NonAlignment 2.0: A Foreign and Strategic Policy for India in the 21st Century (2 page)

On 28 February 2012, ‘NonAlignment 2.0’
was launched as a monograph by two former national security advisers of India, Brajesh Mishra and
M.K. Narayanan, and their successor in the post, Shivshankar Menon. Since its publication the
monograph has generated considerable debate and even controversy. Some of the criticism was directed
towards the title itself, that is, the term ‘NonAlignment’. Others questioned the
assessments relating to our relations with China, and still others were critical of what were seen
as significant gaps in the study. For instance, attention was drawn to the absence of any separate
sections on the USA, Europe or South-East Asia, despite these being important foreign policy
priorities for India.

The authors have together and in their individual
capacities, respectively, held several interactions with think tanks, scholars and civil society
groups both in India and
abroad. They felt that it would be both appropriate
and timely to revise and recast the original monograph in the form of a book, incorporating some of
the very useful suggestions that emerged out of these debates. They have also tried, to the best of
their ability, to respond to some of the criticisms of both the format and the contents of the
monograph. This book is the result of these follow-up endeavours, and the authors are thankful to
Penguin India for agreeing to its early publication.

It may be worth recalling the original intent of
the authors, as set out in the Preface to the earlier monograph:

NonAlignment 2.0
is an attempt to
identify the basic principles that should guide India’s foreign and strategic policy over the
next decade. The views it sets out are rooted in the conviction that the success of India’s
own internal development will depend decisively on how effectively we manage our global
opportunities in order to maximize our choices—thereby enlarging our domestic options to the
benefit of all Indians.

The purposes of the present strategy document are
threefold: to lay out the opportunities that India enjoys in the international sphere; to identify
the challenges and threats it is likely to confront; and to define the
broad
perspective and approach that India should adopt as it works to enhance its strategic autonomy in
global circumstances that, for some time to come, are likely to remain volatile and uncertain.

The necessity of such a document is driven by a
sense of urgency among all its authors that we have a limited window of opportunity in which to
seize our chances. Further, the decisions and choices we make in coming years will have long-term
effects upon our future development and will set us down paths that will determine the range of
subsequent future choices. It is therefore imperative that we have a clear map of the terrain which
we shall have to navigate in coming years—and, equally, that we have a definite sense of the
national goals, values and interests that we need to pursue with consistency and vigour.

It should be clear that the document does not
intend to prescribe specific policies. Such policies remain the prerogative of government—and
their definition must occur in the domain of public debate and deliberation. What our document does
insist upon is the critical need for a strategic consensus and for a unified approach to
India’s international engagements. We believe that the principles and views set out here about
our national interests should command cross-party support, as well as support from across
government, the corporate
community, civil society and the media. While
there may be important disagreements about matters of specific policy and detail, a strategic
consensus is vital if India is to be able to successfully pursue its national development goals in
difficult global circumstances.

Since the release of the monograph
‘NonAlignment 2.0’, several analysts and commentators have questioned the wisdom of
retaining a title that is allegedly outdated and associated in public perception with a failed
foreign policy. It has been pointed out that in a world that is drastically changed and still in the
midst of a radical transformation, India’s interests are not fully encompassed by the use of
the term NonAlignment. This, it is argued, may even lead to regression in India’s approach to
the changing global environment.

The authors believe that the essence of
NonAlignment is India’s unwavering and continuing search for strategic autonomy. More
specifically, it encompasses three core strategic principles that remain relevant to India’s
engagement with the world: the need to make independent judgements in international affairs without
being unduly influenced by ideas and policies set elsewhere; the need
to
develop the capacity for autonomous strategic action to secure India’s own interests without
being excessively dependent on, or restrained by, the capabilities and interests of other powers;
and the need to work towards a more equitable international order that reflects the shifting balance
of aspiration and power.

In this context, it is important to distinguish
between NonAlignment as a strategic doctrine underpinning India’s foreign policy and the fate
of the Non-Aligned Movement, which was a response to the binary geopolitics of the Cold War era.
With the end of the Cold War, the Non-Aligned Movement lost its moorings though it continues to
survive as a pale legacy from the past. However, nonalignment as a doctrine of India’s foreign
policy, and as articulated by India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, reflected the
overwhelming political consensus in newly independent India to ensure that, in a world increasingly
riven by ideological and great power conflict, the country should retain its ability to take
relatively autonomous decisions on issues of vital national interest.

