Vladimir Putin has few allies in his war against Ukraine. The democracies of East Asia, Europe and North America are against him, and have imposed unprecedented economic sanctions. Almost the entire rest of the world has condemned the invasion.
A few countries are reluctant, or have outright refused, to take a stand. I asked the Atlantic Sentinel‘s China, India, Israel and South America experts to explain why. (more…)
Indian president Pranab Mukherjee was in Moscow this weekend to join the grand parade marking the seventieth anniversary of the Allied victory over Nazi Germany in the Second World War. This high-profile visit was both timely and significant. India demonstrated a camaraderie with Russia at a time when most Western leaders boycotted Vladimir Putin on account of what they consider his aggressive, destabilizing policies toward Ukraine.
Since the end of the Cold War, when India, despite professing nonalignment, leaned more toward the Soviet Union, the country has gradually shaken off its ideological inhibitions in favor of better relations with the United States. The last two decades have witnessed a cooling in Indo-Russian relations. From India’s point of view, there is no downgrading of its traditional ties with Russia and there are significant overlapping interests that bind the two countries regionally as well globally. But Russia’s inability to alleviate India’s security challenges vis-à-vis China and Pakistan has been one of the crucial factors in moving the latter closer toward the United States. (more…)
American president Barack Obama’s recent visit to India supposedly saw the conclusion of some far-reaching agreements, including on defense cooperation, specifically missile defense, technology transfer and the operationalization of the dormant nuclear agreement Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush, negotiated with India in 2005.
All of this cements the image of India’s new prime minister, Narendra Modi, of being both a strategic thinker and a doer.
But this is at the political level. At the operational level, things are controlled by a bureaucracy that remains deeply anti-American and is ingrained in leftist nonaligned thought. It may well fail to implement or even block the implementation of the latest agreements.
The clearest sign of the Indian bureaucracy’s ingrained anti-Americanism came from the visible euphoria of officials who were part of the negotiations. This in spite of the fact that no public announcements were made. (more…)
There is an expression in Japan: kumo o tsukamuyou. It translates roughly into “like grasping a cloud.” We might call it “wishful thinking.” The proverb springs to mind when reading Japan’s former defense minister Yuriko Koike’s recent commentary.
In it, Koike presents her perspective of the challenges Japan has to face in East Asia. She believes these challenges are easy to enumerate for they all depend on one factor alone: liberal democracy. Those closest to it are under pressure by those farthest from it. China, Russia and North Korea are problems, Japan, the United States and their allies are the solution.
Koike’s is an ideal world in which the leader of the world’s biggest democracy could only possibly choose to ally with likeminded democratic powers and thus India’s new prime minister, Narendra Modi, is dutifully expected by Koike to team up with the alliance being formed to contain China’s assertiveness in the East and South China Seas.
Yuriko Koike, though, might have another thing coming. Not only is Modi not the obvious ally she believes him to be; the government in Tokyo itself may very well have other plans. (more…)
After a decade in power, India’s Congress party appears to have lost both the ability and the will to push through the reforms the country needs to grow and provide jobs for the millions of young Indians who are joining the labor market each year.
The only alternative in the elections that start on Monday is Narendra Modi, the conservative Bharatiya Janata Party’s prime ministerial candidate. (more…)
Named as one of Bloomberg Markets’ fifty most influential people in its upcoming October issue, Raghuram Rajan has been much more than a mere professor of economics over the course of the past decade. One part public intellectual, one part policymaker and perhaps the most famous Cassandra of the global financial crisis, he is widely considered to be among the world’s preeminent thinkers on economic matters. Yet few would envy Rajan today as he steps into the middle of his country’s growing financial maelstrom as governor of the Reserve Bank of India,
While nearly all emerging markets have suffered from capital flight in anticipation of the American Federal Reserve’s return to tighter monetary policy — including the winding down of its quantitative easing program — India has been especially hard hit. Its economy is suffering from multiple woes: a rupee diminishing in value every week and mired in inflation, uncontrolled budget deficits and subsidy programs and the world’s second largest current account deficit. (more…)
India’s recent decision to raise a mountain strike corps along the border with China has raised arguments over the strategic orientation the country is supposed to have in years to come.
