firms have built fancy campuses for their employees, not all that much different
from ones you might see in Silicon Valley. But a whiff of the acrid winter air
from New Delhi’s innumerable dung fires, the frustration of unremitting traffic
jams in Bangalore’s overcrowded thoroughfares, or the experience of several
power outages during a single morning meeting on one of the city’s technology
campuses suggests even India’s globally competitive cities have a long way to
go to get their infrastructure up to par. That is to say nothing at all about
India’s villages, home to some 70 percent of the country’s people.76
India is, in its own way, moving to address all of these issues. The scale
of the challenge is immense. There are 1.2 billion Indians of diverse religions
75 Vojay Sakhuja, “The Karakoram Corridor: China’s Transportation Network in Pakistan,”
BBC, October 8, 2010, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-13945072.
76 Ministry of Home Affairs, “Provisional Population Totals: Rural-Urban Distribution,” Census of India 2011, http://www.censusindia.gov.in/2011-prov-results/paper2/data files/india/
paper2 at a glance.pdf.
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From the Outside-In
193
and socioeconomic strata living in twenty-eight states. Indians speak hundreds
of languages.77 Despite India’s rapid economic growth and the considerable
wealth amassed by many of its people, 300 million Indians still live on less
than a dollar a day.
Aside from poverty, millions of Indians also grapple with internal secu-
rity challenges that have practically nothing to do with foreign affairs. Nax-
alites, Maoist-inspired insurgents, are active in large swathes of India’s east and
south.78 Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has on multiple occasions termed it
the single greatest internal threat to India’s security.79
That said, India’s long history of tension and war with Pakistan is still
a political hot button for many of its people and leaders. India’s enormous
Muslim community makes its relationship with a self-professed Islamic Repub-
lic like Pakistan a politically sensitive one. In the past, Indians were primarily
worried about Pakistan’s military strength. Today, there is a far greater – and
justifiable – fear of Pakistan’s weakness and instability, coupled with anger over
Pakistan’s use of terrorists. The Indian desire to punish Pakistan for events like
the Mumbai attacks of November 2008 remains strong. But that desire has
been tempered by the recognition that even though India may be the greater
military power, any victory over Pakistan would be Pyrrhic.
India has no serious military answer to the threat posed by Pakistan-based
terrorist groups. When crises have hit over the past decade, New Delhi has
expected Washington to put pressure on Islamabad. For this reason, most
Indian leaders would prefer to maintain good ties with a sympathetic American
partner that also enjoys significant influence in Pakistan.
If U.S.-Pakistan relations break, India would lose a form of indirect leverage.
The brilliant Indian strategist C. Raja Mohan, whose soft-spoken commentary
carries weight with the most senior foreign policymakers in New Delhi and
Washington, takes the argument one step further. He includes China’s influence
as a positive force in Pakistan. He writes, “There is no reason for India to
wish that Washington and Beijing abandon their cooperative relationships
with Islamabad. In fact, India would want America and China to exercise their
influence in changing the Pakistan army’s calculus in supporting international
terror networks.”80
After 2002, most Indian leaders concluded that India has much to fear
from Pakistan but few solutions, military or otherwise. This led New Delhi to
be receptive to diplomatic engagement with Islamabad and explains why the
77 “General Note,” Census Data 2001, Government of India, Ministry of Home Affairs, http://
censusindia.gov.in/Census Data 2001/Census Data Online/Language/gen note.htm.
78 “India’s Naxalites: A Spectre Haunting India,” Economist, August 17, 2006, http://www
.economist.com/node/7799247.
79 Rahi Gaikwad, “Manmohan: Naxalism the Greatest Internal Threat,” Hindu, October 11, 2009.
80 C. Raja Mohan, “The Essential Triangle,” Centre for Policy Research, http://www.cprindia
.org/blog/security/3373-essential-triangle.
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194
No Exit from Pakistan
government of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh repeatedly went back to the
negotiating table, even after the 2008 terrorist attack in Mumbai and in spite
of Islamabad’s failure to act against the attack’s Pakistan-based plotters.
Progress on opening Indo-Pakistani trade and business travel, jump-started
by a return to formal peace talks in February 2011, reflected the Indian cal-
culation that taking steps toward normalizing the relationship with Pakistan
might prop open the door to dialogue about security issues later. Even if not,
the agreements posed little threat to India’s interests. Forging ties with busi-
nessmen across the border was perceived as a way to build stronger peace
constituencies inside Pakistan.
