Strategic autonomy is all very well, but it cannot be the be-all and end-all of India’s attitude to the world. Our sovereignty is no longer under threat; there is no power on earth that can presume to dictate to India on any international issue. It is time for us to build on our much-vaunted independence of thought and action by treating our strategic autonomy as a platform from which to soar, not a ball and chain around our ankles. As a major power we can and must play a role in helping shape the global order. The international system of the twenty-first century, with its networked partnerships, will need to renegotiate its rules of the road; India is well qualified, along with others, to help write those rules and define the norms that will guide tomorrow’s world. Rather than confining itself to being a subject of others’ rule-making, or even a resister of others’ attempts, it is in India’s interests (and within India’s current and future capacity) to take the initiative to shape the evolution of these norms as well as to have a voice in the situations within which they are applied. That is what I have called Pax Indica: not global or regional domination along the lines of a Pax Romana or a Pax Britannica (in which military victory by the Romans and the Britons, respectively, ensured that peace prevailed because potential adversaries were too exhausted to resist), but a ‘Pax’ for the twenty-first century, a peace system which will help promote and maintain a period of cooperative coexistence in its region and across the world.
This ‘Pax Indica’ must be built and sustained on the principles and norms that India holds dear at home and abroad. It would see a democratic and pluralist India working for a world order that sustains and defends democracy and pluralism; a ‘multi-aligned’ India serving as one of the principal fulcrums of a networked globe, in which countries pursue different interests in different configurations; an India free of poverty, growing and engaging in trade and investment in and with the rest of the world, and upholding arrangements that make such trade and investment relationships possible; an increasingly prosperous India, prepared to share the benefits of its prosperity with other nations on its periphery and its extended (land and maritime) neighbourhood; and a technologically savvy India, setting its sights on, and lending its expertise to, the management of outer space and cyberspace in the common interests of humanity.
The title of this chapter suggests that it offers thoughts ‘towards’ a grand strategy for India. My friend Keerthik Sasidharan asked me, ‘When the state is weak, or at best a wobbly or “jelly” state, can it project a “grand” strategy?’ I believe the Indian state is not as weak as its critics imply, and that the outlines of a grand strategy have been implicit in its approach to the world in recent years. The present volume has attempted to pull some of these strands together into a credible tapestry, but it is still a work in progress, with many weaves yet to emerge from the loom. Perhaps one of the readers of this book will take the argument further—if not today, then in twenty years, when many of the trends discerned in this book will have fructified, or withered on the vine.
In keeping with Nehru’s original vision, the ‘Pax Indica’ I have outlined would not even principally be about India at all, but about India’s sense of responsibility to the world of which it is such a crucial part—and whose destiny it has earned the right to help shape.
CHAPTER TEN: INDIA, THE UN AND THE ‘GLOBAL COMMONS’: THE MULTILATERAL IMPERATIVE
*‘Riding’ is Canadian for ‘constituency’.
Selected Bibliography
Cohen, Stephen P. India: Emerging Power. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2001.
Damodaran, A.K. Beyond Autonomy: Roots of India’s Foreign Policy. New Delhi: Somaiya Publications, 2000.
Datta-Ray, Sunanda K. Looking East to Look West: Lee Kuan Yew’s Mission India. New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2009.
Dixit, J.N. Across Borders: Fifty Years of India’s Foreign Policy. New Delhi: Picus Books, 1998.
——. India’s Foreign Policy 1947–2003. New Delhi: Picus Books, 2003.
——. Indian Foreign Service: History and Challenge. Delhi: Konark Publishers, 2005.
Emmott, Bill. Rivals: How the Power Struggle Between China, India and Japan Will Shape Our Next Decade. London: Allen Lane, 2008.
Jha, Prem Shankar. Crouching Dragon, Hidden Tiger: Can China and India Dominate the West? New York: Soft Skull Press, 2010.
Khilnani, Sunil, et al. ‘Nonalignment 2.0: A Foreign and Strategic Policy for India in the Twenty First Century’. New Delhi: Centre for Policy Research, 2012.
