So addicted is the Indian power elite to being treated as the representative of an unstoppable rising great power that it finds the recent decline in India’s global stature and influence incomprehensible.
The signs of decline are unmistakable. The ‘India Story’ is no longer the world’s flavour of the month, ‘the Next China’ metaphor has faded from the western media, and the raucous side of Indian politics is being highlighted, including strife and corruption. Added to this is Narendra Modi’s aggressive, contention- and hate-driven bid for power, growing exposure of widespread crime-politics links, and the December 16 rape, which underscore Indian society’s ugly pathologies.
The negative perception is reinforced by the recent economic slowdown, rising balance-of-payments problems, and the steep fall in the rupee vis-à-vis the US dollar. With manufacturing growth shrinking, India is no longer seen as a fast-industrialising nation. Nor is it the preferred destination of foreign direct investment, virtually on a par with China, as it was only a year ago.
The rudest shock, however, comes from India’s embarrassment over its bid to secure one of the 10 non-permanent seats for 2020-21 on the United Nations Security Council from the Asian quota. New Delhi – which has thrown its hat in the ring for a permanent Council seat along with Germany, Japan and Brazil through the G-4 grouping – now finds it hard to get support even for a short two-year term without jeopardising its relationship with Vietnam.
Vietnam has told India, which held a two-year seat until last December, that it should stand down. If India does, Vietnam will support the G-4. Or else, India will face a contest in 2019.
India had celebrated its victory in the 2010 election to the non-permanent seat as a “big day for Indian diplomacy” (the-then foreign minister SM Krishna) and a “monumental” triumph. In reality, India won just one more vote than tiny Colombia despite a furiously energetic campaign in which Krishna spoke to 123 foreign ministers, and India got Kazakhstan to withdraw its candidature.
An India-Vietnam contest would set back their bilateral relations, including strategic-level cooperation. The two see a common adversary in China: India, because of its long-term rivalry with China and its Look East policy, and Vietnam because China makes territorial claims on Hanoi.
Equally fraught would be the next (2020) election, in which Afghanistan wants a non-permanent seat – for the first time ever. India, which seeks influence in Afghanistan after the planned US withdrawal in 2014, will be hard put to deny it a seat. Besides, it would be in India’s own interest to get Afghanistan’s nascent democratic institutions international legitimisation.
When the election for the Asian seat comes up yet again in 2021, the United Arab Emirates will be a candidate. Opposing the UAE, a friendly state where millions of Indians work, would violate the convention that the Council should include an Arab state either from the Africa or the Asia group. India would be loath to violate the convention. Nor will it be easy for India in 2022 to oppose Mongolia, which it has been cultivating strategically with China in mind. In 2023, the likely contender could be Pakistan, which had backed India in the 2010 election.
India will thus find it near-impossible to get back into the Council for at least a decade without a contest. India’s experience in fighting Council elections hasn’t been happy. When it last contested, in 1996, against Japan, it lost humiliatingly – by 142 to 40 votes.
So much for former Indian UN ambassador Hardeep Puri’s earlier boast: “We are entering the Security Council (as a non-permanent member) after a gap of 19 years…we have no intentions of leaving the Security Council…before we complete our two-year term we will be a permanent member…”!
However, the G-4 faced and will continue to face opposition, including from the ‘Coffee Club’ comprising Pakistan, Italy, Spain, South Korea, Mexico and others. China is especially allergic to Japan’s permanent Council bid and will probably resist India’s till the very end. So support for a permanent seat for India from the US, France, Britain and Russia will not ensure the absence of a veto by all the Permanent Five members.
India’s Security Council bid is driven by a search for (false) prestige, not a transformative universal agenda. While on the Council in 2011-12, India offered no forward-looking perspective, or resistance to the dominant powers. India failed to prevent the obnoxious ‘responsibility to protect’ paragraph enabling attacks on Libya, with disastrous consequences. India by and large tailed the US, and failed to raise major issues such as reform of the international financial institutions, solutions to the global economic crisis, and north-south inequalities.
To boost its power, India has joined numerous alliances and regional groupings, including Basic (Brazil, South Africa, India and China) in the climate negotiations, Ibsa (India, Brazil, South Africa) for South-South regional cooperation, and Brics (Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa), not to mention the Asean Regional Forum and many others.
These ‘force multipliers’ haven’t performed to expectation. Basic was set up mainly to ward off pressure for climate actions from the developed countries most responsible for causing climate change, but its creation substantially weakened the developing-country Group-of-77, of which India has been a leading member.
At the Durban climate conference (2011), both the developed countries and many poor developing countries ganged up against Basic. It conceded far too much. Since then, South Africa has broken ranks with Basic on the legal form of a new climate agreement to be negotiated by 2015.
Brics comprises five of the world’s biggest, fastest-growing economies, with over 40 percent of its population, 27 percent of its purchasing-power GDP, 15 percent of trade and two-fifths of global foreign currency reserves. But it has failed to translate its potential into a thoroughgoing reform of the global economy.
Take the global Great Recession. Instead of challenging neoliberalism, and demanding a radical change in the global financial system, Brics allowed the west to dictate (non)-solutions to the crisis, which perpetuate corporate dominance, speculation and inequality, and impose harsh ‘austerity’ upon working people.
During the World Bank ‘voice reform’ debate (2010), ostensibly to promote voting-power ‘parity’ between developing and developed countries, Brics went along with cosmetic changes. The low-income countries’ vote-share in the bank only rose from 34.67 to 38.38 percent. The rich still corner over 60 percent of the vote. Post-‘reform’, China’s share (3.23 percent) remains smaller than France or Britain’s (4.20), and Brazil’s lower than the Netherlands’.
This partly explains the growing disenchantment with India among concerned citizens and underprivileged people. India still can play a worthy global role if it returns to the agenda of fighting for a just and equal economic and political world order, becomes an advocate-campaigner for the world’s subjugated and dispossessed people, upholds non-military resolution of disputes, and champions a world free of mass-destruction weapons.
But this means giving up the addiction to power projection by military means, abandoning delusions about India’s assured place at the world’s High Table, improving relations with the neighbours as a high priority, and articulating a humane, compassionate global vision. But can India’s elite, which does just the opposite domestically, invest the country’s global power with such universal purpose?
The writer, a former newspaper editor, is a researcher and rights activist based in Delhi.
Email: prafulbidwai1@yahoo.co.in
Praful Bidwai, "False prestige," The News. 2013-10-19.Keywords: Political science , Political issues , United Nations , Security Council , Economic crisis , Diplomacy , Corruption , Security , Elections , Narendra Modi , Vietnam , China , Afghanistan , GDP