India and the New American Hegemony
by Mira Kamdar
Connecticut Journal of International Law, Vol. 19:3, Spring 2004, Special Issue: The New American Hegemony

When Deputy Prime Minister of India L.K. Advani was asked what the focus of his meetings with the Americans would be during his visit to Washington last year, he replied: " . . . it would be the attitude and approach of my host which would affect many things." As if to hint at the attitude the Americans might wish to display, Advani went on to recall fondly his visits to the Soviet Union in the 1970s, when India enjoyed close relations with America’s Cold-War enemy: "You could see the warmth on the people’s faces. Which is still there." It would be a mistake to conclude from these remarks that the Indian deputy prime minister is motivated primarily by the emotional response of foreign nationals when calculating India’s foreign policy. But it would not be entirely wrong to surmise that the man widely believed to be India’s leader-in-waiting does desire, if not outright affection, at least just a little respect from the world’s sole superpower. Also, it would be wise to note that the recent dramatic, and unprecedented, rapprochement between India and the United States has not made Advani forget that his country has close, historical ties with other great powers.

The emergence of the United States as the most powerful nation in history puts an emerging power such as India in a bind. If the United States is, in the words of former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, "the indispensable nation," then for a country such as India it is also the unavoidable nation. India, like most of the rest of the world, with the possible exception of North Korea, has no alternative but to engage with the United States. It needs and desires a stable, productive relationship with the global hegemon. Indeed, it has much to gain in its own national and regional ambitions by hitching its star, as it were, to the great American Milky Way. In fact, a closer relationship with the United States is perhaps the most critical component in India’s efforts to transform itself from a developing country and an emerging power into a developed country and a major world power.

Yet, India remains leery of being dictated to by the United States. It cannot, if it wishes to protect its own interests, allow itself to become, nor even be perceived, as a mere client state in the service of American hegemony. In a world tilting toward unipolarity, India must balance the inevitable engagement with the superpower against what multi-polar and multilateral options it can preserve or enhance. These include India’s bilateral relationships with other major powers, such as Russia, China, and members of the European Union, as well as India’s participation in regional organizations such as ASEAN and SAARC. In a changed world dominated by the United States alone, India is redefining its role in the Nonaligned Movement, of which it was a founder and a key leader for decades. In line with that tradition, India has embraced a leadership role for the interests of the "South," along with Brazil, China and South Africa, within the World Trade Organization, as evidenced in Cancun last year, and played host this past January to the WTO alternative, the World Social Forum (WSF), featuring anti-globalization activists from France’s José Bovée to India’s own Arundhati Roy. Perhaps the multilateral institution to which India attaches the most importance is the United Nations, in which India has historically played a major role, despite lacking a seat on the Security Council as currently configured.

The Bush Administration’s National Security Role for India

It is highly significant that the 2001 official statement by the Bush administration on the "National Security Strategy of the United States of America" focuses on India in Section VIII, the section titled "Develop Agendas for Cooperative Action with the Other Main Centers of Global Power." The fact that the Administration defines India as a "main center of global power" and not, as previous administrations might have done, as part of the developing world represents an important shift in U.S. policy toward India. Though much of India’s population still faces developing-world problems — a growing HIV/AIDS epidemic, endemic poverty, lack of access to clean water, and high rates of illiteracy — India has made enormous strides in the past decade in growing its economy, enlarging its regional sphere of influence, and enhancing its global stature.

The exact language of the "National Security Strategy of the United States of America" with regard to India bears citing:

There is a great deal of continuity between this statement and the policies of the second Clinton administration. Since India’s independence in 1947, the theme of shared democratic values (the United States is the world’s oldest democracy; India its largest) has been a leitmotif of the relationship between the two countries. But the recognition by the United States of India as a "growing world power," something India had been seeking from the United States quite in vain for some years, is new. Also, the explicit U.S. intention to put the nuclear issue on the sidelines of a growing economic and strategic partnership is a major departure from past U.S. policy. Clearly, the Bush administration views realpolitik considerations of India’s potential strategic usefulness to the United States — in the war on terror as well as in the context of regional balance-of-power considerations — to supercede foreign policy niceties such as sanctions aimed at limiting nuclear proliferation.

