The Role of India in the World Today

On the 6th of October 2022, INCIPE held a new digital meeting entitled The Role of India in the World Today. The event was presented by the secretary general of INCIPE and ambassador of Spain, Manuel Alabart. After the presentation, a round of questions was moderated by the director of INCIPE, Vicente Garrido, which addressed issues such as: the role of the superpower in Eurasia, and especially the Indo-Pacific; in the current crisis in Ukraine and within the Sino-American confrontation.

Ambassador José María Ridao began his presentation with a brief reflection on the complexity of India, this being understood as an amplitude of phenomena and realities; not as irrationalism. To get closer to the country, Ridao stresses the importance of understanding the persistence of the traces of colonialism, both the plundering of resources and especially the European ideological worldview.

James Mill’s work The History of British India will permeate the national and international spheres with his idea of splitting the country into two identity divergent nations: Hindus and Muslims. Implicit in this is the transfer of a purely geographical concept and theological (Hindu) umbrella to a single creed, discarding the plurality of religions that initially covered the concept. It also implants a mistaken image of Muslim pretension to legitimize political power, to which, however, most of the creeds of the Hindu umbrella did not aspire. The enormous plurality of beliefs and castes pushed Gandhi to find a unifying discourse against colonial power, protecting the most marginalized, the Untouchables, as the fifth caste next to the traditional four. However, this theological and political revision would not accept the Muslim creed, which, together with the idea of the division of nations already mentioned, paved the way for the creation of Pakistan.

José María Ridao insists that the deep wound of the partition, still open, cannot be explained without the figure of Nehru, who, distinguishing himself from other colonial peoples, linked the anti-colonial struggle with the democratic and constitutional claim. Since 1947, and despite the federal and central rule of the Congress (or INC), the erosion of the party and its constitutional proposal paved the way to Hindutva or Hindu nationalism, opposed to the Muslim nation. The irremediable erosion of the system led  in 2014 to the revitalization of the proposal with the victory of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), led by Nahrendra Modi.

Ridao underscores how Nehru’s constitutional rethinking permeated the country’s foreign policy through the Non-Aligned movement during the Cold War. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union and a transformed international panorama, India required a new positioning; remaining in an analytical limbo until a new policy was defined with the arrival of Subrahmanyam Jaishankar to the foreign ministry. Reformulating Nehru’s non-alignment policy, Jaishankar promoted polylateralism, opening the country’s channels of cooperation in a multipolar world to maintain its strategic autonomy. This was accompanied by a commitment to the Charter of the United Nations, but also by demands for reform within the organization. Finally, recent years have been marked by the search for new regional and extra-regional operational structures, among which the Ambassador highlights the QUAD or the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.

Among the fundamental crises that India has had to face in recent times, José María Ridao highlights those of Afghanistan and Ukraine. The U.S. departure from Afghanistan rekindled the wound of partition with Pakistan’s apparent victory and the defeat of the great democratic country. Pakistan presented itself as a potential communicator with the Taliban, rising as a major international power. However, this feeling was short-lived, with India dominating the Indo-Pacific in a matter of months through a skilful strategy of framing and supporting multilateral and United Nations forums, rather than a bilateral approach. Afghanistan’s strategic problem was thus reduced to a de facto security problem.

With regard to the conflict in Ukraine, while 70 per cent of the country’s dependence on Russian defense equipment or access to energy supply markets remains a fact, the desire to prioritize its strategic autonomy should not be forgotten. Jose Maria Ridao invites us to avoid contrapositions, paying attention to the polylateralism that defines the strategy and that does not cease to guarantee favorable results.

To conclude, the ambassador introduces two questions: Are we dealing with an enormously large country or a great power? Is India an international power per se, or does it owe its new role to its undeniable importance in the Indo-Pacific? Regardless of the answers, what is undeniable is that “India is one of the countries with sufficient conditions to lead the international community, as long as its domestic policies are adequate and its foreign policy continues to develop intelligently,” said Ridao.

Sofía Provencio

INCIPE