Valedictory lecture given by Jean-Luc RACINE at the closing of the Réseau Asie-IMASIE’s third Congress

Valedictory lecture given by 
Jean-Luc RACINE 

on September 28th, 2007
at the closing of the Réseau Asie-IMASIE’s third Congress:

INDIA AND THE NEW ASIAN CHESSBOARD

Allow me to make two preliminary remarks. It so happens that I was in charge of heading the scientific committee responsible for selecting the contributions that structured the congress that we are concluding here today. I would therefore like to take the opportunity of being at the podium to thank my colleagues who gave the committee their time and expertise. I would equally like to thank all those who helped the committee evaluate the various proposals it received. Each and every person’s participation in approving and rethinking the workshops made these three full and enriching days possible.
Second remark: when I was asked, not so long ago, to give this closing conference about India, I committed a short synopsis to paper which was included in the documents which have been circulated, much to my surprise. Although it was a promising synopsis, this was surely careless; in light of such an audience, I hope my take on the challenges of Asia at large will be up to par.

THE CENTURY OF ASIA?

Let us begin with the posture of doubt that becomes the researcher. Will the twenty-first century be “the century of Asia”, as it has often been said? The phrase clearly has multiple meanings. It may refer to the vast  geopolitical movements that make the global system’s dominant pole shift from one continent to the next. After the European colonization of the nineteenth century, and the “American empire” of the twentieth, this new century would see Asian primacy take its turn. However, the time frame and the nature of the primacy that is being heralded still need some clarification. Will it be economic or strategic? Intellectual or cultural? Hegemonic or not?
The Goldman Sachs Group’s report, Dreaming with BRICs: The Path to 2050—B-R-I-C stands for Brazil, Russia, India, China—made quite a racket when it came out in 2003. It predicted that, “if all  goes well”, the joint economies of Brazil, Russia, India, and China would possess as much as half the economic power of the G6 in 2025, and would be its equivalent by 2040. In 2050, China would be the first global economy, before the United States and India, Japan coming in far behind, almost neck to neck with Russia and Brazil. The reason behind Europe not even appearing in this picture remains hard to justify. Indeed, as it is all too often the case, the Goldman Sachs experts chose to ignore the European Union as an entity, although its GDP is higher than the United States’, and chose to consider the Union’s Member States separately.
In a study predicting the state of the world in 2020, the possible consequences of India and China’s emergence were pondered by analysts from the United States’ National Intelligence Council. Perceiving Asia’s rise to power as a tectonic movement, the American government was quick to take it into consideration and push for a closer, previously unseen relationship with New Delhi, which intensified under the presidency of George W. Bush. The economist Clyde Prestowitz believes that the expected upheavals will be even greater if China and India "do manage to work together", especially at a time when the map of world capitalism is being redrawn, and when these low-wage countries have gone against all the rules of classic economies by becoming places of innovation. Others, such as Berkeley-based Indian economist Pranab Bardhan, are more doubtful. They point out that neither China nor India can become true superpowers so soon because, in spite of their impressive growth rates, both are up against structural handicaps that hamper their growth’s social impact and sustainability. In France, Diana Hochraich shares this point of view (Pourquoi l'Inde et la Chine ne domineront pas le Monde, 2007). Contrary to what Prestowitz claims in the title of his last book, there are not Three million new capitalists in Asia, because Asia—and India more than any other country—still is home to a large portion of the planet’s poor.
At the very least, and omitting all hegemonic connotations this time, “the century of Asia” could also be a phrase used to signal Asia’s return onto the global stage after a time under colonial domination and then another of under-development. In and of itself, such a return is a major event, one that is concluding a decisive phase of history in front of our very eyes. This phase, which lasted five centuries, began with the Age of Discovery and, particularly, with the arrival of Vasco de Gama on the coasts of India in 1497. Strengthened by the success of the East India Companies, and enriched by politico-economic-technological European expansion, this phase put an end to the decadent Moghol Empire to the benefit of the British Raj, and sent the Chinese Qing  dynasty  into decline, paving  the way for the Sun Yat Sen Republic. In a way, Japan’s awakening, which began with the Meiji era in 1868, and continued with its victory over imperial Russia in 1905, foreshadowed today’s Asian revival.
No matter what we make of “the century of Asia,” even if we decide to reject the phrase because of its rhetorical and over-simplifying nature, one still has to admit that a complex and heavy movement is underway in Asia, and that it will surely modify the world order.
It is in this context that I would like to study the visible, or possible effects of India’s new influence on Asia’s nature and architecture, as well as the questions it raises. We know that Asia’s challenges are vast enough to concern the world in its entirety. In this respect, I will mention among other things, the Unites States’ foreign policy—the United States are also an Asian power. As for the European Union, it is also one of the first to be concerned. Faced with the great Asian countries’ rise in power, the EU will have to determine—beyond the eventual protectionist temptation to modify the rules of globalization as soon as they no longer provide one way benefits—whether Europe can stay satisfied with its blurry political status, which penalizes its visibility and its influence to benefit those of its Member States.
This said, I would like to pause once more to look at the nature of the Indian transition, before analyzing India’s reintegration into Asia, evoking the Great Game that is being played on the Asian chess board today, and finally, asking of what nature the Indian dream might be in this new century.

