In a country of 1.5 billion people, what Amartya Sen has called intuitively rational, there are many views on what India’s national interest actually is. At the risk of sweeping generalizations, these views, as they exist in the public sphere today, can be broadly classified into two types.
The first argues that Jawaharlal Nehru’s world-view and its long-term influence on the Indian state have undermined the national interest since the birth of the nation. We are told that the present regime is trying very hard to revive it through several efforts and interventions. The second view is tantamount to saying that the present regime is destroying India’s national interest by erasing the hard-earned achievements and credibility of the past.
Facts, counter-facts, selective facts and WhatsApp University facts abound for both sides of the debate. It is futile to even try to argue with either side. Perhaps a more appropriate exercise is to formulate a broad framework keeping in mind the strategy of any national interest to India.
1. 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. India became an independent country at the same time as the world entered the rivalry between two ideologically opposed superpowers: the US and the Soviet Union. It was also the beginning of a great decolonization wave in the world, with India being the largest former colony to become a democracy. That it has survived as a country and as a democracy is no small feat.
Like large parts of the world, India and its neighborhood were also the theater of great Cold War rivalries. In fact, one could well argue that the final act in the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Afghanistan War, was played out in this region. The disintegration of the Soviet Union and, with it, socialism, ushered in the era of a US-dominated world order.
The world is still under significant American dominance. But there is a growing perception, and rightly so, that in China, we now have a country that is beginning to challenge American dominance. This challenge is coming in a very different way from the era of Soviet Union and American competition. The competition for hegemony between the US and China is more about controlling the source code of the global economy than the constitutional codes of countries or the world.
2. What does this reversal of geopolitical contradictions mean for India?
India has come a long way from the days of its ship-to-mouth existence that required it to import wheat from the US. It has also come a long way from engaging in security mediation between the Soviet Union and the US as it did during various military conflicts in the past. But India is critically dependent on the US and China today in different ways than it was on the US or the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
With the adoption of globalization, especially in finance and services, India’s fortunes are inherently linked to the US economy and the global economic order headed by it. Take away our service exports, remittances sent by NRIs and portfolio investments flowing into our financial markets – all of which are largely rooted in the US-led global economic order – and the Indian economy will either fall into a forex crisis or have to declare force majeure on its domestic elite, who have begun to take a certain, one might say, First World, standard of living for granted.
China, over the past few years, has emerged as India’s largest source of imports because it can make almost everything – from low-tech to high-tech – more effectively and economically than India. Of course, China’s physical dominance is not limited to India alone. However, what India is also realizing now, as it tries to expand its manufacturing footprint into more high-tech goods, is that China’s support is as essential to kick-start this process as was support from the Soviet or American camp for building our steel factories after independence.
In short, disengagement from the US or China, or managing the world churn caused by the China-US rivalry through mediation, is not a feasible option for India.
3. The Iran war shows that protecting India’s national interests requires an awkward action to set aside the Sino-US rivalry amid flying projectiles
It is difficult in itself to reconcile the US and China, especially when the US has an irascible and aggressive President and China has an active border dispute with India and a vested interest in keeping Indian power in check in the Indian Ocean region. It must be removed at a time when the global economy has been dealt the biggest energy shock ever due to the war in West Asia, making it even more difficult.
However, disruptions now appear to be the norm rather than exceptions in the world. This decade alone has seen four major events: a once-in-a-century pandemic, a war in Europe that lasted longer than World War I, a generational technological shock in the form of AI, and, now, war in West Asia. All these crises have caused/will cause significant suffering and hence have diverted attention and, more importantly, resources from India’s challenge of dealing with the central paradox described above.
4. Preparing for an environment where disruption is the norm rather than the exception requires strategic flexibility
Why did Donald Trump back out of his three-point tariffs on China that he imposed last year? The Chinese threatened to cut off supplies of rare earths to the US, which would have crippled a large portion of US industrial activity. China’s physical influence – its indispensability to global supply chains – is immense in the world today.
For the US, this leverage serves as its tremendous potential, as the dollar is the dominant currency in the world. If the US imposes economic sanctions on a country, commercial transactions with the rest of the world become difficult and expensive.
