Books
POVERTY AND PROGRESS: Realities and Myths About Global Poverty
by Deepak Lal. Oxford University Press, Delhi, 2015.THIS is not a politically correct book. It is opinionated and brilliant because, true to form and reputation, Deepak Lal attempts to substantiate logically and empirically every assertion he makes. In the main, his conclusions are that the classical-liberal package of economic recommendations have served both the economy and the poor around the world well. The key components of the liberal package are an increase in economic freedom and in openness, and obviously both components must be above a certain minimum threshold level to be effective.
Notice the debate about reforms in India today – on ease of doing business, the need for labour reforms, and the need for lower tax rates (which will be achieved once the GST is passed). Associated with economic freedom is a decline in government intervention in the lives of mortals. Deepak’s conclusions are valid, both for countries that follow the economic liberal package, and those that don’t, i.e., if wrong turns or diversions are taken then economic performance falters.
Poverty and Progress will prove to be a great reference work for most of the ideas in development economics – and a lot of it is Lal’s own work. Reading through one appreciates that Deepak is deeply interested in the integration of ideas, and outcomes. He correctly cites another great economist, Angus Deaton, that, ‘The best empirical work in economics uses economic theory as a framework for integrating all of the available evidence, tacit and algorithmic, to tell a convincing story.’ If I had to pick one phrase that describes Deepak’s book, it would be this.
It would be unfair to describe Poverty and Progress as being just about poverty. It is also about methodology, about intellectual dishonesty, and about climate change. But the key to the book is the generally unrecognized progress that the world has made in the removal of absolute poverty. And if it weren’t for the intellectual dishonesty of the poverty peddlers like the World Bank, the world would be talking a lot more about how to satisfy the demands and dreams of an aspiring middle class rather than pursuing policies that corrupt in-the-name-of-the-absolute-poor populism.
What is the evidence? Read Deepak’s book and be convinced. In the 1960s, the developing world was very poor, with China and India among the poorest. The world felt that there was a need for international coordination to help advise governments, and provide funding for the reduction of absolute poverty. The World Bank, originally set up as a project-financing institution in the mid-1940s, changed its colours under the dynamic leadership of Robert McNamara. There was fund flow, technical assistance, and the war on poverty was begun in earnest in the late 1960s. Poverty began to be ever so marginally reduced in the developing world.
And then came globalization. Real per capita incomes in China grew by an average of 8.4% per annum between 1980 and 2013; for India, the average was 4.5%. The two countries together accounted for about 80% of world poverty in 1980 and their per capita incomes collectively increased at a 6.6% annual rate. That is doubling of incomes every 11 years, which also means that incomes went up more than seven times in the last 31 years. Yet the World Bank continued to maintain, as late as 2013, that more than a fifth of the China-India population was absolutely poor, which would have meant that 80% of Indians and Chinese were already dead in 1980. Documentation of this intellectual dishonesty of the World Bank, and that of the angels of aid, is what occupies nearly half of the book.
Deepak documents and knows what he is talking about. The key is that Deepak is no armchair philosopher or economist; he has worked with governments around the world, including India where he was an IFS officer; he has written some outstanding books on poverty, economy and society (I would strongly recommend his two-volume, The Hindu Equilibrium and Unintended Consequences: the Impact of Factor Endowments, Culture and Politics on Long Run Economic Development). You question his work, or most of his conclusions, at your intellectual peril.
The reason I say most is that Deepak has a chapter on the origins and causes of climate change. This chapter challenges the conventional and near universal view that it is CO
2 emissions from industrialization that are the major cause of climate change. Time will tell whether Deepak is right in his conclusion – but by the time we know for certain, we will all be dead!Through his book, Deepak has thrown a thinly disguised challenge to practitioners on the other side – prove, not through internally consistent models with empirical irrelevance but with actual evidence, many assertions about what reduces poverty. For example, many poverty practitioners in India offer the conclusion that programmes like NREGA have helped to substantially reduce poverty in India. Recall that like food for work programmes/NREGA were invented for times of famines; ‘their success lies in the self-targeting made possible by offering a wage that only the truly needy will accept.’ But what happens when corruption sets in and many more non-needy people enter the fray, and no work gets done? This is the reality of NREGA in India; the NREGA advocates are not interested in doing their homework right, because if they did, it would defeat their basic arguments and recommendations. But Deepak Lal calls this bluff and documents why ideological snake oil is just that – snake oil.
