Southern Branch of a Four-petalled Lotus
There is a long and distinguished tradition of literary forays by Indian foreign secretaries. The first holder of that office, K.P.S. Menon, wrote over a dozen works either side of his tenure. The longest serving occupant, Subimal Dutt, wrote an important memoir covering the run-up to the 1962 war. Y.D. Gundevia, Rajeshwar Dayal, T.N. Kaul, M.K. Rasgotra and J.N. Dixit all followed suit. The most recent example, Shivshankar Menon’s slim but sharp volume, Choices: Inside the Making of India’s Foreign Policy, published last year, marked a shift from the chronological to the analytical. Menon largely eschewed the traditional format of the memoir, instead exploring a handful of key junctures in Indian foreign policy during his time as a diplomat.
Shyam Saran, who immediately preceded Menon, and later served as Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s special envoy for the Indo-US nuclear negotiations, has taken this concept further in his new book, How India Sees the World. Those in pursuit of anecdotes will find slim pickings. To be sure, there are a few well-aimed swipes at former National Security Advisor M.K. Narayanan, both for his role in blocking a deal with Pakistan on Siachen and his apparently jealous turf war on nuclear policy. There is also some remarkable gossip from the bowels of the Copenhagen climate change summit in 2009, including a story of China’s chief negotiator publicly haranguing his prime minister.
But mostly, Saran is regrettably discreet. His own diplomatic role is explored most fully in a series of chapters of traditional format that cover Indo-US talks on civil nuclear cooperation, India’s subsequent pursuit of a waiver from the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group, and those “difficult, unpleasant and acrimonious” talks in Copenhagen. Other important episodes are covered in chapters on Pakistan, China and Nepal. Yet the more ambitious part of How India Sees the World is its effort to demonstrate that India’s behaviour flows from an ancient heritage of statecraft.
Saran’s starting point is the cosmology of the Mahabharata, which locates India as the southern branch of a four-petalled lotus. He infers two things from this. One is that India “is only one among the lotus petals that make up our universe”—quite the opposite of China’s “inherently hierarchical” view of an advanced Han core, above less civilised supplicants. “India will never have a middle Kingdom complex,” insists Saran. “It accepts a world in which there are other dvipas or islands with their own characteristics and values.” Another implication is that the Indian subcontinent and its maritime space are a “single, interconnected geopolitical and geoeconomic unit”. This unity was fractured in 1947, sundering India from its natural connections to the Persian Gulf, Central and Southeast Asia. “There is a constant effort, even if only at the subconscious level,” argues Saran, “to rise above the political divisions in the subcontinent so that the ancient geography becomes whole again.” These two themes—India’s historically rooted, deep-seated attachment to a multipolar world, and the striving to recreate the “sacred geography” of the subcontinent—are important threads that run throughout the work.
There are, of course, different ways to pursue these goals. India could seek regional unity through bending small neighbours to its will, in a coercive Pax Indica. But Saran, with his intimate experience of India’s travails in Nepal, is clear that this would be a mistake. Alluding to Manmohan Singh’s memorable formulation—“while we cannot change borders, we can make them irrelevant”—Saran instead urges India to create a “web of interdependencies”, with the grand—perhaps grandiose?—aim of a “shared regional identity”. (It is a pity that the obvious parallels with Europe’s post-war trajectory go unexplored.)
Saran is impassioned, even radical, on this subject.
He goes as far as to accuse India of a “colonial” mindset, treating borders as defensive walls rather than transmission belts. Despite the Modi government’s Neighbourhood First initiative, Saran laments the slow progress. He points out that while India has sought trade transit rights through Pakistan and Bangladesh, its own policies are far from generous. Absurdly, it takes over one month to move a container from New Delhi to Dhaka, whereas a direct cargo rail service could do it in just five days. He urges New Delhi to loosen the rules on border trade, to grant its neighbours ‘national treatment’ on Indian roads, railways and ports, and to relax its “extremely stringent” visa policy to enlarge the flow of scholars, journalists, civil society representatives and artists.
Saran also points to “systemic” issues with India’s delivery systems. He warns that the number of IFS officers is still grossly inadequate, though he puts the figure at 900 rather than the more worrying 770 reported last year, and complains that a proposed Development Cooperation Agency was crushed by “the perennial inter-ministerial turf war”, resulting in an enfeebled body in its place.
The consequences of all this are clear. “Our engagement… tends to be episodic and crisisdriven, and not backed by the human and material resources that our neighbours deserve”. The fifteen-year-old saga of India’s involvement with Iran’s port of Chabahar is not mentioned, but there could be no better illustration of the gap between Indian rhetoric and delivery on the ground. This diagnosis informs Saran’s measured view of China’s sweeping Belt and
Road Initiative (BRI). He is clear that the connectivity scheme is an instrument of Chinese hegemony, threatening the multipolar balance that India seeks. But he argues that merely opposing China’s presence would be to miss the point: “I have always held that if you leave empty spaces behind someone else will walk in.”
More broadly, How India Sees the World is buttressed by a commanding grasp of China’s language, culture and history. Saran’s musings on the differences between China’s visual culture, of ideograms and India’s aural culture, of the chanted mantra, flowers into a broader discussion of the central role of written history in Chinese political discourse, “artfully coded in language that lends itself easily to ambiguity and innuendo”—often tragically misunderstood by Indians.
The book takes the reader authoritatively through the intricacies of the Sino-Indian border dispute. The most important point that emerges is Saran’s belief that the only politically acceptable solution in India would be “LACplus”, involving India’s retention of its territory in the east (Arunachal Pradesh) and China handing over some of the territory it holds in the west (Aksai Chin). If he is correct, the prospects for resolution are very low. Saran also cautions that without the restraining force of the present Dalai Lama, India “would find it increasingly difficult to control militancy in the Tibetan community”. This would inject further poison into an increasingly rancorous post-Doklam relationship.
But on the question of how India should respond, Saran treads delicately. “So long as India refrains from becoming a member of an anti-China military alliance,” he counsels, “China has more to gain by increasing its engagement with India than by confronting it.” He even warns of “possible collusion” between Washington and Beijing, “even in the changed environment of India–US relations.” Ultimately, though, this doesn’t prevent him from urging “closer relations” with the US, Japan, Vietnam and Australia, and even a “countervailing coalition”. In the present environment, with the trilateral US-IndiaJapan Malabar naval exercises growing and India taking a more aggressive stance on the South China Sea, it is hard not to read this as an endorsement of the Modi government’s forward-leaning approach. The question is how far India can go before China believes a de facto alliance has taken shape. St Augustine comes to mind, here: ‘grant me chastity and continence, but not yet’.
How India Sees the World is an impressive disquisition on foreign policy, but it is more than this. It is also a liberal, humane and far-sighted perspective on India’s place in the world many decades into the future. Saran gives Kautilya and Kissinger their due. But he urges that India take an “expansive Ashokan approach”, paying much more attention to the cultural and ecological dimensions of grand strategy. Saran concludes with an unmistakable political barb. “How Indians relate to one another influences how the country handles interstate relations. A shrinking vision at home cannot sustain an expansive vision abroad.”
Saran’s book attempts to demonstrate that India’s behaviour flows from an ancient heritage of statecraft