India’s Neighborhood Under Modi

Since he was elected to the post of prime minister four years ago, Narendra Modi of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has steered India’s foreign policy in a different direction than his predecessor, Manmohan Singh of the Indian National Congress (INC). Modi’s greatest achievement has been to steer the basis of India’s foreign policy to one that centers around its use in promoting India’s national interests. This has been a welcome departure from the Nehruvian idealist approach that previously characterized India’s foreign policy: Whilst sounding noble in its pursuit of multilateralism and nonalignment, it did little for India’s interests.

Modi enhanced India’s engagement with the United States; maintained close ties with traditional ally Russia; deepened India’s ties with Middle Eastern states; and intensified India’s engagement with the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, an informal strategic dialogue between the United States, Japan, Australia, and India. Most importantly, Modi’s frequent foreign trips have managed to stress the importance of India to the global community. India continues to receive enormous foreign investment, despite domestic bureaucratic hurdles, and it recently shed the unfortunate distinction of being home to the largest number of people in absolute poverty in the world. Meanwhile, its economy has overtaken France’s to become the world’s sixth largest.

Yet, despite these gains, all is not well with India’s foreign policy. In particular, in regional policy – in its approach to South Asia, and the Indian Ocean – New Delhi has experienced numerous setbacks. This is not to discount the numerous victories the Modi government has scored at the tactical level. Cross-border strikes into Pakistan and Myanmar have demonstrated that India will not show restraint in taking out hostile militants and terrorist groups. And it handled the Doklam crisis in Bhutan well, by demonstrating a backbone in defending its interests – and those of its ally – at least when directly confronted with an incursion from Chinese forces. (Chinese and Indian forces confronted each other for several weeks after Chinese forces entered territory disputed with Bhutan.)

This is more than most other countries would have been able to manage. However, as Indian foreign policy expert Brahma Chellaney points out, Dokalm “illustrates that while India may be content with a tactical win, China has the perseverance and guile to win at the strategic level,” because of its perseverance in building up its infrastructure near the disputed territory. Undoubtedly, these developments will cause Bhutan’s leaders to think twice about relying on India for their security. Everywhere in or near South Asia – in Nepal, Sri Lanka, the Maldives, Afghanistan, and Iran – India’s position has weakened from a strategic perspective, due to a lack of vision. This is despite a strong start: Modi invited the leaders of India’s neighbors to his inauguration, and articulated a “neighborhood first” policy, but failed to follow up on early gains.

A recent ranking of countries by power by U.S. News and World Report placed India 15th, behind countries like Iran and Saudi Arabia. It is notable that a country with the demographic, economic, and military power of India should be ranked as such. Yet, it is apt. India’s approach to foreign policy can be described as “having one foot in the door” (of wanting to pursue a well-defined geopolitical strategy). Despite India’s enormous potential, it still struggles to leverage its power, hard and soft, to its advantage. It simultaneously wants to be a great power, to play at the level of the United States, Russia, and China, but refuses to consistently pursue the policies necessary to become a great power, and be the paramount power in South Asia, with grit, gumption, and consistency.

This is not merely an organizational or economic issue, but is a function of a lack of geopolitical vision and unity of purpose, of a reactive foreign policy, and of the utter primacy of domestic politics. A country like Iran, which has been under a sanctions regime for decades, is thus able to have a greater impact in its perceived sphere of influence than a giant such as India, because Tehran plays its limited hand to the fullest extent. Yet, on the other hand, India cannot simply adopt a quiet approach to foreign policy similar to those pursued by other large powers, such as Brazil and Indonesia. India is too big, too pivotal, and too powerful, to abscond from the great game.

Throughout South Asia, India has repeatedly undermined its own interests by not coming down firmly on a policy, whatever dicted by its national interests, and sticking with it. Foreign policy decisions inevitably involve a tradeoff between a state’s perceived ethical positions, and its national interests, which do not always align.

This is particularly evident in the way India handled its Maldives policy. Having failed to court the government of President Abdulla Yameen, India failed to have any impact on the Maldives’ domestic situation after Yameen declared a state of emergency in February, and arrested opposition leaders and judges. Since then, Yameen has courted Chinese investment, strengthened ties with Pakistan, and ordered Indian nationals and military helicopters to leave the islands. The Indian reaction has thus far been tame: While former exiled Maldivian President Mohamed Nasheed suggested that India intervene militarily, India has not even applied stringent economic and diplomatic pressure to change the situation there, instead expressing concern over the situation in the islands, and holding up visas for Maldivian nations. Possibly seeing the direction in which the wind is blowing, the Indian Ocean island nation of Seychelles also recently revoked its earlier offer to India to allow it to construct and operate a military base on one of its islands.

