Six decades of Indian Foreign Policy - A critique

India foreign policy in the Nehruvian era (Jawahar Lal Nehru, the First Prime Minister of Independent India) was guided by Prime Minister Nehru’s (1947-64) often misplaced sense of idealism. It was not until more than 50 years after independence that Indian policy-makers started seeing foreign policy as an instrument to advance the country’s national interest.

In the Nehruvian era India saw itself as a savior of fellow poor & just-independent Afro-Asian nations, most of who were of little use to India at any major world forum. India was happy to be a rallying point for these countries, often fledgling democracies aping Indian / Soviet systems of governance. The Non-Aligned Movement led by Tito & Nehru which started as a mechanism to protect the interest of these third-world countries as against the developed world was a natural outgrowth of this line of thought.

India could have very well have become a part of the first world, exerting power & prestige as did China which had a similar just-independent status in the 1940s. It was by choice that Nehru’s India became a poor man’s champion and itself a member of the poor, third-world block. Foreign policy in those days was seen as an instrument of advancing Gandhian principles at world forums to anybody who cared to listen, which was almost always the same Afro-Asian nations whose cause India so dearly espoused.

The socialist hangover continued with successive governments for much of the second half of the 20th century. India was for total destruction of WMDs, a laudable but impossible goal; India often sided with the poor Arab countries, who were against the might of US & Israel. All matters of multilateral importance were battles of David vs. Goliath, and India invariably sided with the underdog.

These governments were led mostly by the Nehru-Gandhi family of the Indian National Congress, which ruled India through its first fifty years of independence almost uninterrupted. The symbolism was not lost on anybody when almost 50 years after independence, and long after Nehru was consigned to history books, Congress’s first non-Nehru-Gandhi Prime Minister Mr. Narasimha Rao (1991-96) paid a visit to Burkina Faso, offering technological & financial aid to a country that most Indians would be hard pressed to find on the World Map.

Even though India was proud to proclaim its non-alignment, there was little doubt in the minds of Western governments, not without reason, that India tilted more than a little towards Soviet Union. India often voted with USSR & its allies, and that led US & its allies to encourage Pakistan to act as a counter to India in the South Asia region.

In economic policies too, Nehruand his daughter Indira Gandhi (1966-77 & 1980-84) focused on self-sufficiency rather than increase its pie in international trade. India’s share in world trade had dropped from about 2.4% in 1951 to about 0.4% in 1980. India bet heavily on creating a large, mostly inefficient public enterprise while allowing private enterprise to continue with massive restrictions. Profit was a dirty word in these days & most large banks were nationalized in 1969 by Indira, and by & large private participation was stifled. A notable exception was agriculture, which remained entirely in private hands. That agriculture did exceedingly well under private hands to help India attain self-sufficiency in food-grain production was often overlooked. Green revolution in India was however, brought on into India by government intervention through the then agriculture minister Mr. C S Subramanium, as well as through the enterprise of small & big farmers across several states in India, who accepted the risk of using his imported seeds.

Even after India was forced to start opening up its markets under pressure from the World Bank in 1991, which saw it coming out of its worst economic crisis, its foreign policy was largely confused & directionless and not related to its economic goals & aspirations. USSR had just disintegrated, & Russia was grappling with its own massive problems in the aftermath of the break-up of the Soviet Union. US was fighting its first war in Iraq, and India sided with Iraq, offering ‘moral support’ to the people of Iraq, while stopping from condemning the act of US. Russia remained the sole supplier of almost all kinds of defense equipment to India.

The impracticality of the Non Aligned Movement, had however dawned on policymakers all over, and the movement was all but dead with the demise of Soviet Union and as the world became largely uni-polar. India under Prime Minister Rao did seriously contemplate detonating a nuclear device, but had to abort plans as it buckled under intense US pressure at crunch time.

The two short-lived third front Governments that followed were around for too brief a time and were too dependent on the Congress prop-up to make too much of an impact on foreign policy. However, it was during the time of Prime Minister Inder Gujral (1997-98) that foreign policy was accorded for the first time in India’s history the importance that it deserves. A Foreign Minister in two previous governments, Inder Gujral showed a glimpse to India what foreign policy can do for a nation, when used with sound judgment. His bilateral parleys with the then Prime Minister of Pakistan, Nawaz Sharif brought the two warring countries back to the discussion table after a long hiatus and started a peace process, which was to be cruelly halted months after Inder Gujral stepped down.

