India has never been so clear about its prospective moves globally, and about its prowess as well as its potential contribution to changing the regional and international order. Over the past decade, it has expanded its presence on the international stage and witnessed a rise in its profile.
Beginning with the 'Neighbourhood First Policy', India has manoeuvred through about a dozen institutional and policy arrangements to engage with countries in the Pacific, Caribbean, Africa, and Latin America. It has increased its missions in Africa and elsewhere and enhanced engagements with Pacific countries, including small island nations.
Meanwhile, India is among the few countries that have largely benefited from the Russian invasion of Ukraine, as the South Asian power maintained win-win relations with both the United States of America and Russia. It has also maintained fine relations with Iran. "India has today moved out of the defensive, non-aligned posture, engaging multiple nations on a range of issues with equal confidence.
It is also a greater contributor to solutions, regional or global," says India's External Affairs Minister, S. Jaishankar, in his book 'Why Bharat Matters'. In the book launched earlier this year, he tells the Indian and international audience that the transition from the long-cherished foreign policy was not a deviation from serving the international interest but an effort to achieve the 'national interest' so that it would benefit the country on the socio-economic front and elevate it further up in the global order.
According to him, the key world players have not only built an architecture to serve their purpose but still retain the influence to promote it, so a power like India will have to swim upstream for a long time to come.
He also explains that when the USA and China drew closer during the pressures of the Cold War in the early 1970s, India doubled down on its relationship with the Soviet Union, which was once suspicious of the Indian national movement.
The book provides a detailed account of the progress that India made on the international level during turbulent times like the COVID-19 pandemic. Navigating India through the challenging times of economic disruptions generated by the COVID-19 pandemic, the Russia-Ukraine conflict, and the China-USA trade war was rather unanticipated when he took the reins of the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) of India in 2019 during Narendra Modi's second term as prime minister.
Through the book, Jaishankar aims to inform and educate common Indians (and foreign readers as well) about the importance of the country's foreign policy in their daily lives. To make his approach more rational, he presents multiple anecdotes and analogies from the past and present to convince them that the present government led by Narendra Modi of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has been trying to correct the historical mistakes made by past governments, especially those led by the Indian National Congress and its erstwhile leader and prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru.
India is at a critical juncture to expand its relations and influence in order to stay afloat in the competition with the West and China. Jaishankar candidly acknowledges this and explains the strategies devised and implemented to achieve it.
He is highly critical of Nehru's foreign policy, which aimed to walk the middle path and keep Western powers at bay in issues concerning Indo-China relations. He also mocks pro-Chindia (China plus India) enthusiasts. According to him, Nehru's China policy was based on false internationalism and provided much leverage to Pakistan, China, and the United States. Jaishankar frequently shifts between his roles as a diplomat and a politician, making more statements as the latter.
India has adopted an outward approach and expressed greater indifference to the region. For about a decade or so, it was interested in the 'Look East' policy, which recently has been upgraded to the 'Act East' policy. It's clear that India wants to keep Pakistan at bay, and the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) has become a victim of the belligerence of the two large neighbours in the region. India is pursuing dealings with powers beyond the South Asian region, and Jaishankar has expressed quite an 'indifference' to the region even in his book. He has also expressed India's intention to maintain its control over the smaller neighbouring countries, however, cautiously.
Meanwhile, he also presents a paradox: too much engagement in the neighbourhood would be considered an intrusion, while too little would be taken as indifference, if not weakness, or could result in losing out to a competitive power.
The book indicates that SAARC has evaporated from India's memory, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) gains prominence, and the Quad (Australia, India, Japan, and the United States) is even more meaningful for India in the long run. Now, India seeks better engagement with the world through the African Union, BRICS, the European Union, and other multilateral cooperations.
Jaishankar uses anecdotes from the religious epic 'Ramayana' to rationalise the importance of diplomacy for a country, making and having reliable allies, making timely decisions, addressing inherent weaknesses, and improving communication and connectivity. For readers from the Indian subcontinent, these anecdotes help better understand the issues and relations discussed in the book.
The book revisits the history of India's diplomacy, enriched by Jaishankar's experience as a career diplomat for four decades and as an ambassador of India to the United States of America. It is the story of a country that aspired to be a global power and regained its position as one of the largest economies in the world a few centuries ago.
This is the book you want to finish but don't want to finish because the 11 essays presented in it not only discuss myriad historical policies and events but also offer invaluable present perspectives, providing a sense of 'freshness' to readers. There are certainly opportunities for Nepal in having a global superpower as a neighbour, but it also entails risks of being neglected or not being taken seriously in regional and international matters.
Published in The Rising Nepal daily's Friday Supplement on 9 August 2024.
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