Alan Bloomfield - India and the Responsibility to Protect

First published 2016 by Ashgate Publishing

Published 2016 by Routledge

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Copyright 2016 Alan Bloomfield

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Bloomfield, Alan.

India and the responsibility to protect / by Alan Bloomfield.

pages cm. (Rethinking Asia and international relations)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 9781409468721 (hardback)

1. IndiaForeign relations1984-. 2. IndiaForeign

relationsPhilosophy. 3. Humanitarian interventionCte dIvoire. 4. Humanitarian

interventionSyria. 4. Humanitarian interventionLibya. 5. Responsibility to protect

(International law)

DS449.B55 2016

341.5/84dc23

2015026590

ISBN 9781409468721 (hbk)

The genesis of this book lay in what turned out to be, with hindsight, a revelatory conversation I had in late 2011 with a distinguished older colleague, Dr Theodore Gabriel. I was teaching a Middle East politics course at the overseas campus of Canadas Queens University located in the idyllic Herstmonceux Castle, near Eastbourne in the UK and I had been following the 2011 Libyan crisis closely with my students. It was early November 2011, less than two weeks since Colonel Gaddafis death, and I now realise I had in some ways become caught up in the wave of youthful exuberance my students displayed when this brutal dictatorship collapsed. I declared to Theodore over lunch that this event marked an important turning point in the fortunes of the responsibility to protect (R2P) norm a positive one and that it was also an important step along the road towards what I thought would be a more democratic future for the Middle East.

But Theodore was less sure. An acknowledged expert in religious studies, he had devoted decades to studying Islam and the Middle East. He is also an Indian, and while he has lived and worked in the UK for many years, he remained closely connected to his family back in India. He alerted me to the fact that Indians were not nearly so positive about events in the Middle East, especially in Libya, and I might want to look into this. I asked him why this was so wasnt India a true democracy? I recall saying on the assumption that being so (surely was another word I think I used) meant Indians perceived a dictators fall little differently to the way I viewed it. He responded by agreeing that India was democratic, for all its flaws, but this did not necessarily mean Indians viewed the fall of an Arab regime to a coalition of Western powers positively, or that democracy would necessarily be advanced in the wake of such events. He urged me to begin reading some of the Indian press reactions to Gaddafis downfall to get a better feel for the unique subcontinental worldview, shaped as it is by the long shadow of colonialism, as I recall him putting it. I questioned him a little further, but we both had to depart for afternoon classes soon. Still, the conversation had started me thinking.

I had never taken much more than a general interest in India until that point, other than knowing that it was a rising power (and one whose people shared, with many of my fellow Australians, a deep love of cricket). But I did take Theodores advice a few days later when the English weather turned bad. I spent my Saturday in the office instead of shopping in Brighton as planned, and because I didnt really feel like doing any real work I read the Indian press reports about Libya which had appeared in the days and weeks after Gaddafis death. And while it would be a gross exaggeration to say that what I saw in those articles precipitated a sort of road to Damascus moment, it is fair to say that this book would not have been written had I not spoken to Theodore (and, perhaps, if the skies had not turned ominous that weekend).

In those articles I saw a fundamentally different worldview on display. I am thoroughly Western. I grew up in Australia, I have travelled widely in Europe and North America in my youth, I have lived in Canada, and I was now in the Old Country, as Australians often put it. And while I had over the years become thoroughly familiar with the history of Western empire and the decolonisation era which followed it I had only read about it in books penned by Westerners. For the first time, however, I was reading about events which I was thoroughly familiar with I had followed the Libyan war closely, after all, in the Western press and in the pages of international relations journals (which are still dominated by Western authors) but these events were being interpreted very differently by Indians. These viewpoints were more sceptical of than celebratory towards the impact R2P was having on the world, and in particular, there were many dark prognostications of trouble to come in Libya.