The idea that defense & foreign policy were deeply interlinked was however brought in by Gujral’s successor, Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, and his Foreign Minister, Mr. Jaswant Singh. Nuclear deterrence, national interest, no-first-strike became part of the Indian Foreign Minister’s vocabulary for perhaps the first time, after India detonated five nuclear devices between May 11, 2005 & May 13,2005. India, the land of Gandhi & Buddha, was a nuclear power. And the face of Indian foreign policy was changed irrevocably with this single event.

It was only when the right-wing nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) led coalition, the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) came into power that India began asserting itself as an independent power, capable of thinking for itself and able to take decisions with its ‘selfish’ national interest in mind. The decision to take India nuclear with the Pokhran tests has to be the single most momentous strategic foreign policy decision in India’s reasonably uneventful political existence for nearly 60 years since its independence. When compared with "When I don't make a decision, it's not that I don't think about it. I think about it and make a decision not to make a decision." Prime Minister Rao, Vajpayee and his allies had shown tremendous resilience & gumption to take a decision and go through with it.

This decision did bring on tremendous political & economic hardship on the country & its peoples, the fallout including Pakistan detonating six nuclear devices compared to India’s five before the end of the same month. Almost every country that mattered announced economic & political sanctions, and before long India was engaged in a bloody battle with Pakistan in Kargil. What saved India and saw it being treated differently from say, the way an Iran, Iraq or North Korea have been treated was its size, its strategic geographic location and its increasing economic might. Indian diaspora in the US & many other countries lobbied hard for an early easing of sanctions. That the then occupant in White House (Bill Clinton, 1992-2000) was a Democrat & loved curry should have helped somewhere, as is the case with most White House decisions. The high-level exchanges that followed between Strobe Talbott & Jaswant Singh (memoirs here) set out the path for a speedy return of India to the world, with India now bargaining hard from a somewhat equal position to get the most concessions out of the world community.

By the time Vajpayee’s tenure at the Center came to an end, India had mended its ties with most countries in the world, most types of sanctions had been lifted, and India was at least tacitly accepted as a nuclear power. Nuclear deterrence had helped surprisingly well, with both India & Pakistan pledging to work hard to ensure South Asia did not turn into a nuclear flashpoint. The course of Indian foreign policy, in six years, had been altered enough to ensure an about-turn is just about impossible. The focus on pragmatism & national interest, as opposed to the fancied idealism in the past is something that is tough, well nigh impossible to alter for many years.

India now exports defense equipment to a few countries, it now imports advanced jet trainers & other sophisticated equipment from many countries, including France, US, Russia, UK & Israel.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh (2004-Current) is an economist by training and a political light-weight. There is little doubt that real political power is wielded by the Congress Party leader, Mrs. Sonia Gandhi. Mr. Singh is an expert on economic policy, is well read on the subject and is credited with turning around India from one of its deepest economic crises in 1991. His being an expert in a particular area of government policy, however, is a hindrance to his Government’s performance in other areas of government policy. It is unlikely that Mr. Singh would be remembered as a statesman, somebody who was able to influence national policy (foreign & otherwise) and left his own unique stamp on governance. His being an expert in a particular area & non-committal in other areas of policy & governance, apart from his being a political light-weight has however meant that policy decisions are more decentralized and made at the respective ministries than ever before, and this should be good in the long run, as some of sort of an insurance against future incompetent leaders of Government.

Most of his foreign policy decisions are left to the experienced Natwar Singh, who has continued on the philosophy of national interest first. India demonstrated a UN Security Council seat is more important than the friendship of old friend Iran, ruffling quite a few feathers democratically. The current dispensation lacks the numbers in the Indian Parliament to carry out any significant changes in the India foreign policy. Left wing support is crucial for the continuance in power of the current dispensation & hence the influence of Left parties on foreign policy would not be insignificant.

It is however, important to remember that the national foreign policy must be dictated by long-term strategic goals rather than tactical goals of getting a permanent seat at the UNSC by a particular deadline. Subtle changes must be effected in foreign policy as per the world order rather than as knee-jerk reactions to isolated events.

Only in recent years have Indian policymakers realized that economic policy, defense policy & foreign policy are more closely-linked than was thought earlier. Foreign policy should be guided by national interest. The two major pillars of national interest of a nation are its defense needs & economic development goals. Long-term economic goals & medium & long-term defense needs should guide the national foreign policy, rather than any altruistic or idealistic goals.