There are several conceptual and empirical gems in the book. How private transfers among families are more important for poverty reduction than government transfers; how a vast majority of foreign aid has failed to alleviate poverty; how ‘particularly for the merit goods, primary health care and primary education, even if there is a case for public financing, there is none for public production’; how a ‘need for a "social safety net" does not prejudge whether this should be provided through private or public action’; how ‘in many labour-abundant (and land-scarce) parts of the Third World, the squatters are encroaching on private land or public land designated for parks, drains, and other public goods’; and how some of the important methodological techniques (e.g. many randomized control experiments) are akin to statistical snake oil.
As is his wont, and expertise, Deepak does not take a narrow bite of history to inform us of progress. He takes a whole chunk, in this case about a thousand years. So just as a matter of historical documentation, record keeping if you will, Deepak has produced a masterly volume. But it is not just record keeping – the why and how also have to be answered, and Deepak Lal does that very well.
Surjit S. Bhalla
Chairman, Oxus Investments, Delhi
INTERROGATING INCLUSIVE GROWTH: Poverty and Inequality in India by K.P. Kannan. Routledge, India, 2014.
SCHOLARS in Development Studies have in recent years drawn our attention to the fact that a significant segment of the population in developing countries remains disadvantaged and often excluded from the dynamic economy governed by the logic of capital. The book under discussion, Interrogating Inclusive Growth: Poverty and Inequality in India by K.P. Kannan is a written in this tradition. Published in 2014, it draws on articles written between 2008 and 2013 which take stock of the experience of neo-liberal growth in India (i.e. growth experienced in India after the formal acceptance by the Indian state of a policy stance distinctly in favour of big global and domestic capital) on incidence of poverty and vulnerability (the book adopts a specific definition of classifying households that are vulnerable based on both consumption and additional indicators), on employment creation and quality of employment, and on the situation of inequality.
Chapter 2 assesses the impact of India’s much vaunted ‘high’ growth performance on the poverty status of the households. Kannan classifies all households according to different thresholds of poverty, using the official poverty line as a benchmark. By going beyond the bi-variate classification of the population, into below and above poverty line, this chapter establishes, convincingly, that faith in the market mechanism to reduce poverty through a ‘trickle down’ process is misplaced and at best likely to reduce poverty only at a ‘snail’s pace’. Without going into the nitty-gritty of numbers (the book is a very nuanced and rigorous for those who are number and measurement inclined), this chapter establishes that the so-called ‘robust’ growth in the Indian economy in the post 1990s, has only helped the extremely poor to become poor, the poor to transcend to becoming marginally poor, the marginally poor to the vulnerable and so on. These groups add up to more than three-fourths of India’s population, with middle and high income groups accounting for just 23% of India’s population by the end of the last decade. The chapter also neatly establishes the correspondence between economic status of households and their work (informal), educational (low) attainments, and social status (SC, ST, Muslims, OBC and others in ascending order).
The findings of this chapter should inform all serious discussion, talk and policy discourse about growth, and challenge those who talk about introducing economic criterion for favourable discrimination in India. It questions the common sense view, of mostly the literate and ‘successful’ population of India, that extreme poverty and vulnerability in India is now passé in post-liberalized ‘Shining’ India (even slum dwellers have TV and two wheelers is a common refrain in Lutyen’s Delhi). The message from the book that the ‘clustering of the poor is not along the poverty line in India but just above it’, implies that even a modest raising of the poverty line will result in a significant increase in poverty levels on the basis of consumption expenditure. Once again, this finding has important implications for the ways of understanding, looking at and depicting poverty in India. For a more realistic understanding of poverty we would perhaps be better off talking about poverty bands and not a poverty line. This clustering of population also reveals how a large population in India ‘lives on the edge’, which has once again substantive meaning for those who wish to understand the social and political undercurrents in this country. Two powerful associations and explanations of persistent poverty that emerge from the book – social identity and education – further reinforce the usefulness of this discussion for social scientists and policy makers.
