Editorial: Understand Frontiers before Strategic Planning

“NonAlignment 2.0: A Foreign and Strategic Policy of India in the Twenty First Century”, a document prepared and recently released by an independent group of respected scholars, former diplomats, soldiers and public figures [Sunil Khilnani, Rajiv Kumar, Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Lt. Gen. Prakash Menon (Retd), Nandan Nilekani, Srinath Raghavan, Shyam Saran and Siddharth Varadarajan], introduces itself as “an attempt to identify the basic principles that should guide India’s foreign and strategic policy over the next decade”. Predictably, the document addresses relations with China in detail, and although it has been panned as being too superficial and impractical by critics and people in the “security” sector, the document does succeed in flagging important strategic issues which will confront the nation in the coming decades and suggests foreign policy course corrections on how best to address these challenges, many of whom are already unfolding. In their defence, the authors explain in their preface itself that “it should be clear that the document does not intend to prescribe specific policies”. “Such policies remain the prerogative of government—and their definition must occur in the domain of public debate and deliberation. What our document does insist upon is the critical need for a strategic consensus and for a unified approach to India’s international engagements,” they explain. China’s economic and military capabilities growing at a smarter clip than India’s is of clear concern to the analysts who point out that the power differential is likely to widen in the coming years. Since it is universally accepted that India cannot catch up and reduce this differential in the foreseeable future, the document calls for an “asymmetric strategy” towards China. One of the proposed asymmetric strategies recommends accelerated “integration of the frontier regions and its people by speeding up and improving communication infrastructure with the mainland”. This suggestion should find unanimous endorsement throughout the “frontier regions” like Sikkim, where even though the border regions are kept out of bounds even for locals and traditional residents of the land in the name of national security, little or no genuine effort is expended towards reaching either effective development or even infrastructure to these parts.
The ambiguity with which India engages China definitely needs to be addressed, not only to serve the nation’s strategic and foreign policy requirements, but also to reflect more pride [by showing some spine] and to reassure the people who live in the frontier regions that policy-makers in the “mainland” have their back and understand them. One of the suggestions included in the document, although it does not explicitly say so, does address this quotient of a “mainland” which understands the “frontier regions”.  “Our Tibet policy needs to be reassessed and readjusted,” the document suggests in a section devoted to China in the first chapter title, “The Asian Theatre”. What Delhi appears to have overlooked all these years is that India’s Himalayan ring around Tibet is populated by followers of Tibetan Buddhism, all of whom hold the Dalai Lama in high reverence, and while they might not be expressing themselves vocally, they are disconcerted by the increasing consistency with which Delhi and even mainstream media has been sidelining and even stifling the Tibet issue not just in matters of politics, but even on issues of faith. What is worse, most of this disquieting attitude is pushed by hawks and their poorly informed speculations. Given this extant scenario, what NonAlignment 2.0 suggests comes like a breath of fresh air even if it is simplistic. The analysts have called for an attempt to “persuade” China to seek reconciliation with the Dalai Lama and the exiled Tibetan community. Although they admit that such a move might attract a “hostile reaction” from conservative sections of the PLA, the authors underline that “the Dalai Lama’s popular legitimacy among his own people is a fact that the Chinese government must acknowledge”. For the past decade, China has consistently worked towards increasing its influence in South Asia and even enjoys Observer status in SAARC now. It gets this access through its occupation of Tibet and now, with Climate Change and water having emerged as important regional resource management issues [if one is to keep politics out for now], India should leverage the arrival of these new equations to recalibrate its posture on Tibet.
There is much more in the 70-page document than space allows to be discussed here, and admittedly, the document is far from comprehensive, but it is in clear recognition of otherwise overlooked aspects like thinking of the nation’s own peripheries before strategising for beyond that NonAlignment 2.0 becomes a significant document for policy makers to take into consideration when finalising strategic and foreign policy.