By M H Ahsan
Just at the apogee of the India-US nuclear agreement saga, Indian domestic politics are condemning its final conclusion to another round of contentious debate. The outcome of this eleventh-hour stumble, however, goes beyond simply evaluating the technical parameters of the recently negotiated bilateral agreement with the United States over civilian nuclear cooperation. The issue at stake is nothing less than redrawing the fundamental premise of Indian grand strategy and the role New Delhi seeks to carve out for itself in the emerging international system. An August 18 resolution by the left-wing parties - vital allies for the ruling United Progressive Alliance central coalition in New Delhi - exemplifies the domestic political divide: "The politburo decided to take the issue of the nuclear agreement and the dangers of the strategic alliance with the United States to the people through a nationwide mass campaign."
At the outset, it is useful to reflect on the original logic of engagement with the US and specifically on what the nuclear deal was meant to achieve for Washington and for New Delhi. Until the July 18, 2005, India-US joint statement on the nuclear agreement, India's status in the global non-proliferation system was that of a pariah state. Since the 1974 nuclear test (Pokhran-I) and the ensuing sanctions regime imposed on India, New Delhi's goal was in essence one of preserving its strategic weapons program and insulating itself from an adverse external diplomatic assault, prosecuted largely by the US.
Finally, in May 1998, India chose to abandon its ambiguous posture by demonstrating a declared nuclear-weapons capability (Pokhran-II). This was a point of no return, and indeed India in the ensuing couple of years endured yet another US diplomatic onslaught, manifested in automatic sanctions to compel New Delhi to reverse course. Suffice it to say, New Delhi stayed the course and by the early 2000s, most pragmatic voices in Washington had accommodated themselves to an India that would be permanently nuclear. As the primary enforcer of the non-proliferation regime, Washington chose to pursue the next logical step of identifying a solution to the Indian nuclear question - enabling India to enter the nuclear system on an exceptional basis and thus eliminating the most contentious obstacle to the normalization of US-India relations.
But why would the US choose to bestow such an extraordinary gesture on India? Students of realpolitik and US foreign policy would be acutely aware that altruism in international affairs is as absurd as "to ravish a woman for a purely moral reason". This is where the timing of the nuclear deal becomes important. By 2005, it had become clear in Washington that the fantasy of reshaping the security structure of the Middle East had reached an impasse. Geopolitical developments elsewhere were equally disconcerting for Washington. Russia, after more than a decade of internal upheavals, was displaying signs of breaking free of the shell that Washington's cold warriors had confined it to since 1991.
It will also be recalled that China had gained from the strategic surprise of the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, which had diverted US strategic attention to the West Asian theater, from President George W Bush's pre-September 11 national-security goal of expanding the scope of its East Asian containment strategy. In sum, by mid-2005, with the US bogged down in Iraq and the two primary Eurasian land powers, Russia and China, rapidly accelerating their geo-economic profiles and influence, America's unipolar triumphalism appeared all but over. Indeed, China was seeking to refurbish its own equation with India, manifested most importantly by Premier Wen Jiabao's April 2005 visit to New Delhi and the mutual declaration of a "strategic partnership". Russia's expanding military-technical market share in India's modernization drive in the same year again suggested that the US was being excluded from a growing arms bazaar. Within South Asia, too, there was a sense of deja vu.
After the initial exhilaration of New Delhi's elite in the aftermath of September 11, one that had anticipated a natural elevation of India-US ties, the United States' geopolitically expedient decision to ally with Pakistan as its frontline state in Afghanistan implied that the India-US honeymoon was over. It is in such a structural flux that Washington's subsequent engagement with India must be considered. In retrospect, the timing of Washington's decision to revolutionize its relationship with New Delhi appears to have immense geostrategic and geo-economic logic, the latter arguably a critical parallel driver for Washington eager to gain the fruits of a belated Indian economic renaissance. By dangling the nuclear deal, it offered an irresistible instrument to New Delhi's strategic elite and re-altered the incentives for subsequent Indian foreign policy.
The above perhaps succinctly capture the larger US incentives for the nuclear deal - gain a vital strategic foothold in South Asia, one that it had unsuccessfully sought over the entire course of the Cold War. What were the Indian motives for the nuclear deal? This was obvious. As a nuclear-weapon state, but one outside the international system manifested in great-power arrangements, New Delhi's security elite was acutely aware that until its pariah status was transformed, one that had lasted more than three decades, India would remain condemned to the periphery of the international system, without access to high-technologies in the nuclear sphere, and excluded from any subsequent modifications to such arrangements.
