In a country of 1.5 billion people, which Amartya Sen has called argumentative by instinct, there are many views on what exactly is India’s national interest. At the risk of a sweeping generalisation, these views, as they exist in the public realm today, can be broadly classified into two types. LPG tanker ‘Shivalik’ arrives at Mundra Port in Gujarat on March 16 after safely crossing the Strait of Hormuz in Gujarat. (PTI)
The first argues that Jawaharlal Nehru’s world-view and its prolonged influence on the Indian state have undermined national interest since the nation was born. We are told the current regime has been trying very hard to rejuvenate it through a host of efforts and interventions. The second view is tantamount to saying that the current regime is liquidating India’s national interest by undoing the hard-earned achievements and credibility of the past.
There are facts, counter-facts, selective facts and WhatsApp University facts galore for both sides of the debate. It is futile to even try to argue with either side. Perhaps a more worthy exercise is to lay down the broad framework of what any national interest strategy for India should take into account.
1. A medium-to-long term assessment of the central geopolitical contradiction
Any national interest strategy is as good or bad as its assessment of the world order it is meant to navigate. India became an independent country at the same time the world entered into a rivalry between two ideologically opposed superpowers: the US and the Soviet Union. It was also the beginning of a great decolonisation wave in the world with India being the largest former colony to become a democracy. That it has survived as a country and democracy is no mean achievement.
Like large parts of the world, India and its neighbourhood were also a theatre of great Cold War rivalry. In fact, one can very well argue that the last act in the demise of the Soviet Union, the Afghanistan war, played out in this region. The disintegration of the Soviet Union and, with it, socialism, ushered in a period of a US dominated world order.
The world is still under significant US dominance. But there is a growing view, and rightly so, that in China, we now have a country which is beginning to challenge American dominance. This challenge is coming in ways, very different from the era of Soviet Union and American competition. The hegemonic competition between the US and China is more about controlling the source code of the global economy than the constitutional code of countries or the world.
2. What does this shifting of geopolitical contradiction entail for India?
India has come a long way from its days of ship-to-mouth existence which required it to import wheat from the US. It has also come a long way from indulging in a security arbitrage between the Soviet Union and the US as it did during various military conflicts it had in the past. But India is critically dependent on the US and China in different ways today than it was on the US or the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
With its embrace of globalisation, especially in finance and services, India’s fortunes are organically linked to the US economy and the global economic order it presides over. Take out our service exports, remittances by the Indian diaspora and portfolio investments which come to our financial markets -- all of which are largely rooted in the US led global economic order -- and the Indian economy will either run into a foreign exchange crisis or will have to declare force majeure on its domestic elite which has started taking a certain, shall one say, first world, standard of living for granted.
China, over the years, has emerged as India’s largest source of imports because it can make pretty much make everything -- low-tech to high-tech -- more effectively and economically than India. To be sure, China’s physiocratic dominance is not just vis-à-vis India. However, what India is also realising now, as it tries to expand its manufacturing footprint into more high-tech commodities, is that China’s cooperation is as essential for kickstarting this process as was the support of either the Soviet or American camp to build our steel factories after independence.
The short point is that decoupling from either the US or China, or managing the churn the Sino-US rivalry is creating in the world via arbitrage, is not a feasible option for India.
3. The Iran war shows that safeguarding India’s national interest requires pulling off a trapeze act of navigating Sino-US rivalry between flying projectiles
Navigating between the US and China is difficult in itself, especially when the former has a mercurial, brash president, and the latter has an active border dispute with India and a vested interest in keeping Indian power under check in the Indian Ocean region. That this has to be pulled off at a time when the global economy has suffered its largest ever energy shock because of the war in West Asia makes it even more difficult.
Disruptions, however, now seem to be the norm rather than exceptions in the world. This decade alone has seen four really big ones: a once in a century pandemic, a war in Europe which has lasted longer than the First World War, a generational technological shock in the form of AI, and, now, the war in West Asia. All of these crises have inflicted/will inflict significant pain and therefore divert attention and, more importantly, resources, from India’s challenge of handling the central contradiction described above.
4. Preparing for an environment where disruption is the norm rather than the exception requires strategic resilience
Why did Donald Trump back down from his triple digit tariffs on China which he imposed last year? The Chinese threatened to cut-off rare earth supplies to the US, which would have crippled a large part of the latter’s industrial activity. China’s physiocratic leverage – its indispensability to global supply chains – is immense in the world today.