Like many other countries, India too does not have any such strategic advantage. This puts it in a position where it must try to minimize the potential pain if the two superpowers decide to exert their influence in a hostile manner against India. In the short term, this could take the form of diversification beyond the US-China basket, sometimes through trade deals or technological collaboration with other countries. But the long-term solution is only one: either acquire leverage or immunity against the practice of such leverage.
5. The guiding framework for building such resilience for India should be “Land, Peace and Bread” in a democratic framework
A specific national interest optimization problem should target three simultaneous and interrelated objectives: protecting the country’s sovereignty, maintaining domestic order, and ensuring a decent standard of living for citizens. In the case of India, this effort will have to abide by the constraints imposed by democracy.
Taken as a whole, India’s military capabilities are not impressive. However, they are being eclipsed by increasing Chinese capabilities. India’s inadequacy is also reflected in the lack of its other strategic security measures. For example, what else explains the fact that despite India being a more populous country than China, India’s strategic petroleum reserves are a tiny fraction of China’s? To achieve these objectives a country needs economic strength.
Today India is a much more peaceful society than it was a few decades ago. Much of this relative peace is the result of economic growth over the past three decades. Even though the development process has been entangled in inequality, it has led to a valuable increase in the power of the nation state to provide economic palliatives. However, this material peace is more inclined towards uncertainty than prosperity. The increasing demands on the fiscal pool are slowly but steadily leading to instability.
Certainly, politics in India is more devilish than kind, as it is deeply rooted in nefarious, rent-seeking political finance. The latter has created an environment where private accumulation is increasingly divorced from activities that would protect and enhance the goals of the national interest. This is best reflected in the situation where the largest share of the country’s breadwinners are in the bread-growing business (agriculture), who are doomed to live under a structural viability crisis. Private capital is largely shying away from promoting investment in job creation activities even as it seeks greater profits from trade and rent-related sectors.
6. So, what needs to be done to protect India’s national interests?
Let us start with what will not protect it.
Putting all your eggs in one of the two competing great power rivalry camps, or even appearing to do so, is the biggest mistake anyone can make. Unlike in the past, the US is now purging and torturing its own satellites. It doesn’t make any sense, and more importantly, there’s no point in even trying to become one right now. China, unlike the Soviet Union, is not interested in acquiring camp followers who would benefit from socialist philanthropy. Given the very low levels of per capita income and the ongoing demographic decline, China views its future from the perspective of insecurity. The challenge is to understand these contradictions and resolve them rather than isolate or confuse ourselves in the hope of pitting one against the other, which was, to some extent, a practical strategy during the Cold War.
The pursuit of democratic legitimacy may not be the great Indian trick of balancing increased economic relief with dishonest political finance. This has become a vicious cycle in our political economy. The balance that a healthy capitalist democracy must strive for and maintain is in managing the conflicting terms of trade between workers and capital, where creative destruction ensures that the overall strength of the economy continues to grow rather than stagnate.
The only way to overcome these two challenges is to make them an integral part of political discourse that appreciates these nuances rather than vacillating between narcissism and nihilism. The latter is exactly what our political debate has become.
It is tempting to blame individual political actors on both sides of the spectrum for this not happening. However, it is more appropriate to see this as a major philosophical crisis for theorists and practitioners of Indian political economy. Social issues like caste and religion have been the most heated debates in Indian politics in the last three and a half decades. However, overall, there has been a consensus on economic strategy: economic reforms coupled with reforms fueled by majority political finance.
When charlatans pretending to be scholars want to portray standalone acts of commission or omission as the ultimate act for or against India’s national interest, they are trying to hide this massive bipartisan bankruptcy. With each crisis, which causes more suffering to an already distressed people, the emptiness of such arguments becomes more apparent.
7. But what about Pakistan?
Many people may ask this question. As a hostile neighbor, Pakistan must become an extremely important component of our national security strategy. But national security strategy is a small subset of national interest strategy. Countries which mistake the first for the second end up exactly like Pakistan or North Korea. India and Indians deserve and must do better.
