India in the World: Neither Rich, Powerful, nor Principled

Ramesh Thakur

From Foreign Affairs, July/ August 1997

Article preview: first 500 of 3,071 words total.

Summary:  After 50 years of independence, India appears to the world neither rich nor powerful nor principled.

Ramesh Thakur, head of the Peace Research Centre at the Australian National University in Canberra, is the author of The Politics and Economics of India's Foreign Policy and The Government and Politics of India.

The end of the Cold War presented India with a stark choice. It could persist in an inward-looking policy that slid it further into international irrelevance. Or it could take a hard look at developing countries that had achieved success through outward-looking policies and gained diplomatic gravitas.

India failed the first test in the Gulf War, one of the defining events for the post-Cold War order. India's confused response -- which included a unilateral peace initiative to Baghdad -- based on a faded image of itself as leader of the nonaligned nations, succeeded in alienating both Baghdad and Washington without winning any friends. Being bracketed with Cuba and Yemen in a U.N. Security Council vote at war's end calling for Iraq's surrender was less than edifying.

Five years later, India repeated the policy mistakes. Last September the U.N. General Assembly approved the text of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which India had campaigned against, by a vote of 158-3. Only Bhutan and Libya joined India in rejecting the treaty. The next month, the General Assembly voted to fill five non-permanent seats on the Security Council. India and Japan keenly contested the Asian vacancy. What was expected to have been a close vote, perhaps requiring several ballots, turned into a rout. Japan romped home, 142-40. The two defeats proved that, 50 years after independence, India is neither rich enough to bribe, powerful enough to bully, nor principled enough to inspire.

THE SOCIALIST LEGACY

India's failure to match East Asian growth rates has diminished its international influence over the last three decades. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru (1947-64), armed with socialist faith in an interventionist state and an aristocratic disdain for consumerism, tried to transform India into a giant of heavy industry. The achievements were genuine and substantial. India's economy grew three times as fast during the 1950s and 1960s as during British rule. The food security that Nehru worked for contrasts with recurring famine under the raj. In just 40 years, infant mortality was halved, life expectancy nearly doubled, and adult literacy almost tripled.

Even so, four decades of state-directed economic planning brought slow growth, rising unemployment, and growing dependence on imported capital goods and technology. Compared with developing countries in East Asia, India fared badly. Its share of world output and exports fell, and even quality- of-life measures on which a socialist government could have been expected to concentrate lagged far behind those of East Asia.

A major balance-of-payments crisis in 1991 gave the government of P. V. Narasimha Rao (1991-96) the opportunity to overturn the Nehruvian consensus on central planning and Fabian socialism and institute economic reforms. The pace of reform was brisk from 1991 to 1993, but inaction since then is catching up with India. The government deficit hovers around 6 percent of GDP, as unproductive spending continues for debt service, market-distorting subsidies, inefficient public sector enterprises, and unneeded civil servants' salaries. India's competitiveness ranking, according to the World Economic Forum, slipped from thirty-fifth in 1994 ...

End of preview: first 500 of 3,071 words total.