Although the operational details of the proposed mountain corps, which involves enhancing India’s third and fourth-generation warfare capabilities, are yet to be revealed, what’s clear is that the unit will contain up to 50,000 soldiers and be headquartered at Panagarh in West Bengal. This will mark a deviation from India’s existing continental offensive strategic orientation which is primarily focused on Pakistan. It will also mark a shift in orientation toward China from defensive to proactive. (more…)
After a disastrous election defeat and a stint as absentee leader of the opposition, Lal Krishna Advani finally resigned from India’s opposition conservative party on Monday at the culmination of its national conference held in Goa. That conference was meant to sew up the final minutiae of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s electoral strategy for next year’s general election. The Indian press labeled the resignation as some kind of major churning being set in motion.
Ostensibly this churn is a result of the meteoric rise of Narendra Modi, the supposedly divisive chief minister of Gujarat state. Advani, as the story goes, believed Modi’s divisiveness to be detrimental to the party’s electoral prospects. The reality is that Advani, like most Indian politicians, used identity politics to further his own career. This had little to do with inclusiveness and everything to do with an internal power struggle. (more…)
India reaffirmed on Saturday its willingness to develop Iran’s Port of Chabahar during the seventeenth meeting of the India-Iran Joint Commission in Tehran. With an initial investment pledge of some $100 million, the move further strengthens the emerging partnership between the two countries in Afghanistan.
The Chabahar port is critical to India’s Afghanistan policy. In the absence of direct physical access to the country and a hostile Pakistan denying Indian goods transit, the Iranian harbor is the most viable access point India has to Afghanistan and the rest of Central Asia. (more…)
In the Himalayas, two great powers are blaming each other for stirring tension. India says Chinese troops crossed the Line of Actual Control, the de facto border there. China claims it was merely responding to earlier intrusions carried out by Indian border guards. We don’t know who is speaking the truth. But “calculated” political tension has emerged.
The root of the Sino-Indian border dispute lies in the 1914 Simla Accord, signed by India’s British rulers and demarcating the border with Tibet. This “McMahon Line,” named after India’s foreign secretary at the time, is recognized by India but disputed by China which insists that Tibet was not a sovereign power. China invaded and conquered Tibet in 1950. (more…)
As usual, after the military tension at Line of Control in Jammu and Kashmir earlier this month, India and Pakistan have reengaged in a verbal spat.
The first causalities of the recent tension were senior citizens from Pakistan who wanted to pay a visit to India. Their visa request was put on “hold,” which in pragmatic terms means denied by the government of India.
The second victims were Pakistani hockey players who were in India for games. They were sent back to their country due to ruckus created by right-wing fringe elements during the opening ceremony of a tournament in Mumbai.
The third mistake was committed by Pakistan’s interior minister Rehman Malik who suggested that India should provide better security for its famous film star Shahrukh Khan who was invited to Pakistan by a known terrorist. “We are capable of looking at the security of our own citizens,” said India’s home secretary, Raj Kumar Singh, in response. “Let him worry about his own.” (more…)
In modern international relations, states are expected to act rationally and responsibly. Looking into the behavior of South Asia’s great powers, however, it can hardly be said that the two act rationally and certainly not responsibly.
The region is in turmoil. The United States are preparing to withdraw from Afghanistan in 2014. The Taliban are hoping to return to power there. But instead of trying to meet those challenges, India and Pakistan were at it again in the disputed region of Jammu and Kashmir.
The arguments are familiar. Pakistan wants the United Nations to look into an alleged breach of the ceasefire agreement. India does not. While the present standoff may not lead to another war, it does affect the pace of bilateral engagement between the two countries.