Indeed, India believes that it was precisely its acquisition of nuclear weapons capability in 1995 that forced the United States to finally acknowledge it as a global player. The Indian example has not gone unnoticed by other countries working to acquire nuclear weapons capability. As India’s National Security Advisor Brajesh Mishra put it: "One either changes the policy to suit the environment or changes the environment to suit the policy. The nuclear tests helped us change the environment." Since it became a nuclear power, India has worked to reshape the nuclear environment — a goal it shares with the Bush administration, whose own openness to the potential use of some types of nuclear weapons has alarmed many committed to traditional non-proliferation and disarmament goals. India justified its accession to the club of nuclear haves on the basis that it inhabits "a rough neighborhood," and, though it has pledged never to use nuclear weapons first, India maintains that possession of a credible nuclear threat is vital to its national security interests. It is an argument the United States, given its own nuclear capabilities and its acknowledgment of a newly dangerous world that happens to be particularly dangerous in India’s part of it, is hard pressed to demolish.

In addition to its nuclear weapons capabilities and its large and well furbished standing army, India is working diligently to cultivate bilateral and multilateral relations with its neighbors and other allies. Last October, the foreign ministers of India, China and Russia announced their intention to meet to discuss trilateral cooperation on areas of mutual interest, top-most among them Iraq and United Nations reform. No doubt American hegemony in Asia and the Middle East was a factor in these discussions. Also, India has worked to bolster its economic, strategic, and cultural ties with the European Union, which accounts for 25 percent of both India’s imports and exports and is now India’s largest trading partner.

The War on Terror

The Bush administration acknowledges that India, like the United States, has been a victim of terror and remains a target of terrorists. India immediately pledged its support to the United States’s war on terror in the wake of the attacks on September 11, 2001. But India’s hope that the United States would finally acknowledge Pakistan as the major source of international terror, including activity by Al Qaeda, was somewhat dashed by America’s conviction that a working bilateral relationship with Pakistan was vital to its national security in the war on terror and to regional security in Central and South Asia. As allegations have begun to surface in the international press about Pakistan’s aid to rogue nuclear hopefuls, India may yet be successful in bringing the United States around to its point of view. For the moment, however, the United States has publicly expressed its continued faith in and commitment to Pakistan’s president Pervez Musharaff, and has played a constructive role in the latest thaw in Indian-Pakistan relations.

Nevertheless, India and the United States have embarked, under the Bush administration, on an unprecedented level of military cooperation, holding frequent joint military exercises and engaging in extensive intelligence sharing. Cooperation on missile defense has been one of India’s "technology quartet" of goals in engaging the United States during the Bush administration, which also includes civil nuclear development, commercial space programs, high technology trade and the development of other "dual-use" technologies. The two countries worked intensively to achieve breakthroughs in these areas following the visit to the United States by Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee last fall, culminating in an unprecedented agreement shifting India from the category of "presumption of denial" to "presumption of approval" on transfers of sensitive technologies from the United States, and the announcement by President Bush of India’s accession to this so-called "Glide Path" at the Summit of the Americas in Monterrey, Mexico in January 2004.

India’s new strategic doctrine has led to another dramatic break with the past: an historic rapprochement with Israel. Ariel Sharon recently visited India, the first Israeli leader to do so, and the two countries are engaging in close cooperation on intelligence and weapons technologies, on regional security and, perhaps most importantly, on the war on terror.

