Adrift on growth, and a hope

The Indian prime minister has returned from China after signing some extravagantly titled documents. The British prime minister has come and gone after making some equally grandiose noises. And India has hosted the French president on its Republic Day celebrations. The world, it seems, is India’s oyster. India is being touted as the next great power on the horizon by one and all (even by the Chinese) but the Indian foreign policy continues to drift without any real sense of direction. The seemingly never-ending debate on the US-India nuclear deal had made it clear that today Indian policy stands divided on fundamental foreign policy choices facing the nation.

What Walter Lipmann wrote for US foreign policy in 1943 applies equally to the Indian landscape of today. He had warned that the divisive partisanship that prevents the finding of a settled and generally accepted foreign policy is a grave threat to the nation. “For when a people is divided within itself about the conduct of its foreign relations, it is unable to agree on the determination of its true interest. It is unable to prepare adequately for war or to safeguard successfully its peace.” In the absence of a coherent national grand strategy, India is in the danger of losing its ability to safeguard its long-term peace and prosperity.

As India’s weight has grown in the international system in recent years, there is a perception that India is on the cusp of achieving ‘great power’ status. There is just one problem: Indian policymakers themselves are not clear as to what this status of a great power entails. At a time when the Indian foreign policy establishment should be vigorously debating the nature and scope of India’s engagement with the world, it is disappointingly silent.

There is clearly an appreciation in the Indian policymaking circles of India’s rising capabilities. It is reflected in a gradual expansion of Indian foreign policy activity in recent years, in India’s attempt to reshape its defence forces, in India’s desire to seek greater global influence. But all this is happening in an intellectual vacuum with the result that micro issues dominate the foreign policy discourse in the absence of an overarching framework. The recent debates on the US-India nuclear deal, on India’s role in the Middle East, on India’s engagements with Russia and China, on India’s policy towards its immediate neighbours are all important but ultimately of little value as they fail to clarify the singular issue facing India today: what should be the trajectory of Indian foreign policy at a time when India is emerging from the structural confines of the international system as a rising power on way to a possible great power status? Answering this question requires one big debate. However much Indians like to be argumentative, a major power’s foreign policy cannot be effective in the absence of a guiding framework of underlying principles that is a function of both the nation’s geopolitical requirements and its values.

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