On November 1, the United States agreed to grant India a special waiver from the trade sanctions sanctions on Iran that kicked in from November 4. After a tense period in the Indo-US diplomatic relations due to India’s refusal to bring down its Iranian oil imports to zero, international-relations observers had been closely watching Indo-US bilateral relations.
This episode has raised very fundamental questions regarding Indian foreign policy that, since its inception, has been primarily non-aligned in character. India has always refrained from choosing or aligning completely with one side or the other. This gave India a much-needed manoeuvring capability to build strong ties with almost all major powers in the international system. But, the international system today is vastly different from what it used to be back in the Cold War period. The same is true for India’s position in world affairs, India has gone from being a Third World developing nation to an emerging power.
Since India is recognised by the great world powers as a major power itself, their expectations from the country has also heightened as a result. Now, the global community expects India to take strong stands on global issues (often third-party issues), and even choose sides if needed. For instance, both the US and Iran were looking for India’s support during their tussle after the scrapping of the Iran Nuclear deal by the Trump administration. India for its part refused to choose sides.
The great powers like the US and Russia don’t want India to have the luxury of manoeuvring itself in global politics, like it has been successfully doing since decades. During the Cold War, when the international system was largely bipolar in nature, India’s visionary leadership and skillful diplomacy made sure that it doesn’t get trapped into the bipolar geopolitics and, as a solution, the Non-Alignment Movement was conceptualised in which India was one of the leaders.
Post-Cold War, when the international system has become multipolar, the relevance of India’s non-aligned credentials have come under question. The core question always remains: Who is India not aligned with today, when there is no bipolar order present? Can it afford to remain equidistant from all powers that exist today? India has managed to pull itself out from these tricky situations by saying that its foreign policy is guided by calculated ‘self-interest’.
India has always carved out a middle path (‘madhyam marg’) for itself and has avoided getting into the ‘Us vs Them’ debate. This can be seen through many examples, be it choosing between the US and Russia, Israel and Palestine, or Saudi Arabia and Iran. India’s track record has been to keep itself out of a position where it has to choose sides. In the recent past, it is increasingly seen that India has found itself in a catch-22 situation which it wants to avoid.
When a country’s power and reputation rises in the international order, the international community starts expecting differently from that state and wants it to assume greater responsibility. Till now, Indian diplomacy has been fairly successful in doing that but the question is for how long can India continue to move on this tried and tested path of deft diplomacy. The question about India’s foreign policy framework is whether the path of non-alignment was taken out of a conscious ‘choice’ or out of ‘necessity’ to balance the bipolarity of the Cold War politics with the US on one side and Soviet Union on the other.
Scholars of Indian foreign policy have debated over this but no concrete answers have come out of these discussions. Many experts on international relations consider the non-theorisation of non-alignment policy as a missed opportunity on India’s part as it would have solidified the Indian foreign policy even more concretely as well as making it well-defined and nuanced. The opposite view on this has been that it is good that the non-alignment remained a policy and didn’t become a theory because, had it been theorized, it would have curtailed India’s manoeuvring capabilities between the bipolar-bloc politics during the Cold War and even the post-Cold War era as well.
It was precisely due to this manoeuvring capability or the ‘madhyam marg’ enshrined in our foreign policy that India could extract best benefits from both superpowers without antagonising any of the two. For instance, the example of India’s space cooperation during the Cold War period shows how India managed to collaborate with both the superpowers in a calculated manner. On one hand, India collaborated with the US for the SITE (Satellite Instrument Television Experiment) experiment which revolutionised telecommunications in India, while on the other hand, India collaborated with Soviet Union to launch its first indigenous satellite, Aryabhatta, in 1975.
Had India not been non-aligned or had non-alignment been theorised, there would have been very high chances of India’s relations with one of the superpowers deteriorating. Post-Cold War, the situation has become even more interesting as despite the US being a hegemon in the international system, there are many countries which have become regional powerhouses in the last quarter of a century, the most important of them being China.
Today, the question before the Indian foreign policy makers is whether non-alignment is serving India’s self-interests as much as it did during Cold War because one shouldn’t forget that non-alignment policy was product of a particular context and time. If the answer is yes, then India should stick to this path which has served it so well in the past; however, if the answer is no, then there lies a tough task for the Indian diplomacy in the near future.
Source: financialexpress.com