A return to the roots of India’s non-aligned policy

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World politics might not be the same after Putin has seriously exposed the limits of American unilateralism – being cloaked in the principles of democracy, rule-based order and so on.

In the past, European imperialist expansion was aimed at gaining control over territory and resources. The Russians did so for fame and glory. Culture was at the “centre” of all empires. The Tsar “Russified” territories he controlled. The Soviet-created socialist buffers collapsed later due to economic ruin. Putin seems intent on retrieving Russia’s traditional protective glacis, not on the expansionist logic but to protect Slavic land from trespassers.

China applies its ‘Middle-Kingdom’ theory of the ‘core’ controlling the ‘peripheries’ through the ritualistic tribute system, adding modern tools to acquire territory and market access.

After the Monroe Doctrine, America is currently following the Wolfowitz Doctrine (1992) — to preempt the rise of any potential rival to its supremacy. Its response to the Ukraine crisis is aimed at preventing US’ decline, nothing else.

The British Empire in India adopted the Curzonian “forward policy” to expand its frontiers beyond the Hindu Kush to counter Russian southward expansion. Kipling called it the ‘Great Game’; for Russia, it was the ‘Tournament of Shadows’ that was fought in Afghanistan.

Yet, the British never heedfully promoted India’s own ‘strategic-depth’ that was historically driven and transcended beyond the colonial boundary to reach far off seas in the Pacific. Instead, they exoticised Indian culture and replaced it with their own. Indians were made to feel their culture was inferior to British culture.

The Gulf States remained British protectorates. Iraq was a district of the Bombay Presidency, and Bengal administered Singapore. Geopolitical imperative apart, the joke was that the British could rule over such a big empire on a simple conviction that ‘God was an Englishman’. It later became the title of Delderfield’s epic historical novel series.

British cynicism was why India’s glacis remains mutilated. The Western world ensured that India remains downsized. They hyphenated and armed Pakistan pushed Islamabad’s quest for “strategic depth” vis-à-vis India and Russia to install a puppet regime in Kabul and grab Kashmir.

China described India as a hegemon and, for years, Indian thinkers too held a narrative that a strong and prosperous Pakistan is in India’s interest!

What people forget is that India’s own version of the Monroe Doctrine goes back 2,000 years, and it was achieved not by virtue of realpolitik or military campaigns but by the prudence of hard knowledge and wisdom – the Dharmic order. In fact, India’s Rajamandala “sacred circle” was so expansive that it encompassed even China-de’se, albeit within its spiritual disposition.

The entire peripheries of Asia revolved around the core Mandala. The weapon of Dharma was so powerful that it eliminated all adversaries. Even the fierce Mongols got disarmed by the 11th century – Chengiz Khan never crossed the Oxus. The Chinese envoy to America, Hu Shih, said, “India conquered and dominated China culturally for 20 centuries without ever having to send a single soldier across her border.”

India was threatened only by the West, i.e., Greeks, Islamic expansion, the British, and so on. They conquered India and flattened its sacred circle of unity and infinite relations. India and China were not ancient enemies, until the West fiddled with their wide intersecting frontiers in Afghanistan, Kashmir, Xinjiang, Tibet, etc.

Now that Putin has risen to protect Russian cultural glacis against the West trying to fragment the Slavic world, it bears reiteration that the West could wreck the frontiers of others, too, including India and China. Putin is following a thinking that he articulated in 2007, “The two pillars of Russian Statehood are nuclear weapons and Orthodoxy”.

India’s ‘independent foreign policy’ has resurfaced in the wake of the Quad and the Ukraine crisis, and is now being praised even by our adversaries — Pakistan and China. Surely, this is beyond the capacity or diplomatic adroitness of our South Block Mandarins. It stems from the same roots that underpinned India’s non-aligned policy.

New Delhi should be mindful that it does not become an act of ambiguity that would be interpreted by the West as cheating. It needs a strong and sound ideological footing.

To be sure, the ideological aspect of Narendra Modi’s foreign policy and his willingness to tack on India’s ancient path to greatness cannot be overlooked. In fact, no Indian leader after Nehru has tried to sift through India’s past tracks to glory as much as Prime Minister Modi is attempting, though not with that great finesse. Modi did try to look beyond the national boundary to leverage India’s Dharmic power, to realise the cultural pulls of India, when he reached out to Nepal, Bhutan, Japan, Sri Lanka, South Korea and Mongolia, to smaller island-nations like Seychelles and Mauritius. He even tried to strike a direct chord with China, visited temples in Xi’an. He has sought to fine­tune India’s soft power with a global tag for Yoga and tried (bureaucratically, though) to revive India’s global heritage of Buddhism.

Whatever one may say or think, India’s image of a benign and non-­threatening power is not going to evanesce. It remains India’s biggest weapon that continues to pay hard strategic dividends.

The challenge lies in finetuning it to re-occupy critical space in the Asian balance of culture, economics, and politics. Over 98% of Indic Dharma followers live in the Indo-Pacific region. They intersect deeply with the social, political, economic, democratic, and nationalist assertion of the region – something the Quad members cannot fathom, except India.

The Dharmic power always drew people, societies and nations to connect with India, instead of India chasing them for influence outside its borders. However, redrawing the adjacent and far-off peripheries now requires prosperity at home. New Delhi must be mindful of the Western devilry of fomenting conflict with others.

(The writer is a former Indian Ambassador to Kyrgyzstan and keenly studies Eurasian affairs)