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CIAO DATE: 04/05/07
Reorienting Indian Foreign Policy
Review by Sumit Ganguly
C. Raja Mohan, Crossing the Rubicon: The Shaping of India's New Foreign Policy, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004, 336 pp. $29.95.
The transformation of India's foreign and security policies at the end of the Cold War was nothing less than revolutionary. The country's leadership had to re-examine the fundamental tenets of its policies, as the pillars on which they had rested crumbled. Throughout much of the Cold War, India's leaders pursued a foreign policy based upon the principles of nonalignment that were formulated at the time of India's independence by India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. The nonalignment doctrine deemphasized the use of force, sought to steer India away from superpower entanglements, and attempted to forge a third world coalition to address North- South economic disparities. In practice, many of these lofty and desirable goals were not realized.
During his last days in office, Nehru painfully realized that moral suasion without the requisite military capabilities could result in a strategic calamity when dealing with an intransigent adversary. In 1962, following the failure of border negotiations with the People's Republic of China, Chinese forces attacked India's Himalayan border positions, and Indian defenses collapsed. Worse still, India's self-imposed diplomatic isolation from the Soviet Union and the United States ill-served its interests since neither party proved especially forthcoming during India's moment of crisis.
This military disaster led to a drastic reorientation of India's defense policies as the country embarked upon a significant program of military modernization. It acquired a 45-squadron air force equipped with supersonic aircraft, a million-man army with ten new mountain divisions trained for highaltitude warfare, and a navy capable of defending India's littoral interests. Despite this marked shift of resources to the military and Nehru's demise in 1964, his successors proved both unwilling and incapable of changing the direction of India's foreign policy. Adherence to the principles of nonalignment remained India's lodestar.
It was not until the early 1970s that India all but abandoned key elements of nonalignment, even though its foreign policy elite continued to tout these tenets at international forums. Faced with an emergent nexus between the United States and China in their attempts to contain Soviet power, India increasingly gravitated toward the Soviet Union. The Soviets, keen on forging a relationship with the only third world democracy of any consequence, which also happened to share their reservations about Chinese power, proved to be a willing partner. The Soviet Union successfully cemented its diplomatic relationship with India through significant arms transfers at highly concessional rates. For most of India's foreign policy elite, the relationship with the Soviet Union was not based upon ideological or cultural affinity; rather, considerations of statecraft were the primary motivations. India needed a vetowielding superpower in the United Nations Security Council to protect its interests and also to curb possible Chinese revanchism closer to home. This bond remained robust until the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979.
Soviet actions in Afghanistan caused India to reconsider the Indo-Soviet relationship. The Soviet presence in Afghanistan suddenly revived Pakistan's significance in American foreign and security policy calculations and thereby brought the Cold War to India's doorstep. Pakistan, previously treated as an international pariah because of its appalling human rights record and pursuit of nuclear weapons, was now seen as a handmaiden of American interests in South Asia. India's decision-makers were unwilling to abandon the relationship with the Soviet Union due to their arms transfer relationship and the tacit security guarantee it provided against China. Nevertheless, they started to become more circumspect about the enduring strategic value of the Indo- Soviet nexus. Simultaneously, the steady maturation of the Indian economy generated structural asymmetries in Indo- Soviet trade. India, which had embarked upon a limited and fitful strategy of economic liberalization, realized that it could not obtain vital, cutting-edge technologies from the USSR. Accordingly, even during the first Reagan administration, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi proved receptive to some tentative American overtures to improve relations.
Following Mrs. Gandhi's assassination in 1984, her son, Rajiv Gandhi, assumed the mantle of leadership. Lacking significant political experience and possessed of no diplomatic acumen, he was hardly qualified to re-orient India's foreign and security policies. Instead he appeared content to continue his mother's policies and repeat the well-worn mantras that he had inherited. He did, however, speed up the process of economic reform, slowly improve relations with the United States, and marginally reduce India's military dependence on the Soviet Union. Any dramatic shift in India's foreign and security policies awaited the demise of the USSR and the end of the Cold War.
Sumit Ganguly is Professor of Political Science and holds the Rabindranath Tagore Chair in Indian Cultures and Civilizations at Indiana University in Bloomington.