EDITORIAL 2: A world of our making
Introduction
Indian foreign policy is in a deep morass that is often difficult to see. Our hyper-nationalism prevents us asking tough questions. The daily news cycle is caught in tactical matters or image management for the government. Behind our failures lies a refusal of true realism, or a genuine confrontation with our predicament.
The current state of diplomacy
- India is rightly concerned, and is somewhat shocked, that it lost the diplomatic high ground after Operation Sindoor.
- We got boilerplate costless condemnations of terrorism, but also felt that no one stands with us.
- It was fascinating to contrast the breathless self-proclaimed triumphs of the parliamentary delegations and our government with what other countries from the Global North and South were actually saying, behind our backs, as it were.
- We can blame other countries’ self-interest and their anti-India disposition for the failure to politically capitalise on Operation Sindoor.
- But we were so besotted with our sense of our case that we did not honestly confront how the case might appear to others.
- The rest of the world may be mistaken. These days, no country has much of a moral leg to stand on.
- But it is worth asking why the moral distinction between India and Pakistan was diplomatically much harder to convey than we thought.
The moral distinction
- The violence in Balochistan and Kashmir, for the rest of the world, gets connected, in a chain of associations.
- In the backdrop of the fact that we have a government that does not exactly have a stellar reputation on moral condemnation of targeting people on account of their religion, it makes it easy for the world to say that these horrendous killings are, as one diplomat once put it, “one of those periodic South Asian things”. This is condescending, but we invited it.
- Second, we are missing the point on anxieties on the nuclear front. Both sides may be right in thinking that, in principle, they can control an escalatory ladder.
- But focus on rational control of escalatory ladders does not address genuine worries about accidents.
- Third, wasn’t it a matter of pride among our diplomats to say to Europe and the rest of the world that Ukraine was their problem?
- Terrorism is also not “their” problem. What is their problem is the risk of nuclear accidents.
- And finally, India’s absolute loss of credibility in the Global South. A country that cannot so much as morally squeak on what is now almost universally acknowledged as an ongoing genocide in Gaza, obsessing over terrorism adds narcissism to the charge of moral abdication.
- Add to this the fact that we botched our credibility as a state on meaningless operations allegedly targeting useless Khalistan activists in Canada and the US. Further add to this the fact that not allowing an open domestic discussion even on the bare facts of the war furthers our credibility crisis. Even our truths become less credible.
- So, India’s moral claims now invite a long “meh” at worst. And since our foreign policy establishment is easily satiated with the meaningless communique that makes the evening headline, that is at best what we get.
The actual realism
- The other disposition impeding clear thinking is our approach to realism. The current dispensation’s interpretation of realism is not actual realism about the state of the world.
- It is a simple inversion of some perceived past of Indian foreign policy. This supposed realism, with its fantasies of transcending India’s South Asian context, has led to such a spectacular misreading of the neighbourhood that we have lost much of the neighbourhood.
- This is a realism that thought that the excessive courting of America was a sign of machismo. America is important to India. India’s political economy might yet save India from selling the entire store to the US.
- But one of the deepest ironies in the recent excessive craving for validation from the US is that the pro-America lobby has never had confidence about building India’s own strengths.
- But to think these deals will be our salvation, or that they will miraculously be a catalyst for domestic reform, make us secure against China, enhance our global moral standing, allow us to sort out our problems in the neighbourhood, is sheer fantasy.
- And it prevents us from seeing what the American project is: A project of global dominance. Resisting it will require a different tool kit.
Conclusion
Our lack of realism comes from the fact that our establishment has come to believe the lies it is trying to tell the people.