Nonalignment did not imply passivity or sitting on
the sidelines with respect to important regional and global issues of the day. India embraced an
active role on the international stage, virtually since its emergence as an independent country. It
mobilized the United Nations
(UN) against apartheid in South Africa, played
a seminal role in the drafting of the Declaration on Human Rights, led a global movement for a
nuclear weapon–free world and played a leadership role in several UN peacekeeping missions. It
was the country of choice to head the International Control Commission on Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam
and served on the Korean Armistice Commission. In fact, India’s international profile belied
its relatively modest economic and military capabilities. The contemporary narrative on nonalignment
which ignores this history, and portrays India as a passive and disengaged country prior to the
1990s, is a gross distortion. Equally flawed is the assumption that nonalignment crimped
India’s security choices during the Cold War. On the contrary, it enabled India to craft
arrangements that were more attuned to its interests than formal alliances which demanded a high
degree of conformity and specialization. Nor is the strategic doctrine of nonalignment passé
merely because it was conceived in an older context. After all, key components of contemporary
strategic vocabulary and thought—deterrence and coercion, containment and
intervention—date back to the Cold War years.

It is true that during the Cold War era, India
pursued a policy of economic self-reliance, shying away from the export and foreign
investment–led strategies of East and
South-East Asian economies.
Despite its modest footprint in the global economy, India nevertheless played a leading role in
seeking a more equitable global trade and financial system. It was and has remained a key player in
the World Trade Organization (WTO). What drives India’s increased influence as a major power
today is the confluence of its tradition of global political engagement with more recent growing
global economic engagement. NonAlignment 2.0 is an exploration of the opportunities that have been
unleashed by this confluence, giving India the wherewithal to play a more active role in a rapidly
transforming international terrain, where political and economic power are becoming more diffused,
creating the space that India has all along sought to pursue its own destiny. It is our belief that
in fact nonalignment as a strategy has become more pertinent than ever as a compass for defining
India’s choices and decisions—provided we are able to update and renovate some of its
assumptions and arguments.

India is at a pivotal moment in its history. The
extraordinary changes of the last two decades are fundamentally transforming India’s economy
and society. These changes have, for the first time in history, created the possibility that India
can become a reasonably prosperous and equitable society. Given its scale, a successful India is
destined to leave an extraordinary footprint on the world, and define future possibilities for
humankind.

The fundamental source of India’s power in
the world is going to be the power of its example. If India can maintain high growth rates, leverage
that growth to enhance the capabilities of all its citizens, and maintain robust democratic
traditions and institutions, there are few limits to its global role and influence. The foundations
of India’s success will therefore depend on its developmental model. If our developmental
model is successful, it will give us still greater legitimacy in the world—and it will enhance
our capacity to act for ourselves, in pursuit of our
values and interests,
in the international arena. By the same token, our competitors will, from time to time, impugn the
validity of our model and seek to place obstructions in its path.

This has two implications for India’s future
strategy. Under no circumstances should India jeopardize its own domestic economic growth, its
social inclusion and its political democracy. Its approach to the outside world must be to secure
the maximum space possible for its own economic growth. But this pursuit of economic growth will in
turn require India to confront new challenges—challenges whose roots and dynamics often lie in
a volatile global environment. We need therefore to ask: What kind of foreign and strategic policy
is appropriate to India’s development requirements?

Despite immense challenges, India faces a broadly
propitious environment for its growth. A range of factors—demography, the unleashing of
domestic entrepreneurship, the rising aspirations and innovation of millions of marginalized people,
technology—give India’s growth prospects a sound foundation and provide a competitive
advantage that could sustain growth for some time to come. There is widespread consensus that the
main thing that can hold India back is India itself. There are no alibis if we were, in these
circumstances, to fail.

But while the underlying trends are propitious,
time is of the essence. This is so in two senses. The window of opportunity for India to become a
prosperous nation is relatively small: the basic structures and dynamics necessary to achieve this
prosperity will have to be put in place in the next ten to fifteen years. The underlying factors
propitious for our growth may not endure long. Further, our future possibilities are going to be
heavily path-dependent. That is, once certain institutional choices and development pathways are
adopted, it will be very hard to change them: they will become entrenched. So, the choices we make
now will define the horizons of our possibility for decades, if not longer. It follows that rather
than imagining that growth can allow us to postpone hard decisions, our strategic approach must be
exactly the opposite. If we do not seize the opportunities provided by a relatively benign
environment, we will not get a second chance to correct our mistakes. For instance, if India wants
to avoid the ‘middle income trap’ that has afflicted many other societies where growth
rates experienced rapid acceleration only to peter out, then it will have to move decisively and
rapidly across a range of issues.

