The world in your hands

India's growing global engagement needs an attitude of expanding national power and influence, rather than foreign relations for mere material survival.

When I explain to Indian friends that India should start playing a more proactive role in international affairs, they often stop me midway and ask, ‘Why?’ That is a reasonable question. India is still a developing country with several problems back home. Its resources are limited, and should be better spent on domestic problems, rather than on foreign troubles. But in the globalised world, a proactive foreign policy is more a prerequisite for economic growth rather than a mere luxury. Indians need their government to be more powerful and influential around the world, in order to be able to fulfil the needs of ordinary Indians both at home and abroad.

At no point in history has the average Indian been as thoroughly globalised as today. Each day, she wakes up to an alarm clock made in China, eats breakfast cereal invented in America, uses a watch designed by the Japanese, and drives a car engineered in Germany, fuelled by oil from the Middle East. In 1960, India’s exports and imports together amounted to less than a tenth of the GDP. By 2014, they weighed up more than four-tenths. In 2016, there were 3,60,000 Indian students in universities overseas, and the year before, almost 16 million Indians were resident abroad — the most for any country that year, according to United Nations data.

The purpose of foreign policy is to create favourable conditions for all of these Indian students, businesses and workers abroad. Indians aspiring to gain international exposure and experience should feel the security of a strong Indian passport and an influential Indian government. Back home, India’s farmers and engineers need favourable trade conditions to flourish and prosper. Fishermen need rights over marine resources to sustain their livelihoods. Labourers toiling in the Gulf to send money for families back home need better working and living conditions. Just as importantly, India needs global support against threats to its own security, whether from terrorists or from sovereign states.

Yet, India is still far from fulfilling all these expectations. For several years now, India has expressed its desire for global leadership. But its foreign policy has remained stuck in the dogmas of the past. Indian foreign policy has traditionally been restricted to the analysis of bilateral transactions — trade agreements, defence equipment purchases, infrastructure deals and the like. By contrast, limited time and strategic thinking is spent on the development of a coherent strategic vision that would increase India’s global power and influence. State visits by prime ministers have often seemed more like the peripatetic travels of a CEO, revolving around MoUs and business deals rather than political influence.

This practice of foreign policy was designed for a much weaker India. Today, India has the world’s second largest military, third largest defence budget, and fifth largest economy. Its growing global engagement needs an attitude of expanding national power and influence, rather than foreign relations for mere material survival. That demands a clearer definition of
what India is, what India’s interests are, and what India can do for the rest of the world.

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Democracy is difficult to establish. Countries can take decades to cultivate a democratic culture, which can sustain itself. But the corollary is also true: Once a mature democratic culture takes root, it is very difficult to be done away with. Leaders with authoritarian tendencies may come and go — but try as they might, they may never turn a mature democracy into a full-fledged tinpot dictatorship. My conviction, {as I argue in chapter 2}, is that India’s democratic culture was one of the strongest reasons why Indira Gandhi’s Emergency turned out to be a temporary blip.

What makes democracy resilient? A democratic culture means that people become well used to their rights as citizens — they speak and question freely, protest at will, and petition various influencers for change, even if such actions are met with sanctions. In India, despite reports of intimidation, the press continues to write and comment freely on all political and public affairs, with the exception of the television media. But even on television, there have been some standouts: In 2019, Ravish Kumar and Nidhi Razdan — both of the NDTV news group won the Ramon Magsaysay Award and the International Press Institute Award respectively for their efforts to hold the government accountable.

State institutions are resilient too. Corruption and centralization can impact the independence of institutions even in a democracy, but if a leader silences ninety-nine institutions, he will invariably find the 100th institution pushing back. In the aftermath of the Delhi riots, Justice S Muralidhar in the Delhi High Court pulled up the Delhi Police for its actions (or inactions) during the violence. In scathing remarks, he also tore into leaders from the ruling party for their hateful speeches in the run-up to the violence. Shortly afterwards, as he was being transferred to the Punjab and Haryana High Court, he received a raucous send-off from a huge gathering of judges and lawyers, who lauded his conscientious discharge of duty.