The study of poverty across regions reveals that the gap is widening, and that the real divide is not so much across states but social groups. Even those states that have improved their rankings, failed to pull up the socially deprived groups of SC and STs and there is evidence of increased inequality amongst these groups. This suggests that state rankings based on averages often hide much more then what they reveal. The association between social identity and vulnerability is found to be very strong, suggesting that even though all are poor, some are more poor than others; that the consumption of a poor household belonging to the SC/ST grouping is lower than that of a poor household belonging to minorities and OBC, which in turn is lower than that of a poor household belonging to other castes.
After ‘empirically’ destroying the misplaced policy emphasis on growth and the associated argument of placing full faith on trickle-down in the chapters on poverty and vulnerability, the book goes on to examine the issue of employment. The final two chapters of the book discuss labour market issues. The data, debate and arguments are a bit dated but nonetheless the larger argument stands valid. The reality is that the manufacturing sector in India is characterized by low gains in employment, low quality jobs and informalization of the workforce in the formal sector. Low wages, low productivity and miserable working conditions of the informal labour get due attention in the book and the evidence complied is effectively used to contest the idea that India is following a model of inclusive growth. The book, however, fails to draw out the fuller implications of its labour market argument for the policy and political discourse in the country. One important implication of the findings is that all talk about second generation labour reforms or the rigidity of the labour market as a factor inhibiting industrial growth appears misplaced. In fact, a more important and interesting question is that since the labour market is already deregulated even without formal changes in labour laws, what larger political purpose does the current discourse on deregulation of the labour market serve.
1Following the discussion on trends in poverty and vulnerability and its social correlates, the book turns its attention to the trends in inequality across various poverty groups as well as social groups in order to evaluate the claims of ‘inclusive’ growth. The author finds evidence supporting an increase in inequality across different consumption groups or poverty bands as well as across social groups. Unfortunately, the book does not follow up on its conclusion of why the growth model in India has not been inclusive. Is it just policy failure or a case of neglect on the part of the government, or something that is rooted in the very process and dynamics of the growth path/model that the Indian ruling classes have adopted in recent years? This reader feels the need for a deeper explanation for the absence of inclusion. This, however, could be seen as both as a success and limitation of the analysis presented. The analytical framework of the book sees an imperative for basic social security on both economic grounds and for reasons of social and economic justice. But on what basis does the author see the state fulfilling this role in Third World economies like India, which are both a constituent of and constrained by their linkages with global capitalism, is not discussed. On what basis do we believe that Third World states can adopt and implement specified welfare policies which even advanced countries are finding difficult, needs a better argument. Interestingly, the final paragraph of the introduction provides some clues about what the author thinks. It says that the reason behind not only economic but also social and political problems in India is the ‘steady rejection of a national development agenda that ought to focus on the various forms of disparities and deprivations and provide a broad-based content for growth by consciously taking into account the vast informal economy, including the rural economy.’ It is important to ask why there is this rejection of a ‘national development’ agenda?
It is difficult to deny the continuing importance of the nation state in the world capitalist system. However, the very existence of the system is shaped by specific national forms of its constituent parts, each with its own history and internal logic, and by the relations among these entities. Global capitalism does not exist as a unitary entity; it involves the complex and contradictory interaction of many capitals, each organized in relation to the nation state, and that relations between these capitals or states entail systemic inequalities and hierarchies of power which inevitably make for antagonisms and conflicts. How useful is it then to bring in the ‘national development agenda’ as a core developmental concern of the current growth paradigm?
If we examine the nature of politics in independent India, it is clear that liberalization, a potentially contentious process, has been less on the agenda than it might otherwise have been. The big debates of the time have not been economic, thus enabling policies of liberalization to be pushed through almost by ‘stealth’. A result of this ‘stealth’ has meant that the dynamics of accumulation and profit in India in the phase of economic reforms has been largely led by dispossession (of the poor, small landowners, self-employed, home workers, etc.) or by encroachment (either of land or forests by the mining companies, or by rural and urban land by developers, builders and speculators). Moreover, the institutional environment for accumulation is less dependent on building competitiveness through transparency and increased accountability and more on ensuring continued public legitimacy and robust capital accumulation through the ‘back door’.