The nature of modern societies compels those who
wish to be successful to do two things simultaneously. For one, successful countries need to
prioritize their aims and focus
their energies on those basic priorities.
For another, minor deficiencies can have a major impact across the system. That the kingdom can be
lost for want of a horseshoe nail is not just a nursery rhyme: it is a parable about the nature of
power. A host of factors, both very large and very small, go into the making of effective power; and
India does not have the option of neglecting any of them. Grand strategy and fine-grained analysis
and action have to be pursued in tandem.

The core objective of a strategic approach should
be to give India maximum options in its relations with the outside world—that is, to enhance
India’s strategic space and capacity for independent agency. This in turn will give it maximum
options for its own internal development. Such an approach will preserve and sustain two core
objectives of nonalignment in a changing world. This policy can therefore be described as
‘NonAlignment 2.0’—a reworking for present times of the fundamental principles
that have defined India’s international engagements since Independence. The core objectives of
nonalignment were to ensure that India did not define its national interest or approach to world
politics in terms of ideologies and goals that had been set elsewhere; that India retained maximum
strategic autonomy to pursue its own developmental goals; and that India worked to build national
power as the
foundation for creating a more just and equitable global
order.

The context in which India’s strategy is
defined by nonalignment has changed considerably, as have India’s own capacities and
requirements. Any national strategy needs to adapt and to assimilate these changes if it is to be
credible and effective. The most fundamental change to that context is recognition of the fact that
our economic growth requires deepened economic engagement with the outside world at all levels:
trade, labour, technology and ideas. It is therefore central to any future Indian strategy that we
strive to maintain an open global order at many different levels.

The material preconditions for our economic success
have grown correspondingly complex. India now has an increasing range of interests, which are
anchored in different parts of the world and which stem from a vast array of factors: for instance,
the need to secure energy and other vital natural resources; the responsibility to protect the
rights of Indian labour overseas; the imperative to maintain open shipping lanes; the need to seek
and protect Indian investments overseas; and the need to secure trade access.

In ensuring our economic growth, one factor is even
more fundamental than access to resources. This is our
ability to compete in
the field that is vital to defining national power in the twenty-first century: knowledge and
knowledge production, especially the capacity to innovate and to generate new forms of knowledge,
both pure and applied. Economic growth, if it is to be both sustainable in terms of resources and
competitive across global markets, will depend ever more completely on scientific and technological
progress, on developing human capital and on disseminating skills and expertise across the working
citizenry. Given our scale, this will necessitate the revitalization and expansion of India’s
research and educational infrastructure, right from the apex pure research institutes down to the
access points for effectively imparting primary education and vocational skills to the wider
citizenry.

The complexity of India’s material interests
and their intermeshing with the imperatives of human capital formation and knowledge production have
profound implications for how we think of foreign and strategic policy. For one thing, it will make
it much more difficult for us to adopt stances rooted in abstract idealism, or to seek to follow a
narrow analysis of what serves our national interest. The complexity of our national interests,
given both the material and intellectual dimensions which define them, makes articulating a
coherent, effective national
strategy a far more subtle task than any simply
specified pursuit of power. We will need to develop a strategic culture—rooted in policy
analysis, evaluation and research, and modes of constructive intellectual debate about our strategic
options—that is attuned to this complexity.

Grasping this complexity will require, for
instance, a more nuanced understanding of a whole range of concepts and principles that have guided
our foreign policy: the principle of state sovereignty, the conditions under which we deploy force
overseas, our approach to international negotiations in domains ranging from trade to climate
change, to cite just a few examples. Our global engagement on each issue will resemble not so much a
boxing match—where victory and defeat can be rapidly judged in terms of decisive punches or
counterpunches—as it will a chess grandmasters’ tournament, where each move will have to
be mindful of several other pieces on the board and each game is played as part of a long strategic
interaction.

