At the same time, it is important not to be carried away by hubris. Shiv Shankar Menon put it well in a recent speech:
We must always be conscious of the difference between weight, influence and power. Power is the ability to create and sustain outcomes. Weight we have, our influence is growing, but our power remains to grow and should first be used for our domestic transformation. History is replete with examples of rising powers who prematurely thought that their time had come, who mistook influence and weight for real power. Their rise, as that of Wilhelmine Germany or militarist Japan, was cut short prematurely.
Real power may not yet be India’s, but its weight is incontestable and its international influence is already being exercised in creative new ways. One example of India’s constructively deployed influence that is worth examining in detail is India’s aid policy.
India’s aid programmes in its neighbourhood and in Africa have been characterized by a willingness to let the recipient set the terms, respect for the priorities and the culture of the recipients, and a focus on projects that promote self-reliance, economic growth and political democracy (including women’s empowerment). Though some 75 per cent of India’s aid is tied to the provision of goods and services from Indian suppliers — an excusable condition for aid coming from a developing country — it has by and large been welcomed as helpful, less intrusive and less disruptive than other countries’ (the traditional donors’) aid programmes have tended to be. As such it now forms an essential part of India’s projection to the world.
This too echoes ancient Indian wisdom. A millennium and a half ago, the great king Harsha declared: ‘Before, while amassing all this wealth, I lived in constant fear of never finding a storeroom solid enough to keep it in. But now that I have spread it in alms upon the field of happiness I regard it as forever preserved!’ The 2011 Africa-India summit in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, at which the Indian government pledged $5 billion in aid to African countries, drew attention to a largely overlooked phenomenon — India’s emergence as a source, rather than a recipient, of foreign aid. For decades after independence — when Britain left the subcontinent one of the poorest and most ravaged regions on earth, with an effective growth rate of 0 per cent over the preceding two centuries — India was seen as an impoverished land of destitute people, desperately in need of international handouts. Many developed countries showcased their aid to India; Norway, for example, established in 1959 its first-ever aid programme there. But, with the liberalization of the Indian economy in 1991, the country embarked upon a period of dizzying growth, averaging nearly 8 per cent a year since then. During this time, India weaned itself from dependence on aid, preferring to borrow from multilateral lenders and, increasingly, from commercial banks.
Today, the proverbial shoe is on the other foot. India has begun putting its money where its mouth used to be. It has now emerged as a significant donor to developing countries in Africa and Asia, second only to China in the range and quantity of development assistance given by countries of the global South. The Indian Technical and Economic Cooperation Programme as established in 1964, but now has real money to offer, in addition to training facilities and technological know-how. Nationals from 156 countries have benefited from ITEC grants, which have brought developing-country students to Indian universities for courses in everything from software development to animal husbandry.
In addition, India has built factories, hospitals and parliaments in various countries, and sent doctors, teachers and IT professionals to treat and train the nationals of recipient countries. Concessional loans at trifling interest rates are also extended as lines of credit, tied mainly to the purchase of Indian goods and services, and countries in Africa have been clamouring for them.
In Asia, India remains by far the single largest donor to its neighbour Bhutan, as well as a generous aid donor to Nepal, the Maldives, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka as it recovers from civil war. Its humanitarian assistance to Indonesia and Myanmar in the wake of the 2004 tsunami and the 2008 Cyclone Nargis, respectively, was swift and effective, and its rapid provision of aid after humanitarian disasters in Pakistan and Tajikistan was exemplary. Given Afghanistan’s vital importance for the security of the subcontinent, India’s assistance programme there already amounts to more than $1.2 billion — modest from the standpoint of Afghan needs, but large for a non-traditional donor — and is set to rise further. As described in Chapter Three, India’s efforts in Afghanistan have focused on humanitarian infrastructure, social projects and the development of skills and capacity. Futher west, its long record of aid to the Palestinian refugees has now been augmented by a significant assistance programme to the Palestinian National Authority.
In Africa, India’s strength as an aid provider is that it is not an over-developed power, but rather one whose own experience of development challenges is both recent and familiar. African countries, as I mentioned earlier, look at China and the United States with a certain awe, but do not, for a moment, believe that they can become like either of them; India is a far more accessible benefactor. Moreover, unlike China, India does not descend on other countries with a heavy governmental footprint. India’s private sector is a far more important player, and the government often confines itself to opening doors and letting African countries work with the most efficient Indian provider that they can find.
Similarly, unlike the Chinese, Indian employers do not come into a foreign country with an overwhelming labour force. Whereas China’s omnipresence has provoked hostility in several African countries, Indian businesses have faced no such reaction in the last two decades. Indeed, Uganda, where Idi Amin expelled Indian settlers in 1972, has been actively wooing them back under President Yoweri Museveni.
Finally, India accommodates itself to aid recipients’ desires, advancing funds to African regional banks or the New Economic Partnership for Africa’s Development. Its focus on capacity development, its accessibility and its long record of support for developing countries have made India an increasingly welcome donor. Its creation of a Pan African e-Network, described in Chapter Seven, is an impressive example of its ability to showcase its strengths while providing an indispensable service with no tangible direct benefit to itself. It is, of course, a far bigger bilateral donor than it is a multilateral one: it gives some aid to and through the UN and AU bodies where its own identity as a giver is blurred, but this is dwarfed by its bilateral offerings. Nonetheless, it is increasingly seen as an aid giver, not least by a large collection of recipients.
This could not have been imagined even twenty years ago, and it is one of the best consequences of India’s emergence as a global economic power.
At the same time India is not the incipient ‘superpower’ that over-enthusiastic supporters have described it as being. I earned some notoriety in 2010 when I suggested at a public event that we could not be a ‘superpower’ when we were still ‘super-poor’. I did not go quite as far as the historian Ramachandra Guha, who wrote in the Financial Times in July 2011 that ‘India is in no position to become a superpower. It is not a rising power, nor even an emerging power. It is merely a fascinating, complex, and perhaps unique experiment in nationhood and democracy, whose leaders need still to attend to the fault lines within, rather than presume to take on the world without.’ Discounting the overstatement, it is true that there are still a number of essential unfinished agendas to be attended to at home, and foreign policy must be seen as an instrument to help us fulfil them.