This implies that some of the structural features of the capitalist economy in India are politically constructed. The influence of the ruling classes on government policy is the core issue – a policy that produces collusion and competition simultaneously. Politics around caste, favourable discrimination in jobs, minority rights and safety, sons of the soil issues, regional parties and coalition compulsions, issues of accountability and transparency, right to information, corruption, and so on, are all very handy for continued sustenance of this specific form of capitalist accumulation. Framing policy discussions in terms of nation building/nationalism helps divert attention from real concerns. Nationalism has often taken a variety of anti-people, imperialist or statist or racist or fascist forms, providing ideological support to ruling class politics and political domination at home and abroad. The recognition of this role of nationalism in the building of global capitalism, at the very least, demands a fresh look at an approach which explains the contemporary crisis as just a ‘rejection of national development agenda’.
Atul Sood
Associate Professor, Centre for the Study of Regional Development, JNU, Delhi
Footnote:
1. See Atul Sood, et. al., ‘Deregulating Capital, Regulating Labour: The Dynamics in Manufacturing Sector in India’, Economic and Political Weekly 49(26-27), 28 June 2014.
AFTER THE BOMB: Reflections on India’s Nuclear Journey
by Achin Vanaik. Orient Blackswan, Delhi, 2015.THIS is a timely book, for 17 years have passed since India became an overt nuclear weapon power. The promise by the pro-weapon lobby at the time was that India and Pakistan would benefit from bringing the bomb out of the basement, establish a minimum credible deterrent with no possibility of a nuclear arms race, and live in nuclear stability. Achin Vanaik is a leading member of the anti-weapon lobby which believes otherwise and surely 17 years is long enough to permit a reality check.
The author is of the opinion that the two countries are far from achieving any kind of nuclear stability and that the Kargil and Parakram crises have brought the countries to the brink of nuclear instability. He has a point in that during the Cold War, over a 45 year nuclear stand-off in Central Europe, the closest analogy to the India-Pakistan scenario, there was only one small arms firing incident between NATO and the Warsaw Pact countries, whereas in the subcontinent firing never ceases between the two uniformed forces guarding the LoC and the IBL. Not surprisingly, other powers have termed the subcontinent the most dangerous place on earth. This much is true. But would it have been any different had India and Pakistan not tested weapons in 1998? Hardly likely, for the Pakistanis had a deliverable weapon in 1987 as leaked by A.Q. Khan to Kuldip Nayar, and the Kashmir insurgency was initiated in 1989 under the cover of nuclear weapons.
Did nuclear weapons have any effect on the outcome of the Kargil war and Operation Parakram? The Pakistanis are adamant that they did, for why else did Prime Minister Vajpayee restrain the Indian Army and Air Force from crossing the LoC? And again, why did India not attack Pakistan in 2002, either in January or in May after the Kalu Chak incident? The author has no answers to these questions, as indeed no one does, other than some Pakistani generals who believe that their nuclear weapons compensate for their conventional inferiority against India. The real question is whether the danger in the subcontinent is posed by the mere presence of nuclear weapons, or by Pakistan’s bizarre strategy of combining terrorism with a nuclear weapons.
In hindsight, after A.Q. Khan’s statement to Kuldip Nayar in 1987, there was no chance that India would not make the bomb, and after the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) came up for indefinite extension in 1995 with the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), there was little possibility that India would not test. It is true all this is realpolitik, a concept that the author vilifies as something that Indian observers don’t truly understand. However, realpolitik intrudes heavily into the entire story. The US turned a blind eye to Pakistan’s weaponization during the Afghan war due to realpolitik, and China assists Pakistan hugely in becoming a weapon power out of realpolitik. Indeed, the story of China’s deceitful help to Pakistan in its nuclear and missile programme is one of the more glaring omissions of Vanaik’s book.
It is unlikely that Pakistan would have had a bomb as early as 1987 without China’s help, which became even more substantial thereafter with an entire missile factory being transferred to manufacture the Shaheen-1s. There is also the collusion between China, North Korea and Pakistan in the transfer of the No-Dong (Ghauri) to Islamabad. This assistance continues in full military flow to keep India tied down South of the Himalayas. So while it is undeniable that the India-Pakistan nuclear relationship is a dyad, the constant presence of China necessitates that India take a wider stance on the whole issue beyond the dyad. Fortunately, India was given the nuclear deal in 2005, another source of unhappiness for the author. But the 30 year old technology sanctions on India were lifted by the US in a most generous deal, which has mistakenly been named the Civil Nuclear Deal even when there has been no transfer of civil nuclear assets.
