Or will it seek to articulate an alternate Asian model of international relations keyed to regional tradition and historical circumstance? Will India seek to forge a broad range of strategic partnerships in the Indo-Pacific while maximising its leverage by not aligning with any particular state or group of states? Or will it develop a preferred partnership with a select power or set of powers?
India’s leaders have time and again displayed a keen and consistent grasp of their country’s strategic purpose despite the breadth of these questions. In his keynote address at the Shangri-La Dialogue on 1 June, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi endorsed a vision of the Indo-Pacific where the major and middle powers both, with Southeast Asia at its centre, serve as anchors of stability and prosperity.
India will be an enabling power, seeking to establish a loose concert of common principles and best practices in the region’s international relations such that power is exercised in a spirit of self-restraint by its dominant entities. India will be a law-abiding power, seeking to entrench respect for international law on land, air and sea such that a new regional order can be constructed by a sense of obligation to rules rather than the creeping assertion of power. India will be a pluralistic power, facilitating the involvement of the widest spectrum of Asia’s stakeholders in the region’s endeavours, including within flexible minilateral formats that are neither exclusive ‘club[s] of limited members’ nor ‘alliances of containment’. And India will be a stabilising power, prepared to deploy its geopolitical weight to craft an equitable ‘balance of interests’ within the fast-shifting Indo-Pacific equilibrium.
In framing India’s role in these terms, Modi was echoing the same principles of an Indo-Pacific order that India’s ex-national security advisor Shivshankar Menon had sketched out a few years earlier. Such an order, Menon had noted, ought to be inclusive, comprising all powers relevant to the practice of Asia’s security. Its geographic scope ought to be extensive, extending from the Suez to the Pacific (Modi’s Indo-Pacific spans the ‘shores of Africa to that of the Americas’). Its security structure ought to be plural and open-ended, having learnt its lesson from the history of past collective security arrangements gone sour. Finally, its institutional mechanisms ought to be non-prescriptive, respectful of the region’s preference for consensus-based approaches to problem solving, and centred in that crossroads of Asian inter-civilisational interaction — Southeast Asia.
Two decades before Modi’s Shangri-La address and long before the concept of the Indo-Pacific was a twinkle in the eyes of strategists, India’s then foreign minister Jaswant Singh presciently projected India as a stabilising force within the broader region: in a Foreign Affairs article authored barely four months after New Delhi’s nuclear tests of 1998, he noted that India had ‘acted in a timely fashion to correct an imbalance and fill a potentially dangerous vacuum’ in the emerging Asian balance of power.
That said, the ‘Indo’ and the ‘Pacific’ are not created equal in the ordering of New Delhi’s security interests. India’s interests east of Sumatra are decidedly secondary. A wide-angled view of India’s diplomatic approaches and operational activities in the South China Sea, which links the Indian and Pacific Oceans, affords useful insights in this regard.
In January 2015, Prime Minister Modi and then US president Barack Obama issued the landmark Joint Strategic Vision for the Asia-Pacific and the Indian Ocean Region, which explicitly referenced the South China Sea and called upon all parties to ensure freedom of navigation and resolve disputes according to universally recognised principles of international law. By July 2016, following the South China Sea arbitration award in favour of the Philippines, India had conspicuously separated itself from the common US–Japan–Australia position calling on China to mandatorily abide by the decision. When Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, a minted China-antagonist, visited New Delhi for the annual bilateral summit that year, Modi bent him to his will in the semantic formulation on the South China Sea that prevailed in their joint statement. No navigational patrols have been conducted either by the Indian Navy in the South China Sea in a joint or independent capacity.
As for its independent defence cooperation activities with the claimant states in the South China Sea, it is instructive to note what New Delhi has not provided or conducted. It has not sold offensive weapon systems to a South China Sea littoral state (despite long-standing ties with Vietnam). It has not deployed its vessels to this contested waterway to defend its economic interests. And until earlier last month (when it conducted a maiden exercise with Vietnam), it had not engaged in a naval exercise with a South China Sea claimant state.
By contrast, in its core Indian Ocean area of interest India has been on a veritable tear, signing a spate of mutual logistics supply and reciprocal berthing agreements. From Djibouti and Reunion to Seychelles and Mauritius, from Duqm and Diego Garcia to Singapore and Denpasar, the Modi government has been busy stitching up its own ‘string of pearls’ in this crucial thoroughfare.
India’s diplomacy remains firmly anchored in an upward spiral of improving relations with all the major and middle powers of the Indo-Pacific. The more broad-based and deeper the content of the relationships, the wider will be the margin for New Delhi’s room for manoeuvre. And the greater the likelihood that its vision of order will comport with the evolving realities on the ground in the approaching post-San Francisco system era.
Sourabh Gupta is Senior Fellow at the Institute for China–America Studies in Washington DC.