In this country of 1.5 billion people, which Amartya Sen described as inherently controversial, there are many views on what precisely India’s national interest is. At the risk of sweeping generalization, these views, as they exist in the public sphere today, can be broadly classified into two types.
The first claims that Jawaharlal Nehru’s worldview and its prolonged influence on the Indian state have undermined the national interest since the birth of the nation. We were told that the current regime is trying hard to renew it through a series of efforts and interventions. The second view is tantamount to saying that the current regime is working to undermine India’s national interest by weakening hard-won achievements and undermining the credibility of the past.
There are facts, counter-facts, selective facts, and WhatsApp University facts galore for both sides of the debate. It is futile to even try to argue with either side. Perhaps the most important exercise is to establish the broad framework of what any national interest strategy for India should take into account.
1. A medium to long-term assessment of the central geopolitical contradiction
Any strategy concerned with the national interest is only as good or bad as its assessment of the global system it is supposed to navigate. India became an independent country at the same time that the world entered into a competition between two ideologically opposed superpowers: the United States and the Soviet Union. It was also the beginning of a major wave of decolonization in the world with India being the largest former colony to become democratic. Its survival as a state and a democracy is no small achievement.
Like large parts of the world, India and its neighbourhood, too, were the scene of great rivalry in the Cold War. In fact, one could argue that the final act in the Soviet Union’s demise, the Afghanistan War, took place in this region. The dissolution of the Soviet Union, and with it socialism, ushered in a period of world order dominated by the United States.
The world is still under great American hegemony. But there is a growing view, and rightly so, that China now has a country that is beginning to challenge American hegemony. This challenge comes in ways very different from the Soviet era and American competition. The competition for hegemony between the United States and China is more about control of the source code of the global economy than about the constitutional law of nations or the world.
2. What does this shift in geopolitical paradox entail for India?
India has come a long way from its days of ship-to-mouth supply, which required it to import wheat from the United States. It has also come a long way from indulging in security arbitrage between the Soviet Union and the United States as it did during the various military conflicts it fought in the past. But India critically depends on the United States and China in different ways today than it did on the United States or the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
As it embraces globalization, especially in finance and services, India’s fortunes are organically linked to the American economy and the global economic system over which it presides. If we take our exports of services, remittances from the Indian diaspora and portfolio investments that come into our financial markets – all of which are largely rooted in the US-led global economic system – the Indian economy will either face a foreign exchange crisis or be forced to declare force majeure on the domestic elite that has begun to regard a certain standard of living, so to speak, as first world.
China has, over the years, emerged as India’s largest source of imports because it can manufacture almost everything – from low-tech to high-tech – more effectively and economically than India. There is no doubt that China’s physiocratic hegemony is not limited to India only. But what India is also realizing now, as it tries to expand its manufacturing footprint to include more high-tech goods, is that Chinese cooperation is essential to starting this process, just as support from the Soviet or American camp was to build our steel mills after independence.
The short point here is that separating from the United States or China, or managing the chaos created by Sino-American competition in the world through arbitrage, is not a feasible option for India.
3. The Iran war shows that protecting India’s national interest requires implementing a see-saw operation represented by the competition between China and the United States between flying missiles.
Navigating between the United States and China is difficult in itself, especially when the former has a volatile and reckless president, an active border dispute with India and a vested interest in keeping Indian power in check in the Indian Ocean region. The fact is that this must be implemented at a time when the global economy is suffering from the largest energy shock ever due to the war in West Asia, which makes the matter even more difficult.
However, it seems that unrest is now the norm rather than the exception in the world. This decade alone has seen four major events: a once-in-a-century pandemic, a war in Europe that lasted longer than World War I, a generational technological shock in the form of artificial intelligence, and now war in West Asia. All of these crises have inflicted a great deal of pain, thereby diverting attention, and more importantly, resources, from the challenge that India faces in dealing with the central contradiction described above.
4. Preparing for an environment in which disruption is the rule rather than the exception requires strategic flexibility
Why did Donald Trump roll back the triple-digit tariffs on China he imposed last year? The Chinese threatened to cut off supplies of rare earths to the United States, which would have paralyzed a large part of US industrial activity. China’s physiocratic influence – indispensable to global supply chains – is enormous in today’s world.
