India's strategy for subcontinental security

A second, outer ring includes India’s wider periphery around the Indian Ocean, flanked by the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal. It stretches from the Mozambique Channel and the East African coast to the Gulf, Central Asia, China’s hinterland regions (including Xinjiang, Tibet, and Yunnan), and up to India’s two eastern maritime neighbours, Thailand and Indonesia. Within this space, the Suez-Singapore route assumes central importance for India’s economic security, given its extraordinary reliance on sea-borne trade.

Commenting on this wide regional environment, the late Indian Foreign Service officer KS Bajpai lamented that its “geographical and political complexity is exceptional, requiring knowledge, skill and flexibility we hardly ever allow for”. Besides such diplomatic attributes, one can also add the need for dedicated institutions, resources and capabilities for India to achieve its subcontinental security interests, beyond just dealing with conventional military threats and territorial disputes with China and Pakistan.

The neighbourhood today features an increasingly diverse set of non-traditional security challenges. Five of which stand out.

First, the regional nexus of climate, environment and national resources. These are the physical dimensions that connect India to its neighbourhood, with profound implications for socio-economic stability. Climate change is accelerating glacial bursts in the Himalayas, obliterating infrastructure critical to military mobilisation in border areas. Erratic riverine water flows are at the heart of bilateral disputes with China, Nepal and Bangladesh. India finds itself as both an upper and lower riparian power, for example, on the Brahmaputra River. Climate change is also intensifying extreme weather patterns, affecting crops and food security. The 2020 India-Pakistan desert locust plague and the 2004

Asian tsunami are examples of ecosystem and natural disasters affecting India’s security.

A second set of security challenges includes terror, insurgency and criminal networks operating across the subcontinent. This will require continued resources and attention to traditional threats targeting India, including Pakistan-supported and transnational Islamic terror networks, left-wing extremism, and separatist insurgent groups in the Northeast region, along the border with Myanmar. While India’s prevention and response capabilities have seen significant progress, these non-state threats will continue to consume attention and divert resources from India’s military and security establishments. They are also using weakened governance structures to engage in criminal networks, as most recently seen in Myanmar: whether in narcotics, cyber-scamming, or smuggling, India must prepare for various new hybrid threats that will operate flexibly across the neighbourhood, especially across borderlands.

The third security challenge is of state stability and resilient governance frameworks in the immediate periphery. Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka are frequently listed as high-risk in the Fragile States Index. Few other regions in the world feature as many weak states: coupled with an inevitable economic slowdown and some of the world’s youngest populations (Bangladesh with an average age of 26), the political economy transitions across the subcontinent promise turmoil and instability. Recent protests in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Nepal might well be harbingers of growing unrest by young, restless populations.

While not new, anti-India sentiments across the neighbourhood are also on the rise, driven by political leaders who seek quick electoral or popularity gains. This can quickly spiral out of control, endangering the safety of Indian citizens and the country’s private-sector investments. Finally, Sri Lanka shows that weak governance structures and political centralisation in the neighbourhood can also lead to financial collapse, pushing India to be a first responder in terms of economic assistance, but also bringing a risk of moral hazard.

As India develops cross-border infrastructure, including energy transmission lines, oil pipelines and land ports, it will also have to invest in its paramilitary capabilities to secure these.

Fourth, there is a rising risk of refugee populations across the subcontinent and beyond. Today, one million Rohingya refugees linger on in Bangladesh camps. These numbers could easily swell as conflict continues in Myanmar. With multilateral donors and American and Western aid agencies scaling back their support, neighbouring countries will increasingly look to India for support to feed and employ, or relocate, refugees across the region. Hundreds of thousands of other refugees from Tibet, Afghanistan and Sri Lanka continue to depend on India’s hospitality. Climate disasters, extremist regimes, lack of economic opportunities and state collapse or civil wars indicate that refugee flows might increase across the subcontinent in the coming decades.

Fifth and finally, India’s subcontinental strategy must also focus on health security. The next global pandemic is only a matter of time, and the response to the 2020 COVID-19 crisis reflects many regional shortcomings and a lack of cooperation in South Asia. Compared to other regions, including the African Union’s Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, India’s neighbourhood remains one of the least integrated in terms of data sharing, disease prevention, and response to communicable diseases.

To address these multiple security challenges, India cannot afford to neglect its neighbourhood. It must certainly continue to play the broader geopolitical game and develop resources to project power beyond the subcontinent. Yet even as it shows up on distant shores, it must not let its gaze on the global horizon affect its focus on the immediate periphery.

