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India's foreign policy needs a new direction

India will be present at various multilateral fora – the South Asian Association for Regional Co-operation and the ASEAN Regional Forum in the next few days, and the Non-Aligned Movement summit a couple of months later.

This will be nuclear India’s first presence and certainly, Indian officials will have a lot of explaining to do on why India had to go nuclear, point to Chinese support to Pakistan, to the growing Sino-United States nexus, to the new world order that seeks to perpetuate nuclear apartheid.

India will, with some justification, point out to the others that the world has changed irrevocably since the Cold War. Friends and foes are no longer defined, new partnerships and equations are being formed, and, perhaps most important, there is emerging a New World Order, only no one know how it will be. What is, however certain, is that this new order will dominate the pattern of international relations in at least the first half of the 21st century.

By going nuclear, India has chosen to do away its immediate past and tread a new path. And it is in this light that perhaps today we must examine our membership of the various organisations, and what purpose they serve. We need to examine which organisations are of importance, and which are not, and then decide what is to be done. For instance, certainly the World Trade Organisation will matter. The United Nations might matter if the US stops treating it like a personal forum.

The ASEANRF is important if only because it gives New Delhi a chance to interact with the Association of South-East Nations, a region of economic and strategic importance in the country’s neighbourhood. India is already a full dialogue partner with ASEAN, and has tried, in vain so far, to join the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation meet and the Asia-Europe Meeting. Despite the current problems, East and South-East Asia are expected to be economic power regions, India can only gain by seeking closer linkages with it. One only hopes that whatever diplomatic loss India has suffered after Pokhran II will soon be nullified. Unfortunately, much depends on India opening up its economy and achieving a growth of 7 per cent of GDP, both seemingly far away.

But the relevance of NAM and the Commonwealth that really need to be examined. India might believe that such membership enhances its status, but that is far from the truth. NAM may have been relevant at the height of the Cold War, but it was always a grouping with extremely limited abilities. One good reason is that it is still a movement and not yet a proper organisation with a secretariat, general secretary, a specific charter, etc.

NAM gave Jawaharlal Nehru a global role, but it also diverted his attention to more pressing problems in the immediate neighbourhood. Just to recall: NAM was officially born in 1961 at Belgrade with Nehru playing architect; in 1962 when Chinese troops were overrunning Indian territory almost at will, NAM (and Nehru) was unable to do anything and India had to seek US help.

Even when Yugoslavia, a founder-member, disintegrated, NAM was only a spectator while a host of organisations – the European Union, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, the UN – have tried valiantly to resolve outstanding ethnic rivalry and civil war. Then again, the US (through the United Nations or alone) has continuously treated Iraq in a most humiliating manner, denying it aid and forcing worldwide sanctions against its people. NAM has not done anything, and frankly, it really can do nothing.

If NAM cannot help its members, then what is its need? In fact, NAM lost its relevance the day it began to lean towards the then Soviet Union and turned into an America-bashing platform.

Today, being non-aligned when there is no one to align to makes little sense. Still, it would be stupid to lose all the goodwill gained over the years. The way out is to give NAM a new direction, a newfound purpose. One such role can be to turn the Non-Aligned Movement into a full-fledged organisation with a charter setting out specific objectives (like, say, South-South trade), a powerful secretariat located in a major city, appointing a general secretary, setting up sub-committees, etc.

NAM members are all mostly from the Third World and in a globe dominated by economic issues and disparity, it can still be relevant in a new avatar of a single voice of the South. It could then seek to play a political-economic role in the WTO and other fora on issues such as patents, intellectual property rights, labour movement, social barriers, and so on. This is just one suggestion, there may be far better ones.

The second one concerns the Commonwealth, based on the former British Empire. It is an unwieldy organisation headquartered in London. What it does share is the English language, which is today clearly the global language. But its members are often divided on various issues right from the time of imposing sanctions on White-ruled South Africa. The interests of the rich nations -- led by the ABC (Australia, Britain, Canada) -- really do not coincide with the poorer nations, usually led by India. <

One positive aspect, at least from the perspective of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, is case of migration into the rich countries. Another aspect is that most have a common pattern of education, helping migration and labour movement. Beyond this, one still has to see the Commonwealth play a major role. An imperial past cannot help face the 21st century, especially when the formation of regional organisations exert a strong centrifugal force on the Commonwealth. It too needs a new definition.

Then there is SAARC, considered the most divided regional organisation, yet one with perhaps the greatest potential at a time when the world echoes with acronyms such as EU, NAFTA, Mercusor, APEC, etc. But SAARC flounders because its Big Two – India and Pakistan – are still at daggers drawn and the recent nuke tests have not really improved matters. No organisation can function effectively when its two major partners talk of war. European unity came about only after France and Germany buried the hatchet once and for all.

There are two options: either SAARC evolves a way to still grow without letting Indo-Pak bilateral issues (read Kashmir) affect the organisation. This may not be possible because Pakistan has time and again stated that unless the core issue is resolved, there is little scope of improving Indo-Pak or intra-SAARC ties. India believes in allowing other areas of co-operation to create a better atmosphere. As Deng Xiaoping put it: ‘Let a generation wiser than ours resolve disputes that we can’t.’ But Islamabad believes, quite correctly, that putting Kashmir on the backburner would mean accepting the status quo forever, hence its unwillingness to compromise.

There is perhaps another way out. India has formed, within SAARC, a Quadrangle Growth Area along with Bangladesh, Bhutan, and Nepal. India should also include Sri Lanka (and if possible, the Maldives). This actually means shutting out Pakistan, which is quite sad but perhaps necessary. We cannot let economic ties with other neighbours suffer simply because of outstanding disputes with one, Pakistan. Moreover, all of India’s neighbours (except Pakistan and Maldives) are on its eastern side, much nearer ASEAN which now extends up to Myanmar. This would be a golden opportunity to foster trade and economic ties with ASEAN that could also go a long way in challenging China’s growing clout in the region.

Improving ties with our eastern side will also help India’s east, the poorer side today. Alternatively, with south India flourishing today, it is well located to exploit economic ties with the ASEAN countries. It really appears to be a win-win situation.

Of course, everything written here is quite simplistic and there are many complex details that cannot be examined in this column. There are, one is sure, many reasons why India will have to maintain its memberships in various associations and why changes may not come about, at least not very soon and easy, and reasons of state for many of the changes made that go beyond what is mentioned above.

However, the suggestion is that today, India needs a new direction to its foreign policy orientation, more purposeful and meaningful, better geared to meet the emerging challenges of the next century which might be, at least in the beginning, multipolar in economic terms, and unipolar in military terms. It might also see a superpower on India’s North-Eastern border and fundamentalist forces on the North-Western side.

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