Also cognizant of the reality of India's lack of system-shaping capabilities, Indian foreign policy chose to engage with the primary manager of the contemporary system, the US, to alleviate its "status discontent" with the prevailing reality. Of course, negotiating the terms of such an entry into the system of non-proliferation was imperative too. Thus preserving the essence of India's strategic weapons development and its indigenous three-stage reactor program rightly became a vital goal in itself. Indian political and intellectual discourse over the past two years has vividly reflected this imperative and has arguably contributed to New Delhi adopting appropriate negotiating positions.
That New Delhi was largely able to reach a more or less acceptable bilateral agreement last month was as much the result of internal checks and balances as it was to Washington's larger grand strategy (ie, India as the strategic prize), extending the United States' maritime cordon sanitaire around the East Asian landmass and thus achieving dominant control over the vital sea lanes from the Persian Gulf to the Sea of Japan. Returning to domestic political events, it should be clear that the nuclear deal was a means to an end. That end was the much-belated acknowledgment of India's nuclear status and, by extension, its entry into an important multilateral arena of great-power commerce, namely the market for dual-use technologies that would enable India to augment its socioeconomic and military potential.
Up to this point, I suspect there would be little bipartisan objection in India for such a strategy, for it preserves the fundamental premise of Indian foreign policy, one that lays an exceptional premium on independence and autonomy, and an aversion to extra-Indian evaluations of Indian national interest. Suffice it to say, only by the successful adherence to these principles can India achieve its great-power aspirations. The ongoing discord, however, arises from certain domestic political quarters that have viewed or are now viewing the nuclear deal as a stepping-stone to an open-ended strategic alignment with the United States, especially in the military sphere. For such ideologues, the nuclear deal has paved the way for the emergence of a natural relationship between two great democracies that were separated only by the contradictions of the Cold War. In many ways, these ideologues are the mirror-image of the Indian left, which is ideologically anti-American. As usual, India's international salvation lies in the middle path.
Again, it must be emphasized that constructive engagement with the US is in India's interest. As is evident from the extraordinary record of Beijing's own open-door policies since 1978, cultivating economic linkages with the US offers enormous developmental advantages. At the geostrategic level, too, with all major powers continuing to place a premium on their relationship with the United States, India by disengaging only loses out. Yet the major powers are also adopting omni-directional, non-exclusive relationships. The patterns of interaction between today's actors are a critical element of the evolving order that deserves some elaboration.
The international political economy and its globalizing forces are compelling actors to pursue multi-vector foreign policies - the core thrust of foreign policies of the major states is being driven by non-exclusive engagement. It is useful to recall that the bipolar division of the past system was geopolitical and geo-economic. Both blocs were self-sufficient and inter-bloc trade and investment were irrelevant. Today's system is clearly more interdependent than during the Cold War. To be sure, this interdependence is state-driven, and the economic division of labor is nowhere near as efficient as in national economies. In an anarchic world, it never will be. But certainly, trade and investment are becoming both the means and ends of state power and leverage.
India's primary goal must be to assume a growing share of this international division of labor, one that is gradually decoupling from the United States, as the industrial revolution across the Eurasian geo-economic space attests to. Thus India's US policy must operate in a multi-vector framework. It is only by engaging all major actors that India can achieve strategic flexibility to leverage its foreign and economic goals, and simultaneously preserve the ideational foundations of Indian foreign policy. The ideological discord within Indian foreign policy has also manifested recently in debates over New Delhi's military diplomacy.
India's decision to participate in the quadrilateral - US, Japan, Australia and India - naval exercises in the Bay of Bengal next month, while remaining ambivalent to developments in the Eurasian land space exemplified by the recent Shanghai Cooperation Organization military exercises, illustrates New Delhi's inability to implement a multi-vector policy, and indeed is a futile attempt at ignoring its own geography. Thus while naval cooperation among the quadrilateral group would in principle be defensible, when seen in conjunction with India eschewing other multilateral developments in its periphery, it certainly arouses suspicion toward New Delhi's exclusive outlook. Surely there's more to India's "Look East" policy than naval cooperation?
At a time when China is rapidly integrating the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations into the Chinese economy, New Delhi is engaging with extra-regional actors in the military sphere, and yet achieving little influence in its extended neighborhood. The geopolitical pluralism today is heading one way - a multipolar world - with the underlying fundamentals arguably already in place. In such a scenario of systemic change, and given that the redistribution of power is accruing to the Eurasian geopolitical space, one where India resides, is it wise to pursue an uncritical path toward bandwagoning with an offshore power in relative decline?
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