Wg^Z[^c\ cdiZ INDIA’S ROLE IN THE NEW WORLD ORDER By Charles Grant With every passing year, India is making an increasing mark on the world’s economic and political system. In July 2008, India, together with China, blocked a deal in the World Trade Organisation talks, provoking their collapse (though the US must share the blame for that outcome). Over the past two years Indian companies have bought Europe’s two biggest steel-makers, Arcelor and Corus. Many European and American IT firms have relocated large parts of their operations to India. Indian diplomacy is increasingly active in Africa, Central Asia and South East Asia. India’s increasing global influence has been driven by rapid economic growth. But India’s leaders should not assume that future economic success is a given. They must overcome crucial challenges such as inadequate infrastructure, poor outcomes in health and education, and dire rural poverty. If we assume that the politicians take enough of the right decisions to ensure that India remains a rising power, what will be its impact on the world’s economic and political systems? The answer is far from clear. India’s leaders proclaim their support for the principles of multilateralism. But reality often fails to match rhetoric. Like most of the other great powers in the world today, India is capable of acting multilaterally, unilaterally or bilaterally. At the United Nations, India has a reputation for being one of the less constructive members. It sometimes reacts in a negative or hostile manner to the initiatives of others, and does not often take its own initiatives. Evidently, so long as India is denied a permanent seat on the UN Security Council (UNSC), its officials will have an excuse for occasionally taking the UN less seriously than some others would wish. In its own neighbourhood, India has no compunction about acting unilaterally, as it did when it sent forces into Sikkim and Goa (both now part of India, in the 1960s), Bangladesh (in the 1970s) and Sri Lanka (in the 1980s). Today, India’s government has its own policy on Myanmar, namely to boost Indian influence in the country and not to criticise the regime, and it is not enthusiastic about tackling the problems of Myanmar in a multilateral framework. Some US commentators, like Robert Kagan, predict that the world’s democracies will team up to confront the more authoritarian countries, like China and Russia. But India does not want to be part of an anti-China coalition, or a league of democracies. Indeed, it has seldom allowed its democratic political system to influence its foreign policy. If India does have a natural preference in international relations, it is to deal with other powers bilaterally. The fact that India is large gives it weight in its bilateral relations, notably with China, Russia and the US. Although India does not want to be part of an axis of democracies, the most significant shift in its foreign policy over the past two decades has been the rapprochement with the United States. Traditionally, the focus of India’s foreign policy was non-alignment, but a non-alignment that left it much closer to the Soviet Union and its allies than the US. Several factors explain the greater warmth towards Washington: ★ The collapse of the Soviet Union and the relative weakness of Russia since then; ★ Growing economic ties between the US and India, particularly in the IT industries;
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