bout de papier, Vol. 26, No. 2 (2011) — Fall/Winter 2011 // Automne/Hiver 2011, pp. 34–35
From the introduction to Does the Elephant Dance? Contemporary Indian Foreign Policy, by David Malone, Oxford University Press, 2011, 448 pp., $ 45.00.
“India is a huge, boisterous nation bursting with optimism for its future…, while struggling to reduce the severe poverty afflicting hundreds of millions of its citizens. Like the USA, India is primarily inward-oriented. Goings on within India, of great local interest and often of some international significance given India’s growing weight, could readily absorb the sum total of — Does the appears to protect India jrom tne nortn (aimougn mp PARU several invaders from the north have accessed ES
India through Afghanistan) and perhaps, a sense that India sufficed onto itself.
But today, we witness an India reaching out: its private sector is doing so aggressively, carving out markets for itself globally, investing widely and taking over industrial and service icons abroad. Nonetheless, corporate India faces frustrations within its home country particularly with regard to business conditions and barriers to effective inward investment…
The size and population of India is now complemented by sufficient economic progress as to guarantee it a place at the global high table of influence. With the elevation of the Group of 20 to the level of leaders in 2008 as the key assembly of globally significant countries, India was offered an opportunity to play a major role. Even earlier it had joined Brazil, China, Mexico and South Africa as a “dialogue partner” of the Group of Eight, the forum for policy discussion among leading industrialized countries. While at the G-8 India and the other guests playing a subsidiary role found their unequal status grating, if not insulting. In contrast, at the G-20 they were not only equals, but clearly mattered more than a number of Western participants in economic global discussions…
Thus, it was India’s economic significance that lent weight to the country’s international profile. Its foreign policy, regional concerns, and geostrategic views were largely unknown to the rest of the world, as they are to most Indians, who remain overwhelmingly preoccupied with the struggle for improved conditions within their own country.
However, as of 2008, its international relations mattered more (at least to non- Indians). In that year India escaped from the partial international purdah into which its 1974 nuclear test and to a lesser extent its 1998 tests had consigned it, thanks to multilateral acceptance of its nuclear cooperation agreement with the USA…” bout: Why the fascination with India (which obviously predates your Head of Mission assignment and the book)?
Malone: I grew up in part in Iran, a truly beautiful country but a very sombre one in many ways even before the revolution of 1978-79. Thus, the contrast with India — a riot of colour, noise, overt entrepreneurship and ceaseless bustle, was doubly striking. I had been travelling to India for many years prior to my diplomatic assignment there, to see small bits of it (land travel around India was and remains a slow and often grinding proposition), always yearning to return. As well, with the balance of influence and of economic weight within Asia shifting after China’s and then India’s economic reforms in the late 1970s and early 1990s respectively, it became more likely that the first century of the new millennium would be Asia’s, the last having been, incontestably, America’s.
bout: What does India’s emergence mean for Canada, especially given our relatively large diaspora population?
Malone: …is our sub-continental immigrant population incidental or central to future relations? Our diaspora population forms a human bridge between India and Canada, a very positive foundation for human ties between the two countries, and, to some extent, for economic ones. That said, most Indo-Canadians hail from Punjab, a prosperous, important but small, state on the periphery of the nation, bordering on Pakistan and having suffered greatly from partition and later from the separatist free Khalistan movement and the Indian government’s reaction thereto. Happily, we also have a strong Gujarati community and smaller communities from other corners of India. What is most positive about the diaspora’s role in the bilateral Canada-India relationship is that, in spite of all the hardships early Punjabi immigrants faced in Canada, including blatant racism and discrimination, the pluralistic nation that has developed within our borders since 1960 has allowed Indo-Canadians to prosper, become active in politics and report back home positively on their country of adoption. However, contemporary India’s interest in Canada, modest at best, relates more to economic links and our access to the US market. Canadian natural resources are attractive to a fast-growing country of 1.2 billion inhabitants, as is our market for services (at which India excels, often at very low cost).
bout: Was Canada wrong to react so negatively to India’s nuclear testing (which prompted Pakistan’s acquisition of the bomb)?
