, infrastructure or banking sectors, which form the backbone of any stable economy. The plan was to build them as we went along, but then in the euphoria of short-term success, it got lost.
India’s exports of goods grew from $20 billion in 1990-91 to over $310 billion in 2019-20. Looking at these absolute figures it would seem as if India has arrived on the world stage. However, India’s share of global trade has moved up only marginally. Even now, the country accounts for less than 2% of the world’s goods exports.
More importantly, hidden behind this performance was the role played by one sector that should have never made it to India’s list of exports—refined petroleum. The share of refined petroleum exports in India’s goods exports increased from 1.4% in 1996-97 to over 18% in 2011-12.
An import-intensive sector with low labour intensity, exports of refined petroleum zoomed because of the then policy regime of a retail price ceiling on petroleum products in the domestic market. While we have done well in the export of services, our share is still less than 4% of world exports.
India seemed to emerge from the 2008 global financial crisis relatively unscathed. But, a temporary demand push had played a role in the revival—the incomes of many households, both rural and urban, had shot up. Fiscal stimulus to the rural economy and implementation of the Sixth Pay Commission scales had led to the salaries of around 20% of organized-sector employees jumping up. We celebrated, but once again, neither did we resolve the crisis brewing elsewhere in India’s banking sector, nor did we improve our capacity for healthcare or quality education.
Employment saw little economy-wide growth in our boom years. Manufacturing jobs, if anything, shrank. But we continued to celebrate. Youth flocked to low-productivity service-sector jobs, such as those in hotels and restaurants, security and other services. The dependence on such jobs on one hand and high-skilled services on the other was bound to make Indian society more unequal.
And then, there is agriculture, an elephant in the room. If and when farm-sector reforms get implemented, celebrations would once again be premature. The vast majority of India’s farmers have small plots of land, and though these farms are at least as productive as larger ones, net absolute incomes from small plots can only be meagre.
A further rise in farm productivity and consequent increase in supply, if not matched by a demand rise, especially with access to export markets, would result in downward pressure on market prices for farm produce and a further decline in the net incomes of small farmers.
We should learn from what John Treacy did right. He didn’t give up, and pushed for the finish line like it was his only chance at winning. Treacy had years of long-distance practice. The same goes for our economy. A long grind is required to build up its base before we can win and celebrate. And Ovett did not blame anyone for his loss. We play the blame game. Everyone else, right from China and the US to ‘greedy corporates’, seems to be responsible for our failures.
We have lowered absolute poverty levels and had technology-based successes like Aadhaar and digital access to public services. But there are no short cuts to good quality and adequate healthcare and education services. We must remain optimistic but stay firmly away from the optimism bias.
In the end, it is not about how we start, but how we finish. The disastrous second wave of covid and our inability to manage it is a ghastly reminder of this fact.