Shivshankar Menon - India and Asian Geopolitics: The Past, Present

In spring 2018 I taught a course on Indian foreign policy at Ashoka University. My bright young students were mostly born in this century; I was born in the first half of the last one. They rapidly taught me that familiar events from my lifetime were ancient history to them. When I said Mrs. Gandhi meaning Indira Gandhi, they heard Sonia Gandhi, who had headed the Congress Party in their lifetimes. My vivid memories of walking about Delhi with friends during the 1965 war enforcing the blackout against air raids was something their generation would never know, now that GPS and precision sensing have made blackouts irrelevant. It is sobering to realize that the events that frame your conscious life have already faded into the fog of history. But my students enthusiasm and interest in learning about and analyzing those events, no matter how remote they may have seemed to them, encouraged me to attempt this book.

At another level, my students only reflected the massive changes in India and Asia in the last seventy years. At the end of World War II India and Asia were still largely colonized. India was poor, backward, and weak, and Asia was little more than a geographical expression. Today, Asia is at the center of world politics, is the most dynamic and rapidly developing region in the world, and some Asian countries now worry about a middle-income trap. India and China have eliminated more poverty in a shorter amount of time than any other nations in history. Several Asian states have acquired agency in the international system unprecedented in their modern history.

This book is the story of India in that changing Asia, of how India has adapted to changes since Indian independence in 1947, when the modern Indian state came into being. While India is unique, and therefore a singular actor in many respectsgeography, history, demography, cultureit has also always been a part of the Asian story and an active participant in it. Even as India experimented briefly after independence with an inward-looking approach in its quest to transform, develop, and strengthen itself, the country has consistently recognized that it must work with others in the international system to further its own interests. Paradoxically, as India has evolved and gathered power in the international system, its need for and dependence on the world have steadily increased. While India attempted from the start to pursue interests in partnership with other states and actors different from itself, it was often alone abroad because of the unique set of geopolitical compulsions and drivers for its foreign and security policies. Despite that, it was still able to achieve many of the nations international goals not only because of its relative power or influence, hard or soft, but because of its use of the shifting geopolitical situation around the country, particularly in Asia. That recent past, along with the consequences of Indias choices in Asias geopolitics, is still with us. Hence, the title of this book. Today, India is more connected to and involved with the world around it than ever before, as its interests grow and change. That is the story this book attempts to tell.

While this book is not a history of Indian foreign policy, or comprehensive in any way, and should not be considered a work of scholarship or of international relations theory, despite its development through an international relations department course, it does attempt to look at Indian foreign policy with a wide-angle lens. It examines Indian foreign policy, not as an autonomous activity driven by personality and domestic politics and reacting to external stimuli, but as part of larger historical shifts in Asia and world geopolitics, of which India is a significant constituent. From the very outset, with independence in 1947, and even before that under the interim government from September 1946, India was not just a reactive or passive object of Asian geopolitics but an active participant, and it sought to shape the Asian environment. This proactive role was played by Indias earliest leaders, Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi, and by later heads of government, P. V. Narasimha Rao, Atal Behari Vajpayee, and Manmohan Singh.

As an Indian diplomat, it often seemed to me that the explanations advanced in the media and in scholarly studies of the countrys policies were simplistic, unidimensional, or insufficient, no matter whether they were realist, liberal, or constructivist. Each of these approaches seemed to be useful but incomplete or unsatisfactory as an explanation of state and leader behavior. In my experience of diplomacy and policymaking, most of the brilliant thoughts, concepts, and ideas that analysts and historians discuss seldom influence the politicians and policymakers who make the decisions that are the raw material of history. At the same time, the better ones are acutely aware of how their decisions will appear to their constituencies and have a clear sense of the power equations and geopolitics around them. That brought me to the idea that it might be worth examining the geopolitics of India in Asia. Also, intellectual and other histories of geopolitics tend to overemphasize Europe and the Atlantic, and in an age of U.S. hegemony, the maritime domain. I wanted to explore Indian foreign policy through a geopolitical perspective for what it reveals about Indias past, present, and, possibly, future behavior.