Indian Foreign Policy, 1947-2022
Editorial
August 2022, volume 46, No 8

Seventy-five is an old age for a man but relatively young for a republic or state, even more so for our ancient nation. How has India’s foreign policy done since Independence in 1947?

To answer that question, we must first establish metrics to measure success or failure. In India’s case that metric is obvious and simple: the extent to which we are able to transform the lives of Indian citizens so that they live in a prosperous, secure and modern state where every Indian has the opportunity to realize his potential. In other words, the transformation of India into what we want, not what we have.

Our abject condition at Independence left us little choice but to make this the overriding national goal. And the purpose of our foreign policy therefore was to enable the transformation of India and, to the extent we could, create an enabling external environment for that transformation. It was not a quest for status or recognition or revenge for historical wrongs, all of which suggest weak self-esteem.

And for that transformation it was clear from the outset that we would have to rely on the world for what we lacked in terms of resource endowment, capital and technology, while maintaining our political independence, and that this required an extended period of peace.

Events soon made this task difficult. India gained Independence when the Cold War was dividing the world between two blocs, each trying to pull India into its orbit. In 1947 India was diminished by Partition and its consequences. Pakistan sent raiders and troops to seize Kashmir illegally and India was fighting a war immediately after Independence. With the Chinese occupation of Tibet in 1950, a historically peaceful border saw Chinese troops for the first time and India had a border that China soon disputed. Internally, the multiple tasks of nation building made pressing demands on scarce resources and harassed leaders.

India’s policy response to this difficult situation was a brave strategic choice—nonalignment. Rather than joining either bloc and being entangled in the bloc’s choices and conflicts, India chose to go its own way while working with others, judging each issue on its merits, on its effect on India’s enlightened self-interest. Active diplomacy followed, with India contributing to the search for peace and solutions in early Cold War crises such as the Korean War and Indo-China. India also worked successfully with freedom movements in the neighbourhood in Burma, Indonesia and elsewhere to roll back the return of European colonial empires after WWII. Later phases of the Cold War saw the room for manoeuvre and the efficacy of India’s peace diplomacy diminish as a result of the Sino-Soviet split, superpower detente, and a tacit US-China alliance after 1971.

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 meant a new international context for Indian diplomacy, with the unipolar moment of US supremacy tempting the West into the neoliberal Washington Consensus, which attempted to prescribe state behaviour not only on the international stage, as the Bretton Woods institutions with their Keynesian approach had done, but also within their boundaries. Globalization and the formation of global supply and value chains accelerated, and countries relying on export-led growth like China made spectacular progress, changing the international balance of power.

India, which changed its internal economic course in the eighties and early nineties, readjusted the tactical and operational aspects of her diplomacy. Three Prime Ministers from different backgrounds, ideas, and ideologies—PV Narasimha Rao, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, and Manmohan Singh—adjusted policies to the post-Cold War world where the US was the only superpower and the global economy saw the high tide of globalization, with all its benefits and drawbacks. The policies they followed were multi-directional, opening up relations with Israel and Taiwan, China and the US, and they integrated India on its own terms with the world economy, making foreign and security policy much more economics driven than ever before. At the same time they built the sinews of hard power, enabling India to declare itself a nuclear weapon state in 1998 and to build credible nuclear deterrence.

But the unipolar moment only lasted until the global financial crisis of 2008, which was taken by China and many others as marking the terminal decline of the West. While this may have been partly true of Europe, it was not true of the USA.

The Present International Context

Today’s world is the product of globalization, of political choices by the great powers and, to a lesser extent, of technological change. It is a world of paradox. More people live better, longer, healthier and more prosperous lives than ever before in history. Yet, inequality, conflict, uncertainty and deaths by conflict are at levels unseen since WWII. Globalization made the world one economic and geopolitical system, expanding risks and contagion, as we saw with the pandemic.

In essence, as a result of globalization, the balance of power has shifted. The world is multipolar economically, still unipolar in military terms, but confused politically. Asia is different as it is increasingly multipolar in both military and economic terms and is being forced to choose, unwillingly, between the US and China which are now acknowledged strategic rivals. The post-WWII political order no longer exists (as we saw from the pathetic international response to the Covid pandemic).