THE INDIAN TRANSITION: POINTS AND COUNTERPOINTS

Transition epistemology is a difficult art to master. How can we come out of L’oubli de l’Inde, to cite the title of Roger-Pol Droit’s 1983 book, without falling into the trap of fashionable hyperboles like “India Shining,” a slogan used by the then-ruling (and later defeated) government in the 2004 Indian elections, or “India Everywhere,” which was the large Indian delegation’s credo at the 2006 Davos summit?
Five major parameters seem to define this transition: new economic policy, demographic transition, strategic and diplomatic redefinitions, new ideas about the self and the world, and finally, a political continuity based in the practice of parliamentary democracy, but continuously nourished by debate. Debates center around two major questions that can help us understand a few of the transition’s essential aspects: the essence of the Indian nation on the one hand, and the forms of emancipation of the oppressed on the other.

New economic policy

India’s economic reforms started as early as the 1980s, but only in halftones, as the decisive change took effect in 1991, a dozen years after the turning point Deng Xiaoping orchestrated in China. Their success is no secret, and economic growth has now met initial expectations. India’s GDP grew 44% between 2000 and 2006, and surpassed the thousand billion dollar mark for the first time in 2007. Over the last four years, the average yearly growth has been of 9%. Computer technology, software, and back office services—to use multinational corporation terminology—are all examples of India’s emblematic economic success. But we are only starting to measure the effects of yet another important mutation, one which will discredit the common simplification that made China the “world’s workshop,” and India “the world’s office”. This is the mutation induced by India’s industrial capitalism. Think of Mittal. Of course, Lakshmi Mittal is an Indian citizen, raised and trained in India, but technically speaking, when Mittal Steel took over Arcelor in June 2006, it was a European-based company taking over another European-based company for 18 billion euros. If one can make such a comparison, Lakshmi Mittal is to Indian industry what Salman Rushdie is to Indian literature, a brilliant member of the diaspora, whose worldwide renown foreshadows what will come next, which is to say, Indian companies coming directly from India. In the domain of steel, it’s already done. In 2007, Tata Steel bought out Corus for 11 billion dollars, a transaction with satisfied the Anglo-Dutch Company. Tata Tea had already bought, Tetley the world’s second largest tea company in 2000, and recently took over Jaguar Land Rover in 2008. Post-colonial times are over. India has moved on to the post-post-colonial. Indian multinational corporations are starting to make themselves known. Not only the Tata empire, and not only in Europe.
However, the new economic policy, carried by a cautious and gradual liberalization, is confronted with multiple problems. India’s infrastructure’s saturation point is diminishing too slowly. Social and regional inequalities are growing. Twenty or thirty years after the green revolution, the agricultural crisis is presently characterized by tens of thousands of over-indebted peasants committing suicide, and this while the question of sustainable development, faced with the challenges of global warming, is no longer confined to experts’ quarrels. Poverty is dropping too slowly—supposing that the criteria for calculating poverty are even trustworthy—and employment is still a persistent question. Indian economists ask themselves: is India experiencing growth without development?
In a comparative perspective, India is clearly lagging behind China economically. Its one thousand billion (current) dollar GDP in 2007 is three times smaller than China’s, and five times smaller than Japan’s. India and China are not quite on the same level. As for the socioeconomic index, whatever we may say about the Indian middle class, or of “shining India,” the statistics speak for themselves. Notable examples can be found in the two global rankings bellow:
· Gross Domestic Product per capita in 2006: Japan 19th, South Korea 49th, China 129th (between Cape Verde and Angola), India 161st (between Timor and Sudan).
· Human Development Index 2006: Japan 7th, South Korea 26th, Russia 65th, Brazil 69th, China 81st (between Armenia and Peru), India 126th (between Namibia and Cambodia).
How do these numbers fit into the picture of emerging India? Here, we have reached the heart of the paradox. These mediocre—and even bad—rankings, bordering those of Pakistan and Bangladesh, show that India is not yet a great power. However, they don’t keep India from being on a promising path to becoming one, even if its current dollar GDP is ranked only 12th in world. Today, India weighs a little less than Russia or Brazil, but is growing faster than both, and in terms of purchasing power parity India’s ascension is much quicker. In 2007, the new world ranking made India pass into 4th place behind the United States, China, and Japan, and surpassing Germany. We are definitely dealing with a dynamic India. 
What does a dynamic India imply in terms of Asia?
Firstly, it confirms that democracy doesn’t exclude growth, contrary to the rhetoric that was often heard supporting supposedly more efficient authoritarian regimes—at least in East Asia, and which, in the beginning, often preceded a later transition to democracy.
Secondly, Indian dynamism confirms that economic reform must be controlled, in addition to being more pragmatic than ideological. In a debating society such as India, the government always seeks a minimal consensus, even if it is not always found. This principle, which is adjusted to regular elections, generates slower, but perhaps more secure change than in other places. It also produces animal metaphors. After the tigers stuck by the Asian financial crisis of 1997, after the Chinese dragon, now comes the Indian elephant, who walks slowly but surely.
The third consequence is that India’s relative breakthrough created a new economic attraction pole. The considerable slackening of protectionism made partnerships possible, and investment flows are growing, although they are still modest in comparison to China’s. Fifteen years after launching its “Look East” policy, India’s trade is increasing too, with South east Asia, but also with the European Union, its first trade partner, and with the United States and China, presently neck to neck. Taking these new economic activities into account, the growing attractiveness of the service industry has been widely commented on. It now sustains electoral campaigns in Washington DC, London and Paris, where the specter of relocation is evoked, no longer just for low-cost clothes manufacturing, but for service jobs. However, the facets of this new Indian competitiveness have yet to be precisely evaluated. In addition to the overworked personnel of India’s controversial call centers, or outsourced management services (accounting, airline reservations, healthcare records), one must also consider the research and development centers installed by US multinational companies in the flourishing High Tech Cities of Bangalore, Hyderabad, Chennai, as well as in the new cities on the outskirts of New Delhi. People go on about Indian assets, such as English-language university training, engineers graduating from a number of excellent establishments and private institutes, even going back to traditional Indian mathematics—after all, Indians claim to have invented zero. All the attention is paid to this rich heritage, invoked to glorify centuries of speculative intellectualism, or the adjustment to computers’ binary system. Less talked about are the pessimistic evaluation reports on the state of Indian universities, or the predicted lack of highly qualified engineers.
India’s unquestionable economic growth is also a source of concern in three important domains.
The first one is energy security. India largely depends on highly polluting coal, imports two thirds of its hydrocarbon, and its civil nuclear program is under international restrictions since its first test in 1974. The global problem of searching for energy, which affects emerging countries, is aggravated by explicit competition with China, particularly over global oil and gas reserves.
The second challenge is environmental. It is not limited to industrial or energy questions, but actually affects the rural world in a much more serious way, confronting it with soil depletion and the quest for irrigation water. For a long time, environmental risk was perceived as a Western myth meant to counteract low-wage countries’ comparative advantage. This is no longer the case. India is starting to take environmental challenges seriously, even though it voiced reservations about the Kyoto protocol, and was active at the Bali conference in seeking to exonerate emerging countries from having to curb greenhouse gas emission levels as early as 2012. Nobel Prize winner, and chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Rajendra Pachauri, also head of a major Indian research institute, issued many warnings, but for India’s leaders there is not much room to maneuver between the right to growth and environmental imperatives. This position is similar to China’s, which also points the finger at Western countries’ historical responsibility, while it becomes a major CO2 producer itself.
India’s third challenge is persistent poverty, although it is officially diminishing. The debates are heated about whether or not the criteria that define poverty are under-evaluated, according to critics. India’s intense growth reminds us that the development problem, which was cast aside at the time of triumphant liberalism, is still perfectly relevant. India’s leaders have understood this, and now speak of “inclusive growth” meant to benefit the “common man”. Although the ways and means of implementing such policies have yet to be defined, they will need to be more efficient than policies adopted in the past. For now, if India stands out from its neighbors in terms of economic substance, it remains at their level with respect to its (low) human development.

