Shaping the Emerging World: India and the Multilateral Order

2. The Changing Dynamics of India's Multilateralism

25 Introduction: Four Phases of Multilateralism The evolution of India’s multilateralism remains one of the underexplored domains of India’s foreign policy. This is surprising given the pressing nature of the multilateral agenda in recent years—international trade negotiations, nuclear nonproliferation, global warming, humanitarian intervention, and the promotion of democracy—and India’s complex responses to it. As New Delhi confronted these issues in the last few years, its multilateral positions encountered much criticism at home and abroad. Yet there has been no systematic effort to record, assess, historicize, and theorize about India’s rich multilateral experience. Meanwhile, the popular, policy, and academic discourses on New Delhi’s multilateralism are clouded by the political presumption of a default Indian position. Some critics of India’s multilateralism argue that India is too wedded to the ideology of nonalignment, third world solidarity, Westphalian sense of national sovereignty, and the principle of nonintervention to make effective contributions. Other critics attack current Indian foreign policy for deviating too far from India’s presumed gold standard of multilateralism. Neither view is backed by solid empirical evidence. Nor have systematic efforts been made to codify the multilateral tradition of India, its approach to various regional and international organizations, and the domestic contestation over these policies. Even a preliminary look at India’s multilateral record reveals that it is by no means monochromatic. There is much variation in India’s position on critical issues over time and across space.1 This chapter presents a broad overview of the evolution of India’s multilateralism in four phases. It points to considerable difference between the 2 The Changing Dynamics of India’s Multilateralism c. raja mohan 26 c. raja mohan presumptions about India’s multilateralism and its practice in the real world. It suggests that India has begun to adapt to the new imperatives of multilateralism , while the pace and direction of change are questioned at home and abroad, and concludes with a reflection on how India’s multilateralism could develop in the coming years. Expansive Internationalism The first phase, covering the final decades of India’s independence movement and early years of independence, was a period of expansive internationalism. While India’s emerging worldview had diverse elements in it, a strong streak of internationalism did indeed stand out. Rabindranath Tagore’s critique of Western materialism and Indian nationalism formed the basis for the conception of a humanist internationalism. His ideas on Asian cultural unity and a shared spiritual civilization helped to construct Asian universalism as an alternative to the dominant Western one.2 The discovery of Indian influence on Southeast Asia at the turn of the twentieth century had a big impact on India’s own sense of historic linkages with the world and led to the notions of a “greater India.”3 The Indian communists and socialists joined various streams of left-wing internationalism. This period also witnessed a more centrist internationalism—a notion of a world federation or a “one world.” Jawaharlal Nehru was at the forefront of making the Indian National Congress aware of the changing world in the interwar period and recognizing the importance of the external for India’s own struggle for independence. The interwar period proved decisive for the emergence of an internationalist consciousness of the Indian national movement, which in turn laid the foundation for India’s independent foreign policy under Nehru.4 The first diplomatic act of the new India was to convene the Asian Relations Conference in New Delhi in March 1947, a few months before formal independence. The proposal for such a conference can be traced back to 1930, when the Indian National Congress called for a meeting of all Asiatic people to promote greater solidarity and laid the foundation for an “Eastern Federation .”5 India’s international role in the first decade after independence—as a champion of Asian solidarity and decolonization, opposition to racism and apartheid, rejection of militarism and call for general and complete disarmament , contributor to international peacekeeping, and proponent of peaceful coexistence between different political systems—is widely noted. A closer look, however, reveals much complexity in India’s multilateral positions and occasional conflicts between positions held dear on various issues. These posi- tions are at considerable variance with the contemporary understanding of a “Nehruvian foreign policy” and its default positions. Consider, for example, India’s current wariness of Western efforts to promote human rights; its strong commitment to universally...