Trade

Beyond the new strategic role for India under the regime of the new American hegemony, India is playing an increasingly important role in the area of economic growth. The United States is India’s largest trading partner after the European Union, and is likely to regain its position as India’s number one trading partner in the very near future. Trade between the two countries grew rapidly during the 1990s following trade liberalization in India. No sector has grown more than that of Information Technology. Microsoft’s only overseas facility, for example, is in Hyderabad, India. India’s own homegrown hi-tech firms, such as Infosys, have also grown to become internationally competitive companies. Since the tech bubble burst, however, high unemployment in the United States has triggered resentment both against Indian hi-tech workers in the United States on H1-B visas and against a growing trend by U.S. companies in many different business lines to outsource or offshore back-office functions to India. Many Americans may have spoken on the telephone about a credit card charge or a new computer glitch to a "Jim" or a "Susan" who, in fact, was a Vijay or a Swati sitting in a call center in an Indian suburb. Hard data on the exact number of American jobs lost to India in the past couple of years due to outsourcing is impossible to come by, but estimates run into the hundreds of thousands.

Literally millions of customer service and data processing jobs are expected to move from the United States to India during the coming decade. Other English-language or highly skilled technical jobs are likely to follow, as demonstrated by the recent announcement that several of the major investment banks will soon be hiring lower level financial analysts in India to cut costs. An Indian financial analyst is happy to take home an annual salary of $35,000, whereas one in New York may grumble about a mere $150,000. IBM recently announced it was moving thousands of skilled jobs to Asia, mostly to India and China. Its American workers will be asked to train the foreign counterparts designated to replace them as their last assignment. Thus, India has become the focus of globalization’s newest wave, involving the transfer of highly skilled, knowledge-based jobs out of the United States. This phenomenon is likely, especially in an election year, to elicit a more vociferous reaction than the more than decade-old "NAFTA-effect" on well paid jobs in manufacturing.

India’s bet is that, by investing in technology and developing a knowledge-based economy, it will be able to "leap-frog" and transition from a developing to a developed country in record time. In fact, India’s prime minister has declared it India’s goal to make that transition within the next 20 years.

This is a very ambitious goal given the fact that, with a population of over 1 billion, at least 400 million people in India still live in absolute poverty, and India is faced with the threat of a serious epidemic of HIV/AIDS, among other alarming problems. Though India makes up 16 percent of the world’s population, its share of GNP is only 1.5 percent. South Korea’s per capita income is 20 times higher than India’s. A report by India’s Confederation of Indian Industry recently warned that infrastructural deficits in telecommunications (bandwidth and down time) and transportation could result in a loss of up to $21 billion in foreign investment to other competing countries in coming years.

India’s efforts to accelerate the integration of its economy with the world economy will exacerbate the growing gap between the country’s globally enfranchised haves and its abjectly poor have-nots. This, in turn, is likely to increase political pressures on India’s democracy, particularly with regard to caste- and religion-based politics, and may fan the flames of communal violence. Indeed, those states in India which have modernized their economies the fastest, such as Maharashtra and Gujarat, have also been beset by the worst incidents of communal violence and social polarization.

Hindu Nationalism

For the six years since 1998, India has been governed by a coalition government led by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), a Hindu nationalist party. The BJP’s ability to set its agenda for the promotion of so-called Hindu values, known as hindutva, at the national level has been somewhat limited by the obligation it has had to work with opposition members of the coalition government. This may soon change. The BJP swept to power in three of five recent state elections (Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chatisgargh), a show of strength that surprised India’s political establishment, including members of the ruling BJP. The BJP leadership lost no time in making it clear that it intended to consolidate its hold on power at the national level (what in India is called "the centre," New Delhi) and that it regarded its former main rival, India’s founding Congress Party, as no longer posing even the slightest threat. The Bush administration may share the same view. Some saw in the timing of President Bush’s "Glide Path" announcement in Monterrey a pre-election gift to the BJP as the party sets out to sell itself to the Indian electorate as the party that can get things done for India, including winning major concessions from the United States.

