Election victory for BJP frontrunner could bring about
readjustment in country's relations with China, US and south Asian neighbours
By Jason Burke
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Photograph: Deshakalyan Chowdhury/AFP/Getty Images
A Chinese army officer greets his Indian counterpart at the border between Sikkim state and Tibet.
China remains the biggest rival and example to India of apparently successful development.
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In the heart of
Kathmandu, in the narrow lanes
around the famous Durbar Square, a quiet transformation is taking place. The
Chinese are coming. There are the tourists – almost 10% of the total visitors
to Nepalin 2012 and more than eight times as
many as a decade before. There are the new languages schools – generously
subsidised by Beijing. And there are the shops full of Chinese goods, even
those which India, long the dominant power in the
small Himalayan state, can supply in abundance.
"Middle-class Nepali people can afford jeans if they are
made in China," said Babu Dhakal, a
32-year-old shopkeeper who earns a living from cheap Chinese clothes, drinks
Chinese beer and eats Szechuan cuisine when he can with new Kathmandu-based
Chinese friends.
Beer, hotpots and
trousers may not add up to a geopolitical shift but are nonetheless central to
the success or failure of India's efforts to guide the vast, troubled but
steadily less poor south Asian region towards stability and prosperity, all
while countering the growing power of regional rivals and maintaining good
relations with the US.
Writing in the local Indian Express newspaper last week, Amitabh
Mattoo, a respected Indian foreign affairs specialist and academic, said those efforts
were failing.
"India's military
and economic prowess is greater than ever before, yet India's ability to shape
and influence the principal countries in South Asia is less than it was … 30
years ago," Mattoo wrote.
Senior officials in
India's ministry of external affairs say such criticism is misplaced and argue
that the nation's foreign policy has followed sophisticated, coherent and
realistic principles that brought considerable success.
"We understand
that in a globalised world, there are just too many linkages between states to
try to coerce people, even if you are the biggest in a region. Much better to
be friends with everybody and watch them all then come to you," said one.
Such views explain why
India, as its own diplomats readily admit, punches below its weight globally. A
series of abstentions on key votes at the United Nations has frustrated western
diplomats who complain of India's apparent lack of any guiding vision.
This too is rebutted
by Indian officials. "The criticism is [that] we are not muscular enough.
But when you are at our stage of development, economic and otherwise, you don't
have the big visionary thing, you stay below the radar, and you focus on your
own backyard," one said.
But India's backyard is a thicket of thorny problems, even if
huge opportunities for commerce and other exchanges do exist. Growing trade
between India and its neighbours – even hostile Pakistan – has not
been matched by closer relations between the two states. Nepal, Bangladesh and
the Maldives lurch from one political crisis to another. India cultivated the
ruling military regime in Burma where, with a haphazard reform process now
under way, it has found itself wrong-footed. Leader and Nobel prize laureate Aung
San Suu Kyi delivered a stern reprimand to her hosts when visiting
Delhi in 2012. Relations with Pakistan, despite hopes of a reboot following the
election of commercially-minded Nawaz Sharif, remain poor. There are fears for
Afghanistan after most US troops leave at the end of the year.
One problem for Indian
mandarins is the impact of domestic politics on the "subtle, complex,
balanced" foreign policy they say they would like to pursue. Sometimes
India's regions have exploited the apparent drift at the centre to pursue
external relations independently – or have sufficient electoral significance
for policy to be made to suit them.
Last year the Indian prime minister, Manmohan Singh, was forced
to skip the meeting of Commonwealth heads of government in Colombo. Coming amid
allegations that the Sri Lankan president, Mahinda Rajapaksa, had failed to
properly investigate allegations of war crimes committed by his army in the
final phases of the bloody war against Tamil separatists or to move forward
political reconciliation with the Tamil minority of the island nation, attendance
would have incensed India's own more than 70 million Tamils. Singh had hoped to
divert anger by visiting Jaffna, capital of the Tamil-dominated north,
officials told the Guardian, but under pressure from strategists within his own
party chose eventually not travel to Sri Lanka at all.
"He had to choose
sides," said an Indian official. Relations with Pakistan are also hostage
to a vociferous rightwing and an often jingoistic media.
China, which remains
the biggest rival and example to India of apparently successful development,
can exploit such weaknesses. Beijing, which according to Delhi-based analyst
Manoj Joshi "systematically challenges the very idea of an Indian sphere
of interest", has used commerce, soft loans and technical assistance for
major projects to make inroads in Sri Lanka as well as Nepal. China has made a
push in Bangladesh too.
Though hawkish Indian
policymakers worry about encirclement by Chinese client states, Mohan
Guruswamy, an expert on Chinese-India competition, says Beijing's influence is
"exaggerated".
One potential ally to help stem competition from China might
have been the US. But after a sudden warming a decade ago which resulted in a
landmark nuclear agreement, relations have chilled. A
spat over the arrest of an Indian diplomat in New York revealed
a friendship that was at best frayed and fractious.
The flagging Indian
economy – around a third of the size of China's –may be one reason for
Washington's lack of interest. A second may be the absence, since 2009, of key
individuals committed to the relationship in the White House. Officials in
Delhi say the relationship has become "transactional, not strategic"
and that has allowed "petty disputes to dominate". However, defence
sales and joint military exercises are thriving. As for the European Union and
the UK, both appear more interested in India than vice versa.
Wholesale change now looks likely. Singh and the left-leaning
Congress face defeat in the ongoing elections by the Hindu nationalist
Bharatiya Janata party, led by the controversial and polarising Narendra Modi. Though
Rajnath Singh, the party president, told the Guardian last month that the BJP
wanted to be "friends with all nations in the world", the BJP
manifesto also talks of stopping unnamed countries running
"roughshod" over Indian interests and hints at a revision
of India's doctrine of "no first use" of its nuclear weapons.
A reference in the Congress manifesto to encouraging friendly relations with "socialist"
countries was dismissed by analysts as a throwback to the 1970s.
While campaigning,
Modi has already signalled a tougher line on ongoing border disputes with China
and has said that he wants to see a "strong" India that cannot be
"stared down" by other powers.
In reality this may
clash with a desire to build commercial partnerships regionally, said Michael
Kugelman, an analyst at the Woodrow Wilson Centre in Washington.
"His pro-business
and pro-trade qualities will lead him to cultivate strong relations across the
board … Yet at the same time, he will certainly react more strongly to
provocations from neighbours than did the Congress-led government,"
Kugelman said.
One conflict Modi may
have to fight is with his own diplomats, most of whom see the subtle, pragmatic
complexity of policy over the last decade as in tune with "Indian",
and their own, sensibilities.
"It is about
being mature and readjusting to the new reality. It is about growing up,"
said the Indian official.
Additional reporting by Ishwar Rauniyar in Kathmandu
Additional reporting by Ishwar Rauniyar in Kathmandu