Demographic transition

The second element of the overall movement in which India is partaking, is a demographic transition. It corresponds to the precise definition that demographers give: the Indian demographic rhythm and growth is slowing around 1.5% per year, and the fertility index is dropping. It may even be dropping a bit too much when we think of the unbalanced gender ratio: 927 for children under six years old, to the detriment of little girls. However, this drop in demographic growth is unequally spread out. It amplifies the North-South dichotomy, where the South is dynamic and the North lagging behind. The States that have maintained the highest demographic growth rates are often those who are behind in terms of economic growth and social indicators. If this tendency lasts for a certain amount of time, the classic vicious circle might bring about social and political problems.
The slowing of demographic growth will not keep the Indian population from surpassing China’s around 2030. Optimists point out that in fifteen years, India will dispose of the highest share of young professionals in the world, which would act as an additional growth engine. Others, understandably more careful, retort that this “window of opportunity,” as experts refer to it, will only materialize if employment opportunities are sufficient. If this is not the case, the social and political challenges will intensify.
In terms of Asia, this demographic transition shows first of all that demographic growth can slow down significantly without having to resort to Chinese coercion, and this even before it reaches full development. On an imaginary level, demography heightens the competition between India and China. Yesterday, China, which controlled its population, was opposed to India, which was incapable of doing so. Today, New Delhi would like to emphasize the contrast between an aging China and a young and active India. This game of representations is certainly ambiguous. It obliterates other realities, yet without hiding them completely, such as the race for natural resources, sustainable development, global public goods, or employment. Being called upon to become the world’s number one can produce a certain lightheadedness, like the one that seized India in the 1990s, as it approached the billion-inhabitant threshold. That period gave way to an extraordinary inversion of dominant perceptions. Demographic growth, which had been perceived as penalizing in terms of family planning for decades, became a celebration of future power. Yesterday, entry into the billion club; tomorrow, the front of the demographic stage. Promises of power, or inevitably deepening inequality?