For the US, this leverage works in the form of its coercive capacity thanks to the dollar being the dominant currency in the world. If the US imposes economic sanctions on a country, commercial transactions with the rest of the world become increasingly difficult and expensive.
India, like many other countries, enjoys no such strategic leverage. This puts it in a position where it must try to minimise the potential pain when the two superpowers decide to exercise their leverage in a hostile manner against India. In the short term, it can take the form of diversifying beyond the US-China basket, sometimes via trade deals or technological collaborations with other countries. But the long-term solution is only one: either acquire leverage or immunity against the exercise of such leverage.
5. The guiding framework of building such a resilience for India has to be “land, peace and bread” in a democratic framework
A typical national interest optimisation problem should target three simultaneous and interlinked objectives: protect the country’s sovereignty, maintain domestic order and ensure a decent standard of living for the citizens. In India’s case, this pursuit has to observe the guardrails that a democracy imposes.
India’s military capabilities, when seen in absolute terms are far from unimpressive. However, they are increasingly being eclipsed by the augmentation of Chinese capabilities. India’s inadequacy also reflects in its lack of other strategic safeguards. For example, what else explains the fact that India’s strategic petroleum reserves are a small fraction of China’s despite India being a more populous country than China? A country needs economic might to pursue these objectives.
India today, is a much more peaceful society than it was even a couple of decades ago. A lot of this relative peace is the result of economic growth in the past three decades. Even though the growth process has been entrenched in inequality, it has made a valuable addition to the nation state’s prowess to provide economic palliatives. However, this material peace is tilted more towards precarity than prosperity. The growing demands on the fiscal pool are slowly but steadily inching towards unsustainability.
To be sure, politics is more diabolic than compassionate in India, given its entrenched roots in nefarious, rent-seeking based political finance. The latter has built an environment where private accumulation is increasingly diverging from activities which would safeguard and augment national interest goals. This is best reflected in a situation where the largest share of the country’s breadwinners is in the business of growing bread (agriculture) are doomed to live under a structural viability crisis. Private capital continues to hold back on boosting investment in mass employment generation activities, even as it seeks more and more profits from trade and rent-seeking-related sectors.
6. So, what will it take to safeguard India’s national interest?
Let us begin with what will not safeguard it.
Placing all our eggs in one of the two competing great power rivalry camps, or even appearing to do so, is the biggest mistake one can commit. The US, unlike in the past, is purging and persecuting its own satellites now. There is no point, and more importantly, no benefit in even trying to become one right now. China, unlike the Soviet Union, is not interested in acquiring camp followers who will benefit from socialist altruism. China rightly sees its future from a perspective of insecurity given its much lower per capita income levels and the now underway demographic decline. The challenge is to discern these contradictions and navigate them rather than decouple or delude ourselves in the hope of dangling one against the other, which was, to some extent, a workable strategy during the Cold War.
The pursuit of democratic legitimacy cannot be the great Indian rope trick of balancing growing economic palliatives with unscrupulous political finance. It has become a vicious cycle in our political economy. The balance, which a healthy capitalist democracy should try and persevere, is in managing the conflicting terms of trade between workers and capital, where creative destruction ensures that the economy’s overall prowess keeps rising instead of being stagnant.
The only way these two challenges can be overcome is by making them an integral part of the political discourse which appreciates these nuances instead of fluctuating between narcissism and nihilism. The latter is exactly what our political debate has become.
It is tempting to attribute the blame for this not happening to individual political actors on both sides of the spectrum. What is more appropriate, however, is to see this as a larger philosophical crisis for theoreticians and practitioners of Indian political economy. Indian polity, in the last three and a half decades, has had its most acrimonious debates on social issues such as caste and religion. However, there has been, by and large, an agreement on the economic strategy: reforms along with economic palliatives midwifed by plutocratic political finance.
When tricksters pretending to be learned voices want to portray standalone acts of commission or omission as the ultimate act for or against India’s national interest, they are trying to put this larger bipartisan bankruptcy under cover. With each crisis, inflicting more and more pain on an already precarious people, the vacuousness of such arguments only becomes more apparent.
7. But what about Pakistan?
A lot of people might ask this question. Pakistan, as a hostile neighbour, will have to be an extremely critical component of our national security strategy. But national security strategy is only a small subset of a national interest strategy. Countries which confuse the first as the second end up exactly like Pakistan, or North Korea. India, and Indians deserve, and ought to do, better.