Though the US comes in for much criticism in the book, the author is unable to differentiate between the US Cold War behaviour and its post-Cold War attitudes to nuclear weapons. In the post-Cold War world, the US has taken on the mantle of the world’s policeman when it comes to the NPT, and however much this attitude is brought on by self-interest, it is a role that one must concede to the US. The book unfortunately came out before the Iran nuclear deal which, all things considered, is the best deal under the circumstances. All countries, even India, stand to benefit from the deal, barring perhaps the Israelis.
Many of Vanaik’s arguments against the bomb were made in 1998 and considering that the subcontinent has gone well past weaponizing, it would have made better sense not to go over well trodden ground once again, claiming as to how much better it would have been without the tests. This deficiency is in part addressed by discussing what can be done ‘now’. The author may be surprised to learn that some of the points he has recommended are precisely what are being discussed by retired military and diplomatic people from the two countries on Track II. So there is no inherent conflict between disarmament as an ideal, and possessing nuclear weapons to defend one’s country.
The author is correct in some of the observations he makes about nuclear weapons in South Asia. First, there is a degree of elitism among those who feel they are entrusted with nuclear deterrence. This elitism goes along with a degree of arrogance, which the early strategists worked against by writing an inoffensive nuclear doctrine. But admittedly under the control of the doctrine there is some scope for militarism, and that is the second useful point that Vanaik makes. There is no all-encompassing anti-militaristic, anti-weapon lobby in India or, if there is one, it is weak and muted. For these reasons this book continues to be a kind of conscience keeper for realpolitik inclined strategic thinkers and analysts about the greater role of ethics and morality in international relations.
Raja Menon
Rear Admiral (retd.), Indian Navy, Delhi
CONTESTED POLITICS OF EDUCATIONAL REFORM IN INDIA: Aligning Opportunities With Interests by Manisha Priyam. Oxford University Press, Delhi, 2015.
ASSESSMENTS of national performance, whether of economic growth or educational reform, in a country the size and diversity of India, when made in macro terms, are usually misleading in that any statement will be true of some parts and not of others. As the famous saying by Joan Robinson goes, ‘Whatever you can rightly say about India, the opposite is also true.’
1 Yet, it is hardly satisfying to always argue that such-and-such an outcome is broadly true, with some exceptions, and so on. The micro foundations of macro reform have been the subject of considerable research, but making clear connections is usually possible only by reducing the relevant complexities.2 The belief that development is amenable to a technocratic analysis from which clear policy guidelines follow remains more deeply rooted than might be thought. As Stiglitz remarks, ‘It has been almost an article of faith that if certain technical allocation issues were solved, economic development would inevitably follow.’3 He himself has argued for recognizing the role of tacit and local knowledge and developing the ability to resolve disputes in a ‘democracy-friendly’ manner. The role of context, institutions, and policy leaders then becomes far more visible.In the field of educational reform, no less than the economy, the widely shared belief in replicable models of reform has majorly influenced policies, programmes and resource allocation. When outcomes are less impressive than expected, many factors might be held to be responsible, including the social context, outdated procedures, sluggish institutions, vested interests, and so on. Politics, for example, is usually seen as an impediment to what otherwise might have been a smooth process of change. The book under review is a brave and ‘successful’ attempt to understand the positive role that politics can play in the educational reform process. An empirical study that casts its net wide, researching into the ways in which political interests aligned for change, the role of individual state leaders, the changes in educational institutions, and the responses of the community, it draws upon data collected through different methods and analyzed through the prisms of political theory and comparative studies. It examines diverse outcomes of educational reform by embracing complexity: specifically, by looking at the ways in which state level politics influenced educational outcomes in two states of a national programme with broadly similar design.
Priyam takes issue with the irritatingly common assumption that politics serves as a constraint in a change process, and argues instead that it can be an enabler; that new policies also create new opportunities for political action, the basis of which is more complex than material self-interest; and that ‘the actions of political leaders matter more than those of policymakers in the successful adoption of change’ (p. 9). Policy-makers are the architects of programme design, itself influenced by several forces, including, in the case of education, external aid agencies. Global commitments, funding and national expert opinion together is what shaped the contours of educational reform from the 1990s. The implementation, however, had to be managed by state governments and this, as she suggests, meant considerable ‘readaptation and variation’ (p. 18).
