Pax Indica: India and the World of the Twenty-first Century (39 page)

The transformation of the India–US relationship from estrangement to strategic partnership is well on its way, and the relationship has clearly acquired a depth that goes beyond the utilitarian measurement of successful transactions. The twenty-first-century world is one in which an emphasis on the shared values of both countries—democracy and pluralism, tolerance and transparency, and respect for personal liberty and human rights—has greater salience than ever. For the first time in human history, the majority of the world’s population lives in democracies. The idea that the two principal ones have special interests and responsibilities is not a fashionable one, but it could become one of the defining features of the new era.

As democracies, India and the United States have the additional responsibility of establishing and running international structures to cope with the myriad challenges of the twenty-first century that go beyond the capacity of any one state or alliance to resolve. These include terrorism and nuclear proliferation, but also less conventional threats: state failure, transnational organized crime, the spread of pandemics, piracy in international waters, the management of cyberspace and the military misuse of outer space, to name a few. The threat of Islamist fanaticism and the rise of an authoritarian China also pose specific national security challenges to the United States and India that, if handled well and in cooperation, could assure a safer world.

The possibilities are vast. As they say in America, Obama stepped up to the plate in India, and in his speech to Parliament, he hit a home run. To turn to a more Indian sport, let us make sure that, well after his departure, we keep the ball in play.

The rest of the world presents India with an intriguing mix of underdeveloped opportunities and unexplored potential.

Europe is a case in point. India has had a very long history of relations with the Old Continent, going back to the days of the Roman Empire. The south-western state of Kerala boasted a Roman port, Muziris, for centuries before Jesus Christ; excavations are going on now that are revealing even more about its reach and influence. The discovery of ancient amphorae has confirmed that products such as olive oil, wine and glass used to be imported into India from there, in return for more exotic items like ivory and spices from India. Interestingly, an ivory statue of the Hindu goddess Lakshmi dating back to the first century
BCE
was found in the ruins of Pompeii in south Italy during excavations.

After centuries of languishing, trade is once more a major determinant of the relationship. The EU is India’s second largest trading partner, with 68 billion euros of commerce in 2010, accounting for 20 per cent of India’s global trade, in addition to services exports from Europe worth 10 billion euros, and services imports valued at a little over 8 billion euros. But Europe’s contribution to India’s overall global trade has been shrinking: the percentage of India’s total trade made up by imports from and exports to EU member states has in fact been decreasing even while the Indian economy grows. Differences persist on tariff barriers and on climate change.

India has a number of affinities with Europe and with the EU, not
least since it, too, is an economic and political union of a number of linguistically, culturally and ethnically different states. Both are unwieldy unions of just under thirty states, both are bureaucratic, both are coalition-ridden and both are slow to take decisions. But in practice these affinities have not translated into close political or strategic relations. Though India was one of the first countries (in 1963) to establish diplomatic relations with the European Economic Community, and the India–EU Strategic Partnership and Joint Action Plan of 2005 and 2008 offer a framework for dialogue and cooperation in the field of security, it will take time for the EU to develop a common strategic culture, which is essential for meaningful strategic cooperation between the EU and India. The India–EU Joint Action Plan covers a wide range of fields for cooperation, including trade and commerce, security, and cultural and educational exchanges. However, as David Malone has observed, ‘These measures lead mainly to dialogue, commitments to further dialogue, and exploratory committees and working groups, rather than to significant policy measures or economic breakthroughs.’

Indians have an allergy to being lectured to, and one of the great failings in the EU–India partnership has been the tendency of Europe to preach to India on matters it considers itself quite competent to handle on its own. As a democracy for over six decades (somewhat longer than several member states of the EU), India sees human rights as a vital domestic issue. There is not a single human rights problem about India that has been exposed by Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch or any European institution, which has not been revealed first by Indian citizens, journalists and NGOs and handled within the democratic Indian political space. So for the EU to try to write in human rights provisions into a free trade agreement, as if they were automobile emissions standards, gets Indian backs up. Trade should not be held hostage to internal European politics about human rights declarations; the substance of human rights is far more important than the language or the form. On the substance, India and the EU are on the same side and have the same aspirations.

Once this irritant is overcome, the negotiations for an FTA, which has been long in its ‘final’ stages, should be concluded and should transform trade.