The shift in the balance of power is clearest in global GDP shares:

Share of Global GDP (PPP)

19802016
Advanced countries64%42%
Europe30%16.7%
China2.3%17.8%
India3%7.24%
USA25%24%

 

The world’s economic and political centre of gravity is now Asia, but a very different and new Asia with the rise of China. To India’s east, fundamental shifts are evident in the return of Asia-Pacific to centre stage in global politics and economics, the international system’s limited ability to accommodate change (when established powers like the US, Europe, Japan and Russia are losing self-confidence), and the return of classical geopolitics in terms of territorial and maritime disputes, political instability, and contention in the maritime domain in the South China Sea and the East China Sea.

How did we do?

Looking back, how did Indian foreign policy do in the constant churn and crosscurrents of the international system? It did well, after some learning, would be my answer.

In its first 24 years Independent India faced four large-scale conventional wars, but has had to fight only a limited conflict in Kargil since. Instead, our adversaries have had to resort to terrorism and asymmetric warfare, the tactics of the weak. This is because by the early seventies India had built up sufficient deterrence to ensure the peace required for development and had begun integrating her economy with her neighbours. She did so through military reforms in the sixties, eighties and nineties, through strategic programmes and partnerships. Those earlier rounds of military reform have now run their course. The time has come for another bout of serious military reform that includes jointness, theatre commands, technological dominance, upgrades in doctrine, thinking, and in the quality of manpower.

India did relatively well in terms of the primary purpose of her foreign policy, i.e., enabling the transformation of India. Relative to all other significant countries except China, by every metric of power India steadily improved her position for seven decades. The high-growth years were the thirty-odd years from the mid-80s onwards when India averaged over 6% GDP growth and transformation accelerated. For various reasons the growth momentum has slowed in recent years. So, for the most part Indian foreign policy achieved its goals of facilitating the transformation of India and, to the extent permitted by India’s capabilities, creating an enabling external environment for that transformation.

This is quite remarkable when you think that Jawaharlal Nehru’s only experience in government before becoming Prime Minister in 1947 was as Chairman of the Allahabad Municipal Board for two years in the twenties, and foreign policy and intelligence were the two functions of the Government of India closely held by the British and the last to be ‘Indianized’. The Foreign and Political Department and Indian Political Service which staffed it were not ‘Indianized’ before Independence. It was a newly formed and constituted Foreign Service and Ministry of External Affairs that accomplished independent India’s foreign policy tasks.

Learnings

The question naturally arises, what might we learn from our experience of seventy-five years of conducting an independent foreign policy.

To my mind one lesson stands out. Successive governments of India, whatever their position on the political spectrum, have consistently found that strategic autonomy serves India’s interests best. This has been true irrespective of whether we are in a bipolar, ideological Cold War world, in a unipolar, neoliberal time, or in today’s world between orders. Why? Because of India’s unique situation, condition and interests. While we have congruent interests with many others—such as the developing or emerging countries in the global south, or with the US and the West, with Russia, with Japan and South-East Asian countries—our unique geography, history and needs mean that we do not have the identity of interests with anyone that would justify an alliance.

The corollary to strategic autonomy is strategic capability. You cannot have one without the other. The pursuit of India’s strategic capability has been a steady and consistent feature of the policy of all Indian governments. The clearest instance is our nuclear programme: from developing nuclear capabilities in the fifties and sixties, demonstrating it in 1974, to weaponizing it and developing our own delivery systems in the eighties and nineties, to conducting nuclear weapon tests in 1998, and then creating a credible nuclear deterrence force and doctrine. This national goal is a corollary of the emphasis on strategic autonomy.

The obverse to strategic autonomy is the fact that India has no alternative to a policy of active engagement with the world. Almost half of our GDP is generated by the external sector and we need energy, fertilizer, non-ferrous metals, technology and capital from the world for India’s transformation. This only comes with engagement, but ideally, engagement on our own terms.

There are also other features of Indian foreign policy which mark it out from that of others. These include:

Tactical flexibility and caution combined with strategic boldness, as we saw with the choice of nonalignment, or the multi-directional policy after 1991.  Galwan in 2020 and the war in Ukraine in 2022 are reminders that situations change and friends change and that only interests are permanent.

