China-India Ties: Modi and the Renewal of Defence of India

India has a new government. It bears a striking similarity to the previous government. After a bruising election campaign, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s BJP-led National Democratic Alliance coalition was returned to the Lok Sabha on May 23 with an even larger majority. It is a rare moment in Indian electoral history for a sitting, full-term government, as well as a single governing party, to be returned to office with an enlarged mandate. The great Jawaharlal Nehru would have been proud of this mandate. The bitter polemics exchanged during the campaign notwithstanding, the BJP deserves to savor this famous victory.

The new government will have a new vision and policy on national security. That too will bear resemblance to the vision and policy of the previous government.

Doklam Signal

In summer 2017, on the Doklam plateau, the Modi government militarily engaged China for the first time from the soil of a friendly partner country (Bhutan) to uphold the latter’s sovereignty claim to a disputed patch of territory. In February 2019, the Modi government militarily crossed the recognised international border in peacetime for the first time to conduct a precision strike inside undisputed Pakistani territory. Both episodes were not without risk. In the case of the former, it is worthwhile to note that even the mighty US military does not extend defence obligations to disputed territories that its allies do not exercise effective control over – let alone intervene on their behalf, and that too against an adversary of the magnitude of China. Equally, with regard to the latter, escalation risk in the sub-continent’s nuclearised environment is not one that should be pursued lightly.

Bipartisan Consensus

More pertinently, however, both episodes were distinctive innovations introduced by the Modi government within the practice of India’s national security and regional deterrence strategy. This conceptual and practical broadening of policy will probably go down as the first Modi government’s foremost contribution to India’s national security. Going forward, the muscular projection of forthright deterrent resolve – even as it is situated within the broader framework of India’s rules-based, status quo-ist approach to global and regional geopolitics, will continue to animate the new Modi government’s national security policy. A new vision and policy for national security will continue in substantial part to resemble the old. And in doing so, it will maintain continuity with the bipartisan consensus that has prevailed across two decades of post-Cold War Indian diplomatic and national security strategy.

Vajpayee’s Recalibration

The post-Cold War origins of India’s security strategy can be traced back to the dynamic political and philosophical recalibration instituted under the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government at the turn of the 21st century. That recalibration had two fundamental components: first, India would unapologetically build its own autonomous strength and deterrent capabilities. The defence of India was non-negotiable and non-contractable. Second, that in the course of consolidating its autonomous deterrent strength, India would also seek out and simultaneously deepen strategic ties with each of the major power center in the international system. Non-alignment would be forsaken for multi-alignment, even as the kernel of non-alignment – the ability to judge and act on one’s own judgment on the basis of enlightened self-interest – would be preserved. As an adjunct, India’s diplomatic strategy would also no longer be wedded to – and be bogged down by – high principle. The calibration between principle and power would be re-worked in the latter’s favour to ensure a healthier balance between the two.

The key challenge going forward within this scheme of things, then, was to ensure that no one set of relations with a major power negatively impacted – and impeded – that with another power. India though did not have to choose sides. The gravitational pull of its swelling geo-strategic power would ensure that global powers would willingly gravitate to its orbit – in turn, ensuring an upward spiral of improving relations with all the major powers and a wider room of manoeuver for Indian diplomacy. For the most part, this eloquent vision of national security has been realised over the past two decades and the Modi government’s national security policy continues to be framed with the praxis of this strategic conception.
Modi’s Canvas

As the second Modi government gets down to charting a national security policy for the next half-decade ahead, it should contemplate a couple of enhancements at the sub-continental, regional, and major power relations level.

In South Asia, the overriding feature of the region’s geopolitics over the next 5 years will be the drawdown and withdrawal of almost all, if not all, US troops from Afghanistan. Most of India’s key bottom lines in that country – that the Afghan peace and reconciliation process and outcomes be Afghan-led and Afghan-owned (meaning the Ghani government in Kabul must be included and should be able to exercise a veto within the process); the political and constitutional structure of Afghanistan, including its standing as a ‘republic’ should be maintained; fundamental political and civil rights of citizens, including woman’s, ethnic and religious minorities’ rights, should be protected; and the duly-elected Ghani government should not be forced to enter into an interim power-sharing arrangement with the Taliban – are not likely to be honoured.

Surveying the Af-Pak Salient

New Delhi must ensure however that regardless of how the Af-Pak endgame plays out, Afghan soil is never again allowed to serve as an organising base for terrorist and separatist elements to hurt India. And to solidify deterrence in this regard, New Delhi must endow itself with the means, both kinetic and intelligence-based, to conduct non-military medium-range and stand-off range precision strikes on rural and urban targets in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Basic Exchange and Cooperation Agreement (BECA) on geo-spatial data sharing, which is currently being negotiated with Washington, must not hamstring this capability by way of secret prohibitory clauses.