Diplomatic and strategic redefinitions  

The third component of the great Indian transition is its new diplomatic and strategic policy. A major external rupture, the USSR’s implosion, drastically changed the global context in 1991, at the same time as India—thanks to a historical coincidence—was defining its new economic policy, which progressively abandoned protectionism. Without turning its back on its old Russian friend,—which had been rather inconsistent under Yeltsine, but more loyal under Putin—India had to rethink its diplomatic route. Its new economic policy helped it do so by gradually changing its image.
The second rupture, this time decided by New Delhi, occurred at the time of the 1998 nuclear tests. India’s new economic policy implemented by the Congress party was a sign of the times. To the contrary, the decision to conduct nuclear testing, which was prepared by the Congress, but implemented by the nationalist Hindus of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), opposed “global correctness”. In 1995, headed by the Congress party, India had already refused to sign the prorogation of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). In 1996, governed by a “third front” coalition, India similarly refused to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT).
In spite of the sanctions lead to by the 1998 nuclear tests, India’s posture reinforced its diplomatic weight. Whatever we may think of civil or military nuclearization, India’s decision to test asked a decisive question by taking effect outside the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Opposed to the “nuclear apartheid” established by the Treaty, to the sole benefit of countries who already possessed the nuclear weapon before 1967—countries that happen to be the five permanent members of the UN’s Security Council—, India made clear that it intended to take its place as an emerging power, resolved to guarantee its national freedom on its own, in an almost de Gaulle-ian style. In so doing, India took the risk of opening a Pandora’s box of proliferation. Indeed, Pakistan conducted its nuclear tests two weeks later, and even more questions arose surrounding both North Korea and Iran’s nuclear programs, in turn susceptible to lead their Asian or Middle Eastern neighbors to nuclearize their forces as well. While it spoke out against Chinese support to Pakistan’s nuclear program, India gave certain guarantees, by defining principles that stand as a doctrine: voluntary moratorium on tests, no first strikes, “minimal” dissuasion.
Taking advantage of its two ruptures—the first economic, launched by the Congress, and the second strategic, lead by the BJP—India decided to reorient its diplomacy pragmatically and sought to kill two birds with one stone: by redefining its relations with the rest of Asia—or better yet, by reintegrating Asia—India will pursue its essential objective, which is searching for its proper place in the new international order.

But what is its “proper place”? How can India’s status be defined today? Is it a regional power, an Asian power, a world power? For now, the third hypothesis is inadequate.  India is not a world power yet, although its voice is more easily heard than before. Even if it is increasing steadily, India’s external trade only counts for 1% of world trade. Unlike China, India is not a permanent member of the Security Council. Unlike Japan, it is not a member of the G8. However, its aura spans more than just South Asia, and its new activism in its “extended neighborhood,” an area expandable from the Persian Gulf to South East Asia, via Central Asia, makes it more than just a simple regional power. The ambiguity surrounding India’s actual status can be attributed the indeterminate position it occupies, between being an Asian power and a world power, accumulating certain powerful properties while combining them with structural weaknesses. If not yet a full fledged global power, India is certainly becoming a global player.
China’s old strategy of supporting Northeastern Indian insurgents, and then Pakistan to entangle India in the immediate proximity of its Himalayan conflicts, is no longer as imperative for Beijing as it was before. It succeeded in the past to the point that it allowed Pakistan to get nuclearized, but it did not keep India from advancing. India is not waiting for the extinction of pauperism to seek economic power, nor waiting to better relations with its neighbors to display its wide-reaching diplomacy. Its goal is to adjust to (and up to a point to reshape) the post Cold-War reality, defined by three major parameters: the rise of China, the challenge of extremism and terrorism and its link with the Afghanistan-Pakistan continuum, and the evolution of US policy in Asia, to which I’ll come in a moment.

