Pro-US strategy pushing India into trouble

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi adopted a hawkish China strategy after he got re-elected to a second term in office and appointed Subrahmanyam Jaishankar as external affairs minister in May 2019. The shift in India's China policy was evident long before the Ladakh incident, and the unfortunate death of 20 Indian servicemen hastened the process. Undoubtedly, Jaishankar is the architect of India's new China policy.

India does not have a publicly available China policy, per se. However, the changing contours of its policy toward China appeared last year in two separate papers. These documents were Jaishankar's address at the Atlantic Council on October 1, 2019, and his remarks at the fourth Ramnath Goyenka Lecture on November 14. These two lectures provided a framework for how India's China strategy could change during Modi's second term in office.

At the Atlantic Council, an elite foreign-relations elite club that was created to promote trans-Atlantic understanding and galvanize US supremacy in the world, Jaishankar outlined how India and the US could move forward by upholding "democracy" and "rule of law," in his view superiors in "moral virtue" to any other system of governance.

Similarly, Jaishankar spoke on the topic "Beyond the Delhi Dogma: Indian Foreign Policy in a Changing World" at the fourth Ramnath Goyenka Lecture, a gathering of diplomats, strategists, foreign-policy experts, academia and journalists. The crux of his chat was that India's foreign policy until 2014 was dogmatic because it didn't look toward "the West" to a full extent.

By reviewing these documents and observing India's strategy on China, we see than Jaishankar looks like a good pathologist but a bad physician. He is a good pathologist in the sense that he diagnosed India's strategic "disorder" correctly on China policy but a bad physician because he prescribed bad and unaffordable remedies. He also suggested the last treatment at first.

In the diagnostic perspective, first, Jaishankar seemed mindful of the "Goldilocks Principle" because he categorically pronounced it in his Atlantic Council speech. The Goldilocks Principle is that the superpowers neither allow their possible rivals to grow too strong nor allow them to become too weak. The incumbent superpower always tries to keep the aspirant superpower in the middle, meaning neither strong nor weak.

He was right, in his address to the Atlantic Council, that a weak India is neither in the interest of "the West" nor of China. For instance, the West helped India after it was weakened by its defeat in the 1962 Sino-Indian war. But the West opposed Indian when it claimed South Asian prominence by playing a crucial role in Bangladeshi independence in 1971. Jaishankar recognized that superpowers play a pivotal role in the expansion and contraction of any country's strength.

Second, he rightly said that risk-taking is an inherent aspect of strategy, diplomacy, and policymaking as it is in investment management. India had been suffering from a risk-averting or low-risk foreign policy. As a result, it had been getting few rewards.

Bad physician

In prescribing the remedy to these Indian disorders, Jaishankar gives the impression of a bad physician. If he invests all his assets in a single investment scheme, he is not taking a risk but is gambling, which could turn out to be a strategic blunder. He is committing such a blunder by putting all his eggs in the American basket.

He seems unaware of the portfolio-management theory, which advocates diversification to minimize risk. This theory is equally valid as a risk-taking approach in diplomacy. There is no guarantee that the West will provide preferential market access to India for its hawkish China stand for it to achieve its goal of becoming a $10 trillion economy by 2030.

Participation in the US-led alliance puts India at risk on several fronts. First, its strategic autonomy will be at unprecedented risk. For example, India has been maintaining and strengthening its diplomatic, economic, military, and trade ties with Iran and Russia, the United States' adversaries. India also will not able to reverse its relationship with China. Yet India needs to give up its relations with these countries for the sake of the US alliance - none of whose members will solve India's border problem beyond lip service.

Second, India currently considers itself the regional leader in South Asia and a security guarantor in the Indian Ocean Rim. However, India is backed by none of the South Asian countries, except its protectorate Bhutan. India will also be confined as a partner of the US-led alliance in the Indian Ocean Rim.