Tit For Tat With China

On the eastern front meantime, New Delhi must rapidly scale up its capacity to mobilise a defensive wall in the face of a Chinese incursion at times of elevated bilateral tension while simultaneously being able to deploy the core nucleus of a rapid reaction force at points along the disputed frontier where India enjoys terrain advantages. China’s military incursions in the Himalayan borderlands are essentially statements of brinkmanship to convey political displeasure; they are not a threat of intent to militarily absorb territory. Forty-four years without a shot being fired in anger across the frontier should confirm this thesis. India must learn to play this game more astutely and be able to pay back in similar coin.

Rule Based

For the Indo-Pacific arena, Prime Minister Narendra Modi laid out an evocative vision of India’s role in his keynote address at the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore last year. India will be an enabling power, seeking to establish a loose concert of common principles and best practices in the region’s international relations such that power is exercised in a spirit of self-restraint by its dominant entities. India will be a law-abiding power, seeking to entrench respect for international law on land, air and sea such that a new regional order can be constructed by a sense of obligation to rules rather than the creeping assertion of power. India will be a pluralistic power, facilitating the involvement of the widest spectrum of Asia’s stakeholders in the region’s endeavours, including within flexible minilateral formats that are neither exclusive ‘club[s] of limited members’ nor ‘alliances of containment’. And India will be a stabilising power, prepared to deploy its geopolitical weight to craft an equitable ‘balance of interests’ within the fast-shifting Indo-Pacific equilibrium.

Political Economy

India’s deeds, however, have fallen short of its words. In the political economy realm, India remains, as yet, only superficially connected to the Asia-Pacific’s growing economic and financial regionalism and entirely disconnected from the region-wide, vertically-integrated value chains that have dynamically linked the region’s destiny with final markets in the West. A trilateral trade format involving Japanese design inputs, Indian production-shared light manufacturing, and American final goods consumption could propel a formidable trilateral geo-political co-dependency that no amount of trilateral Malabar series naval drills in the Indian Ocean can replicate. Prime Minister Modi must make sub-regional and regional cross-border connectivity and liberalisation – interestingly an early talking point during his first term but which later faded away – an unyielding priority of his new government.

Woo Indonesia

Over and above this, India must deepen and inject content in its relations with Indonesia. As a (‘swing State’ in the global system but a ‘leading power’ in the Indo-Pacific, India more than most other states should be instinctively able to grasp and embrace Indonesia’s aspiration to become the Indo-Pacific’s ‘swing State’. Far from gravitating towards Jakarta’s orbit as a willing suitor however, India’s economic, political, maritime and strategic links remain tenuous at best and stand-offish at worst. Perhaps, New Delhi could sponsor Indonesian’s entry within the BRICS grouping. Whatever form it might take, at the end of the day, without a qualitatively more imaginative and engaged Indonesia and ASEAN strategy, New Delhi risks consigning – and limiting – itself to the role of naval doorman of Asia.

Finally, at the level of major power relations, India’s ties with the US particularly in the defence sector remain well-anchored and institutionalised. This political and bureaucratic deepening must continue. The same cannot be said of ties with China, which are overly dependent on Head of State / Government-level engagementfor its stable management. The maritime theater has emerged of late too as a new arena of contestation; going forward, Mr. Modi has the opportunity to convert it into an arena of cooperation.

Sino-Indian Rivalry

It is often-times casually observed that China is determined to become a full-fledged strategic player in the Indian Ocean Region (IOR) in order to protect its sea-borne trade. But what is the evidence for this claim? Beijing does not need to challenge New Delhi in the IOR to protect its sea-borne trade. No major power, after all, has mounted a sustained and economically significant campaign to interdict the maritime trade of another major power since the 18th century — except in a general war. A threat of interdiction that is only as good as its non-activation is good theatre but poor policy. And if the breakout of an armed contingency at sea was ever to arise, it would be the result – not the cause – of Sino-Indian strategic rivalry. Given the arduous task for Beijing to project superior naval power west of Sumatra (just as it is for New Delhi east of Sumatra), the new Modi government should give thought to drawing up a “maritime peace and tranquility” agreement with China that is modelled on lines analogous to the India-China land boundary agreement of September 1993. In time, as a modicum of trust and goodwill at sea is restored, detailed protocols of good neighborliness in the Indian Ocean realm could be drawn-up – again, akin to the Confidence-Building Measures agreement of 1996 pertaining to the Line of Actual Control.

More philosophically, Prime Minister Modi must persevere in turning China, a state that his countrymen have learnt to fear, into a reliable partner on the basis of shared interests and regional tradition, and the United States, a state that his countrymen have grown to trust, as a next-to-last resort to resist revisionist challenges to the Indo-Pacific’s balance of power.

The second Modi government takes its oath of office at a time of turbulence in India’s extended neighbourhood and transition in the international system.To the country’s west, a fratricidal Sunni-Shia conflict that resembles the European wars of religion of the 16th and 17th century is lamentably underway. To the country’s east, the incumbent superpower and the emerging superpower are engaged in a high-stakes, great power game of maritime contestation. At this frangible moment, India must chart a confident path forward – even as it threads a fine balance among the contending parties. Unassailable autonomous deterrent strength, matched with astute diplomacy that preserves the widest range of strategic manoeuver, are the foremost instruments in India’s national security toolkit, and the two must continue to govern the day.