As India proceeds along the path of carving out a role for itself in the global multilateral space, there are some tasks from which it must not shrink. India’s is a culture which values modesty in conduct and speech, but one boast we have not been shy of making is that we are proud of being the world’s largest democracy. It is India’s conviction, from its experience in maintaining this distinction, that democracy is the only form of governance that gives each citizen of a country a strong sense that her destiny and that of her nation is determined only with full respect for her own wishes. India should therefore be proud of being able to demonstrate, in a world riven by ethnic conflict and notions of clashing civilizations, that democracy is not only compatible with diversity, but preserves and protects it, even while serving as a tool to manage the processes of political change and economic transformation so necessary for development.
This is an obvious repudiation of the argument that democracy is incompatible with development, but India has nonetheless been reticent on advertising its own experience and quite unwilling to use it as a calling card in its international relations. For many years India was a reluctant and rather minor participant in the work of the US-inspired Community of Democracies, not wanting to promote an affinity with the West at the expense of its traditional image as the leading trade unionist of Third Worldism. I changed that when I led the Indian delegation to the community’s conference in Lisbon in 2009, proclaiming India’s commitment to the democratic principle while at the same time using the same forum to push for greater democracy in global governance (‘We hope that our common ideals of democratic inclusiveness and a level playing field will guide members of this community in supporting reform of the international governance system,’ I suggested somewhat self-servingly) and to seek the support of the world’s democracies in India’s fight against terrorism. I could not forget India’s bureaucratic preference to keep a discreet distance from Bush-era democratic proselytization around the world, but I believed it was necessary for India to help square the circle. ‘Let us cherish and value what we have in common as democracies,’ I suggested, ‘but let us also respect what makes us different from each other, and appreciate that it is in the nature of democracies to be responsive to the very different preoccupations of their own internal constituencies.’
Democracy is, of course, a process and not just an event; it is the product of the exchange of hopes and promises, commitments and compromises which underpins the sacred compact between governments and the governed. But it makes no sense for India to abjure, on grounds of non-aligned principle or developing-country solidarity, its own democracy on the international stage. The Non-Aligned Movement, in any case, is, in the words of the Indian analyst C. Raja Mohan, ‘politically divided, economically differentiated and ideologically exhausted’. It cannot be the be-all and end-all of India’s international posture. The last century has, despite many horrors along the way, given us, in the famous phrase, a ‘world safe for democracy’. India has every reason to work, in the twenty-first century, to establish a world safe for diversity.
This raises broader questions about India’s positions on international issues of democracy and human rights, where for a variety of reasons (mainly to do with the inadmissibility of external interference in a newly independent country’s internal affairs) India has more often found itself on the side of developing-country violators of human rights than of First World democracies. Hard-headed calculations also often come in: as our discussion in Chapter Three on Myanmar reveals, India accepted the capacity of the junta in Naypyidaw to stifle dissent, jettisoning its own sympathies of Aung San Suu Kyi and her party in favour of an amoral realpolitik that enhanced India’s security in its ‘soft underbelly’ and opened up access to Myanmar’s natural resources. India’s temporizing responses to repression in Myanmar and elsewhere have raised an uncomfortable question we all need to face: can India afford an ethical foreign policy?
For many years after independence, the answer to that question seemed an obvious one: we couldn’t afford a foreign policy that was anything else. Having fought for our freedom against colonial oppression, Pandit Nehru and his colleagues saw themselves as voices for democracy, justice and fairness in the world, and they did not hesitate to express an Indian view of world affairs steeped in these values. Nehru and Krishna Menon, in particular, relished doing so: on issues like Indo-China, South African apartheid and the Suez, they saw themselves as giving a voice to the voiceless and the marginalized of the developing world, often against the great-power hegemons of the day. Indian foreign policy pronouncements were regularly couched in the language of transcendent moral principle. Nehruvian New Delhi spoke often, and our government, for decades, seemed to take greater satisfaction in being right than in being diplomatic.
Few challenged India’s right to do so: the land of Ashoka, Akbar and Mahatma Gandhi seemed, to many, to have earned the authority to speak from an elevated ethical podium. But even in those early years there were those who wondered whether it was wise to transform the conduct of international relations into a kind of moralistic running commentary on world affairs. Our moral superiority began to grate on many otherwise well-disposed foreigners even when our positions were unexceptionable; but when we strayed from our own professions of virtue at home, such as over Kashmir or Goa, our critics found it easy to dismiss our foreign policy as posturing humbug.
As time began to tarnish the glow of our independence struggle and the hard realities of national interest became the principal yardstick for both the conduct and the expression of our foreign policy, we quietly abandoned many of our ethical formulations. The gap between profession and practice was in any case becoming more and more glaring. Silence, or at least discretion, was clearly preferable to moralizing — at least in a world in which the inventors of non-alignment had signed a treaty with the Soviet Union, the advocates of democracy had suspended it in a state of Emergency, the vocal opponents of international capitalism had gained the most from globalization, and the leading advocate of disarmament had become a nuclear power. We were now less ethical in our pronouncements, but we were also less hypocritical.