India, the Asian headache?

In the latest issue of Foreign Policy Barbara Crossette writes about how India is the real “headache” in Asia. She refers to India as the “elephant in the room” that no one seems to be talking about. The piece is extremely critical of how India handles its international relations, and calls it “an international adolescent, a country of outsize ambition but anemic influence.” However, she fails to empirically explain how India’s actions are a bigger problem as compared to other Asian countries.

Crossette begins by blaming India of believing that international rules do not apply to it. She says, “Bucking an  international trend since the Cold War, successive Indian governments have refused to sign nuclear testing and nonproliferation agreements — accelerating a nuclear arms race in South Asia.” She seems to ignore Pakistan, North Korea and China whose nuclear proliferation records are anything but clean.

India refused to sign the NPT and CTBT since it considers them to be discriminatory. India believed that the NPT “discriminated against countries that did not have nuclear weapons, heightened difficulties for countries trying to develop nuclear energy and failed to force existing nuclear weapons states to engage in serious disarmament.” The NPT was finalized in 1968 by which time erstwhile USSR and China were already in possession of nuclear weapons. At the same time, India was a newly independent country and had already fought two wars with its neighbors- Pakistan in 1965, and China in 1962. It is not difficult to imagine that it had apprehensions about binding itself to an international treaty that forbade it nuclear technology without guaranteeing that its hostile neighbors would do the same. China signed the NPT as late as 1992 and only after it was recognized as a nuclear weapons state.

However, the Indian attitude appears to be changing, and last month Prime Minister Manmohan Singh expressed the possibility of reconsidering India’s position on the NPT and CTBT. He said that India would sign the CTBT after the US and China did so. In spite of its refusal to sign these treaties, India has maintained a no-first-use nuclear policy, and continues to be a responsible nuclear weapons country that cooperates with the IAEA. It has been under a self-imposed test moratorium since its last nuclear tests in 1998.

In her article Crossette also blames India for the failure of the 2008 Doha trade talks, and the more recent climate change negotiations. (This contradicts her own claim that India has “anemic influence”.) The 2008 Doha talks failed because India, China and the US could not agree on agricultural trade, mainly the special safeguard mechanism. As a country where 60 percent of the workforce is involved in agriculture, it was the Indian minister’s primary responsibility to safeguard the interests of the people he was elected to serve. Foregoing their interests would have been a breach of trust that the Indian farmers put into their government, not to mention political suicide for Mr Kamal Nath. The Crossette article gives the impression that other countries had no role whatsoever to play in the failure of the talks. However, Peter Mandelson, the European Union trade commissioner, explained after the talks that “the agriculture talks had been harmed by the five-year programme of agricultural subsidies recently passed by the US Congress,” and that it had been a “collective failure.”

The most egregious claim in her article is regarding Indian intransigence during Copenhagen talks. The consensus amongst experts regarding Copenhagen relates to China’s stubbornness. Foreign Policy magazine itself had an article titled, ‘How China Stiffed the World in Copenhagen’. Neither has any high ranking international official made any statement claiming Indian negotiators stalled negotiations at the Copenhagen talks. In stark contrast last month India has announced 20-25 percent cut in carbon emissions irrespective of the outcome of the Copenhagen Summit.

India is one of the smaller emitters (India’s per capita emissions are approximately 1.2 tons as compared to the global average of around 4.2 tons) and its cuts will only make a small dent in the total. India’s current climate change position has been criticized by many Indian analysts. Arvind Panaragiya at the Economic Times is critical of how the country negotiated at Copenhagen, and says that “India ended up raising its commitments even further at Copenhagen by agreeing to ‘international consultations and analysis’ of biennial progress reports it must submit to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.” Crossette’s piece does not say anything about what other Asian countries in Central Asia, Sri Lanka, Japan, Indonesia, Malaysia etc are doing in this regard, but simply blames India of standing in the way of negotiations.

The article then criticizes India for not being a “liberal democratic paradise“. Exactly how this is related to the central thesis of the article regarding India being a ‘headache’  during international negotiations in unclear. While India might not be the perfect democracy, it has been the one of most well functioning democracies in the continent, and the world, with free and fair elections. The same cannot be said of more than half of the countries in Asia which do not have democratic governments. China, Myanmar, North Korea, Laos, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Iraq are only some of the glaring examples. India on the other hand has a multi-party parliamentary system that represents the cross-section of a multi-lingual, multi-cultural and multi-religious country. A written Constitution and independent judiciary protect the rights and freedoms of its people. It also has no record of military coups.

Freedom of press and speech is ensured as a fundamental right, and there are no restrictions on internet content (as are often heard in case of China). The Indian press and cyber-community freely criticizes the government, its policies and political leaders, without fear of punishment by the State. Though some authors/books/films may be banned by the government at various times, they are an exception and thousands of books -some very controversial- are published each year. ( Countries across the world, including the United States have banned books at one time or another.) While it is unfortunate that the government is wary of writings that could incite religious violence, it is also its primary responsibility to ensure peace within the country. But how far can the occasional ban on books be a measure of democratic robustness and ideals of a country?

As a multi-religious country with a history of partition of the country by the British on religious grounds, it is no surprise that religious riots happen in India. But, India has never hushed up its riots and human rights organizations within India and outside have been free to criticize government action. There is always room for improvement, and I think that more needs to be done to ensure speedy and fair trails in riot cases. But to imply that it has a poor record of ensuring minority rights as compared to other countries in Asia would be a gross misrepresentation.

India is a secular country with the third largest Muslim population in the world. Like the United States, it has also been affected by Islamic fundamentalism and resulting distrust towards minorities. Minorities including Muslims Christians, Buddhists, Jains, Sikhs, Jews live freely and are guaranteed the same rights as the majority Hindus. There is affirmative action for religious and cultural minorities. Crossette does not give any statistical references to compare India’s record with even those Asian countries that have some form of democracy. While the Indian government has a long way to go to eliminate religious riots, it has done considerably well considering the enormity of the challenge.

The lack of context and comparisons add up to a piece that comes across as biased rather than well-argued.