In the glare of media focus on issues pertaining to corruption and governance, an important foreign policy statement of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, made during his interaction with the television media last week, went out of public focus. In response to a question on India’s stand on the unrest on the Arab street, the prime minister said: “India welcomes the dawn of democracy anywhere in the world.”
Heads of government like leaving behind ideas on foreign policy that strategic policy analysts construct into doctrines. If there is to be a Manmohan Singh Doctrine on Indian foreign policy, this statement would be the second leg on which such a doctrine would stand.
The first element of the doctrine was, in fact, enunciated in Dr Singh’s very first Union Budget speech of July 1991, when he famously said: “No power on earth can stop an idea whose time has come. I suggest to this august House that the emergence of India as a major economic power in the world happens to be one such idea.”
Linking the idea of India’s economic resurgence, its “emergence” as a “major economic power”, to India’s place in the world was a new and revolutionary idea that has come to define Indian foreign policy in the post-Cold War world.
While Jawaharlal Nehru did say to the Constituent Assembly in December 1949, “foreign policy is the outcome of economic policy” (for the full quote and text of Nehru’s speech, see my book Strategic Consequences of India’s Economic Performance, Academic Foundation, 2006, pages 453-464), Nehruvian foreign policy and that of Indira Gandhi came to be identified in the popular imagination at home and abroad more with anti-imperialism, third-world solidarity and non-alignment, rather than India’s own national interests pertaining to its ‘re-emergence’ as a vibrant economy integrated with the global economy.
This way of looking at the world was not yet in vogue, given the experience with colonialism and neo-colonialism, and India’s emergence as a voice of the Third World. The end of the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of China, based on the notion of ‘comprehensive national power’ (CNP), in which economic competitiveness and human capability were important elements, altered India’s own thinking about the role of economic performance in the manifestation of national power.
That the July 1991 formulation was not a passing thought but the expression of a new idea is further underlined by the fact that in his February 1995 Budget speech, Dr Singh returned to the theme when he said: “It is this vision, of a resurgent India taking her rightful place as an economic power house in Asia, which has inspired our economic policies.”
India’s economic performance since then and its economic interests have, without doubt, shaped Indian foreign policy options — both in the relations with major powers and with India’s wider Asian neighbourhood.
However, India cannot be viewed simply as an ‘emerging market’ and a ‘growing economy’. India’s global personality cannot be simply that of an increasingly prosperous nation. India’s aspirations cannot be those of a wannabe middle-class family — earning more, buying more, spending more. Nor should India be seen as an entitlement seeker, a newly status-conscious nation obsessed with identity and image, demanding a membership of the high councils of the world — be it the UN Security Council or the International Monetary Fund.
India must come to represent an enduring idea that the global community values and respects. It is this idea that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has tried hard to articulate over the past six years when he has repeatedly spoken of the relevance to people around the world of India’s rise as a secular, plural and inclusive democracy.
Last week, Dr Singh said to his media interlocutors that “the world today appreciates that India is a democracy… committed to the rule of law, committed to respect of fundamental human rights, is trying to seek its economic and social salvation in the framework of democracy and a rapidly expanding economy.”
Marrying the idea of a rising economy with the very “idea of India” gives India’s rise a moral imperative.
Critics might ask what is new with the idea of ‘democracy’ in the realm of international affairs. After all, the West, especially the United States, has promoted the idea for a long time. There is a difference.
The Indian idea of democracy is linked to two important values that India must underscore at all times, especially in the context of what is happening in the Arab world, and the European and Asian debates about multiculturalism.
First, that India values a form of democracy that is truly inclusive — based on the ideas of secularism and pluralism. This is important. It also has important strategic implications for India and for the rise of Asia, where religious extremism and political authoritarianism pose a challenge to the future of pluralism and liberalism.
Second, apart from respect for the rule of law, human rights and secular and plural values, Indian democracy also seeks to be inclusive. That is the strategic relevance of the idea of ‘inclusive growth’. In the ideological battle between the discredited “Washington Consensus” on economic policy and the so-called “Beijing Consensus”, it is an idea from India, a “New Delhi Consensus”, so to speak, of inclusive growth that will finally prevail.
For it to do so, however, India has much homework to do in the fields of governance, given the renewed concerns about an ‘ethical deficit’ and a ‘governance deficit’. The defence of pluralism and secularism remains a daily challenge for India, as the defence of inclusive growth and good governance. Defending them at home is vital for India’s place in the world.