The game of representations : ideas about the self, ideas about the world

The true engine of the Indian transition, which defines its path and widens its ambitions today, is the conviction that another India is possible. The idea is not new. Gandhi and Nehru already used this notion during the anti-colonial movement. Then, came the uncertainties of the 1970s and 1980s, Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi’s mixed heritage, both of their deaths happening before either were able to “take India into the XXIst century,” as Rajiv had wanted. In the 1990s—the years of the great turning point—the “resurgent India” theme upheld by Hindu nationalists in their march to power was connoted. It suggested at once the apogee of an ancient golden age, and the decline of India “subjugated to Muslim invaders” since the year one thousand, and then to Western powers, even finally to “westernized” nationalist leaders—a way of getting at Nehru.
Today, Congress Party Prime Minister Manmohan Singh takes up the “resurgent India” phrase, freeing it of its anti-Muslim and even its anti-colonial connotations. In this regard, the speech he made at Oxford in July 2005 is emblematic of the major evolution that has been at work for fifteen years, which marks a passage to what I would call the post-post-colonial. This new condition allows first, to rethink what a philosopher would call India’s “being-in-the-world,” and then, to prepare for its repossession of the world, this time at a planetary scale.
Surely, Gandhi, Nehru and Vivekananda before them, saw India as a carrier of universal values. But Nehru, as head of the country at the dawn of its independence, had to build a post-colonial India. Protectionism, which India was not alone in adopting, was a response to its difficult history of subjugation to international traders. Not only did the East India Companies (the British, the French, the Dutch, and the Danish ones) serve as torch-bearers for the first capitalist globalization, they became as well the precursors of State colonialism. As for non-alignment, the pillar of Nehru’s strategy—which India again was not alone in adopting—it was the response of an India hungry for independence, and faced with the fractures the Cold War, in addition to the old US doctrine of “those who are not with us are against us”.
The post-post-colonial defines a new time for India, characterized by the double aperture of the 1990 transition, a time in which India gained previously unseen leeway from which it still benefits today. Although it began as a step-by-step process, India’s economic aperture continued more steadily when the idea that globalization was not only a challenge but also an opportunity, prevailed in both Indian economic and political realms. As for India’s diplomatic aperture, its first target was South East Asia, starting with the “Look East Policy” established in 1992, but it also sought to position itself on the global scale with its nuclear policy put in place by three different governments between 1995 and 1998. India could then reap the fruit of this double self-assertion by strengthening ties with the US on one hand, while at the same time maintaining good relations with Moscow, in addition to renewing what I choose to call its Southern inclination. Despite what may be said in New Delhi, this evolution transformed India’s former non-alignment into a strategic panoply. Some partners were multilateral—the Group of 21 responsible for the collapse of the WTO’s Cancun summit—or even transcontinental, like the India-Brazil-South Africa axis, also known as IBSA. The search for permanent member seats at the UN crosses the multilateral with the transnational, and the North with the South, since a “package” of candidates (India, Brazil, Germany, and Japan) is trying—although unsuccessfully for now—to counter China and the US’ shared reticence.
India’s newfound self image, self-confidence, and its newfound image of the world, have led to the gradual spread of a new image of India throughout the world, after an initial period of wariness and doubt. This game of representations works both ways, abroad and in Asia, including China. In order for it to work, the game had to start in India and base itself on national premises. This was the case, and no reference was made to “Asian values,” or to the Asianism theorized by Mohammad Mahatir and Shintaro Ishihara in The Voice of Asia published in Japan in 1996.
It would be impossible to conclude this section without stressing an essential element that has flourished in India’s intellectual tradition and that has also shaped India’s political life for more than a century. India’s independence was built on the foundations of a debate culture, which generates free press, multi-party politics, and openness to the world. The world in question, which was at one time Oxford and Cambridge, today is mainly made up of the United States, from Silicon Valley to NASA, from its prestigious Ivy League universities to the US-India Business Council, and all the way into Washington’s think tanks and the lobbies of Capitol Hill. This explains why Georges W. Bush decided to change the rules of the game and provide India with civil nuclear power.
Nobel prize winner, Amartya Sen, is without a doubt the best example of the attention-grabbing entrance of first rate Indians into the high spheres of Western knowledge. In 2005, he appropriately published a book called The Argumentative Indian, referring to the Indian who argues and debates. But one must also take into account modernity’s other facet, or rather the other facet of India’s post-modernity, referring this time to a protesting India, and its largely feminine leading figures like Vandana Shiva, Medha Patkar, or Arundhati Roy, who play as big a role in internationalizing their country as its business men and artists. Many observers believe that this culture of plurality will be an advantage in the growing competition between India and China.

Political stability, ideological debates, social dynamics

In sixty years of existence, India only decreed an emergency state for two years (1975-77) under Indira Gandhi. It was a time when the rights of the opposition were compromised, but it ended by the elections organized and lost by the party in power. The remarkable vigor of the democratic polity in such a highly populated, diverse and widely illiterate country silenced the skeptics who thought India couldn’t remain united without a strong government. India’s experience, in terms of Asia but also on the global scale, is unique: it has no single political party, has had no military coup, and has a voted Constitution applied since 1950. It is also a Republic that has learned to manage, relatively well, the dialectic between unity and diversity, as well as to govern a Babel of languages. Whatever the limits of Indian democracy may be, a political democracy more than a social democracy or democratic socialism, this route is looking particularly attractive today, at a time when the current political option also allows for economic start-up.
It’s not that India is exemplary in everything. This is clearly demonstrated by its mediocre socio-economic index, which hardly make it a reference for Asia. However, India remains an extraordinary laboratory where experiments in social engineering of unequalled magnitude are being conducted, whether they concern the massive affirmative action regulated by public employment quotas, the implication of women in politics, or linguistic plurality management… The demands of backward castes and their process of integration into the political system unearth the question of building modernity in a specific socio-cultural context. Like in 19th century Japan, post-independence India invented its own way of thinking its relationship with the West, by borrowing and inventing, by evolving without disowning its past.
This combined quest for modernity, identity and power gives way to heated ideological competitions since Hindu nationalism, marginalized by Nehru, lifted its head and took advantage of the fact that the old Congress party had lost it hegemonic position. Hindu nationalists accepted economic reforms, got the country out of nuclear ambiguity, and clearly exhibited resurgent India’s ambitions. They also revealed a dark side of “Indian-ness” by often reducing it to a particularly militant “Hindu-ness,” to which a number of Hindus refuse all affinity. However, this way of asserting oneself while promoting a closed definition of identity, characterized by the supporters of hindutva extolling the values of a supposedly 5000-year-old nation, has not kept strong ambitions from forming. Another India has appeared, one which can be at once chauvinist and open to the outside world.
However, beyond the duality that opposes—to be brief—the Nehruvian paradigm to Hindu nationalism, behind these two ideological conceptions of the nation, there is still room for consensus, which is a source of stability and strength: essentially, consensus about the institutional basis, economic reform, now-acquired nuclearization. There are also challenges that everyone must take up, once in power. One in particular, concerning human capital, seems essential to take into consideration. Too little has been accomplished in terms of education and health. There is a massive aspiration for education, which is definitely a key element for the future. When India boasts about its success in information technology, and claims that it intends to build its future prosperity on a knowledge economy, it has reasons to do so. But the question remains concerning the ancient social fracture inscribed in the caste system, which is being undermined and delegitimized in terms of access to knowledge. Yes to a knowledge economy, but for whom? And how many will be left behind?