If the complexity of material interests and the
imperatives of being a knowledge-producing society preclude simple narratives, so too does the
changing nature of global power. NonAlignment 2.0 has to be articulated in a context where power
itself is becoming far more complex, diffused and fragmented—less a once-and-for-
all achievement and more a constant wary effort to stay a few moves ahead of
competitors and opponents.

In contrast to the twentieth century, the
twenty-first century is unlikely to be characterized by a world bifurcated between two dominant
powers. While China and the United States will undoubtedly remain superpowers, it is unlikely that
they will be able to exercise the kind of consistent, full-spectrum global dominance that
superpowers exercised during the mid-twentieth-century Cold War. Alongside the US and China, there
will be several other centres and hubs of power that will be relevant, particularly in regional
contexts. This means that nonalignment will no longer be limited to avoiding becoming a front-line
state in a conflict between two powers. It will instead require a very skilful management of
complicated coalitions and opportunities—in environments that may inherently be unstable and
volatile rather than structurally settled. It is this very openness and fluidity that has the
potential to provide India with rich opportunities, especially if it can leverage into the
international domain some of its domestically acquired skills in coalition management and complex
interest negotiation.

India will also inhabit an economic world where the
other great binary of the twentieth century, the polarity between the developed and the developing
world, is
undergoing substantial redefinition. India’s interests, as
those of many countries, will straddle this divide, and be heterogeneous in character. As in global
geopolitics, it is unlikely that there will be enduring coalitions based on fixed structural
positions on one or the other side of this divide in the world economy. Coalitions will be a lot
more contingent and fluid, and will need artful management.

One of the great lessons of the late twentieth
century centred on the destabilizing effects of asymmetries in power. The capacity of even small
powers or non-state groups to generate effects disproportionate to their physical scale or their
ostensible material power has become evident. In an age when technology can place weapons of great
potency in the hand of non-sovereign agencies and otherwise weak states, and when new media forms
can diffuse information and images that can delegitimize national reputations, the apparently less
powerful can produce massive impacts and effects on more powerful states, and can thereby transform
horizons and options. Therefore the kinds of power that a state requires will take two different
forms. On the one hand, the fact remains that great power competition of a classical kind will
continue to define aspects of the global order. We must seek therefore to ensure that no other state
is in a position to exercise undue influence on us—or make us
act
against our better judgement and will. On the other hand, we need to devise appropriate responses
that address the unpredictable ways in which weak states, terrorist groups and new postmodern
Internet- and media-based and other forms of power can influence or threaten our interests. Our
institutions, our technologies, our resources and our knowledge and analytic capacities will have to
undergo radical shifts and enhancements if they are to respond to both types of extant power, and to
their new configurations.

India’s great advantage is that, barring
certain perceptions in our immediate neighbourhood, it is not seen as a threatening power. The
overseas projection of Indian power has been very limited; in its external face, India’s
nationalism does not appear belligerently to any country, nor as expansionist or threatening in any
way. This has, in some respects, been a great asset to India. Its power has often been the power of
its example. The world recognizes that it needs India to succeed. This is an asset that we have
rather taken for granted, and it behoves us now to leverage that global consensus as effectively as
we can.

By the same token, however, India is at times
perceived as a power that, even when its interests are adversely affected, can do no harm; that it
is overly passive. In a range of relationships and contexts, India’s ability to
retaliate is seen as limited. Here, our big challenge will be at once to
develop a repertoire of instruments to signal—and where necessary to establish—that
there will be serious costs to attempts to coerce Indian judgements or actions, while at the same
time ensuring that we do not appear threatening to our many friends and well-wishers.

While the nature of global power is undergoing
redefinition and thereby enjoins states to generate new capabilities to acquire and sustain such
power, it is also the case that domestic political authority and legitimacy will have to be
maintained in more competitive and stringent conditions. This is because new forms of citizen
mobilization and vigilance are coming to prevail, particularly in democratic societies. In this
regard, effective state security will above all be a function of state openness. Accountability,
adherence to norms and a capacity to enable pluralism to flourish, all will be essential to enabling
states to command domestic legitimacy, and thus also to possess global credibility. Such state
legitimacy will also depend on state capacity: on the state being able to effectively deliver public
goods and services, and to discharge its law and security responsibilities. Enhancing state capacity
in all respects must therefore be recognized as a basic element of India’s strategic
conception.