Malone, David. Does the Elephant Dance? Contemporary Indian Foreign Policy. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Markey, Daniel. ‘Developing India’s Foreign Policy “Software”’, Asian Policy 8 (2009): 73–96.
Menon, Adm. Raja, and Rajiv Kumar. The Long View From Delhi: Indian Grand Strategy. New Delhi: Academic Foundation, 2010.
Meredith, Robyn. The Elephant and the Dragon: The Rise of India and China and What It Means for All of Us. New York: W.W. Norton, 2007.
Mohan, C. Raja. Crossing the Rubicon: The Shaping of India’s New Foreign Policy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
——. Impossible Allies: Nuclear India, United States, and the Global Order. New Delhi: India Research Press, 2007.
Muni, S.D. India’s Foreign Policy: The Democracy Dimension. New Delhi: Foundation Books, 2009.
——(ed.). The Emerging Dimensions of SAARC. New Delhi: Cambridge University Press India, 2010.
Nawaz, Shuja. Crossed Swords: Pakistan, Its Army and the War Within. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Nehru, Jawaharlal. The Discovery of India. New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1946 text, reprinted 2011.
——. Selected Speeches, Vols I–III. New Delhi: Government of India, 1963.
Siddiqa, Ayesha. Military Inc.: Inside Pakistani Military Economy. London: Pluto Press, 2007.
Talbott, Strobe. Engaging India: Diplomacy, Democracy and the Bomb. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2004.
Tharoor, Shashi. Reasons of State: Political Development and India’s Foreign Policy under Indira Gandhi, 1966–1977. New Delhi: Vikas, 1982.
——. India: From Midnight to the Millennium. New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 1997.
Internet research: Numerous articles, blogs and essays by Brahma Chellaney, Sumit Ganguly, Salman Haider, Amitabh Mattoo, A.G. Noorani, Nitin Pai, Kanwal Sibal, T.P. Sreenivasan, K. Subrahmanyam and Ashley Tellis. Statements and speeches by Indian foreign policy makers, from www.mea.gov.in. Transcripts of speeches by Shivshankar Menon and Shyam Saran, circulated by email.
Acknowledgements
This book is a work of reflection, not scholarship, though it draws upon a variety of published and unpublished sources. As a harried member of Parliament attending to his own research and writing amid a number of other preoccupations, I consciously cast this work as an extended analytical essay, devoid of footnotes or reference material. However, most of the attributed quotations in this volume can be found in one or another of the handful of books and other sources cited in the Bibliography.
Though a number of friends inside and outside the diplomatic profession have contributed (sometimes unknowingly) to my appreciation of the issues analysed in this book, I would like to single out for gratitude my former MEA colleague Sandeep Chakravorty and my occasional op-ed collaborator Keerthik Sasidharan, who ploughed through the entire manuscript, for their invaluable comments and insights. To them, to my son Kanishk Tharoor and to my friends Virat Bhatia and Arun Kumar, who offered comments on specific portions of the book, as well as to my editors Jaishree Ram Mohan and Udayan Mitra of Penguin, I am most grateful. Nonetheless I remain solely responsible for the contents, arguments and conclusions of Pax Indica, and responsibility for any sins of omission or commission is mine alone.
Portions of the book have appeared, in different form, as articles or columns in the Asian Age/Deccan Chronicle, Times of India, Guardian, The Hindu, Mail Today, Fortune India, the journal Ethics and International Affairs and
in my internationally syndicated column (issued through Project Syndicate), all of which publications are gratefully acknowledged.
It also bears stressing that though I am a member of the Indian National Congress party and a Member of Parliament, the opinions expressed in this book are strictly personal and engage neither the Government of India, nor the political party of which I am a member, nor any other institution with which I may happen to be associated.
My wife Sunanda rightly forced me to devote the time necessary to complete the book when its writing, beset by too many other distractions, had been dragging on for far too long. For her determination, tenacity and love, I have no words that are adequate. I promised her that the book would be in her hands in time for her birthday, and I present it to her with gratitude as a humble offering—and a promise fulfilled.
New Delhi, March 2012 SHASHI THAROOR
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Shashi Tharoor, Pax Indica: India and the World of the Twenty-first Century
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