Making sense of India’s ‘strategic autonomy’

New Delhi wants to do business with all and not belong to any camp; it is non alignment but without a moral component

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been on the hunt for new terms to mark the ideological shift from socialism and non-alignment movement of the Congress era to that of India-first nationalistic assertion of the BJP. So, the Planning Commission was decommissioned and the National Institution for Transforming India (NITI) Aayog was set up.

On the foreign policy front, non-alignment, a fallout of Cold War politics, has been replaced by the concept of ‘strategic autonomy’. Even as the change at the political helm from the Congress to the BJP was inevitable, other changes became necessary, too, as the ideological framework got replaced.

There has not been much scrutiny of either NITI Aayog or ‘strategic autonomy’. It is time to do so. India is not yet fully a free market economy despite the much-vaunted liberalisation of 1991.

Governments, both at the Centre and in the states, continue to play an active role through policy measures as well as direct intervention through state-run schemes. Ease of doing business remains an ideal. Entrepreneurs still have to run through the gauntlet of approvals from authorities to start businesses. NITI Aayog still formulates plans and programmes in a desultory manner.

The change in foreign policy stance has been slower, and it still remains largely unclear. In many ways, strategic autonomy is another name for non-alignment.

India wants to do business with all, and it does not want to be part of any camp. India accepting membership of the Commonwealth with the British monarch as a symbolic head was a cultural gesture rather than strategic.

New Delhi is not particularly interested in identifying with the South Asian Association of Regional Cooperation (SAARC). It is partially interested in BRICS and in G20, and it does not want military entanglement of any kind though it has signed up for Quad, comprising the United States, Japan, Australia and India.

India wants to go solo as much as possible. There is the added self-consciousness that India will soon be the third largest economy, after the United States and China. There is an innate ambition, which is natural, to become a superpower at some point. The ‘Vishwaguru’ is but a rationalised version of the desire for power and glory. Perhaps, it is easier for India to become a developed country – ‘Viksit Bharat’ – by 2047 than to become a superpower.

Athens in ancient Greece believed that its democratic political virtue is superior compared to other city polities in Greece. Rome, when it was a republic, established the fairness of the Roman political system where anyone coming under Roman dispensation is a citizen of the empire, an idea that revolutionary France had adopted. India does not have an inspiring political ideal to offer the world.

India’s political leaders are forced to fall back on pragmatism in international affairs. Nehru at the height of his popularity did not relish the idea of India as part of a large group.

The Bandung Afro-Asian conference of 1955 and the first NAM conference at Belgrade in 1961 were not his ideas. He was pulled in by leaders of other decolonised countries — Indonesia’s Sukarno, Egypt’s Nasser, Ghana’s Nkrumah and Yugoslavia’s Tito.

Nehru believed in India’s own cultural superiority. But there was nothing much he could do about it. So, he remained friendly with the Americans, the British, and the Russians. The public sector steel plants created in collaboration with Germany in Rourkela, with the Soviets in Bhilai, and the British in Durgapur, the IITs and the IIMs with the Americans reflected ideological agnosticism.

India’s critical stance towards the West in international affairs after Independence was a legacy of India’s freedom movement with its anti-colonial flavour; it has less to do with the suspected leaning towards socialism and communism. S Gopal in his biography of Nehru notes the fact that Rajni Palme Dutt, the Indian communist leader in Britain, knew well that Nehru would not yield on democracy for the sake of communism. So, India’s tepid stance of independence in foreign policy during the Congress era was not rooted in ideological predilection.

The same sense of pragmatism prevails now with the Modi-led BJP in power. The BJP from its years of Bharatiya Jan Sangh (BJS) was ideologically anti-communist and pro-American because of its anti-communism. Neither the BJS nor the BJP have any admiration for liberal democracy of America and the West. It was this opposition to communism that was behind its anti-China and anti-Russia stance. Russia has ceased to be communist, and China is communist only in name. Atal Bihari Vajpayee had no inhibitions and neither does Modi in getting close to Moscow and Beijing.

It is not surprising that the Modi government wants to deal with Washington, Moscow, Brussels equitably — buying oil from Russia, getting AI technology from America, a free trade agreement with the European Union (EU), and keeping the door to Chinese investments in India.

The government has to bend over backwards to explain and rationalise the blatantly one-sided trade deal that President Trump has recently forced on India. It has been rightly described as the least disadvantageous, with the implication that it could have been worse.

The Modi government is aware that it does not have much elbow room to stand up to Trump because of its relatively vulnerable economy.

Strategic autonomy does not seem to be anything distinct. It is India’s old way of being on its own and safeguarding its national interest.

India is not willing to stick its neck out and say that the Russian invasion of Ukraine, or the killing of Palestinians in Gaza in the thousands, is morally unacceptable. South Africa has dared to file a case against Israel in the International Criminal Court (ICC), which India would never think of doing.

There is also the fact that India is not a signatory to the setting up of the ICC. But India could have spoken out against the indiscriminate killings of innocent people by Israel in Gaza. Democracy, freedom and the morality that goes with it is absent from India’s foreign policy perspective.

One is reminded of the line from the film ‘My Fair Lady’ when the father of Eliza tells Prof. Higgins that he cannot afford morals. India cannot afford morals in its foreign policy.

(The writer is a Delhi-based journalist and commentator)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.