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India's Goldilocks principle

The author searches for India's interests as the US and China swing between confrontation and accord

Devesh Kapur
With Chinese President Xi Jinping wrapping up his visit to the United States, India needs to ponder where, between rising tensions on the one hand and an encomium between the world's superpowers - perhaps a G2 - on the other, the Goldilocks principle applies to its national interests.

The past few weeks have seen a hectic round of meetings among the Asian powers. Chinese Premier Li Keqiang's recent visit to India followed weeks of rising tension after the intrusion by Chinese troops into Ladakh. The visit certainly calmed tensions and offered the possibility of improved relations between the two nations. Nonetheless, the next round of travels was just as revealing of the complex moves on the global chessboard. Premier Li Keqiang went to Pakistan to both provide strategic reassurance to a key partner ("a friendship more precious than gold") and signal China's continuing capacity to check India in its neighbourhood. As the Chinese government's mouthpiece, The Global Times, pointedly observed, "India must accept and adapt to the enviable friendship between China and Pakistan. China cannot scale down this partnership merely because of India's feelings!" 

 
But India played the same game with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's visit to Japan - doing unto China what China has been doing unto India. Both declared strategic partnerships with countries that have a deep animosity and rivalry with the other. Little wonder, then, that this time The Global Times was less pleased, warning in an article titled "India gets close to Japan at its own peril" that "overheated strategic cooperation with the Abe administration can only bring trouble to India and threaten its relationships with the relevant East Asian countries". As you sow, so shall you reap. 

The reasons for this flurry of activity are well recognised. China's phenomenal rise and recent assertiveness of national power have caused serious apprehensions among its Asian neighbours, virtually inviting the US pivot to the region. The dangers of what Graham Allison has called the "Thucydides trap" - in which a rising power, as it begins to rival a ruling power, becomes more confident and results in fear and anxiety for the ruling power - are entangling alliances and partnerships across Asia and creating new dilemmas for India.

It is hardly news that the rise of China has been an important factor in driving the India-US relationship in the last decade. However, the foundations laid under the Bush administration have grown only modestly subsequently, as uncertainties about each other's capabilities have sown the seeds of doubt about each other's interests.

When the Obama administration initially came into office, it flirted with the idea of a G2 that in retrospect proved severely damaging. Not only did it embolden China, but it also created apprehensions on the Indian side about the credibility of the US. If India did plant itself firmly in the US camp, and if US power continued to slide, what was the guarantee that the US would not reach a modus vivendi with China, leaving India to fend off a much stronger - and unhappy - neighbour? India's foreign policy, cautious to begin with, retreated into a safe but banal formulation of "strategic autonomy". Given manifest evidence of the self-defeating gridlock in American politics and policy formulation, India's reaction was understandable.

However, with China's phenomenal rise and aggressive assertiveness of national power, the resulting apprehensions among its Asian neighbours virtually invited the US pivot to the region. But when this began to unfold, India decided to shoot itself in the foot. Egregious maladministration and policy paralysis created severe doubts about India's capacity to be even a partial hedge against, let alone a serious counterweight to, China.

For India - and indeed for the world - the risks of escalating Sino-US rivalry are as great as a G2 entente. Take the case of climate change. Having achieved its goals of breakneck industrialisation with the resulting massive carbon emissions, it is not unlikely that China will announce a cap on carbon emissions, thereby making possible a deal with the US on climate change. While China will cast itself as a responsible steward of the global commons, India, which has neither industrialised nor emitted anywhere close to the other two, will continue to take a high moral stand and offer pious platitudes - thereby becoming isolated.

To take another example, in information technology and telecommunications, India is caught between the risks of Huawei's hardware and the US National Security Agency's PRISM, which has been directly accessing the systems of Apple, Facebook, Google and other internet and telecommunications giants. (The data mining includes search histories, file transfers and live chats, contents of emails , phone records, even cell phone location.) Indian-origin talent has made considerable contributions to the development of these industries. But these contributions have been mainly outside India, leaving the country vulnerable - a testimony to the manner in which India has proudly dispersed, but not leveraged, its talent.

As two of the world's largest democracies face up to the challenge of the rise of China, their external vulnerabilities are in large part a reflection of their own domestic weaknesses. The degree to which the US State Department devotes its resources to report cards on other countries is extraordinary - be it human rights, religious freedom or trafficking (relics of an era when it had the resources and a certain moral capital) - even as it is pressed by budget constraints to be creative and innovative in a world where it is no longer paramount.

But if the US has insisted on handicapping itself by a bizarre combination of interest group-afflicted foreign policy, self-righteousness, and a severe political cleavage-induced policy paralysis, India has done as least as well, although the reasons are different. The capabilities of the Indian state have been so sapped that its international partners - whether it is Australia, Bangladesh, Japan or the US - believe that even if agreements are reached with India, the likelihood of implementation in a timely fashion is anyone's guess.

When US Secretary of State John Kerry travels to India later this month, both countries will attempt to reassure each other. But domestic weaknesses will not be under discussion and, therefore, the two countries will not really be reassured by each other - which will come as great reassurance to China.

The writer is director of the Centre for the Advanced Study of India at the University of Pennsylvania
Disclaimer: These are personal views of the writer. They do not necessarily reflect the opinion of www.business-standard.com or the Business Standard newspaper

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First Published: Jun 09 2013 | 9:50 PM IST

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