While India did not push its interests more strongly in order to avoid the appearance of interference, and in hopes of influencing the subsequent political development of the Maldives, this strategy has thus far not yielded any results. At some point, India will have to appreciate that in order to pursue its national interests, it will have to constantly commit time, effort, resources, economic aid, and, if necessarily, its military, in achieving its foreign policy aims. Had India intervened militarily in the Maldives, it would not only have secured its national interests, but overthrown an unpopular government and found support in many quarters of the country’s political establishment. The moral consequences would have been minimal. In an international system where great powers bend international law in service of their national interests, India could have undoubtedly spun such an intervention favorably.

Instead, India is at risk of losing not only the Maldives, but also Sri Lanka and Nepal to China’s sphere of influence. Despite the 2015 election of Maithripala Sirisena in Sri Lanka, perceived to be closer to India than his predecessor Mahinda Rajapaksa, Sri Lanka has been unable to escape the debt it incurred from Chinese infrastructure projects; in December 2017, Colombo handed the port of Hambantota to Beijing on a 99-year lease. While many of these projects were initiated by Rajapaksa, his party remains popular and won recently in a local election.

Nepal has gone further down the road away from Indian influence, partially due to an informal Indian blockade during 2015 protests against Nepal’s new constitution by Mahdesis, who are ethnically related to the people of the Indian states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. Nepal’s Prime Minister Khadga Prasad Sharma Oli, from the Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist-Leninist), has leaned toward China since he was sworn in in February 2018. Oli has signed numerous investment agreements with China, including in the hydroelectric sector, vital to India’s own energy security, and joined China’s Belt and Road Initiative, which India has consistently criticized. While Nepal will continue to balance India and China, it is clearly trying to break free of its dependence on India.

India has also begun to reap the negative consequences of a wishy-washy foreign policy toward Afghanistan, and Iran too. It has become clear in Afghanistan that the Taliban are not going to be defeated, and that any final peace settlement there must involve both the Taliban and Pakistan. Accepting such a future for Afghanistan has long been anathema for India, which staunchly opposed the Taliban, and has refused to countenance relations with the group. Yet, the United States government itself has recently authorized talks with the Taliban. Moreover, both Iran and Russia, traditionally partners of India, have provided support to the Taliban for their own reasons. By refusing to think creatively, and look for ways to open up channels with the Taliban (despite their ties with Pakistan), India has lost a lot of its influence in a country that has naturally been closely aligned with it. By refusing to step in militarily to aid the Afghan government, despite requests by that government and the United States to do so, and despite it being in India’s own national interests, India has relegated itself to a secondary role in any future Afghan peace process.

As with the Maldives, and Afghanistan, India has shown itself unwilling to commit fully to a path that may involve some difficulties in the case of Iran. While India has cultivated Iran, its third largest supplier of petroleum, for many years, it declined to staunchly stand up for Iran after U.S. President Donald Trump withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal in May and applied pressure to India and other countries to cease purchasing oil from Iran. While India has not yet buckled to such pressure, it has still taken steps to import more oil from Saudi Arabia and the United States, and does not seem particularly strongly committed to sacrificing its relationship with the United States for the sake of Iran. While this is understandable, India will definitely lose influence with Iran unless it completely defies the United States and risks sanctions by continuing to trade with Iran.

India may also be forced by U.S. sanctions to reduce its involvement in the Chabahar port project, which New Delhi has already mishandled. The issue with the Chabahar project is similar to the issues that India faces in other South Asian countries like the Maldives and Nepal: it has simply proved inept at delivering high-quality infrastructure projects on time. As a result, Iran has opened up the possibility of China investing in Chabahar, though not to the exclusion of India. But Chinese involvement with Chabahar would negate India’s desire to develop the port as a counter to nearby Gwadar in Pakistan, which China is developing.

India has thus been unable to reap the consequences of its economic development, military prowess, and improvements in how it conceptualizes foreign policy in influencing actors in its own neighborhood. Whether due to bureaucratic ineptness, or a general lack of vision and grand strategy, India is falling behind China, and even regional powers like Pakistan and Iran in being able to influence events in South Asia. Even with an economy a fifth the size of China’s, India should be able to construct a functional port in Iran and hydropower plants in Nepal in a timely fashion. That it cannot is testimony to the indifference of multiple aspects of India’s political class to achieving desirable outcomes. Modi’s energy alone cannot make things happen.

On the whole, while the Modi government has had some successes in its approach to foreign policy, especially from the global, marketing, and economic perspectives, India’s regional foreign policy has to be rehauled and reimagined, in a greater strategic context that encompasses all of Asia.