By JOSÉ LUÍS FIORI*
Everything indicates that India is willing to resolve its regional issues in order to assume an assertive and global position on the international stage.
1.
Indian civilization is as old as, if not older than, Chinese civilization, although its development was more discontinuous and less homogeneous. Its formation took place along the Indus River, and the process of “sedentarization” of its populations began around 5000 BC. Its territory, however, was the object of numerous invasions and occupations by “foreign” peoples.
Around 1500 BC, the region was occupied by Indo-European peoples from the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, when the Vedic Period began. In the year 520 BC, its territory was invaded by Darius, the King of Persia, and remained under Persian rule for 200 years, until the invasion by Alexander the Great, who brought with him the marks of Greek civilization.
All these successive invasions, which continued in the following centuries, only managed to establish themselves peripherally, as military or commercial outposts for a diversified and sophisticated local production that was the ancient work of a population that was culturally and linguistically heterogeneous, but that followed Hinduism, the oldest of all religions, for the most part.
Until the moment when Muslim invasions and conquests began in the 1526th century, coming from Sistan, present-day Iran, and which gave rise to the Mughal Empire, founded by Babur, a descendant of Genghis Khan, and which came to dominate almost the entire Indian subcontinent between 1857 and 1720. This imperial structure lasted until XNUMX, shortly after the death of the last great Mughal emperor, Aurangzeb.
Shortly thereafter, in 1763, the English East India Company imposed its mercantile and tax dominion over the Bengal region and, from there, progressively, over the entire Indian territory, until the forces of the British Empire defeated the Indian rebellion of 1857-58, subjecting India to the imperial government of the British Crown, from 1858 until its independence, on August 15, 1948.
In 1885, the Indian National Congress was founded, the first revolutionary seed of a movement that acquired full maturity in 1930, when Mahatma Gandhi launched his Civil Disobedience Movement, which would culminate in Indian independence and the division of British territories between Pakistan and India, and later, Bangladesh.
After its independence, India adopted an anti-colonialist foreign policy and suffered the immediate effect of the coincidence of its date of independence with the date of the beginning of the Cold War, just before the victory of the Communist Revolution in China. These facts alone placed the Indian territory at the heart of a geopolitical space that was of great importance throughout the second half of the 1979th century, during the Vietnam War, and after the fall of the Shah of Iran and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in XNUMX.
During this period, India fought several border wars, three with Pakistan (1948, 1965 and 1971) and one with China (1962), maintained an open dispute with Bangladesh (1979) regarding the nationality of an island in the Bay of Bengal, and since then has maintained an ongoing dispute with Pakistan over its borders in the Jammu and Kashmir region.
Constrained by the way in which the struggle for independence unfolded, India adopted an unquestionable and active leadership position within the Non-Aligned Movement, which emerged from the Bandung Conference in 1955, supporting an “active neutralism” and an uncompromising defense of the sovereignty and equality of all nations against any type of pressure or interference by the great powers in the internal affairs of other states. It established a very close economic, political and military relationship with the former USSR, which it later maintained with Russia.
2.
India does not, at first glance, present the characteristics of an expansive power, and behaves strategically as a state that has been forced to arm itself to protect and guarantee its security in a region of high instability. Even so, it develops and controls cutting-edge military technology, such as its sophisticated ballistic system and atomic arsenal; it also has one of the best-trained armies in all of Asia.
But it was only after its military defeat by China in 1962 and the first Chinese nuclear explosion in 1964, just before the war with Pakistan in 1965, that India abandoned the “practical idealism” of Nehru’s foreign policy and adopted the Realpolitik of Prime Minister Bahadur Shastri, who authorized the start of the nuclear program in the 1960s.
This was when India reached its maturity, with the nuclear explosions of 1998 and the success of the Agni II ballistic missile in 1999. At that moment, it became an atomic power and defined its new strategy of regional and international insertion, based on the simultaneous affirmation of its new military power.
On the other hand, since its independence, India has adopted a strongly nationalist economic strategy, and today it is the country with the highest economic growth in the world system. Despite its increasingly Asian bias, Indian foreign policy maintains a pragmatic equidistance with respect to the United States, Europe and China, and at one point it was close to becoming an atomic ally of the Americans. More recently, it has once again distanced itself from the United States and its plan to build a nuclear encirclement of China, with the possibility of extending NATO's area of operations to the Indo-Pacific region.
Very recently, in mid-2024, there was a movement towards rapprochement between India and China, the most populous nations on the planet, which together have three billion inhabitants and are already the first and third largest economies in the world, respectively, by purchasing power parity. This rapprochement signals the desire to resolve their border disputes in Kashmir and Arunachal Pradesh, which date back decades and have already led to armed clashes with China, with whom it shares a 3.379 km-long border.
The same has happened with regard to Pakistan, and in both cases the new Indian government seems determined to reassure and stabilize its sphere of influence in South Asia. More than that, India has resisted participating in the US-sponsored “Quadrilateral Security Dialogue,” the QUAD, which also involves Australia and Japan; it maintains close commercial and strategic relations with Russia; it was part of the joint creation of BRICS; and it is a member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.
3.
Everything indicates that India is willing to resolve its regional issues in order to assume an assertive and global position on the international stage, in line with its new demographic and economic dimensions, and with the forecast that, by 2050, it will be the second richest country in the world.
Taking all these facts and factors into account, it seems clear that India has already taken a long-term position, alongside its Asian neighbors, against the QUAD project, and even more so, against the idea of creating a NATO in the Indo-Pacific region. Furthermore, India has been signaling its desire to gradually move away from the monetary-financial system supported by the dollar, especially after the freezing of Russian reserves deposited in American and European banks. This position has been gaining an increasing number of supporters inside and outside Asia, especially in the region that is fueled by the expansionary effect of the Chinese and Indian economies.
This real turning point of Indian foreign policy partly explains the absolutely unusual initiative and surprising move by Prime Minister Narendra, who, after going to Moscow in July, visited Ukraine and Poland in August, proposing to mediate peace negotiations outside Asia, in the heart of Europe, involving, as one of its fundamental parties, Great Britain, its former colonial power.
Thus, India is assuming a position within the Global South analogous to that which it occupied at the Bandung Conference of 1955, and in the formation of the Non-Aligned Movement which during the Cold War opposed what they considered to be new forms of colonialism and neocolonialism of the Great Powers of that period.
But this new/old path for India's foreign policy will not be easy, as was evident from the almost immediate retaliation it suffered following the coup d'état that overthrew its ally, Bangladeshi Prime Minister Shikh Hasina, on August 4, which had the support/intervention of the United States. A forced change of government, which followed the new pattern of US interventions since the 2014 coup d'état in Ukraine, could transform Bangladesh, at any moment, into a new focus of military friction between India and China.
In any case, we will have to follow the next developments to evaluate the behavior of this new India that is proposing to enter the “game of the Great Powers”.
* Jose Luis Fiori He is professor emeritus at UFRJ. Author, among other books, of Global power and the new geopolitics of nations (Boitempo) [https://amzn.to/3RgUPN3]
Originally published in the Economic Bulletin no. 7 of the International Observatory of the XNUMXst Century – NUBEA/UFRJ.
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