Neighbourhood First

Throughout, India has followed an active policy in the immediate neighbourhood. Examples range from India’s role in the restoration of King Tribhuvan in 1950 or the coming of democracy in Nepal; to support for freedom movements in Indonesia, Burma, and elsewhere; to intervening to keep Sri Lanka united; and to help restore the legitimate government in the Maldives. India has also displayed considerable sensitivity to the presence of outside powers in the subcontinent and the Indian Ocean region. If we are to enjoy peace at home to develop, we need to consolidate our periphery and work with our neighbours to ensure that it cannot be used against us.

Another feature that stands out is the realist, non-ideological use of power and force by India throughout this period. Over time, as her power and agency in the international system grew, India has moved from a reliance on the UN and the multilateral system to the bilateral use of power. Indeed, India has actively discouraged multilateral engagement and interference by outside powers after a disappointing experience with UN over Kashmir from 1948 onwards.

There is one lesson that we may be in danger of forgetting, namely, the importance of internal cohesion within India for an effective foreign policy. This is a lesson we should have learnt but took for granted. We saw in the past how hostile external forces exploited insurgencies in the North East and unsettled political conditions in J&K and Punjab to undermine India’s national security. The world sees what happens in India and acts accordingly even if it is too polite or transactional to mention it. I cannot overstress how important our internal cohesion and course is to our foreign policy. In a fractured world, an internally polarized polity which betrays confusion about its goals will be played by other more determined, powerful and focused actors, reducing our agency.

Challenges

The big question, of course, is how India should handle China.

China’s rise is our foremost challenge. It is a full spectrum challenge—bilateral, economic, Asian, and global—since China seems to feel that the primacy she seeks requires limiting India’s rise. China now looks at India and other countries primarily through the prism of her fraught relationship with the US. There has been limited progress in vacating Chinese actions changing the status quo on the border in 2020 which resulted in deaths on the border. At the same time, India-China trade is booming with China as India’s largest trade partner in 2021. This combination of cooperation and competition is likely to continue and we are in for the long haul in dealing with this challenge. My prescription, for what it is worth, is to build strength, find partners, while engaging China in a real strategic dialogue bilaterally to see whether we can evolve a new framework for the relationship. The one that was formalized in the 1988 Rajiv Gandhi visit successfully kept the peace and gave the relationship a strategic framework for over thirty years. That framework clearly no longer works. A new one would require respect for each other’s core interests and a modus vivendi on the difficult issues that stress the relationship.

I am not optimistic that we will find a new framework, but the attempt is worth making.  The more India rises, the more we must expect Chinese opposition. India will have to work with other powers, and much harder within the subcontinent to ensure that its interests are protected in the neighbourhood, the region and the world. The balance will keep shifting between cooperation and competition with China, both of which characterize that relationship. The key, for me, is the need to rapidly accumulate usable and effective power, even as the macro balance will take time to right itself.  China’s responses vary depending on her perception of the balance of power.  The India-China gap has grown in the last 30 years. We should not let it grow further. This is where our internal development matters directly for the efficacy of our foreign policy.

The other great challenge that we face is that of responding to changes in world economy. A new economic order is forming around us with the globalized economy breaking up into sub-regional trading blocs like USMCA (US-Mexico-Canada Agreement), the EU, CPTPP (Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific) and RCEP (Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership). New standards are being imposed. The US had devised and managed the global free trade and open investment system of which India and China were the greatest beneficiaries in the decades before the 2008 global economic and financial crisis. Today, however, the liberal economic and free trade consensus is broken in that same US and the West.  The Brexit vote, the US withdrawal from Trans-Pacific Trade Partnership, and Trump’s positions reflected that fear and lack of confidence. India’s decision to walk away from RCEP suggests to others that we share that fear of change and the future.