With a clear mandate of majority rule, the BJP may be tempted to appease the extreme right-wing of its Hindu nationalist base by accelerating its agenda of curbing minority rights, particularly with regard to India’s Muslims, exerting control over the media, rewriting India’s textbooks to reflect a hindutva-sanctioned view of history, and otherwise making efforts to transform India from a secular democracy into a Hindu-dominated state.

State-sponsored, or at least state-facilitated, massacres of Muslim civilians in Gujarat in the spring of 2002, which claimed at least 1,000 lives, were loudly condemned both within India by numerous groups and by prominent human rights groups abroad, including Human Rights Watch, the British High Commission, and the EU. However, the chief minister of Gujarat, BJP leader Narendra Modi, was subsequently reelected by a landslide. Modi has worked tirelessly since then to convince the international business community that Gujarat is a great place to do business. He also campaigned vigorously on behalf of fellow hindutva activist and BJP leader, Uma Bharati, helping her win big in neighboring Madhya Pradesh last fall.

The one ray of hope in Gujarat, and for the resilient powers of Indian democracy, is the scathing criticism by India’s Supreme Court of the state’s handling of the aftermath of the 2002 massacres. Chief Justice V.N. Khare went so far as to warn: "I have no faith left in the prosecution and the Gujarat Government." It is easy to understand Chief Justice Khare’s anger — at the time, no one had been convicted of any offense related to the 2002 massacres. Witnesses had been intimidated or bought off. The fact is that as, state by state, the country’s political arena becomes more and more dominated by Hindu nationalists, India’s Supreme Court is one of the few core institutions left in which those who long for a secular, multi-religious, democratic India may place their hopes. The rule of law is certainly one of the core attributes of a healthy, functioning democracy. As long as India can stake a claim to a politically uncorrupted legal system, it may continue to claim the mantle of democracy as well. But whether an uncorrupted judiciary alone can save India’s secular democracy from religious nationalism remains to be seen in the years ahead.

One would hope, given America’s democratic and pluralistic values and the Bush administration’s stated goal of advancing those values around the world as the ultimate basis of its entire foreign policy, that safeguarding secular democracy and minority rights in India will be critical to the role India will be able to play on the global stage and in relation to the new American hegemony in years going forward. However, the United States has remained steadfastly silent about the BJP’s politics of hindutva, including the state-sponsored massacres in Gujarat, offering only a limp regret over the violence that occurred. It seems that the Bush administration has decided that, on this front, as on the nuclear front, solidarity with a key ally in South Asia with which one has much to gain strategically and economically supercedes the expression of concerns which might cause embarrassment or strain relations.

The Indian-American Community’s Growing Influence

This reluctance to embarrass India may stem in no small part from the growing influence of the Indian-American community in domestic U.S. politics. The sheer population of Americans of Indian origin has grown dramatically to more than 1.5 million and even, some now estimate, close to 2 million. As a group, Indian-Americans have been remarkably successful in the areas of business management and entrepreneurship, information technology and medicine, with many household incomes and education levels well above the national median. As their numbers have grown, so has their political influence. For example, a young immigrant from India, Piyush "Bobby" Jindal was only narrowly defeated after a bitter campaign for the governorship of Louisiana last fall. Jindal represents a "new breed" of Indian-Americans in politics, not the least because of his extremely conservative Republican orientation, a novelty in a community that has traditionally identified with the Democratic Party.

On Capitol Hill, Indian-Americans have become a political force to be reckoned with. The largest of the Indian-American political action committees, USINPAC, is a non-partisan group dedicated to supporting the candidacies of Indian-Americans for state and local office and to advancing a greater strategic and economic partnership between India and the United States. USINPAC’s website makes no secret of its desire to sell the idea that India’s foreign policy goals and those of the United States are one and the same, and openly cites the success of the pro-Israel lobby as its role model. There is no doubt that U.S. politicians on the Hill, within the Bush administration and among the Democratic candidates for president in the 2004 elections, are paying greater attention than ever before to the lobbying efforts of USINPAC and other pro-India groups.

