India's role in a multi-polar world - Alfred Herrhausen Gesellschaft

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Section one India at the crossroads: understanding the multiple transformations
Bridging identities: India as a positive power? Sunil Khilnani India has long aspired to play a role in redefining the global order. Its aspirations stem from its vast human scale, its depth as a civilisation and a normative legitimacy that Indians believe they have amassed, first through their non-violent freedom struggle against British rule under Mahatma Gandhi’s leadership, and second by building a state that despite many perturbances, remains a secular constitutional democracy: one of modernity’s few large-scale triumphs outside the west. If political legitimacy has inspired India’s global ambition, a deficit of economic and military power has tempered it. Initially, India had to devise alternative definitions of power – by, as Jawaharlal Nehru put it in the mid-1950s, adopting a negative sense of power as resisting. Thus, India refused to participate in Cold War alignments; it avoided treaties (such as the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty); and it kept away from markets and international trade. All these structures it saw as skewed in favour of the powerful. The Gandhian idea of boycott defined India’s stance towards the global order. Yet now, as its economic power accumulates, India needs a positive conception of power. It is evident that India is on an economic growth path: savings rates are currently over 35% of GDP and rising, investment is up, and its demographic “youth bulge” has still a decade or so to go before it feeds into the working population. The global recession has certainly depressed India’s near double digit growth Through a billion voices: India’s role in a multi-polar world 13 rates achieved since 2004; but with a less exportdependent economy and with a more regulated, less globalised financial system, India has shown some agility in recovering. Economic growth is enabling greater social expenditure – and more weapons purchases (recent defence budgets have increased by over a third, to nearly $30 billion). None of this means that India is about to become a “superpower” – as some over-excitable commentators like to imagine. But as its conventional power expands, does India have a comparably evolving outlook of what it wishes to do in the world – and prevent the world from doing to it? Analysts invariably lament India’s lack of a “grand strategy” or “strategic vision”. Certainly, it lacks anything like China’s government-devised “peaceful rise” doctrine. Yet this lack of an all encompassing vision could be advantageous. For it is testimony to India’s open society and to the diverse definitions of national interest and identity enabled by its democratic structures. As India’s 28 regional states, its many social groups, and its unequal economic classes use democratic channels to register a voice in their government’s policies and actions, India’s international objectives will be, in part, shaped in arenas far beyond the ministerial corridors of Lutyens’ imperial Delhi. Definitions of Indian national identity and interest are emerging through robust democratic contest – not through the rarified debates of policy “wonks” or the diktat of leaders. Take for example the recent bruising debate over the US-India Civilian Nuclear Agreement: what looked like (and was) public cacophony actually helped to refine the terms that Indian negotiators pressed for and finally achieved. In devising and defining the kind of international power India seeks, India will need to define what it wants power for, and how that power will address the particular challenges India faces internally, within its neighbourhood and the wider Asian region. As India’s global involvement deepens, it will need to confront three critical issues, each requiring distinct Bridging identities: India as a positive power? | Sunil Khilnani
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Dangerous myths: making the case fo
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