For the United States, this influence operates in the form of its coercive power thanks to the dollar being the world’s dominant currency. If the United States imposes economic sanctions on a country, commercial transactions with the rest of the world become increasingly difficult and expensive.
India, like many other countries, does not enjoy such strategic influence. This puts it in a position where it has to try to minimize the potential pain when the two superpowers decide to exert their influence in an aggressive manner against India. In the short term, it could take the form of diversification outside the basket between the United States and China, sometimes through trade deals or technology cooperation with other countries. But the long-term solution boils down to only one solution: either gaining influence or immunity against exercising such influence.
5. The guiding framework for building such resilience in India must be “Land, Peace and Bread” within a democratic framework
Any typical problem of achieving the national interest should target three simultaneous and interrelated goals: protecting the country’s sovereignty, maintaining internal order, and ensuring a decent standard of living for citizens. In the case of India, this endeavor must take into account the barriers imposed by democracy.
India’s military capabilities, when viewed in absolute terms, are anything but modest. However, it is increasingly overshadowed by China’s capacity build-up. India’s shortcomings are also reflected in its lack of other strategic guarantees. For example, what Explains the fact that India’s strategic oil reserves constitute a small portion of China’s reserves even though India is a more populous country than China? Any country needs economic strength to achieve these goals.
India today is a much more peaceful society than it was two decades ago. Much of this relative peace is the result of economic growth in the past three decades. Although the growth process was rooted in inequality, it provided a valuable addition to the nation-state’s ability to provide economic relief. However, this material peace tends towards fragility rather than prosperity. The increasing demand on the financial complex is slowly but surely heading towards unsustainability.
Politics is certainly more diabolical than compassionate in India, given its deep roots in nefarious rent-seeking political finance. The latter has built an environment in which private accumulation increasingly distances itself from activities that would protect and advance national interest objectives. This is best reflected in the situation in which the largest share of the country’s breadwinners is engaged in bread farming (agriculture) and is condemned to live under a structural crisis of viability. Private capital continues to retreat from promoting investment in large-scale employment-generating activities, even as it seeks more and more profits from trade and sectors associated with rent-seeking.
6. So what will it take to protect India’s national interests?
Let’s start with what it doesn’t protect.
Placing all our eggs in one camp of great power rivalry, or even appearing to do so, is the biggest mistake one can make. The United States, unlike in the past, is now purging and persecuting its vassal states. There is no point, and more importantly, no point in trying to become one now. China, unlike the Soviet Union, is not interested in gaining camp followers who would benefit from socialist altruism. China rightly sees its future in terms of insecurity given its much lower levels of per capita income and the demographic decline now underway. The challenge is to recognize and deal with these contradictions rather than separating ourselves or deluding ourselves in the hope of pinning each other down, which was to some extent a viable strategy during the Cold War.
The pursuit of democratic legitimacy may not be India’s greatest trick in balancing growing economic palliatives with unscrupulous political finance. It has become a vicious circle in our political economy. The balance, which a healthy capitalist democracy should try to maintain, lies in managing the conflicting terms of trade between labor and capital, where creative destruction ensures that the economy’s overall prowess continues to rise rather than stagnates.
The only way to overcome these two challenges is to make them an integral part of political discourse that values these nuances instead of oscillating between narcissism and nihilism. The latter is exactly what our political debate has become.
It is tempting to attribute the blame for this not happening to individual political actors on both sides of the spectrum. But it is more appropriate to see this as a larger philosophical crisis for theorists and practitioners of Indian political economy. Over the past three and a half decades, the Indian political system has witnessed the most intense debates on social issues such as caste and religion. However, there was, by and large, agreement on the economic strategy: reforms coupled with economic palliatives supported by plutocratic political finance.
When fraudsters pose as educated voices and want to portray independent acts of commission or omission as the ultimate act for or against India’s national interest, they are trying to hide this larger bipartisan bankruptcy. With each crisis that causes more and more pain to an already unstable people, the hollowness of such arguments becomes more apparent.
7. But what about Pakistan?
Many people may ask this question. Pakistan, as a hostile neighbor, should be a critical component of our national security strategy. But the National Security Strategy is only a small subset of the National Interest Strategy. Countries that mix the first with the second end up just like Pakistan or North Korea. India and Indians deserve and must do better.
