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

14
Through a billion voices: India’s role in a multi-polar world
conceptions of power.
The tyranny of geography
First, as India finds itself located in the world’s most
threatening regional environment, it is perforce having
to recognise the tyranny of geography. In its first four
decades, India was anxious to avoid being drawn
into conflicts whose causes originated elsewhere –
superpower rivalry during the cold war, for instance
– and over which it would have no control. Keeping
out of such conflicts was essentially what national
sovereignty, and autonomy of judgment and action,
meant: being able to choose one’s battles. Now,
however, India faces different kinds of threat – rooted
in its region, linked to neighbours like Pakistan and
China, and even emanating from within India itself.
At the regional level, India is surrounded by unstable
or authoritarian states – Nepal, Bangladesh, Burma,
Sri Lanka and above all Pakistan. Internal conflicts
stemming from within these countries traverse
the subcontinent’s colonially-imposed borders and
infiltrate India’s own domestic security, threatening
its economic prospects as well as political and social
peace.
The primary focus of India’s regional concern is of
course Pakistan, and its incendiary internal conflicts.
In response to its dangerous neighbour, India will
need to cultivate a stronger authority as a regional
power. India’s strategy towards Pakistan has been
threaded around assumptions which are now invalid:
that it is a unified state, and that India can outsource
its Pakistan policy to the US. In fact, Pakistan is
disaggregating rapidly. Power is split among a civilian
political elite, its military chiefs and their intelligence
agencies, and numerous extremist groups, none of
which can claim actual sovereign power over the
country’s whole territory. America’s response to
regional instability – essentially, to throw economic
aid and military hardware at the problem (Kerry-Lugar
+ F-16s) – has proved disastrous.
The reality is that India has most at stake in Pakistan’s
future, and it will need to devise a more creative,
Bridging identities: India as a positive power? | Sunil Khilnani
calibrated policy. It will also need to persuade the
world around to its point of view instead of suffering
the consequences of other people’s policies.
The new Asian drama
The second great challenge will be to find an
appropriate role in the new Asian drama slowly
being played out across the continent. India’s greater
neighbourhood is inhabited by a number of rising,
aspiring powers, while at the same time it lacks any
structural or shared norms that might harmonise the
diverse group of jostling aspirations. It is states in
India’s broad region, stretching from Iran to North
Korea, that are most likely to acquire nuclear weapons
in the near future; and it is non-state actors in India’s
immediate environment – “AfPak” – that will pose
lethal and fugitive challenges.
The central plot in this Asian drama is the very
real threat of conflict. Conflict is now a continuous
condition for all, everywhere, not a singular event. The
idea that the primary purpose of military force is to
deliver decisive, knock-out blows – with the resultant
tickertape parades and photo-op banners announcing
“victory” – is an illusion. It is likely that states will
need to use force more, not less, in coming years
– not in pursuit of conclusive, decisive outcomes
(“decapitating” the enemy, as the gentle phrase
goes); not as an act of “last resort”; but as a way
of managing long-term confrontations and conflicts.
It follows that questions about the proper use of
military force will loom large. Given the broad and
diverse range of threats that India in particular faces,
it will need to think in terms of managing conflict,
rather than definitive, ultimate victory.
In fact, the sort of military conflict India might
face stretches from classical battles (gaining and
defending the commanding heights: the battle for
Tiger Hill during the Kargil war) to, unimaginable as
it is, nuclear blasts. This includes situations where
the battlefield has “dematerialised” and the enemies
are formless – rubber dinghies drifting in the night;
bomb-laden people who slip into railway carriages or