China’s increasingly aggressive moves to establish its regional dominance and hegemony has forced all of its neighbours to sit up, take notice, resist and, in some cases, seek to thwart its designs. For India, China’s mounting bid to snatch strategically-important territory along our Himalayan borders has come as the proverbial last straw on the back of a foreign policy that sought to play in a space between the existing superpower, America, and the rising challenger, China. This was a foreign policy that worked so long as China was still in its ‘peaceful rise’ phase and the power differential between India and China – economic, military and technological – was manageable and narrowing, as India’s own economy and military capability grew. But a Beijing increasingly aware of the widening power gap with a Delhi beset with economic woes and a divided polity and society, both mainly self-inflicted, is seeking to shock and awe India into submission with blatant aggression. This calls for a reworking of India’s foreign and strategic policies. External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar’s recent statement that the “era of non-alignment is over” must be seen in this light.
India’s non-alignment policy was not ideological dogma but a pragmatic position that allowed Delhi space between the Cold War antagonists even as it sought economic, development and military assistance from both sides. Nehru sought American military assistance during the 1962 war with China, and Indira Gandhi aligned with the Soviet Union ahead of the 1971 war with Pakistan. In the post-Cold War world, Delhi sought and sewed up multiple strategic partnerships, calling it ‘multi-alignment’. But with the intensifying US-China rivalry and India’s own position declining vis-à-vis China’s rising power in the last few years, Delhi’s space for manouevre has shrunk.
Jaishankar’s comment has signalled that India is finally ready to align closely with America. Delhi and Washington have had a long courtship, especially ever since the George HW Bush administration declared in 2005 that the US is “ready to assist India’s rise to major power status.” Yet, Jaishankar has ruled out, and rightly so, the possibility of India being part of a formal alliance system. A traditional military alliance system will not work in a post-Cold War, nuclearised, globalised order in which the major and rising powers have both cooperative and competitive interests with each other. The best way forward for India and the US still remains the Bush and Obama-era understanding that a militarily and economically strengthened India will be a natural bulwark against China even without India being part of a formal US-led alliance system. Delhi and Washington must both work towards intensifying their relationship within this ambit.