Indian Foreign Policy dynamics

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The search for conflict resolution, or its grandiloquent avatar, world peace, has been a central objective of Indian foreign policy ever since India won freedom.

India initiated the lexicon of diplomacy in the post-colonial age. The term ‘third world’ was first heard at the Asian Relations Conference, inaugurated by Jawaharlal Nehru in Delhi on 23 March 1947, before 30-plus delegations. An optimistic mood was evident from the fact that regional disputes did not impede participation.

Nehru also promoted the concept of ‘non-alignment’. This found its way to the 1955 Bandung Conference where 29 nations, including China, signed a mantra called Panchshila. Its five points—territorial integrity, non-aggression, non-interference, peaceful co-existence and equality—became a magnet for Afro-Asian solidarity. Six years later in Belgrade he, along with Josip Tito and Gamal Abdel Nasser made non-alignment an international movement, where it remains perched, albeit now precariously.

Nehru turned non-alignment into the focal point of Indian foreign policy, without recognising its fundamental weakness. Jawaharlal Nehru mistook an idea for an ideology. At its most elastic, non-alignment asserted that if nations signed a piece of paper demanding peace, there would be peace. These were words from a mouth without teeth. There was no strategic analysis of potential conflict, or indeed any dispute resolution mechanism in its woolly ambience.

Precisely one year after Belgrade, India paid a heavy price for Nehru’s illusions. In October 1962, China crushed India’s under-equipped and under-resourced defence forces along the Himalayan range. A humiliated Nehru quickly abandoned non-alignment and wrote anxiously to the USA for military aid.

Trapped in his own rhetoric, Nehru had neglected India’s security requirements. Along with his Defence Minister Krishna Menon, he consciously downgraded India’s defence production and capability.

Twice Nehru was offered permanent membership of the UNSC by a superpower, and twice he refused. In 1950, the USA did so, and in 1955, it was the USSR. In August 1950, Nehru wrote that India would not accept at the cost of Beijing’s claims. In 1955, this was repeated to Soviet Premier Bulganin.

Equally sobering was India’s experience in 1965. Some of India’s closest NAM friends offered Pakistan military supplies at the height of war. Non-alignment left India lonely. India understood through experience that solidarity is impotent without substance. In 1970, NAM members resolved at Lusaka to abstain from big power alliances and pacts; in 1971, India signed the Indo-Soviet treaty.

The five pillars of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s foreign policy are rooted in India’s national interest, civilisational philosophy, and the republican and democratic ethos of the 21st century. They are:

Sammaan: Respect for every nation’s sovereignty; Samvaad: Greater engagement; Suraksha: Security; Samriddhi: Shared prosperity; Sanskriti and Sabhyata: Cultural values.

Today, India’s commitment to peace has been layered by a realistic appreciation of the shifting contours of a dynamic challenge. Our policy is focused on multi-alignment: seeking a common approach towards security, economic equity and the elimination of existential dangers like terrorism.

These principles enable India to maintain friendships across binaries. Observers and analysts are sometimes surprised to learn that Modi can welcome Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu of Israel in Delhi as an honoured guest, and within three weeks receive the UAE’s highest civilian award. But no Indian is surprised.

Friendships have graduated from phrase-laden fluff to brick-and-mortar bridge-building sustained by continual diplomacy, even as Modi expands the architecture of multilateral relations. This is why an expanding arc of nations understands when India explains critical decisions it has taken.

The biggest albatross around India’s neck was surely Nehru’s unwise decision to go to the UN in December 1947 over Kashmir. The UN became a pressure point, and sometimes we needed a USSR veto. Today, it is Pakistan which is isolated. This is evidence of the goodwill India commands.

India believes friendship is not a zero-sum game; our relations with Washington are at an apex, while Tehran has long been a friend. Over the last five years, many new economic and strategic bridges have been constructed with Afghanistan, the UAE and Saudi Arabia.

The costs of war are rarely secret; but the price of a US-Iran conflict will be paid in many currencies. Both the US and Iran have enough experience to know that war does not recognise any boundaries. The potential for chaos should be measured carefully by belligerents.

The nature of war is constantly evolving. We often suppose there have been only two World Wars in the last hundred years. I can think of five. Between the First and Second World Wars began the life-and-death struggle for liberation from colonisation. The Cold War continued for at least four intense decades. We are currently in the midst of a fifth world war, against terrorism.

There is another kind of war gradually beginning to dominate: the Long Warm War. It never becomes a conflagration, but its embers continue to glow, taking a periodic toll. It is a state of continual if not perpetual conflict. Its battlefields are rife with false flags. Long War theorists imagine that since the cost is spread, it is containable; and because it refrains from all-out conflict, it is less than a crisis.

Conventional wisdom dates the present US-Iran conflict to the Islamic Revolution in 1979, a year of many dramatic upheavals. But memories run longer than that. Iran has not forgotten the CIA-orchestrated overthrow of Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953. The great American trauma, however, is the seizure of the US Tehran mission in 1980, and the subsequent failure of Jimmy Carter’s military mission to rescue 52 embassy staff.

The rise of Iran as a Shia state led to regional tensions with Saudi Arabia that continue to explode in varied geographies. War often seems to be the first option during crises in the region: the eight-year conflict between Iraq and Iran began with Saddam Hussein confident of marching into Tehran and ended in a stalemate that left both nations in serious need of repair.

On the surface it might seem as if the USA has been consistently hostile to Iran since the fall of Reza Shah. But there has been secret coordination between the two nations. The Iran-Contra deal, in which missiles and other arms were traded to fund anti-regime elements in Nicaragua, took place when hostages were in Tehran. Iran was also able to purchase, through third-party deals, vitally needed arms during its war with Iraq.

Conversely, Iran could have intervened, during America’s Afghanistan offensive in 2001 and its Iraq war of 2003, but refrained. More recently, Iran and the USA shared the same objectives in the war against the Islamic State.

The paradigm is evident: variables of national interest determine levels of tension. This is welcome, because common sense suggests that it is in neither side’s interest to slide towards a destructive open war. However, we all know the dangers of brinkmanship. Any human error can propel events towards conflict.

India’s biggest border dispute is with China, not Pakistan. Despite the bonhomie of the 1950s, China initiated war across a wide front in 1962. There was serious localised fighting at the Nathu La and Cho La passes in 1967; and the Doklam stand-off in June 2017 was a reminder.

In November 1987, India and China agreed to maintain ‘peace and tranquillity’ on the border while their diplomats and political leaders sought a mutually acceptable resolution. A major productive consequence has been the rise of trade and commerce. In 2001, India-China trade was $3.6 billion; in 2017-18 it touched $89.6 billion. In addition, bilateral trade with Hong Kong was $26 billion. This is despite China’s strategic relationship with Pakistan.

Relations between India and Pakistan remain stagnant, and even septic, for one reason alone: Pakistan’s continued use of terrorism. As Modi has said, there is no good terrorism and bad terrorism.

The good news about the US-Iran conflict is that it is in the hands of states rather than non-state actors. The question before the two governments is simple: will they talk before inflicting serious, if not incalculable, harm on the region, or will they talk afterwards?

(This is an edited version of the author’s keynote address at the conference on US-Iran conflict at the National University of Singapore)