India sees such great value in the role the Indian-American population can play in promoting India’s interests abroad as well as enhancing foreign investment in India, that the BJP-led government has appointed a special "NRI" (Non-Resident Indian) ambassador to the Indian American community. The appointment has given rise to a series of embarrassments, such as when the NRI ambassador and India’s ambassador to the United States in Washington have scheduled competing events with the same visiting Indian head of state. The U.S. State Department, for its part, declined to confer on the NRI ambassador the official status of "ambassador," since U.S. protocol recognizes only one ambassador from each country. Still, the continued presence of the NRI ambassador in the United States, discreetly based in New York, alongside his official counterpart in Washington underlines just how important the BJP government views the political and economic role Indian-Americans can play for India and for the advancement of hindutva.

The Importance of Cinema

Joseph Nye, Clyde Prestowitz and others have argued that the United States cannot advance its interests with military or "hard power" alone. Our success depends as much, or perhaps even more, on "soft power" — those attributes, such as our values and our culture, that make others in the world want to do what we want them to do, that make them respect us and even like us. India is no different than the United States in this regard. To be able to advance its interests, India must project and protect its soft power, none the less so, and perhaps more so, because of its acquisition of nuclear weapons capability.

India’s soft power derives to a large extent from the lingering mantle of moral authority the country gained through the non-violent revolution it staged against British imperialism under Mahatma Gandhi’s leadership, through Nehru’s refusal to toss India’s fate into either the American or the Soviet camp during the Cold War and bravely to chart a "third way" through the Nonaligned Movement. India also enjoys enormous prestige at the United Nations, where, despite the lack of a seat on the Security Council, it has played an important role since the organization’s inception. The refusal by India to send troops to Iraq at the request of the United States, its closest ally in the War on Terror, and India’s votes against Israel in the United Nations immediately following Ariel Sharon’s historic visit in 2003, may both be understood within this context: India knows it must safeguard its moral authority, its soft power, if its nuclear-enhanced hard power is to have any credibility.

Much of India’s soft power, like much of America’s, or France’s or Japan’s, for that matter, derives from its cultural exports. Indian-origin authors, from Salman Rushdie to Arundhati Roy, to Rohinton Mistry to Jhumpa Lahiri, who write in English have become among the most celebrated in the Western literary world. India’s films out of "Bollywood" or Bombay’s Hollywood-type movie industry are international best-sellers. Recently, a string of films by Indian-origin directors has garnered international acclaim, from U.S.-based Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding to U.K.-based Gurinder Chadha’s Bend It Like Beckham. Films and literature are helping transform India’s image in the West, including in the United States, from that of a remote, unknowably exotic, and revoltingly poor country into a country with which Americans can find similarities among the differences. Add to that the growth in popularity of Indian food and Indian-inspired fashion, and the fact that sooner or later almost anyone in the United States will probably find herself treated by an Indian doctor, perhaps advised by an Indian financial adviser or even employed by an Indian hi-tech entrepreneur (or fired when her job goes to an Indian worker in Bangalore), and India begins to exert a "soft-power" presence far beyond the reach of its intermediate-range nuclear-tipped missiles.

In the interview I cited at the beginning of this article, where India’s Deputy Prime Minister L.K. Advani mused on the enduring feeling of the Russian people for India, Advani attributed this deep affection to the popularity in the former Soviet Union of the films of the great Indian director of the 1940s and 1950s, Raj Kapoor. India’s strategy in the face of the new American hegemony appears to have taken lessons from the old American hegemony: develop your nuclear capability but invest in your technology infrastructure, reinforce alliances, strengthen your stature in multilateral institutions and make sure your movie directors get great overseas distribution. Hard power enhanced by soft power. It is a strategy that seems to be working well for India, and one the Bush administration, which seems hell-bent to impose the new American hegemony by hard power alone, would do well to revisit.

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