Manmohan’s brave new world

Indeed, if the actions of this and the previous government are any guide, India is proceeding with globalisation more rapidly than with liberalisation. We may still go slowly on disinvestment, labour reform and reform of the state. But for all the pressures of the Left, the one area where India is forging ahead without inhibitions is integration with the world economy. Duties are on downward trend, we are pursuing free trade agreements and pipelines galore, and the momentum towards liberalising foreign investment is inexorable.

The NDA had taken the initiative in terms of intensely integrating India with the rest of Asia. There were two imperatives behind this move. The first was clearly economic. But the second was a way of saying to our neighbours that India was not going to be tied down by the security complexes in its neighbourhood. It was forging ahead with its plan of integrating with the rest of Asia. It was up to our neighbours to join the party or be left behind. Indeed, the thinking was that it might be politically easier for our neighbours to create economic links with us if these were seen as part of an Asia-wide trend.

On this score, Manmohan Singh has continued to be assertive and clear-eyed. Despite opposition from within the Congress, India honoured its Free Trade Agreement with Thailand. But what was remarkable about Singh’s speech was its willingness to call South Asia as a whole to face up to its historical potential. Singh argued that ‘‘we can jointly create reciprocal dependencies for mutual benefit. So far this potentially benign process has been hobbled by narrow political calculations.’’

But Manmohan Singh’s speech was remarkable for its grasp not just of the relationship between economic and foreign policy. It also linked foreign policy with pluralism and a new kind of multilateralism. Ask the question: what kinds of societies are, over the long haul, going to be best able to take advantage of globalisation? One element of the answer is going to be pluralism and openness. Japan’s economy is suffering because it has in some senses remained a closed society incapable of accepting immigration as a solution to its demographic woes. Europe is struggling to acknowledge that it has become multicultural, and the sense of identity of some of its nations is so fragile that a headscarf can put it at risk. Even China’s capacity to negotiate pluralism is still an open question. For all its warts, India has the capability of positioning itself as a negotiator between different civilisations and ways of life. Although, as Singh acknowledged, we can be hostage to intolerance and extremism, India is one of the few societies in the world that is capable of negotiating a deep pluralism. The NDA’s foreign policy, sound as it was in some respects, was premised on frittering away India’s historical inheritance. But this inheritance is also an asset in a globalising world; it ought to be the cornerstone of our foreign policy. Singh’s speech was riposte to both the Left for its resistance to openness, and to the Right for its resistance to pluralism.

Finally, both economic globalisation and pluralism have to be linked to what can be described as a multicentric multilateralism. This is not the multilateralism centered on a moribund institution like the UN. It is a multilateralism that enduringly binds nations in webs of interdependence through a series of overlapping institutions. India is now seeking to join almost any multilateral arrangement that will admit it as a member, from APEC to G-8. These arrangements involve sovereignty tradeoffs. But the underlying vision is that these tradeoffs are more than compensated by the real power that accrues from participation in these institutions.

The three elements of this foreign policy—uninhibited economic openness, pluralism and membership of multilateral institutions—reinforce each other. Genuine economic openness is not sustainable without an open society and a willingness to participate in regional arrangements signals a commitment to openness and dialogue. It is abundantly clear that, as articulated in Singh’s speech, India now has a clearer conception of its role in the world. We used to blame outside powers for all our ills. Now Indian prime ministers chide India for its own reluctance to take advantage of the world. This is a sea change in India’s foreign policy. And it could be argued that whether or not conducting nuclear tests was wise security policy, the way in which they were handled helped India overcome a crisis of confidence that had besotted its foreign policy. The NDA broke the wood, now Singh seems to be going for the carving.

Translating this vision into reality will require immense effort. While economic policy can drive foreign policy, economic policy itself is a product of artful political maneuvering. Just as it was a mistake to assume that we could project power without economic might, it will be naive to assume that economic integration alone will solve our most significant policy challenges in the short to medium run. Good foreign policy requires a combination of sam, dam, dand, bhed: weakness in any of these will have repercussions for the other.