By P.K.Balachandran
Colombo, July 17: In his first term as India’s Prime Minister, Narendra Modi signalled that his government will seek accommodation, cooperation and peace with all countries particularly Pakistan, China and the US.
He made an unscheduled visit to Pakistan in 2015 to demonstrate his bonhomie with Premier Nawaz Sharif. He met Chinese President Xi Jinping 18 times between 2014 and 2020 and concluded landmark defence agreements with the US between 2016 and 2020 to become its “strategic partner”.
But come 2024, India’s foreign policy is a bundle of contradictions and earning all round displeasure.
India’s relations with Pakistan broke when New Delhi abrogated Art.370 of the Indian constitution which had guaranteed the autonomy of Jammu and Kashmir, an Indian State claimed by Pakistan. India’s relations with China soured in 2020 over a border clash amidst accusations that China was in occupation of over 4,000 sq.km of Indian territory in Ladakh.
India responded by putting curbs on Chinese trade and investment and tried to prevent China from weaning away its neighbours with investments.
To counterbalance China, India became a member of the US-led anti-China QUAD in 2017. And to bolster its military strength, it signed a number of defence agreements with the US increased military purchases from the US from near zero in 2008 to US$ 25 billion in 2024.
But India did not stay true its friendship with the US. In a grandiose display if “strategic autonomy” it defied US sanctions against Russia when the latter invaded Ukraine and bought oil from Russia at a discounted rate. When European countries criticised the oil purchase, Foreign Minister S.Jaishankar retorted that Europe could not consider its problems as the world’s problems.
India was a member of QUAD but refused to cooperate on anything that might result in a military conflict with China.
Jaishankar also refused to accept US criticisms about the human rights violations in India and described them as brazen interference in India’s internal affairs or as a colonial hangover.
Not Allies
Ashley Tellis, Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, was the first US scholar to point out the disconnect between India and the US. Writing in Foreign Affairs in 2023, Tellis said: “India’s significant weaknesses compared with China, and its inescapable proximity to it, guarantee that New Delhi will never involve itself in any US confrontation with Beijing that does not directly threaten its own security.”
“India values cooperation with Washington for the tangible benefits it brings but does not believe that it must, in turn, materially support the United States in any crisis—even one involving a common threat such as China.”
Tellis said that India “does not harbour any innate allegiance toward preserving the liberal international order and retains an enduring aversion toward participating in mutual defence.”
“It seeks to acquire advanced technologies from the United States to bolster its own economic and military capabilities and thus facilitate its rise as a great power capable of balancing China independently, but it does not presume that American assistance imposes any further obligations on itself.”
Tellis pointed out that India had consistently rejected the idea of participating in any combined military operation outside of a UN umbrella.
Garcetti’s Outburst
US disillusionment with India came into the public domain starkly when the US Ambassador to India Eric Garcetti spoke at a security related seminar in Kolkata earlier this month. The trigger for Garcetti’s outburst was Modi’s trip to Moscow to meet Vladimir Putin and hugging him on the day Russia bombed a Ukrainian hospital killing 37 people including children.
Garcetti startled the audience when he said that US-India relations were “not yet deep enough to be taken for granted.” He emphasised that “there is no such thing as strategic autonomy during a conflict.”
Pitching on morality, Garcetti said: “In crisis moments we will need to know that we are trusted friends, brothers and sisters, colleagues in times of need, and the next day be acting together.”
Clearly rejecting Jaishankar’s argument that what happens in Europe or to Europe, does not matter to people outside, Garcetti pointed out that in today’s interconnected world, “no war remains distant anymore.”
Urging India to support Ukraine against Russia, the envoy said: “We must not just stand for peace, we must take concrete actions to make sure those who don’t play by peaceful rules, that their war machines cannot continue unabated.”
Garcetti also mentioned that there are doubts in Washington regarding civil rights issues in India. “We must actually confront and find a good way of talking them,” he said.
Garcetti wanted India to continue to buy sophisticated weapons from the US. He urged India to “know where the best systems, the best weapons, are coming from.”
On China and Russia
If India’s relations with US are on a downward trajectory, its relations with China show no sign of improving. As pointed out earlier, apart from the border conflict, India is putting a lot of curbs on Chinese investments and is also pressurizing neighbours not to allow Chinese investments.
India feels uncomfortable in groupings like the Shanghai Corporation Organization (SCO) and in BRICS (the group comprising Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) because it feels that China is trying to dominate them. There is talk in New Delhi of India’s leaving these two organizations eventually.
In their 2023 article for Project Syndicate, Arvind Subramanian (a former Economic Advisor to the Modi government) and Josh Felman said that it makes no sense for India to belong to BRICS which is a “bunch of economic has been.”. China’s GDP growth is more likely to be 3% per annum and Russia is in terminal decline, the authors said.
The geopolitics of the China and Russia dominated BRICS will bring it into a conflict with the US, according to then.
“BRICS members aspire to dethrone the US dollar as the world’s dominant currency, and to provide alternative development resources and emergency funding to poorer countries. But these objectives imply that a better world would be based on Renminbi dominance, Belt and Road Initiative-type lending, and a greater reluctance among official creditors to write-off debts when poor countries face crises,” Subramanian and Felman warned.
They pointed out that India had already opted out of the China-centric Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP). And the Chinese had reciprocated when President Xi Jinping skipped the G20 summit organized by India in 2023.
Writing in Nikkei Asia, Bharma Chellaney of the New Delhi-based Centre for Policy Research said that India is losing interest in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). The reason? China is increasingly in the driver’s seat of the group, he said.
“New Delhi’s creeping doubts about the SCO were first evident last year (2023) when as rotating host of the group’s annual leaders’ summit, Modi chose to convene the meeting online rather than in person,” Chellaney recalled. And sure enough, Modi skipped the SCO summit in Astana in 2024.
“Except for India, the other members of the SCO are all participants in China’s Belt and Road Initiative, which New Delhi has opposed since its launch as a neo-colonial enterprise,” Chellaney pointed out.
The pro-US Indian scholar recalled that China had blocked India from joining the 48-nation Nuclear Suppliers Group pending agreement that its strategic ally Pakistan be simultaneously admitted. Beijing also made sure Islamabad was brought into the SCO alongside New Delhi in 2017.
“Seven years later it is becoming apparent that the SCO carries diminishing value for Indian foreign policy. India’s membership of the SCO, originally established as a regional security bloc, appears incongruent with its close ties with the West and its support for a free, open and democratic-led Indo-Pacific region. Notably, China and Russia reject the very term Indo-Pacific, insisting that the region still be called the Asia-Pacific,” Chellaney said.
Isolation
Presently, an economically, politically and militarily weak India is doggedly pursuing “strategic autonomy” in a conflict-ridden world. This has put it in messy situations. India is in danger of falling between two stools.
There is an option for India to get out of the mess: come to an understanding with its principal adversaries, Pakistan and China, and concentrate on lifting its teeming millions from abysmal poverty.
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