Since well-established fundamental rights and freedoms are difficult to remove overnight in a country where democracy has taken root, Indians continue to discuss and push back against excesses from their government. Protests continued across India against the proposed citizenship tests for months, before disbanding due to Covid-19. Social media has helped raise awareness, in recent times, especially among younger voters who continue to seek to uphold the liberal values of their freedom struggle. But no democracy — whether India or the United States — should take its institutions and rights for granted. The resilience of democracy is not due to divine intervention; it is due to the persistent efforts of the citizens themselves to continue their democratic traditions. In India, the democratic culture seems to be well and truly deep-rooted. But Indians must keep it that way.

The legacy of openness

Unlike China, India has never managed to homogenize itself. It almost appears that India’s destiny is that of a multicultural civilization. In the last 5000 years, mighty emperors have come and gone in the futile effort to homogenize India. They all tried to use the force of the state and its mighty propaganda apparatus to goad Indians — as a whole — to follow a certain defined monoculture.

And they all failed — from Ashoka who propagated Buddhism, to Aurangzeb who propagated Islam, and even the British missionaries who propagated Christianity. Ashoka’s efforts to convert an entire nation to Buddhism were, in fact, more successful in Sri Lanka than in India. Regardless of their individual cultural backgrounds, Indians are inherently global in nature and they have always been. India has long been the land where that which is foreign comes to become Indian. This cultural openness — practised over several generations — is singularly responsible for the dizzying diversity which defines India today. A short drive through Delhi, the epicentre of the 2020 communal riots, is sufficient to establish this point. From one neighbourhood to another, visitors to India’s capital city can see a stunning diversity of architecture — from ancient Hindu temples to Islamic/Mughal monuments and the Victorian buildings where India’s government presently resides.

This inherent openness towards the world is the most intrinsic and natural element which is likely to sustain — and even strengthen — India’s multicultural democracy against any efforts to homogenize the country. If mighty emperors through the ages could not shut the doors and homogenize India, despite all their resources and authoritarianism, it is impossible that any political dispensation could do it in the republic, against the force of a well-rooted democratic culture.

But this means that Indians must — as a people — retain their globalist character. In recent generations, Indians have become increasingly insular, even as they have become culturally globalized. In the Pew survey I just quoted, many Indians supported military rule and authoritarianism. Part of this is due to ignorance: Few Indians know much about the rest of the world and are therefore unaware of the stories of Indonesia under Sukarno, Chile under Pinochet, or Uganda under Idi Amin — all of whom were military rulers. Fewer still know about how authoritarianism and centralization of power have led countries into the vicious cycle of violence and civil war around the world. As a result, Indians have become tired of their peaceful democracy, seeing in it only corruption, inefficiency and policy paralysis.

A large part of the blame here must necessarily be apportioned to the media. Indian media outlets — as a rule — provide very limited coverage of the world. A disproportionate amount of airtime is given to entirely pointless and paranoid discussions on just Pakistan and, more recently, China. Most Indian journalists themselves have rarely, if ever, spent any reasonable amount of time working overseas or observing international affairs.

Sparking public debate

I argued in the preface that limited coverage of international affairs is in large part responsible for India’s insular foreign policy. But a more proactive and internationalist foreign policy may by itself bring about a change in this matter.

If New Delhi took an active interest in issues of global concern in faraway lands, acted proactively in the manner in which we have discussed previously, and built up India’s relevance around the world, the Indian media will have to inevitably expand itself.

American media outlets have stronger international coverage and presence, in part because of Washington’s own foreign policy actions around the world. In this manner, a proactive and outward-looking foreign policy may even get rid of India’s insularity — and have remarkable positive effects for its own multiculturalism and democratic traditions.

In writing this book, I am hopeful of a transformation for India, its foreign policy and the rest of the world. But I am also very conscious of the fact that most of what I propose will not— or, perhaps, should not — happen immediately or all at once.

My objective is to spark public debate and discussion on the issues which I have addressed. In due time, I am hopeful that the changes that Indians undertake together will result in a more open, globalist and proactive India — one which will usher in an era of Indian power for the cause of global good.

The writer is the author of Flying Blind: India’s Quest for Global Leadership, published by Penguin Random House and scheduled for release tomorrow. He is a
foreign affairs columnist and editor-in-chief of Freedom Gazette and has previously worked at the United Nations and with governments in the Middle East. Extracted with permission.