In such a world, issues that once seemed very far away are very much in your backyard. What happens in North America or North Africa — from protectionist politics to civil society uprisings to deforestation and desertification to the fight against AIDS — can affect your lives wherever you live, even in North India. And your choices here — what you buy, how you vote — can resound far away. As someone once said about water pollution, we all live downstream. We are all interconnected, and we can no longer afford the luxury of not thinking about the rest of the planet in anything we do.
It has taken us some time to internalize this conviction in India. After all, self-reliance and economic self-sufficiency were a mantra for more than four decades after independence, and there were real doubts as to whether the country should open itself up further to the world economy. Whereas in most of the West most people axiomatically associated capitalism with freedom, India’s nationalists associated capitalism with slavery — for, after all, the British East India Company had come to trade and stayed on to rule. So India’s nationalist leaders were suspicious of every foreigner with a briefcase, seeing him as the thin edge of a neo-imperial wedge. Instead of integrating India into the global capitalist system, as only a handful of post-colonial countries like Singapore chose to do, India’s leaders (and those of most former colonies) were convinced that the political independence they had fought for so hard and long could only be guaranteed through economic independence. So self-reliance became the mantra, the protectionist barriers went up and India spent forty-five years increasingly divorced from global trade and investment. (Which only goes to show that one of the lessons you can learn from history is that history can sometimes teach you the wrong lessons.)
It was only after a world-class balance of payments crisis in 1991, when our government had to physically ship its reserves of gold to London to stand collateral for an International Monetary Fund (IMF) loan, failing which we might have defaulted on our debt, that India liberalized its economy under our then finance minister Manmohan Singh. The amount of gold possessed by the women of the household has often been seen, in Indian culture, as a guarantee of the family’s honour; surrendering the nation’s gold to foreigners betokened a national humiliation that the old protectionism could not survive. Since then, India has become a poster child for globalization. It is now widely accepted across the political spectrum that our growth and prosperity would be impossible without the rest of the world.
Young Indians today are likely to spend a lot of their adult lives interacting with people who don’t look, sound, dress or eat like them. Unlike their parents, they might well work for an internationally oriented company with clients, colleagues or investors from around the globe; and increasingly, they are likely to take their holidays in far-flung destinations. The world into which they will grow will be full of such opportunities. But along with such opportunities, today’s young Indians may also find themselves vulnerable to threats from beyond India’s borders: terrorism, of course, but also transnational crime syndicates, counterfeiters of currency, drug smugglers, child traffickers, pirates and — almost as disruptive — Internet hackers and spammers, credit-card crooks and even imported illnesses like swine flu.
Yet many Indians have not yet fully realized the importance of their government devising policies to deal with such challenges that would affect their, and one day their children’s, lives. Should such policies, in an ever more interdependent world, even be called foreign? One of the reasons that foreign policy matters today is that foreign policy is no longer merely foreign: it affects people right where they live. Each of us should want our government to seize the opportunities that the twenty-first-century world provides, while managing the risks and protecting us from the threats that this world has also opened us up to.
Indians therefore have a growing stake in international developments. To put it another way, the food we grow and we eat, the air we breathe and our health, security, prosperity and quality of life are increasingly affected by what happens beyond our borders. And that means we can simply no longer afford to be indifferent about our neighbours, however distant they may appear. Ignorance is not a shield; it is not even, any longer, an excuse.
Much of my own life has been conducted on the global stage. Born in London but brought up in India, I left the country at nineteen, studied abroad and joined the United Nations, serving it in Europe, in Southeast Asia and in the United States while helping douse humanitarian and peacekeeping fires around the world. I returned to India, more than three decades after leaving it, to play a part in its public life and contribute to developing, whether in or out of office, its vision of the world in the twenty-first century.
And yet it is not as an unreconstructed internationalist myself that I write this volume. It is true that I have had the privilege of acquiring extensive international experience, especially during those nearly three decades of service at the UN, and I value the perspective this has given me on the world. But my own focus, in the relatively short period that I have been in public life, has inevitably been on the domestic realities of our country. When I think of the world today, I am conscious of the need to think of it not as a former UN official, but from the perspective of a member of Parliament from Thiruvananthapuram, which despite being the capital of Kerala is still two-thirds a rural constituency. Though the city has long had connections to the outside world — one of its shipping harbours, Poovar, was the legendary Ophir of ‘King Solomon’s Mines’, and it was one of the first Indian cities to enjoy air services in the 1930s, at the same time as Karachi and Mumbai — the concerns of most of its residents are largely domestic. I am obliged to remember that the bulk of my time in recent months has been spent in listening, and giving political expression, to the voices of the poor, the marginalized and the downtrodden in my district, a place emblematic in many ways of our ancient land now roaring into life in the twenty-first century.
What does looking at India’s foreign policy mean from that perspective? For me, frankly, the basic task for India in international affairs is to wield a foreign policy that enables and facilitates the domestic transformation of India. By this I mean that we must make possible the transformation of India’s economy and society through our engagement with the world, while promoting our own national values (of pluralism, democracy, social justice and secularism) within our society. What I expect from my national leaders is that they work for a global environment that is supportive of these internal priorities, an environment that would permit us to concentrate on our domestic tasks. Ensuring the country’s security, and its freedom to make its own decisions in its own interests, is the first and most obvious of those priorities; but then comes the need to maintain good relations with those nations that are essential suppliers of the investment and trade, energy and mineral resources, food supplies and water flows without which growth, development and the elimination of poverty would not be possible. India is engaged in the great adventure of bringing progress and prosperity to a billion people through a major economic transformation. At the broadest level, the objective of India’s foreign policy must be to protect that process of domestic social and economic transformation, by working for a benign environment that will ensure India’s security and bring in global support for our efforts to build and change our country for the better.
So a fisherwoman in Thiruvananthapuram may not have the slightest idea who the foreign minister of India is or care about the American withdrawal from Afghanistan, but she will know if the price of diesel for her husband’s boat or kerosene for her kitchen stove has become unaffordable; she understands international economics when a foreign trawler catches fish in waters her husband and his ancestors have fished in for generations; her livelihood is affected when fear of terrorism imposes restrictions on the movement of her community’s boats, or when fear of piracy leads a foreign vessel to shoot at one carrying her brothers. Foreign policy might seem an abstraction to people like her, but it is relevant to her life just as much as to the diplomat in the pin-striped suit who speaks for India in global forums.