After this year’s shocking turn in India-US relations, many argued that India must tilt towards China to counterbalance America. It is true that we have ended up becoming geopolitically more dependent on the United States than the US is on us.
However, there are at least three problems with the ‘tilt to China’ argument. One, it is the US that has what India needs for its development and is prepared to trade, albeit with tariffs. China, on the other hand, is bent on exporting only finished goods and does not really believe in two-way trade. Two, Beijing will accept India’s tilt only on its own imperious Middle Kingdom terms. And three, India has unresolved direct and indirect boundary disputes with China that put a hard limit to the angle of any tilt that one might conceive.
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So the idea that we can use the China card against the US is untenable in practice. What about other centres of power?
India’s engagement with Western Europe, which finds itself amid its own dilemmas, is constrained by the Russia factor. This will limit ties with Germany, France and the UK even after the Russia-Ukraine war comes to an end.
With West Asia, our relationships are circumscribed by the Israel-Palestine and Israel-Arab-Iran factors. Towards the East, our own security considerations limit how far we can go with the Quad, while our economic constraints keep us distant from our South East Asian neighbours.
Then there is Brics, essentially an anti-American showboat that we don’t want to be completely aboard, and finally the fictitious ‘Global South,’ a collective noun coined by the West to refer in shorthand to the rest of the world.
It is clear that India needs a new strategic framework for this new world, one that conservatively carries forward core conceptions of national interests, but at the same time is creative enough to find its way through emerging realities. To have a chance of being implemented at all, any strategy must be consistent with India’s political culture and implementable by governmental machinery.
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So what should India’s foreign policy for the next 10 years look like? When my colleagues and I pondered this question, the following outline emerged.
As outlined by the Prime Minister, India’s primary goal is to become a developed nation by 2047. This means sustained high economic growth, with peace, harmony and environmental sustainability our big national policy objectives. The role of foreign and defence policy is to create a conducive environment for achieving these goals. While this means a front-footed approach to border disputes, there is little room for ambitious military operations across India’s de facto boundaries.
Despite the challenges thrown up by the Donald Trump administration, New Delhi will have to find ways to strengthen its relationship with the US. It is likely that in its second year, the Trump administration will have a better sense of the consequences of its early policy decisions, and thus be in a better position to close a bilateral trade agreement. Even as the New Delhi establishment invests in repairing the relationship with Washington, it cannot and should not forget 2025.
We must also repair ties with China while being fully aware that power is the only language of this relationship. We should not yield on border questions, nor accept that China is a normal trade partner. This does not mean that we cut ourselves off from our northern neighbour. At the risk of overdoing a pun, there is no one China policy. We must explore trade, economics, technology, territory and global issues on separate tracks: cooperating where we can and confronting China where we must.
The US-China relationship will remain volatile: it can be a G2 or its opposite, a Cold War or its opposite, or various other forms that can change from one to another in months. To manage the vagaries of its dynamics, India needs a new systematic approach to engage with the rest of the world.
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It is in dealing with the rest of the world that Indian foreign policy will have to creatively shift towards a more purposeful sectoral plurilateralism. To create backstops and leverage against being pressured by the US or China, New Delhi should invest in a constellation of plurilateral groups centred around specific sectors and comprising countries that share similar geopolitical concerns.
The most effective plurilaterals are those that require India’s participation to be viable. The recently concluded India-Australia-Canada partnership on technology and innovation is a case in point.
There are a number of sectors, including defence, energy, biotech, space, higher education, public health, food security and environment, where India can bring together a few countries to achieve meaningful outcomes. In time, some of these overlapping relationships could grow into plurilateral blocs. Recall that it was the European Coal and Steel Community of 1951 that grew into the European Union four decades later.
Quite a lot of this is incrementalism, which is a good thing. Instead of flashy new doctrines and strategies, New Delhi’s foreign policy establishment should restructure and reorient its portfolio of relationships towards the more coherent purpose of creating meaningful leverage with its partners.
The author is co-founder and director of The Takshashila Institution, an independent centre for research and education in public policy.
