In one of his short stories, Franz Kakfa, writing of the idea of ‘empire’, observed:
One of the most obscure of our institutions is that of the empire itself …. [T]he teachers of political law and history in the schools of higher learning claim to be exactly informed on these matters, and to be capable of passing on their knowledge to their students. The further one descends among the lower schools the more, naturally enough, does one find teachers’ and pupils’ doubts of their own knowledge vanishing, and superficial culture mounting sky-high around a few precepts that have been drilled into people’s minds for centuries, precepts which, though they have lost nothing of their eternal truth, remain eternally invisible in this fog of confusion. But it is precisely this question of the empire which in my opinion the common people should be asked to answer, since after all they are the empire’s final support.
Substitute the words ‘foreign policy’ for ‘empire’, and one has a distillation of the problem this book attempts, however partially, to address.
But that is clearly not the whole story. Because as India changes domestically, its changes will have an inevitable impact on the outside world. So if Indians like me contemplate the shape of the world over, say, the next twenty or twenty-five years, we would also have to ask ourselves what sort of role the transformation of India in that time span would enable our country to play on the global stage, how we engage with it and what sort of responsibilities we are prepared to assume. To the extent that we can project an Indian vision on the world, what would a ‘Pax Indica’ look like?
Indians can never afford to forget the condition in which we found our country at the onset of independence. From a nation that had once been among the world’s richest, and which as late as 1820 accounted (in the estimate of the late British economic historian Angus Maddison) for 23 per cent of global GDP, we had been reduced by 1947 into one of the poorest, most backward, most illiterate and diseased societies on earth. From 1900 to 1947 the rate of growth of the Indian economy was not even 1 per cent, while population grew steadily at well over 3.5 per cent. Imperial rule left a society with 16 per cent literacy, practically no domestic industry and over 90 per cent living below what today we would call the poverty line. The impoverishment of India was the starkest reality that India’s nationalist leaders had to face. It was therefore natural that our domestic transformation should be the overriding priority even in the making of foreign policy.
This is where non-alignment came in. It is understandably fashionable to scoff at the concept when there is no longer a pair of superpowers to be non-aligned between, but its origins were unexceptionable. At a time of great pressure to join one of the two Cold War alliances, as so many countries had done around us, our first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, chose to stay free of such entanglements in the pursuit of our enlightened self-interest. We had spent too long with foreigners deciding what was good for us internationally; we were not going to mortgage our freedom of action or decision to any alliance when we had just begun to appreciate the value of our own independence. So we stayed out of other countries’ fights, and sought to judge each issue on its merits, rather than taking sides automatically or based on alliance politics.
This was not a policy of neutrality, as some, like Dwight Eisenhower’s secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, wrongly called it. (Dulles went on to add, infuriatingly, that ‘neutrality between good and evil is itself evil’.) We were not neutral; we did not cut ourselves off from the world or abdicate our international responsibilities. But our leaders were determined that the independence we had fought so hard for should not be compromised, that our sovereignty should be safeguarded and our right to take our own decisions should be unquestioned. Underlying India’s approach from the start was a firm belief in the importance of preserving our own strategic autonomy, which we have always seen as essential if we are to have a chance to develop India as we wish to. Indeed, one of my favourite — though undoubtedly apocryphal — stories is of Dulles saying to Nehru (in words that have become more famous in recent years on the lips of a later American leader): ‘Are you with us or against us?’ Nehru answered, ‘Yes.’ In other words, we were with the United States when we agreed with it, against it when we didn’t. It’s a good story, if an implausible one, because it goes to the heart of the Indian approach.
In practice, this assertive non-alignment meant that we tried, with varying degrees of success, to have good relations with all the major powers irrespective of ideology, including both the United States and the Soviet Union, and indeed both China and the Soviet Union. We built economic links wherever we could to serve our development. So we constructed the public-sector Bhilai and Bokaro steel plants with the Soviet Union when the West refused to help, but we also received PL-480 wheat and Green Revolution technology from the United States. We engaged in an active peace diplomacy on disarmament to minimize the risks of conflict as a result of the Cold War bipolar world, and on decolonization for the same reason but also in pursuit of our anti-imperial ideals. In the emerging world of free and independent (and overwhelmingly non-aligned) states, we played an active role in the institutions of global governance, notably the United Nations and the Bretton Woods institutions, to promote those very ends. Arguably all of this gave India a standing in the world out of all proportion to its true strength and unrelated to its modest economic and military power.
Taken together, these actions also sought to build the material basis for our strategic autonomy. This was when modern industry and scientific and technical higher education truly began on an effective scale in India, as did our atomic energy and space programmes, and our defence research and production, all aimed at building autonomous national capabilities. The avoidance of external entanglements was intended both to give us the space to pursue our own development and to avoid the restraints on our freedom of action that alliance commitments might have engendered.
It is easy to forget the constraints within which this policy operated. The bipolar world of those days was one of uncompromising superpowers. The means available to us in our foreign policy were extremely limited. And we lacked the traditional sources of international power in terms of military capability, raw materials or geostrategic leverage. But we marched to the tune of our own drummer, even if it meant marching alone.
The results of these policies were quite remarkable and helped lay the foundations of our diversified industrial base, our platform of excellence in higher education, our independent strategic capabilities, and ultimately of the over 6 per cent a year GDP growth that we have enjoyed for nearly three decades, since Rajiv Gandhi became prime minister of India, and the nearly 8 per cent growth of the last ten years. But we rarely portrayed it as such in the first five decades of our independence. For even if our foreign policy had been motivated by the challenge of development, its articulation was driven by the nation’s historical experience. The struggle for freedom against British imperialism dictated some of our political sympathies in favour of other anti-colonial struggles elsewhere in the world. Our reaction to the experience of two world wars added to our determination not to get entangled in other countries’ conflicts, and to work to end those wherever we could. This bias in favour of peace was underscored by the non-violent nature of our own independence movement, which predisposed us to a certain moral conviction that our ways were preferable to those that resorted to violence. We therefore expressed, and acted in accordance with, what former foreign secretary J.N. Dixit called a ‘commitment to co-operation rather than confrontation’. This, allied to a newly independent land’s pride in its own civilization, led to India pronouncing itself on world affairs as if from a moral high ground, not a posture guaranteed to win friends and influence other (supposedly morally inferior) nations. In a phrase typical of this attitude, Dixit (a fine and highly respected diplomat) wrote of India’s ‘catalytic role … in establishing a moral and just world order ensuring peace and co-operation all over the world’. Such claims for a moral underpinning to India’s foreign policy did not always resonate well with other countries, which assumed that New Delhi was engaged in the exercise of promoting and defending its national interests, just as they were. It led to criticisms of Indian hypocrisy and sanctimoniousness that our diplomats never entirely lived down. When defeat in the war with China in 1962 seemed to expose the hollowness of India’s claims to global leadership, the country’s standing went down in the eyes of the world — this time also disproportionately, given India’s real worth and potential.