Column | Kanwal Sibal on India and Strategic Autonomy in the Changing Global Order

India’s attachment to strategic autonomy, which means retaining a degree of independence in foreign policymaking in areas of fundamental strategic importance to the country, is not new.

India has maintained its strategic autonomy from the time of its Independence as much as it could. It resisted Western pressure during the Cold War to choose sides. The concept of Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam, highlighted today as a civilisational one, was, in fact, the geopolitical driver of India’s non-aligned approach to the world then.

That approach sought friendship with all countries undeterred by the ideological barriers of the Cold War. India was not willing to join in the West’s crusade against communism. In fact, India and the communist Soviet Union became close partners from the 1960s onwards. At the same time, India continued its engagement as productively as possible with the US and Europe. Its linkages with the erstwhile colonial power, the UK, were also retained for pragmatic considerations, including membership of the Commonwealth.

India was among the first countries to recognise communist China. We showed solidarity with Japan despite its wartime record and waived reparations. Our strategic flexibility enabled us to play a role in the Korean War (1950–1953), eventually as chair of the Neutral Nations Repatriation Commission (NNRC). The Non-Aligned Movement that Jawaharlal Nehru founded along with Gamal Abdel Nasser, Josip Broz Tito, Kwame Nkrumah and Ahmed Sukarno was, in a sense, a precursor to the Voice of the Global South that we seek to mobilise today to re-balance the global order and push for reforms in global political and economic governance.

In another vital instance of preserving its strategic autonomy, India negotiated the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in good faith but finally refused to accede to it because of its discriminatory nature. India did not want to foreclose its strategic options permanently within an invidious nuclear order and remain a second-rung country. It was a bold decision for which India paid a heavy price by way of decades-long technology sanctions by the West. But this allowed us to build our own capacities over time in the nuclear, missile and space domains which are indispensable for exercising strategic autonomy.

With the end of the Cold War, the Non-Aligned Movement lost its contextual political rationale, but the spirit of India’s attachment to an independent foreign policy in strategic terms has remained unchanged. India now characterises its foreign policy as multi-alignment or retaining strategic autonomy.

Post-Cold War Scenario

India’s approach in a post-Cold War international order—reshaped by globalisation, and lately by anti-globalisation trends—is to engage with virtually all countries and align itself on specific issues with like-minded countries to safeguard its national interest. This “multi-alignment” has become possible because of greater dispersal of political and economic power within the global system, especially towards the East, which enables wider choices in forging relationships based on a community of interests on specific issues, even though the West remains powerful.

Strategically speaking, India needs to maintain productive ties with the US as the world’s pre-eminent power, the most important source of investments and access to technologies and a huge market for our trade in goods and services. But the strategic interests of the US as a global power are not aligned with those of India.

India, therefore, needs to avoid becoming too close to the US strategically because of the vagaries of US policies once again being dramatically exhibited under President Donald Trump. Despite all the progress made in India-US relations in the past couple of decades, the Trump administration has made humiliating remarks against India, hit at our vital interests, targeted us unduly on the tariff front and openly intervened in India-Pakistan relations. The US is proving once again that counting on it as a reliable partner would be a strategic error.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (Nato) is now fighting a proxy war against Russia in Ukraine with little concern that escalation could lead to a nuclear showdown. The US’ war against Iran carries the risk of severely destabilising the global economy, already under stress. The US is using its control of the global financial system and the status of the US dollar as the global reserve currency to impose sanctions on countries. India is coming under pressure on its ties with Russia, which we have resisted, and the war on Iran constitutes a severe threat to our vital trade, financial and expatriate interests in West Asia.

China is presenting another set of challenges to the global system with its declared ambition to be at the centre of global governance by 2049. It already dominates global manufacturing and, in the process, has eroded the manufacturing base in other countries, creating dependencies which it is in a position to exploit. It controls the production and supply of many critical raw materials and technologies, be it lithium batteries, the electric vehicle sector, rare earth supplies, solar cells.

India has to operate in this challenging ecosystem, in which it has to deal with the US as a rampant force and the threats of sanctions, handle an increasingly powerful China, tackle technology dependencies in both the civilian and defence domains, etc.

Strategic autonomy requires India to maintain good relations with the US, keep the doors of dialogue with China open, preserve its ties with Russia despite facing US and European pressures to reduce our energy and defence ties with it, assure its energy security for which ties with the Gulf countries remain most important, maintain links with Iran, especially in the light of the re-distribution of power in West Asia, and, with the fragmentation of the global trading system, pursue bilateral free trade agreements with key countries.

Manufacturing is Key

India has to develop its manufacturing sector to reduce external dependencies. Most importantly, atmanirbharta in manufacturing and defence has to be pursued. In areas like artificial intelligence, quantum physics, robotics and semiconductors, we have to develop our capacities in a mission mode. Integrating ourselves in global supply chains as part of a China Plus One strategy has become more difficult with the discourse of trustworthy and resilient supply chains losing currency with Trump’s US-centric approach.

To deter China’s maritime expansionism, we have subscribed to the Indo-Pacific concept and joined the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue as a member. We are members of non-West groups like Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, whose agenda is to develop mutual cooperation outside Western agendas and priorities. We have sought to widen the support base of our strategic autonomy by becoming a voice of the Global South.

In fact, we played a major role in putting the interests and priorities of the Global South on the agenda of the G20. We have entered into strategic partnerships with a host of countries graded at different levels, which is also reflective of our strategic autonomy, in that there is no exclusivity in our foreign relations.

Interestingly, it is essentially countries like India and France that define their foreign policy in terms of maintaining strategic autonomy. Powerful countries such as the US, Russia and China do not use this vocabulary. Strategic autonomy therefore connotes a defensive terminology, expressing the need to maintain freedom of choice under external pressure.

(Views expressed are personal)

Kanwal Sibal former foreign secretary and former ambassador to Russia

(This story appeared in Outlook magazine’s August 31 issue, 'Whose Idea of India?', in which India’s noted public intellectuals, policymakers, cultural practitioners, political leaders, scholars and economists write in detail about the idea of India they believe can best secure the nation’s future as we celebrate 80 years of independence.)