Foreign Policy Research Center Journal interview with Sanjay Upadhya
1. What Mao Zedong did to Jawaharlal Nehru, Xi Jinping has done to Narendra Modi. Has ‘personal diplomacy’ failed in the case of India-China relations?
Personal diplomacy was always going to have its limits vis-à-vis India and China, considering the scope, content, regional and global impact of the bilateral relations. Moreover, too many external variables are at play with varying levels of intensity. Hoping to reconcile so many complex dynamics through personal chemistry into a stable bilateral relationship can be audacious at best. If Mao Zedong’s and Jawaharlal Nehru’s warmth fizzled amid the geostrategic realignments of their time, the Modi-Xi bonhomie alone could not have seen the two countries through the shifts in the global landscape that COVID-19-has accelerated. For a moment in the vast sweep of time, domestic disagreements, competing ambitions, and threat perceptions amplified by opposing political systems were balanced by a given set of external factors that appeared to have been in equilibrium. The pandemic suddenly shook the international system by accelerating developments already in play. Its impact on the China-India relationship was bound to appear precipitous.
2. America’s fickle foreign policy play with India continues. (Navtej Sarna) The US hasn’t woken up to India’s nightmare of a two-front war with China and Pakistan. To what extent can India expect support from a semi-isolationist America that is withdrawing from various parts of the world and demanding erstwhile allies take care of their own problems?
Despite the current bilateral bonhomie and the attendant rhetoric on both sides, the US foreign policy and defense establishment is severely affected by cold memories of the past. There may have been moments where the world’s largest democracy and its most powerful one could have struck an enduring alliance, say in the 1950s and around the 1962 India-China war. Yet even before New Delhi moved toward an alliance with Moscow a decade later, the United States had enough reasons to be wary of India. To Pandit Nehru, non-alignment was the vehicle that would allow the great powers as well as newly independent nations to find and foster their respective places. As India sought to perfect strategic autonomy as a viable instrument of foreign policy, the Americans were already detecting in the Non-aligned Movement a pronounced tilt toward the Eastern bloc. Unofficially, India and the United States would find themselves on opposite blocs on such issues as the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Vietnamese invasion of what was then Kampuchea.
The perceptible US lukewarmness on India’s Himalayan front and alacrity on securing a maritime alliance with New Delhi is driven by Washington’s specific considerations and requirements. Obvious, while weighing the merits of waving – so to speak – the Taiwan and Tibet cards, New Delhi views Washington’s general intentions and motives with deep skepticism, if not outright suspicion. A shared democratic heritage, economic system, language, and other complementarities may not be enough to compensate for the disparities in their values, attitudes, needs and expectations. As a matter of internal consensus for India, dependence on America cannot yet be a prudent strategy. Thus diversification of multilayered relationships across an assortment of nations becomes a logical extension of India’s strategic autonomy. That many of those nations also happen to be on inimical terms with the United States becomes of less relevance in New Delhi and Washington. As for China, New Delhi realizes that a momentary convergence of Indian-US interests on one dimension of the US-China equation cannot be expected to distort the complex triangular relationship.
3. China impacts India’s ties with her neighbours. Have neighbours gone too far away from India?
If familiarity has bred contempt for India among its neighbors, China continues to benefit from a sense of exoticism. What appears to be a phase of Indian withdrawal amid Chinese inroads is also a time for India and China’s neighbors to weigh their relations with each giant against those with the other. More importantly, in the next phase, neighboring countries must work out how much more they would stand to gain from cooperation with both. This process, perhaps one that could take decades, would require shedding old attitudes, recognizing current ones for what they really are, and making a rational choice for the future. Efforts to manage conflicts well enough certainly have not resulted in unimpeded cooperation – as the breakdown in the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation underlines. But, then, cooperation, must be given a fair chance to mitigate conflict.
4. Will India be able to balance a growing security dilemma vis-a-vis China against the magnetic appeal of its market as a spur to domestic economic growth?
Just as India’s comprehensive personality cannot be understood in unidimensional terms, it cannot allow one part to hold the rest hostage. India’s security dilemma vis-à-vis China will certainly influence the bilateral economic relationship. There are enough economic complementarities for the two countries to work relatively easily in certain areas. Other areas might require prudence, or even contraction/expansion as the situation in any given moment may warrant. The logic of the Rajiv Gandhi-Deng Xiaoping consensus in the late 1980s to disallow the border dispute from seizing the general promise in bilateral ties was not flawed. Precisely because they did so have India and China today been able to share such a vibrant and multifaceted relationship in the decades since. Today, the border certainly has come to bear the larger tensions spread across the relationship between two rising powers. But India and China do have shared interests in promoting a fair and equitable international order where both can continue striving for their full potential while sorting out their disagreements. Operating in such constrained circumstances would certainly require greater persistence and commitment amid growing pushback from different quarters. Fortunately, India’s civilizational strengths provide it with the wisdom and maturity to protect and project its interests.
5. What should India do to safeguard her interests in view of the changing world geopolitical scenario? External Affairs Minister Jaishankar said that India will never join any alliance system in the future just as it never did in the past.
I believe Dr. Jaishankar has spoken well. India has aspirations, expectations, capacities and beliefs that may flower or wither in keeping with its proper recognition of the realities of the times. An alliance-driven set of expectations and obligations would require India to depart from an approach that has, on balance, worked fairly well. World geopolitics will always be in a state of flux and India would have to find a space to pursue its objectives and interests within the specific demands and circumstances of the time. In that sense, an alliance system would be more of a constraint. Instead, India has the means and methods to address challenges and explore opportunities based on issue-specific deliberations.
Foreign Policy Research Centre Journal (J-44) 2020 (4): 56-58