Yet, Indian officials remained skeptical that Pakistan’s diplomatic overtures
would ever amount to more than tactical half-measures. New Delhi suspected
that Islamabad, facing rocky times with Washington and a violent insurgency
at home, simply wished to avoid additional troubles with India. That interpre-
tation remains plausible; Pakistan’s military shows little sign that it has revised
its threat perception of India or slackened its drive for nuclear and conventional
weapons.
A deeper Pakistani shift toward India appeared far more likely during the
waning years of the Musharraf regime, when Pakistan enjoyed better relations
with the United States. At that time, Washington and Beijing encouraged,
and when necessary cajoled, Islamabad to seek real progress in Indo-Pakistani
negotiations. This suggests that an insecure Pakistan may avoid conflict with
India as a temporary tactic, but a more confident Pakistan – one that enjoys
the patronage of both China and the United States – would be more inclined
to seek a diplomatic breakthrough on core political and military issues like
Kashmir.
Thus, Indian strategists expect that the Indo-Pakistani conflict will drag on,
but many are also starting to see China as the more compelling challenge.81
Lingering scars from India’s disastrous 1962 war with China are compounded
by the apprehension that Chinese military, economic, and political power could
dominate the region before India even has a chance to seek its rightful place in
the sun.
This fear is reasonable. China has had an enormous head start on India
in economic and military terms. China outpaces India by more than three to
one in terms of GDP. The People’s Liberation Army is almost twice the size of
the Indian military. Hawkish Indian military strategists see evidence of Chinese
encirclement from Pakistan, to Nepal, to Burma, to Sri Lanka. Borrowing from
a Booz Allen study conducted for the Pentagon, some describe Chinese points
81 As India’s former foreign secretary, Shyam Saran, put it, “India and China harbour essentially adversarial perceptions of one another.” See his Second Annual K. Subrahmanyam Memorial lecture, “China in the Twenty-First Century: What India Needs to Know about China’s World View,” New Delhi, August 29, 2012, p. 26, http://www.globalindiafoundation.org/Second%
20Annual%20K.pdf.
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From the Outside-In
195
of expansion in the region as a “string of pearls.”82 Many subscribe to the
view articulated by a prominent retired Indian diplomat who explained that
Pakistan is now of concern to India only because it represents an “extension of
Chinese power.”83
Then again, there are also excellent reasons to doubt that the future of
relations between New Delhi and Beijing will be defined by conflict. Trade flows
between India and China are already greater in volume than flows between
India and the United States.84 With economic opportunities aplenty, neither
New Delhi nor Islamabad has wanted to see diplomatic disputes get out of
hand.
Leaders on both sides have even explored opportunities for closer ties in
ways that rankle Washington. In 2012, New Delhi hosted the so-called BRICS
group (standing for Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) for its fifth
summit. In addition to seeking a balanced relationship with China, India’s dis-
plays of solidarity against the established powers of the international economy
signal its desire to retain what Indian policymakers and analysts call “strategic
autonomy.”85 That means India will not, under any circumstances, toe the
American line in the ways that other close allies, such as Great Britain or
Japan, have in the past.
Indian reluctance to enter a formal alliance with Washington goes beyond
the fact that the United States and India have different interests with respect to
major global issues, like climate change and trade. India’s desire to go its own
way has deep roots in the prickly post-colonialism of Jawaharlal Nehru, the
dominant prime minister for most of two decades after independence, and the
architect of India’s “non-alignment” stance in the Cold War. Nehru rejected
formal alliances with both Washington and Moscow. He asserted, often in a
82 A good discussion of the so-called string of pearls strategy can be found in Kaplan, Monsoon, pp. 10–12, 127, as well as James Holmes and Toshi Yoshihara, “Is China Planning a String of Pearls?” Diplomat, February 21, 2011, http://thediplomat.com/flashpoints-blog/2011/02/
21/is-china-planning-string-of-pearls/. For an Indian take on the issue, see Arun Sahgal,
“India and US Rebalancing Strategy for Asia-Pacific,” Institute for Defense Studies and Analyses, July 9, 2012, http://idsa.in/idsacomments/IndiaandUSRebalancingStrategyforAsiaPacific asahgal 090712.
83 Author conversation, New Delhi, October 2010.
84 Total trade between the United States and India in 2011 was about $57 billion, while trade between India and China in the same time period was about $74 billion. By comparison, U.S.-China trade in 2011 topped $500 billion. For details, see U.S. Census Bureau, “Trade in Goods with India,” U.S. Department of Commerce, http://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/
balance/c5330.html; “India-China Trade Hits All Time High of $73.9 bn in 2011,” Economic Times, January 30, 2012, http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2012–01–30/news/
30676369_1_trade-deficit-bilateral-trade-china-s-jaishankar; “U.S.-China Trade Statistics,”
U.S.-China Business Council, http://www.uschina.org/statistics/tradetable.html.