Trying to lay responsibility for the recent fray is like asking which came first, the chicken or the egg? Certainly on both sides of the border there are stakeholders who benefit from perpetuating the enmity between the two nations. As happened in the past, whenever there was a chance of engagement or a peace deal, some untoward incident derailed the frontier. (more…)
In a democracy, charisma and leadership are often overstated. Yet no other form of government needs leadership as much as democracy.
In this sense, India can offer a curious case. Despite having so many regional satraps with mass following, very few have been able to project their clout at the national level. Moreover, one regional satrap is not unusually viewed with suspicion by another so that the general consensus is to have somebody with no mass following at all. Incumbent prime minister Manmohan Singh is a perfect example of this.
Gujarat’s chief minister Narendra Modi defies the rule. The conservative politician has a mass following as well as national appeal. As his state votes in assembly elections next week, Modi’s future will be decades. If he leads the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party to victory once more, he could emerge as the party’s prime ministerial candidate in the next general election. (more…)
Afghan president Hamid Karzai reiterated the importance of India’s assistance for his country during his visit to New Delhi this month. He urged the country, and in particular its private sector, to further increase its investment in Afghanistan. The importance of Indian engagement in Afghanistan has been acknowledged by the Americans as well who are pushing India to step up its involvement in Afghanistan post 2014, especially in the security realm.
There is no doubt that India has played a major role in the reconstruction of Afghanistan since 2001. Having contributed close to $2 billion in aid over the past decade, India is the fifth largest donor nation to Afghanistan.
Although India has committed to increase its involvement in Afghanistan, there are some major limitations to its engagement that need to be highlighted. (more…)
There is a popular Marxist axiom that says history repeats itself. That may be the case in many social sciences but a challenging proposition in international relations because of the constant changes that take place in the structure of the world system.
Many analysts consider the future of Sino-Indian relations through the prism of the Marxist theory. Foreign policy hawks and nationalists in both countries maintain that the two rising powers will reengage in war at some point. On the other hand, there are liberals and supposedly pacifists who do not buy this argument and claim that the two Asian giants will rise peacefully.
The debate has raged since the mid 1990s when both China and India started showing high economic growth. Fifty years after the two went to war, questions about the future Sino-Indian relationship are increasingly relevant. Hence the war itself is subject to intense historical scrutiny.
Many theories, indeed some conspiracy theories, have emerged into the reasons of the 1962 conflict. Almost all of them point to the border dispute as the war’s impetus. But that was rather an excuse than a cause.
Chinese ambitions of regional hegemony reemerged after the Communist Party had firmly established itself in Beijing. Indonesia, Japan and Malaysia were seen as hurdles to such a position but not an outright challenge. India, due to its sheer size and political clout, was. To claim a leadership position in Asia, China had to check India’s own aspirations through political or military means.
China’s unilateral ceasefire declaration without putting up serious terms or conditions suggests that its only wish indeed was to remind India of its power. Secondly, there was the clash of personalities between India’s prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, who saw himself as the leader of the Nonaligned Movement, and China’s Mao Zedong, who contested for the leadership of the communist bloc. Mao’s willingness to go to war may at least in part have stemmed from his desire to degrade Nehru’s status on the world stage.
China and India reestablished diplomatic relations in the late 1970s. Trade has since increased between them. By 2015, the volume of Sino-Indian commerce is expected to top $100 billion per year.
Yet all is not well. Despite engagement for more than two decades, the two nations have yet to resolve their border disputes. They have also, intermittently, engaged in spats over political issues.
The present combination of cooperative economic engagement and political instability explains why questions over the future of Sino-Indian relations remain relevant. In the near term, economic necessity will preserve the cooperation that is seen in that sphere but even if another war seems unlikely, unresolved political disputes continue to frustrate a truly “peaceful rise” of both nations.