Malone: At the time of India’s nuclear test in 1974, Canada reacted strongly in part because the test was engineered by pirating and adapting Canadian nuclear technology provided to India for other purposes. So Ottawa’s sense of betrayal was well-founded. That said, there was not much thought in Ottawa, or elsewhere in the West, about India’s increasingly cramped geo-strategic position between China which had defeated India in a border war in 1962 and first tested a nuclear weapon in 1964 and Pakistan (where intelligence suggested that research on a nuclear weapons capacity had started, with Chinese help, as early as 1971). Nor did the West find Indira Gandhi’s hard-nosed foreign policy, involving a degree of alignment on Moscow qualified by high-minded rhetoric, very appealing. In any event, by the mid-1980s New Delhi had its own reasons for complaining about what it saw as Ottawa’s complacency in face of the terrorist aspirations and activities of fringe groups within the Indo-Canadian community supporting the cause of an independent Punjab. So the two countries engaged in a prolonged mutual sulk for reasons each felt very strongly about.
bout: Can India become a real regional superpower without first getting subcontinent’s house in order — resolving its conflict with Pakistan and addressing vexing “internal” conflicts like Kashmir?
Malone: De facto, India is reaching beyond its neighbourhood in joining the tables of international influence such as the G-20 (at which no other South Asian nation sits). On the other hand, its military capacities are tied down by internal challenges (Maoists insurgency, separatist movements in its northeast, the unsettled status of Kashmir) and its ability to project power beyond its own immediate region for the moment relies on its doughty navy, the most impressive of its armed forces. In a sense, India is “outgrowing” its region in more ways than one, but this makes neighbours resentful or at least apprehensive. I was repeatedly told in Pakistan, during interviews for the book, that what worries Pakistanis most about India at present is watching it “pull away”. At another level, Indian prime Minister Singh, when asked about possible great power status for
India in the future, dismisses the notion completely as long as the country is unable to lift out of misery its hundreds of millions of ultra-poor.
bout: Longer term, is India’s great future seriously compromised by the threat of climate change and the drying up of rivers that begin in Tibet (experts predict dire consequences by 2050 for India and Pakistan alike)?
Malone: The challenge for India and much of Asia is not so much a shortage of water (during a good monsoon year, it rains as much in Delhi as in London), but rather management of water resources, and on this India’s performance has been very weak. Excessive pumping of ground-water for wasteful agricultural uses, little effort to capture the monsoon’s bounty, and poor management of rivers leads both to dire droughts and water shortages but also to murderous floods, as in Bihar several years ago, and Pakistan over the past two years. Climate change may aggravate the havoc, but none of it is beyond man’s wit to manage. bOUut: If you could steer Canadian policy on India what would be your top priorities?
Malone: First off, over the past ten years or so, and increasingly under the current government, Ottawa has been focusing on India, and so have a number of important Canadian private sector and educational institutions. And India has been responding, for example, at a symbolic level but very impressively, with a cultural and literary Year of India in Canada in 2011. The Indian private sector is increasingly scouring Canada for opportunities. On the other hand, foreign companies, including Canadian ones, tend to find the Indian market both enticing (1.2 billion consumers!) but also scary because of uneven enforcement of laws and regulations, slow judicial processes, widespread corruption and some of the worst infrastructure and highest costs for expatriates in major urban areas in the world. So, while Ottawa has been pressing ahead hard on an umbrella economic agreement with India, and Canadian universities are hosting ever-increasing numbers of Indian students, it is not clear that wider Canadian engagement with India is proceeding quite as energetically as it could or should. Our universities, for example, should not just attract high fee-paying Indian students to their campuses, but also encourage their Canadian students to spend time in India, from which much future global employment will flow. Several of my younger European friends who happen to have Indian experience have done singularly well in the international business world. Likewise, Canadian companies, facing significant and real barriers to rapidly profitable entry to India, should reflect on how well long-standing Canadian companies in India have done — for example, Sun Life, Bombardier, SNC Lavalin and Scotiabank, to name four pillars of the Canadian business establishment well known throughout India.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 26, No. 2 (2011) — Fall/Winter 2011 // Automne/Hiver 2011, pp. 34–35. Read the rest of this issue →