Of course there are structural impediments that will not disappear. Ironically, given its human rights professions, the EU has long favoured China over India, and China is clearly the preferred investment destination: for every euro invested in India from the EU, 20 euros is invested in China. (This is partly India’s fault, in not creating a comparably congenial climate for foreign investment.) An EU ambassador to India, quoted by Malone, observed that ‘each has a tendency to look to the most powerful poles in international relations rather than towards each other, and each spends more time deploring the shortcomings of the other rather than building the foundations of future partnership’.

A major element in the equation is India’s well-advertised preference for bilateral arrangements with individual member states of the EU, over dealing with the collectivity. This is arguably necessary, given the lack of cohesion in European institutions on strategic questions. Since Maastricht in 1992, Europe has claimed to have a ‘common foreign policy’, but it is not a ‘single’ foreign policy. (If it were, EU member states would not need two of the five permanent seats on the UN Security Council, and be clamouring for a third.)

The case for India–EU cooperation could be strongly made, since the bulk of the problem areas in the world lie between India and Europe (or, as Sweden’s Foreign Minister Carl Bildt once put it, between the Indus and the Nile). To take two examples: more people have been killed in Europe by drugs coming in from Afghanistan than the total number killed in two decades of fighting in that country. India’s security interests in Afghanistan and its greater proximity to that country offer important intersections with Europe’s interests. India’s increasing salience in the geopolitics of the Indian Ocean, and especially in the security of the Gulf, the source of much of Europe’s energy, suggests another area of cooperation.

And yet the prospects for institutional cooperation between India and the EU—despite all that they have in common, the long history of contact between the Old Continent and the subcontinent, and the contemporary relevance of the challenges and opportunities they confront—remain negligible. India–EU relations currently lack substance and strategic weight, despite the conclusion of a strategic partnership in 2004. The oxymoronic lack of European unity undermines the credibility of the collectivity; policy-makers in New Delhi will not be able to find many
instances of the EU, rather than its individual member states, engaging with or standing up to the United States, Russia or China on any major issue. The ongoing eurozone crisis has also not served to enhance India’s confidence in Europe. So New Delhi strengthens relationships with a number of individual European countries that it considers reliable partners, but fails to think of Europe collectively as one of the potential poles in the evolving multipolar world. A European observer, Karine Lisbonne de Vergeron, characterizes the thinking of the Indian elite as follows: ‘Europe lacks a strategic vision and ranks at the bottom of the list of partners in India’s multipolar understanding of the future geometry of world affairs.’ This assessment is not far off the mark.

Conceptually, the foreign policy establishment in independent India sees the nation as a modern state founded on and sustained by strong ideas of sovereignty, territoriality and raison d’état. In contrast, the EU is a post-modern construct, with diminishing regard for sovereignty within its territorial space and a growing desire for extraterritoriality in its aspirations. This basic difference between the conceptual outlook of India and that of the EU might help explain the inherent discomfort of modern India in engaging with a post-modern entity like the EU. In principle and in practice, too, India is wedded to non-interference in the internal affairs of states, whereas the EU is the land on which Bernard Kouchner propounded his theory of a ‘
droit d’ingerence
’ and its soil has offered fertile ground for initiatives revealing a penchant for intervention beyond sovereign boundaries. India and the EU may have democracy and diversity in common, but in their basic orientation towards statecraft, they diverge fundamentally.

For all these reasons, India has consistently revealed a greater sense of comfort in dealing with individual European nation states; New Delhi sees an affinity with London, Berlin or Paris that it cannot bring itself to imagine with Brussels or Strasbourg. As a result, as my former colleague, the Indian diplomat Sandeep Chakravorty, has observed about Europe, ‘it may not be an exaggeration to state that India’s relationship with the parts is more substantive than with the whole’. It does not help that India also considers Europe with its multiplicity of complex organizations to be over-institutionalized and over-bureaucratized and, therefore, far more complicated and less attractive to engage with than national capitals.

The boot is not entirely on one foot. Where Europe and India have divergent approaches to addressing security issues, for instance, Indian deficiencies are arguably to blame. For instance, the EU has formalized an elaborate Common Foreign and Security Policy, a European Security and Defence Policy, and even a European Security Strategy (by the European Council in 2003), while India has not yet even formally articulated a national security strategy. While Europe may desire closer security cooperation with India, India is really in no position to reciprocate except in terms of generalities. On the other hand, of course, Indian decision-makers could point out that there is no European defence ministry, army headquarters or intelligence service, and so security cooperation is in any case better conducted with individual states.