INDIA’S REINTEGRATION INTO ASIA

The wide, and multi-faceted transition that I am trying to define here contributed to India’s emergence, as well as to the new place it occupies in Asia. Asia is rediscovering India after decades of ignoring it. Both time and space are implicated in this. Three breaking periods of unequal duration damaged trans-Asian heritage built over centuries by the spread of Buddhism towards the East (and by the symmetrical Journey to the West of Chinese pilgrims returning to the geographical sources of Buddhism), by the Silk Roads, by the Hindu-ized communities in South East Asia, by the Indian dynasties from Central Asia and Afghanistan, by Indo-Persian culture. Indian companies had cultivated inter-Asian exchanges in the name of trade “from one India to the next”. But in the 19th century, colonial subjugation greatly compartmentalized Asia.
The second split occurred with the almost immediate entry of the postcolonial era into the Cold War. Bloc politics introduced a geopolitical fracture even before colonialism’s effects could be surmounted. India wished to be non-aligned, while the ASEAN emerged as a pawn on the American anti-communist chessboard. The third split can be found in Asia’s diverging economic paths which came on top of ideological differences, without being direct reactions to them. Confronted with Asia-Pacific’s awakening, decades of mediocre growth rates and the image of underdevelopment made India, and all of Southern Asia a separate world in the eyes of the rest of Asia. This separate world was bogged down by internal conflicts: three wars between India and Pakistan between 1948 and 1971, without mention of the Sino-Indian conflict of 1962. Such a context made it hard for inter-Asian exchanges to take place. Cultural dialogue between Tagore and Japan, Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose and his National Indian army’s adventure supported by Tokyo, and Nehru’s openness towards Asia—the first Asian conference in 1946 and the friendly relations taken up with Mao’s China—, none of these lasted very long.
Today, out of three decisive fractures —colonialism, the Cold War, and economic disparities— two have passed, and the third one does not prevent from rethinking international relations. India is therefore able to reintegrate Asia’s chess game by using a double entry strategy, playing both the economic and the diplomatic cards. India wanted this. But did the other Asian countries also want this?

The first circle

I can only sketch out here the new geometry that structures India’s relations with Asia. India is managing its first circle, the one composed of its South Asian neighbors, by trying to normalize bilateral relations with more or less success. “Composite dialogue” with Pakistan since 2004 is of primary importance as part of this strategy. A difficult, but very structured and continuous dialogue, called “composite” because Kashmir is not the only subject up for discussion—contrary to the old Pakistani “Kashmir first” line—but also other contentious borders as well as trade, people-to-people contacts and other fields of cooperation. On the ground, borders are opening. Roads, railway and airway connections are intensifying. Even Kashmir’s Line of control has been partly opened, however limited the opening may be. Things are in movement, and mentalities are changing. It is not likely that India and Pakistan sign a treaty that would put an end to their disagreement over Kashmir, and officially ratify a territorial status quo. However, for lack of a de jure agreement, a de facto compromise may work if it is accompanied by measures wanted by Kashmiris from both sides, such as more contacts amongst themselves and more autonomy from each of the sovereign states.
In terms of its other neighbors, India is searching for a delicate balance, which may be hard to find. After having misled its strength to maintain peace in the late 1980s, India has become very prudent with Sri Lanka. In Nepal, India ended up encouraging a post-monarchical transition by integrating Maoist insurgents into the parliamentary system. Although relations remain difficult with an rather agitated Bangladesh, train lines were recently rehabilitated between Calcutta and Dhaka after decades of inactivity. Sum total, India’s trade and economic exchanges with its neighbors remain abnormally low, and the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) will certainly have some trouble launching a free trade agreement, the so-called SAFTA, as planned during its  2004 summit. Not that India doesn’t want it. Much to the contrary, its diplomats are pleading for the cause of “connectivity” and paint a picture of their country as an economic engine that can extend it’s benefits to the entire region. However, faced with India’s disproportional weight, which only keeps increasing, its neighbors’ old wariness persists. These difficulties have not stopped New Delhi from reaching out further East.

The “Look East Policy”

In 1992, just after launching a new economic policy, New Delhi also launched its “Look East Policy”. A number of South-East Asian countries were skeptical, aside from the notable exception of Singapore. When the ASEM (Asia-Europe Meeting) was created in 1996, the Europeans wanted India to be a part of it, against the opinion of the majority of other Asian members of this dialogue structure. India has now joined the ASEM, well after having been recognized as an ASEAN dialogue partner, after having joined the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF), which serves as a strategic dialogue structure. A most significant choice, India was co-opted to be founding member of the East-Asian Summit, which held its first meeting in 2005. This dialogue organization is larger than its name suggests, as it includes China, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand in addition to the ASEAN’s ten member countries. A new dynamic is therefore underway, for economic reasons—India is starting to be taken seriously with an annual growth rate over 9%—as well as for geopolitical reasons. If South East Asia could look down on India in the 1990s, today it welcomes India as a counterbalance to China’s rise to power, in addition to the fact that the quarreling India and Pakistan are beginning to better bilateral relations, and don’t persist in spoiling international conferences with their interminable contentions.
In this context it is important to mention the multiple regional coalitions that are appearing in Asia today. For the one of the Greater Mekong, which aims at efficiency, how many are empty or nearly empty shells? India contributed to launching the BIMSTEC around the Bay of Bengal. The Bangladesh, India, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Thailand Economic Cooperation became the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical Cooperation, joined today by Nepal and Bhutan, a way of looking East with the countries of Southern Asia, and without Pakistan. India also helped create the Ganga-Mekong Cooperation, which regroups the Greater Mekong partners, excluding the Chinese province of Yunnan. Although it isn’t openly opposed to the Kunming Initiative, with which Yunnan’s capital wants to develop relations between South-East China, Eastern India and Burma, New Delhi is wary of possible Chinese penetration into a particularly strategic space.