India will need to adjust to new economic realities. When India began her reforms in 1991, only 18% of her GDP was foreign merchandise trade, and most of that went West through the Suez Canal. By 2014, 49.3% of India’s GDP was foreign merchandise trade and most of it went East. For India to walk away from RCEP, the economically most dynamic region in the world, makes little strategic sense. For the last three years running we have raised customs duties, increasing our average effective tariff rates, already among the highest in the region, from 12% to almost 18%, well above South-East Asian and East Asian levels.  This deters the investors we are trying to attract. We are cutting ourselves off from the world rather than integrating with it. Just when India has a chance to compete with China for the first time as a global manufacturing centre, we make it harder for us to integrate the Indian economy into global supply chains.

We should simultaneously work with other powers to ensure that our region stays multi-polar and that China behaves responsibly. Some of this began as part of the Look East, now Act East, policy begun by PM PV Narasimha Rao in 1992, and we are working more closely in defence, intelligence and security with Japan, Vietnam, Singapore, Indonesia, Australia and others. The Quad with Japan, the USA and Australia is also part of the response. But it is hard to sustain a political-military relationship with partners if we are constantly at odds with them in our economic relations, in bilateral and multilateral negotiations on trade, climate change and other issues. Walking away from RCEP has not helped. We cannot have an activist political and defence outreach if our economic and trade policy is inward looking, and both are totally disconnected from each other.

Opportunities

Strategically speaking, these times of change also produce opportunity for India’s foreign policy.

A world between orders means that a new order is being formed, standards and norms are being negotiated. Now is the time for India to be engaged, to be present at the creation, as it were. This is a time of fundamental phase transformation in the international system due to the effects of technology: an energy revolution, digital manufacturing, AI and other changes will change global economics. The ICT and other revolutions have already reduced MNC margins, are making smaller and more local production economical, and are producing a new wave of ‘flying geese’ in Vietnam, Bangladesh, etc.

India has to make basic decisions on whether to ride and use the change or not. The global economy is thus both a challenge and an opportunity.

Geopolitically, space has opened up for middle powers to play a role.

There are also opportunities in India’s relationship with the US. For India, the US is an essential partner in our transformation, the only global superpower. It is not just common concerns about China that bring India and the US together. It is the complementarity between the two economies, the congruence in their strategic vision of maritime Asia or the Indo-Pacific, and other commonalities that have resulted in India-US relations being transformed in this century. India-US relations have never been better. And the strategic congruence is growing. Common interests in counter-terrorism, nonproliferation and maritime security bind the two countries. In the Indian Ocean and Indo-Pacific we have a clear coincidence of interest in keeping these seas open, free and safe, and in preventing attempts by any one power to dominate them.

Prospect

Fortunately, the lessons of the last seventy-five years serve us well in preparing for the world adrift between orders that we face in the near term.

Indeed, with the right policies India could be in a geopolitical sweet spot. Today, Asian geopolitics is increasingly driven by China-US contention. As the reaction to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and western sanctions on Russia thereafter showed, most of the world, particularly the global south, does not wish to be drawn into choosing sides in such binary competitions. In fact, these bipolarities, and the limits of the power of the major actors, have opened up space for precisely the sort of strategic autonomy or nonaligned policy that India has followed. Of course, the situation today is very different from the fifties and sixties, and a new nonaligned movement is both unlikely and unnecessary. But there is space for a third way in international affairs, and for India to pursue her interests along with others in a broader diplomatic effort amounting to smaller coalitions.

The bad news is that for the same reasons a world between orders is unlikely to result in the rule-based, predictable, peaceful, plural, and inclusive international order that we would prefer since that would be best for India’s transformation. Instead, uncertainty and conflict in the international system is at levels unprecedented since WWII, states are reacting by arming themselves, asserting their claims and rights, and the multilateral system is missing in action. Inter-state disputes and conflicts and flashpoints are not being addressed by diplomacy or political processes. Nor are the big transnational issues of our time—development and the debt crisis in developing countries, pandemics, climate change—being tackled.

It is said that times of great upheaval and change offer great opportunity to those who understand what is happening. Our present moment certainly qualifies. It is now time for India’s foreign policy to once again rise to the occasion.

Shivshankar Menon, Visiting Professor, Ashoka University, India, and Chair of the Ashoka Centre for China Studies, was  National Security Advisor, Foreign Secretary of India, and Indian Ambassador or High Commissioner to China, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Israel.