85 For more on this issue, see Teresita C. Schaffer, “Partnering with India: Regional Power, Global Hopes,” in Ashley J. Tellis, Mercy Kuo, and Andrew Marble, eds., Strategic Asia 2008–9: Challenges and Choices (Washington: National Bureau of Asian Research, 2008), p. 200.
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No Exit from Pakistan
tone that sounded irritatingly moralistic to American ears, that India had no
dog in the fight between imperialists and communists.
Nehruvian non-alignment is alive and well among a surprising number of
Indian leaders, even though the Cold War is long past. Indeed, in 2012, when
an impressive group of Indian strategists with ties to the government released a
report with recommendations for foreign policy, it was titled “Nonalignment
2.0.”86 When asked to explain the title choice, one of the report’s authors said
conjure up a familiar tradition of thought about India’s role in the world.87
Perhaps there was some value in that, but the title also recalled some of the
very worst periods of Cold War interaction between the United States and
India. To American ears, the title suggested Indian backsliding in its openness
to improved ties with the United States.88
Many Indians oppose policies that would even hint of bringing India into
America’s orbit. The baffling spectacle of watching Indian Prime Minister
Manmohan Singh struggle to win passage of the Indo-U.S. civil nuclear
agreement in 2008 is evidence enough of this reality. American observers,
many of whom thought the deal was far too generous to India, were shocked
to see that if not for the prime minister’s last-minute heroics, a motley political
opposition could have blocked the passage of enabling legislation in the Indian
parliament.89
India’s stance on Iran offers another example of strategic autonomy in
action. Indian interests in Iran, primarily its desire for Iranian petroleum, have
regularly put it at odds with Washington’s determined opposition to Teheran
and its nuclear ambitions. But the problem between the United States and India
is not just one of different goals or policy perspectives; it is also that India will not suffer the indignity of being told what to do. Mohan, the strategist, astutely
notes that if “pressed publicly by the U.S. leaders to fall in line with U.S. policy
(for example, on Iran), the Indian political class will be compelled to affirm its
unwillingness to be dictated to.”90
86 Sunil Khilnani et al., “Nonalignment 2.0: A Foreign and Strategic Policy for India in the Twenty First Century,” Centre for Policy Research, 2012, http://www.cprindia.org/sites/default/files/
NonAlignment%202.0 1.pdf.
87 Author conversation, Washington, DC, April 2012.
88 For more on this, as well as a larger response to the “Non-alignment 2.0” paper, see Ashley Tellis, “Nonalignment Redux: The Perils of Old Wine in New Skins,” Carnegie Endowment for Interna
tional Peace, 2012. Tellis argues that it would be a serious mistake for India to “remain nonaligned well into the future,” and that in fact, New Delhi should “enter into preferential strategic partnerships . . . with key friendly powers – especially the United States.”
89 For a revealing take on the heroics needed to push the nuclear deal through the Indian government, see Vinod K. Jose, “Falling Man: Manmohan Singh at the Centre of the Storm,”
Caravan, October 1, 2011, http://www.caravanmagazine.in/Story.aspx?Storyid=1103&Story-Style=FullStory.
90 C. Raja Mohan, “Poised for Power: The Domestic Roots of India’s Slow Rise,” in Ashley Tellis and Michael Wills, eds., Strategic Asia 2007–8: Domestic Political Change and Grand Strategy (Washington: National Bureau of Asian Research, 2007), p. 207.
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From the Outside-In
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Part of the logic of the Bush administration’s civil-nuclear deal and the
Obama administration’s decision to support India for a permanent United
Nations Security Council seat was that these steps would break down India’s
reluctance to partnership. That bet may pay off in time, but strategic autonomy
is still India’s dominant foreign policy paradigm, and there are good reasons
to believe that it could remain that way well into the future.
After Obama’s October 2010 trip to India, New Delhi took a number of
steps that, intentional or not, reduced American expectations for accelerated
partnership in the near term. Over the course of 2011, India rejected bids by
American manufacturers to supply fighter jets in a mega-deal that would have
amounted to well over $10 billion; abstained from the UN vote authorizing
military action in Libya; and watered down UN language criticizing Syria.91
“Strategic autonomy” is more than warmed-over non-alignment for the
twenty-first century. It also reflects India’s rising power and newfound sense
of confidence. Assuming India’s economic growth remains strong, its leaders
gradually tame some of the country’s greatest development challenges, and the