The extended neighbourhood

There is also another Asia, the one which we call the Middle East, and that India calls West Asia. In a much tenser geopolitical context shaken by major crises, India is more and more diplomatically active in this region. This can be explained by several reasons: the presence of an important Indian diaspora in the Middle-East, the fact that two thirds of India’s hydrocarbon imports come from the Middle-East, and that India sees the Middle-East as a source of instability under the threat of terrorist networks. In this region, India seeks to get along with everyone: with Israel, which has become its second arms provider after Russia, with Iran, India’s closest source of much-needed gas, and with the countries of the Persian Gulf, including Saudi Arabia, although it is an important center for Wahhabism. Afghanistan also matters to India for several reasons. India doesn’t want to leave the country under the predominant influence of Islamabad, in case the situation should change again in favor of the Talibans, and New Delhi is keen to access the energy resources of Central Asia. But Islamabad refuses to grant India transit rights towards Kabul or Kandahar. We will know soon whether the project for a Iran-Pakistan-India pipeline, which has been in negotiations for years, much to Washington’s disproval, will end up being concretized. It would certainly stand for the victory of connectivity...
On the Eastern side, new ties are linking India to China as well as Japan. Not waiting to resolve the tension at their borders, India and China are doing business—China has just taken the United States’ place as India’s second trade partner, after the European Union. Both India and China claim, after a number of visits from both Prime Ministers and heads of state, that they have more common interests than differences. Although wariness is still necessary, as the defense budgets of both sides of the Himalaya are growing more than 10% a year. China has been able to strike India for a long time. The latter is now heightening its nuclear dissuasion with the experimental launching of the Agni III missile that counts China’s eighteen provinces and big metropolises in its range. India’s rise to power has not eluded Japan, who has been investing in it for a long time, and who is also India’s first purveyor of aid. The relations between Tokyo and New Delhi are taking a new turn in which strategic considerations have made their appearance. Even before coming to power, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe stressed the fact that Japanese future status in Asia depended also on getting along with India. Although he stayed in power less than a year, in that short amount of time Manmohan Singh was invited to speak in front of the Japanese Diet, and Abe came to address the Indian Parliament. Beyond individual men, new and lasting structural interests are being shaped.

India in Asia’s “Great  Game”

I am coming to my last point, corollary to the question of India’s reintegration into Asia: what does this mean in terms of the Great game? We are no longer speaking of Kipling’s great game, which was about the British and Russian empires confronting each other over the Karakorum at the time of the Chinese empire’s decline. Today’s Great game in Asia is inevitably played by the United States. As much an Asian power as a European one, Russia is obviously an important player as well. Where is the focal point of this contemporary rearrangement located? In Beijing or in Washington? And where is this leading us? Towards maintaining the dominance of the United States, if Washington succeeds in containing China by creating a network of alliances around it—and if the United States can escape recession? Towards a new bipolar situation where Washington opposes Beijing? Or towards a multipolar world where the Westphalien principle of balance of powers would be applied on the global scale—a scenario that would better satisfy New Delhi, in which it would certainly find a place?
In any case, India must play cautiously, precisely to find its place. To do this, India must first free itself from the constraints on its regional level, which, at best, it will pacify to create a space for economic opportunities and widened circulation (still according to the principle of connectivity), or at least, it will master enough not to get bogged down in them—something it succeeded in doing in the past, even in the dangerous times of Kashmir’s insurrection, of the Kargil war, and the 2002 military mobilization. India cannot forget or neglect the first circle of Southern Asia, but it must advance on all fronts, near and far. Such an ambitious policy demands to take a stand to face the same two major poles of Washington and Beijing, while being able to position oneself advantageously in terms of all the games’ pieces: kings, queens, horses, and pawns, if the chess board can serve as a metaphor, although a board of go may be more appropriate.

TWO MAJOR STAKES

To conclude, I can see two major stakes that should be underlined. The first one is carried by the India-Asia-world order trilogy. The other calls for questioning what India’s future might be once it becomes a world power, particularly in terms of what ideology it would follow.