It could also be argued that the EU adds very little value to India’s efforts to overcome its principal security challenges. In the immediate priority areas of strategic interest to India—its own neighbourhood, the Gulf region, the United States and China—the EU is almost irrelevant, and the story does not get better if one extends India’s areas of security interest to Central and Southeast Asia. On the big global security issues—nuclear proliferation, civil conflict and terrorism—the problem is the same, while the EU has almost nothing to contribute to India’s search for energy security. Even in India’s quest to be part of the global decision-making architecture, including a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, it is not the EU but the existing European permanent members, the United Kingdom and France, which bring more value to the table for India. India certainly needs European cooperation in counterterrorism and European remote surveillance technology, but it would obtain these from European nation states, not from the EU.

If security is therefore a marginal area for EU–India cooperation, there certainly is scope in the fields of food security, the response to climate change and the protection of the environment, where Europe could share with India its advances in ‘green technology’. In the sphere of science and technology, India’s participation in both the International Thermonuclear Reactor Project (ITER) and the GALILEO satellite programmes came through the EU. But beyond these, there are few visible ‘wins’ in India–EU cooperation. There is certainly room for enhanced technological cooperation, where India’s abundant and
inexpensive scientifically savvy brainpower and its burgeoning record in ‘frugal innovation’ offer interesting synergies with Europe’s unmatched engineering traditions and capacity. But the Arcelor-Mittal affair, in which a takeover bid by an Indian steel firm of a European one was challenged in a manner that can only be described as racist (‘Europeans are like a delicate perfume, Indians a cheap eau de toilette’ was only one of the many unpleasantries bandied about) showed India the limits of doing business with and in Europe.

The notion that Europe could collectively emerge as a new ‘pole’ in a multipolar world order has its adherents, but progress in this direction is difficult to discern, especially given the choice of low-profile leaders for the principal European institutional positions, the presidency and the high representative for foreign and security policy. The danger remains that New Delhi will write Europe off as a charming but irrelevant continent, ideal for a summer holiday but not for serious business. The world would be poorer if the Old Continent and the rising new subcontinent did not build on their democracy and their common interests to offer a genuine alternative to the blandishments of the United States and China.

And yet, within Europe, some bilateral relationships have never been stronger. That with France, for instance, has witnessed increasingly close military cooperation and intelligence sharing, creating a level of trust that may also have played a role in the decision to award Dassault’s Rafale the multi-billion-dollar fighter plane contract. France’s willingness to offer India an unprecedentedly generous level of ‘offsets’ in exchange for its decision, as well as to transfer technology, suggests the basis for the kind of close partnership that India is yet to enjoy with the United States. There is active bilateral engagement on specialized defence-related fields such as counterterrorism—the Indo-French Working Group on Terrorism has met every year since 2001—as well as on nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament.

France has also developed an important level of energy cooperation with India, especially following a 2008 agreement between the two countries that has paved the way for the sale of nuclear reactors to India. French interest in Indian culture and a sustained level of scholarship on the country, as reflected by the impressive work of its Centre de
Sciences Humaines in New Delhi and the prestigious Institut Français de Pondichéry, testify to the intellectual depth of the engagement. (This has only modestly been reciprocated by India, which has posted a succession of non-Francophone ambassadors to Paris.)

France enjoys a limited historical basis for its relationship with India, since its colonial presence was limited to a few enclaves and left no lasting mark on society as a whole. The opposite, of course, is true of Britain, India’s colonial master for two centuries and the source of both its Westminster-style parliamentary democracy and its obsession with cricket, not to mention the provenance of the English language that has been India’s calling card to the world. India’s relations with Britain come with an extraordinary amount of historical baggage, compounded by the presence of some 3 million immigrants of Indian origin in the United Kingdom (numbers comparable to those of Indians in the United States, but representing both a higher proportion of the population—some 5 per cent, as against 1 per cent in the US—and a very different demographic profile). Recent developments appear, however, to have reversed the historical pattern; it is now Britain that is seen as the supplicant, seeking to please an often-indifferent India.