The paradox of India’s global rise, its regional decline (GS Paper 2, Bilateral, Regional and Global Groupings and Agreements involving India)
Introduction
- While India’s global rise is a function of growth in absolute power, peer accommodation and a conducive ‘chaotic’ international situation, its waning regional influence is caused by diminishing relative power (vis-à-vis China), loss of primacy in South Asia, and fundamental changes in South Asian geopolitics.
India’s Global rise
- India’s aggregate power has grown over the past two decades — evident in robust economic growth, military capabilities, and a largely young demography.
- Its inclusion in key global institutions such as the G-20, as an invitee at G-7 meetings, and active participation in multilateral groups such as the Quad, BRICS, and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation further highlight its geopolitical significance and its powerful presence globally, even if it is not a member of the United Nations Security Council.
- India’s global rise is also aided by growing international attention on the Indo-Pacific, a theatre that is pivotal to global strategic stability, where India has a central position, geographically and otherwise.
Extraneous factors
- Despite this global rise, paradoxically and worryingly, India’s influence is declining in South Asia.
- Paradoxically, again, some of the factors that have led to the decline of Indian influence in the region are also the reasons behind India’s global prominence.
- The American withdrawal from the region and China filling that power vacuum have been disadvantageous to India.
- But that is, at the same time, a major reason why the United States and its allies are keen to accommodate India’s global interests including in order to push back China in the region.
- In the case of the Indo-Pacific, while interest in the Indo-Pacific has increased, India’s global prominence as an indispensable Indo-Pacific power, New Delhi’s focus on the great power balance in the Indo-Pacific may have stretched New Delhi a bit too thin in the continental neighbourhood.
- If India’s global rise stems from the growth in absolute power and the geopolitical choices made by the leading powers of the contemporary international system, India’s regional decline is a product of the dynamics of comparative power, and geopolitical choices made by the region’s smaller powers.
- To that extent, overlooking the balancing acts by the region’s smaller powers to focus on the great power balancing might become counterproductive.
The rise of China and what India’s response
- Faced with a rising superpower next door for the first time, India is facing stiff geopolitical competition for influence in South Asia.
- The arrival of China in South Asia, the withdrawal of the U.S. from the region, and India’s tilt to the Indo-Pacific have shifted the regional balance of power in Beijing’s favour.
- Sensing this new power equation, South Asia’s smaller powers, India’s neighbours, are engaged in a range of strategies: balancing, bargaining, hedging and bandwagoning.
- India’s smaller neighbours seem to find China as a useful hedge against India, for the moment at least.
- It is also important to keep in mind that a great deal of this regional balancing results from shifts in the regional balance of power, not merely from insufficient Indian outreach to the neighbourhood.
Suggestions for India
- To begin with, New Delhi must revisit some of its traditional conceptions of the region, ‘modernise’ its primacy in South Asia, and take proactive and imaginative policy steps to meet the China challenge in the region.
- First of all, we must accept the reality that the region, the neighbours and the region’s geopolitics have fundamentally changed over the decade-and-a-half at the least.
- Second, New Delhi must focus on its strengths rather than trying to match the might of the People’s Republic of China in every respect — the latter is a fool’s errand.
- Third, India’s continental strategy is replete with challenges whereas its maritime space has an abundance of opportunities for enhancing trade, joining minilaterals, and creating new issue-based coalitions, among others.
- New Delhi must, therefore, use its maritime (Indo-Pacific) advantages to cater to its many continental handicaps.
- New Delhi should try to wean them away from the China-led regional grand strategy by making them a key part of the Indo-Pacific grand strategy where India and its partners hold significant advantage over China.
- Fourth, there is today an openness in New Delhi to view the region through a non-India centric lens. This also means that New Delhi is no longer uneasy about external powers in its neighbourhood as it used to be during the Cold War.
- Finally, New Delhi should make creative uses of its soft power to retain its influence in the region. One way to do that is to actively encourage informal contacts between political and civil society actors in India and those in other South Asian countries.
Conclusion
- The dichotomy between India’s global rise and regional decline has profound implications for India’s global aspirations.
- It is a legitimate question to ask whether a country that is unable to maintain primacy in its periphery will be able to be a pivotal power in international politics.