Governments have enhanced collaboration among various ministries and government agencies since the 2000s to shape the subcontinent’s political, economic and security realities. But more is required for the next decades. India must develop and deploy a comprehensive regional security strategy at multiple levels, requiring a continued investment in new ideas, institutions and instruments.

First, in terms of its ideational outlook, India will need to position itself as a stronger regional net security provider. By delivering security solutions to others, it will advance its own interests. This is easier said than done, with adversarial relations focused on territorial disputes with Pakistan to the west and with China to the north. This explains why, traditionally, the focus was on denial. Instead, more attention will have to be given to the delivery agenda. For example, the Colombo Security Conclave and the Information Fusion Centre-Indian Ocean Region (IFC-IOR) have emerged from ideas focused on India as a security supplier, in terms of domain awareness and interoperability. India is also emerging as a leading humanitarian assistance and disaster response power in the IOR, with operations ranging from complex evacuations from war zones (Yemen) to the provision of emergency relief such as vaccines or drinking water (Bangladesh, Maldives, Sri Lanka).

Second, in terms of institutions, India will need to develop new frameworks for policy analysis and implementation to respond to regional security challenges. Today, there are unprecedented number of actors across central and state governments involved in delivering the Neighbourhood First policy.

Going well beyond the Ministry of External Affairs, regional security requires greater involvement from multiple central line ministries, including commerce, railways, shipping or power. The National Security Council Secretariat has emerged as the apex institution for this policy coordination and interoperable action and must be endowed with further dedicated resources on the subcontinent.

Third, besides ideas and institutions, India will have to develop new instruments to pursue subcontinental security. This requires investment on multiple fronts, for example, dedicated regional and country experts across its diplomatic, military and intelligence apparatus, with specific training in subcontinental languages and sectoral issues. The government alone will be unable to deliver this without a broader ecosystem of regional expertise across Indian universities and think tanks. This might also develop advanced scenario and forecasting systems across multiple sectors, from trade flows to climate change to predict structural changes across the subcontinent that are bound to affect India’s security.

India will have to expand its subnational diplomatic presence across South Asia, with consulates beyond capitals. Indian missions in Birgunj (Nepal), Chittagong (Bangladesh), or Sittwe (Myanmar) will play an increasingly important role in pursuing India’s subcontinental security, alongside the record number of consulates opened since the 2000s (including four in Afghanistan, now suspended, as well as Jaffna and Hambantota). These sub-national consulates might not always be in the limelight for diplomatic postings, but they are essential for delivering on India’s economic and security interests across borderlands.

There is also a need for growing diplomatic-military-intelligence coordination across diplomatic missions in the neighbourhood. Beyond Defence Attache/Advisor, Indian missions must be equipped with large defence and security offices that enable simultaneous operations across multiple fronts, from defence exports to security assessments, training exchanges, and frequent military exercises.

Finally, the instrument of public diplomacy should not be underestimated in a young and restless subcontinent where India’s adversaries are constantly on the lookout to fish in troubled political waters. Through education scholarships and fellowships, India must court today the decision-making elites of the future.

Writing in 1981 on India’s subcontinental security, strategist K Subrahmanyam called for a realist course correction on the neighbourhood policy. “There is no justification for the sense of guilt some in India exhibit about our relationship with our neighbours,” he argued, because “no big country … is loved by its neighbours though it may be feared, very often disliked and sometimes even respected”. 

However, Subrahmanyam’s realist analysis was not fatalistic. Writing well before India’s economic opening and the end of the Cold War, he then presciently argued that India must work on four fronts to achieve subcontinental security: First, through patience when faced with balancing behaviour, because “in the longer run the imperatives of geography, cultural affinities, international politics … and the developing global economic stresses and strains will bring home to our neighbors the facts of life and of realpolitik”.

Second, by constantly communicating “to our neighbours what kind of concessions they can legitimately expect from their big neighbour and what they cannot”. Third, by playing the “external security” game, working with and against external powers, depending on the geopolitical balance of power. Fourthly, by developing capabilities to “combine the optimum preparedness with a certain low-profile attitude towards the neighbours”.

All of Subrahmanyam’s four conditions hold today as core tenets for India’s Neighbourhood First policy. The geography has not changed since the 1980s, but the subcontinent currently features new security challenges, deepening complexity and increased frequency. India’s future security hinges on developing new ideas, institutions and instruments to deter, manage and respond to these regional challenges.