India, Asia, and the  world order

I have just mentioned a few aspects of the geopolitical dimension of this trilogy, which deserve to be further developed in light of questions that push beyond Asia, like the reformation of the UN Security Council, wanted by India, Japan, Brazil, and Germany, or the World Trade Organization’s debates over the bleak future of the Doha negotiations, which risk to run up against the differences pitting the European Union against the states and countries—be they developing countries or emerging powers—that want to defend their poor agricultural classes against the global effects of subsidies given by rich countries (EU member states and the U.S.) to their own farmers. India is on the front lines with respect to this question. Therefore, we can see India adopting simultaneously South-North strategies, and team up with Germany, Japan and Brazil in order to press for the enlargement of the UN Security Council for example, and to reinvent South-South relations in the global framework provided by the WTO, or within specific emerging countries, as illustrated by  the new IBSA axis (India, Brazil, South Africa). However, this has not kept India from becoming closer to the United States than ever before, in spite of strong internal debates, such as the back and forth over the Indo-American agreement on civil nuclear power, which was met with serious opposition within India itself. The temptation of forming if not an alliance, at least a strategic partnership with Washington is a matter of controversy in India, in the name of the country’s necessary diplomatic autonomy. There are surely common interests to India and the US, and multiple military exercises between the two countries or with Washington’s other Asian allies, testify to these new convergences. But if the United States offers unprecedented opportunities from which it intends to benefit, India is also trying to assess their costs accurately. The political debate in India makes sure of that.
The other facets of the trilogy still need to be addressed. In every field, the great stakes for Asia are by definition global stakes, in so far as the way in which Asia evolves, especially China and India, will largely determine the way in which the world of tomorrow will be built. This applies to the future of economic competition between China and India on Asian as well as on global markets, including energy supply and primary resources. It also holds true for the way in which the sociopolitical models that shaped post-colonial India and post-Maoist China will be competing. Finally, it is the case with respect to sustainable environment. At a time when the “post-carbon” age is being conceived, India and China are in similar positions with regards to the Kyoto Protocol, and with what should come of it. Without denying the ecological imperatives, and the risks brought on by climate change, the two Asian giants do not intend to surrender their “right to development”. Already, their rise to power is weighing heavily on certain global markets. It will also weigh more and more on the global environmental impact of  their economic growth.

The Indian dream

Lastly there remains was I call the Indian dream. What might this be? There existed, and undoubtedly there still exists an American dream. There was once a European dream, which unfortunately seems to be running out of steam (or to be confined to peace and market) as the European Union keeps extending. Is there a similar Indian dream? Or rather, to speak in the consubstantial plural that is appropriate for India, among all the ideas of India, among all of the Indian dreams, which one will prevail? No firm answer is possible for three reasons. Firstly, we don’t know which of two paradigms will take precedence over the other: Nehru’s, which is more familiar to us no matter what India’s specificities may be, or one of Hindu nationalism, which can be at once open to the outside world and dramatically paralyzed on the inside, with bloody tendencies and crypto-fascist temptations in its hardest cases, like those who were seen in Gujarat with the anti-Muslim pogrom of 2002— which did not prevent the leaders then in command to be re-elected to power. India’s future doesn’t only depend on the competition between Hindu nationalists and others, but also on the power relations within the Hindu nationalist movement. One can presume that moderation will prevail. So many Indians tell us that the country cannot be governed by extremes... But the Indian dream will be different according to which school of thought prevails, and also according to the configuration taken by the coalition governments that have become the norm, since no hegemonic party can win today, as was the case of the Congress Party during the thirty years which followed Independence.
The second conjectural uncertainty concerns the very principle of India’s transition. The transition finds itself caught between Nehru’s heritage that is still claimed by the Congress government, and the era of triumphant real-politik that is characterized by a fascination with the United States for some, a fascination for American power for other, and finally just a fascination for global power. In any case, including in the Nehruvian tradition, one value remains of cardinal importance: national interest. Does this criteria mean that there are no permanent allies in foreign affairs, but only permanent interests?
The third reason that makes prognostics difficult concerns the fact that analysts, opinion-makers, and ideologues are not the only ones to have firm postures. The official rhetoric is much more careful and measured. It talks less of balance of power—although it certainly thinks about it—than of the necessary balance of interests. The nuance is interesting because the balance of interests is valid for all countries, no matter the respective degree of power. It allows the smaller states to have a place. It’s valid for less developed countries—and it should be pointed out that India becomes a source of aid for such countries. It’s as valid for Pakistan as it is for China, and the United States. The Indian diplomatic rhetoric now takes refuge in verbal precautions, which up to a point are the Indian equivalent to the Chinese neo-Confucian rhetoric about internal and external harmony. Not that India needs Confucian references. It has its own references among which Nehru, all things given, is destined to last.
The Indian dream, as it is formulated by today’s deciders, is mostly defined by a new India in a new global context, and the updating of a few major principles inherited from the Nehruvian paradigm. Idealism will not be enough, although there remains without a doubt, if India were to become a great power—which it isn’t yet—a certain ambition to carry a universal message. Due to the historical legacy of its civilization, its demographic weight, its democratic regime and its new competences, India can contend to sit at the high table of chosen people—chosen by History, not by God. This is being put to the test under our very eyes by the civil nuclear agreement, which George W. Bush consented to India in a previously unseen derogatory status, for which he amended American law. Still, even those who support the agreement that provides a new place for India don’t intend to align themselves with Washington, without even mentioning those who were against it in the name of strategic independence. We are at the heart of a society open to debate that allows for political democracy, and the res publica.
To question India’s essence is risky, but legitimate. However, to ask whether emerging India will tilt towards Asia or towards the West, as do certain analysts enamored of simplistic categories, does not make much sense. Gandhi formulated it his own way, when he said: "I do not want my house to be walled in on all sides and my windows to be stuffed. I want the cultures of all the lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown off my feet by any". This idea, it seems to me, offers a good summary of India’s position in Asia today, and of its posture in the world order.

Jean-Luc Racine is a senior research fellow at the CNRS
Center for Indian and South Asian Studies at the EHESS