Round The World

New Delhi, 1 December  2023

India’s Foreign Policy

CHAMPIONING PEACE

By Dr. D.K. Giri

(Secretary General, Assn for Democratic Socialism) 

The Minister for External Affairs asserted that New Delhi should strive to shape international relations with Indian characteristics. Speaking at an International Relations Conference on “India’s Strategic Culture: Addressing Global and Regional Challenges”, S Jaishankar suggested that foreign policy makers should devote more time to look into India’s deep reservoir of culture and knowledge, history and traditions. 

The EAM laid out his proposition by pointing out the predominance of certain narratives in world politics, mainly the British, which are followed largely even by the Americans. Citing his interactions with his American peers on Afghanistan, he found that their understanding of the country, after being there for 20 years, was influenced by the British narrative. That simply means that “They have looked at geography through one cultural lens. Unless we are able to put our lens in place, they will never look at it in a way in which it will serve our interests”. 

The EAM laments the practice that intellectual concepts, traditions and constructs are largely British or Europeans. The thinkers often quoted are Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, and in diplomacy, people invoke Lord Palmerstone on permanent interest but not remember or admit that Kautilya, the Indian ace diplomat, said it several centuries before. 

Taking EAM’s postulate further, let us accept the hard fact that foreign policies are currently driven by economic and security interests, which are backed by military and economic power. This truism is endorsed by EAM’s own reference to China. He said Westerners had no problem in accepting “500-year-old unbroken Chinese history”, but many of them would not acknowledge India’s old and rich civilisation. Jaishankar quotes the extreme example of Churchill who said, “India is merely a geographical expression. It is no more a single country than the equator.” Such privileging of China is purely due to its high growth in GDP. 

Therefore, if the measure of a country’s power and standing in the international community is defined by its GDP, how does India privilege its own culture and traditions in its foreign policy? There may be several ways of doing it, in order to create a new narrative. The three Cs which I talked about before in this column – Covid, Climate Change and Conflicts (often bloody and violent) – defy the logic of GDP being the predominant factor in world politics. 

And, at the same time, tackling these three Cs will require a different set of values that should cause a paradigm shift. The shift should evolve into new economic strategies that draw on Gandhi and Buddha who espoused the values of peace, non-violence, compassion, renunciation, all enshrined in humanism or a people-centric approach. A German economist EF Schumacher reflected these values in his economic outlook in a legendary book, “Small is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered”. 

In addition, another cardinal value that is uniquely Indian is the ‘culture of synthesis’. Westerners, supposed to be the harbingers of modernism and rationality, divide knowledge or perspectives into two antithetical binaries -- wrong and right, moral and immoral, black and white. But Indians view things in a continuum, not always in conflict. They see the grey between black and white. In the continuum, the opposing perspectives get synthesised, to create or transcend to a higher reality, a common perspective. 

Quite a few countries in the world, perhaps sensing this Indian uniqueness manifesting in its culture of synthesis, expect India to be a peace broker in the current violent world going pathetically through two full-scale wars. That is probably why the Arab nations expect India to play an important role in sustaining peace and stability in the world. Saudi Ambassador in New Delhi Al-Husseini said, “India has a history of supporting peace and stability in the global system. We expect India to play a major role in peace-building”. 

Even in the Ukrainian war, India was expected to broker a peace deal. Mexico had proposed in September 2022 to the United Nations to set up a committee that would include India’s Prime Minister Modi, Pope Francis and the UN Secretary-General Antonio Gueterres to mediate permanent peace between Russia and Ukraine. The proposal was put forward by Marcelo Luis Ebrard Casaubón, the Mexican Foreign Minister, while participating in a UN Security Council debate on Ukraine in New York. 

Where should India start in crafting a new paradigm for peace and security? In fact, New Delhi has already made the beginning in G-20 Summit this year with a brilliantly-formulated theme, “One Earth, One Family, One Future”, drawing on our Vedas that prescribed that world is a family (Vasudheva Kutumbakam). While the theme is powerfully emotive, in order to actualise it, one will have to build a new architecture for one future or a common future; and demonstrate the benefits that would accrue from it to the humanity across the world. 

At the same time, it would be necessary to show the opportunity costs of not working for a common future. Here, India can conflate its values with Western wisdom. Remember that a problem anywhere, in a globalised and deeply-connected world, could potentially be dangerous elsewhere of everywhere (like Covid) across the world. Second, As Shakespeare warned in Macbeth, “It will have blood, they say, blood will have blood’. He meant violence begets violence. Third, Newton’s Third Law stated, “For every action there is an equal or opposite reaction”. 

The degree of consequences of action-reaction may vary. For instance, in Israel-Palestine conflict, the former inflicts a lot more harm and losses on Palestine because of its superior military power, but the bloodshed on Israel side also occurs, albeit to a lesser degree. Israel Prime Minister Netanyahu had said, “The loss of one soldier means a loss of world for Israel”. So deaths cannot be counted in numbers or in proportionate terms even in wars.  The English poet John Donne had evocatively said, “Any man’s death diminishes me because I am involved in the mankind.” 

Fourth, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr famously said, “No one is free until we all are free”. This idea also echoes the Jewish tradition with Biblical injunction to ‘love your neighbour as yourself’. All these values are encompassed in one world and one family, the hallmark of universalism. 

In terms of policies, India needs to advocate building of peace structures in place of accumulating war machinery. New Delhi’s endeavour should be to remodel the global security system from the present confrontation model based on deterrence doctrine into a cooperation framework drawing on solidarity, common stakes and common future. 

Unarguably, war is bloody, destructive, cruel and dehumanising. The world has to say ‘No’ to violence, terrorism and certainly war. The weapon industry has to be dismantled; ironically many of them are located in the West. War is a failure of diplomacy and absence of dialogue. War also is a reflection of incompetence of geo-politics. 

India could make up the void by reviving dialogues based on the above principles. The size of GDP alone will not help. It is the intellectual resources, civilizational values, a Universalist and a humanist approach that will do it. To be sure, in principle, India has them all. What is needed is the political will driven by determination and conviction. ---INFA 

(Copyright, India News & Feature Alliance)