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4. India as a Regional Power
- Brookings Institution Press
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57 Introduction Since independence and partition in 1947, India has largely been seen as a regional, more specifically subcontinental, power. India’s core interests and its capacity to secure these have apparently been bounded by the geography and politics of South Asia. Over the past two decades, however, India’s economic reforms and opening up have unleashed unprecedented entrepreneurial energy and sustained economic growth. The Indian state is steadily, if slowly, translating some of this economic tissue into military muscle. And as with most states, India’s growing power has resulted in a corresponding widening of its own conception of its interests as well as its role on the global stage. Then again, the subcontinental considerations that limited India’s strategic horizons in the past have hardly become irrelevant. India, therefore, is at an interesting juncture, where it needs to strike a balance between regional interests and its global aspirations—considerations that are not easy to reconcile. In consequence , the tension between these will remain a key feature of India’s external engagements in the short- to medium-term future. This chapter focuses on this key tension at the heart of Indian foreign policy . It begins with a brief examination of how India sought but failed to balance these in the past. It then looks at India’s evolving approach to dealing with subcontinental problems and fault lines and suggests that New Delhi has attempted something novel in recent years. The chapter suggests that India’s conception of its“region”has expanded over the past two decades and considers the principal issues on which India’s new regional and global interests 4 India as a Regional Power srinath raghavan 58 srinath raghavan could be most problematic to resolve, arguing that, as India moves closer to achieving great-power status, these tensions will acquire greater urgency and edge. Looking Back India’s foreign policy in the immediate aftermath of independence was undoubtedly shaped by subcontinental considerations. The disputes with Pakistan over Hyderabad, Junagadh, and Jammu and Kashmir (J&K), the treaties with Bhutan, Nepal, and Sikkim, and the problems over Tibet and the boundary with China all consumed India’s attention and circumscribed its strategic vision to the subcontinent. Yet it is misleading to assume that India did not have larger aspirations during these years or that these aspirations were driven simply by a dreamy idealism about anticolonial solidarity, pan Asianism, or third worldism. In fact, from the outset, India regarded its engagement with multilateral institutions, particularly the United Nations (UN), as central to its foreign policy. India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, certainly thought that the UN could pave the way for a new form of internationalism in the postwar world. But he also recognized that it afforded a concrete opportunity for an emerging India to brand its image on the international stage and so pursue its interests with legitimacy. Nehru’s approach toward the UN reflected his awareness of the multidimensional character of power. The use of military and economic power certainly enables a state to constrain the options of its adversaries and advance its own interests. But power is also exercised when a state devotes its efforts to creating or reinforcing political norms and practices that influence and shape the behavior of other states. This process of setting and cementing norms requires a keen sense of the sources of legitimacy in international politics and a willingness to work with and strengthen international institutions. This awareness lay at the core of postcolonial India’s early stance toward the UN. Thus India was an early and vocal opponent of the racial laws introduced by South Africa. Although the latter sought to take refuge under the cover of domestic jurisdiction, India forced the UN to express its displeasure with these policies.1 Subsequently, New Delhi was active in the various international campaigns against apartheid in South Africa. India also played a prominent role in the UN’s attempts to draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the human rights covenants that were supposed to follow the declaration.2 [3.237.178.126] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 12:06 GMT) From the outset, however, there was a tension between India’s desire to promote global norms such as human rights and its wish to prevent the derogation of the principle of sovereignty. As a newly independent state, it is not surprising that India laid considerable emphasis on the latter. During the Nehruvian period, India sought to reconcile these tensions by advocating...