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Journalism of Courage
Most states do today what they did yesterday, and will do tomorrow what they did today, and would keep on doing it forever if allowed. Foreign policy usually means tactical adjustment. New generations of politicians and bureaucrats learn what works from their elders, and the state-leviathan glides smoothly through the years, making its way in a world of similarly propelled states. Aside from a revolution or two, most foreign and strategic policies are highly predictable.
As told in this brilliant account of India’s traversal from pseudo-non-alignment to something new, perhaps “Curzonian” (the subject of a chapter), an international transformation in India’s favour did not take place for at least five reasons, and India’s adjustment to the new international order proved to be slow and painful — the big ship is still changing course:
— The First Gulf War demonstrating that the US was still a player in a region of interest to India, and that its military power, designed to defeat the Soviets in Central Europe, was devastatingly effective against a Soviet-equipped, non-western state. India’s initial preoccupation after 1990 was keeping the US out of South Asia, a task complicated by Washington’s single-minded pursuit of its quixotic non-proliferation policies. It took the Clinton visit to persuade many Indians (some still do not get it) that the US and India had no fundamental strategic conflict. Raja Menon devotes a full chapter to the mutual discovery of India and America, precipitated by the 1998 nuclear tests.
— When the Cold War ended, India’s leadership was fragmenting, with Congress losing power but the BJP not yet able to assemble a lasting coalition. In the interim India’s foreign policy bureaucracy acquired excessive power, and only recently has foreign policy been returned to the care of the politicians. The author is especially scathing of the frozen mentality of South Block’s mandarins and the devotees of non-alignment living in the past.
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— The lowly Pakistanis built a nuclear weapon, changing the strategic balance forever, even if their technology was borrowed and India’s was “indigenous”; from 1990 onward both countries have lived in the shadow of mutual incineration.
— India was faced with a genuine separatist/insurrectionary movement in Jammu and Kashmir supported by Pakistan but which originated in New Delhi’s incompetence.
— Finally, it became clear that its economic policies were 15 years out-of-date, and India was falling further behind China and other East Asian states; the dream of being a great state could not rest upon a totally dysfunctional economy.
Crossing the Rubicon is the first Indian attempt to examine systematically India’s response to these major changes in its strategic environment and domestic politics. Its 10 chapters are a digestible mix of reporting (Menon has used his perch as The Hindu’s strategic affairs editor), history (of the last 15 years), and policy prescription. A new generation of Indian leaders is working through the logic of these separate but interrelated transformations. I find the most tantalizing pages to be those arguing for a “containment” policy towards Pakistan — combining military resistance with the encouragement of regime change in Islamabad. Such a change would well suit India’s interests, and those of other states, but will require new and imaginative policies. Pakistan is no Iraq, and presents one of the greatest challenges to the international system today.
Rubicon offers a pragmatic, “Curzonian”-realist guide to the future, and Raja Menon’s intellectual and personal debt to K. Subrahmanyam and Jaswant Singh is evident. But the reference to Curzon suggests a warning: he was forced out of office by the single-minded, ruthless Lord Kitchener, a dour general who had no interest in Curzon’s Indo-centric statecraft. The author does not name Mr Modi, but the comparison suggests the realist project may face its greatest challenge from within India, not from any outside power.