The two states selected for this comparative study over two decades of educational reform starting in the early 1990s by Priyam are Andhra Pradesh and Bihar. Other studies too have pointed to state level differences in outcomes and tried to advance reasons for the same.
4 Priyam’s is a pioneering attempt to explain variations in terms of political agency permitting or disallowing the formulation of required changes. She discusses in some detail the varying situations in relation to educational reform in the areas of teacher policies, decentralization and community participation, and the working of schools. At the start, Andhra and Bihar were roughly similarly placed in their educational indicators; equally, both saw new and charismatic political leadership emerge at this time. Over the period, however, while Andhra continued to progress and made remarkable strides, including in reducing gender gaps in education participation, the Bihar experience was not so successful.Teachers and teacher unions are a special interest group that in most renderings of conventional theory are expected to oppose change that does not offer unambiguous benefit to all. The two states were very different in the number and strength of teacher unions. One presumes that the goal in both states would have been to try and align the interests of teachers with stated aims of the reform process. However, different strategies were followed and while in AP it proved possible to largely elicit the support of teachers and enable a cooperative process, the relationship between the state and teacher unions in Bihar soon turned confrontational. Importantly, it is not so much the presence or absence of opposition, but rather the ability to negotiate some consensus that made the difference.
Priyam questions many myths/presuppositions in their assumption of linear change processes: teacher unions generally oppose reform is one; similarly, decentralization is good because it allows local priorities to influence allocations and citizens to demand accountability; or that community contact will be energized through the formation of Village Education Committees and School Management Committees. The two states adopted different models of decentralization. In Andhra, for instance, the school education committees being under the line departments never enjoyed any real autonomy; Bihar, in contrast, attempted a different structure. Yet during fieldwork, villagers in Bihar reported many more problems and grievances with the school system. While in Andhra a change in political leadership (from the Telugu Desam Party to the Congress) led to changes in programme design, in Bihar, far more noticeable was a deepening of political indifference. Priyam argues that behind the better functioning schools in Andhra, and thus better observed outcomes, was not an ‘absence’ of politics; rather it reflected the particular way in which state politics and local vested interests interacted to produce more desirable results. In Bihar, for instance, the state leadership, irrespective of the party in power, was either uninterested in or unable to reduce local corruption: ‘Leadership acts with greater autonomy (once freed) from the control of either structures or interests than current assumptions in theory’ (p. 255).
It would be doing this book disservice to atry and summarize its complex arguments in a few sentences. It would also be misleading (returning to the quote at the start) to suggest that it offers an easily replicable frame for analyzing outcomes in other states. Having read this book, it would be difficult to recommend any simple technocratic policy prescription for educational reform. Clearly, successful reform emerges from the complex interaction of many factors – the social and economic context, the role of state level political actors as well as bureaucrats, the nature of political agency and motivation, the ability and incentive to make continuous changes and modifications towards stated goals, and so on. By focusing on the role of political leaders, a new dimension has been introduced. Overall, this book by Manisha Priyam is a pleasure to read, which is not always a requirement of or indeed a byproduct of excellent scholarship. By shifting attention away from national to state level politics, it has additional value in today’s context, with ‘cooperative federalism’ as the new template.
Ratna M. Sudarshan
National Fellow, National University of
Educational Planning and Administration, Delhi
Footnotes:
1. http://www.economist.com/node/5133493
2. For some examples see the MIMAP project at https://www.pep-net.org/history
3. J. Stiglitz, Globalization and its Discontents. W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 2002, p. 38.
4. See, A. Vaidyanathan and P.R. Gopinathan Nair (eds.), Elementary Education in Rural India: A Grassroots View. Sage Publications, New Delhi, 2001; PROBE team, Public Report on Basic Education. Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 1999.
MODI’S WORLD: India’s Expanding Sphere of Influence by C. Raja Mohan. Harper Collins, Delhi, 2015.
WHEN Narendra Modi took over as prime minister in May 2014, few expected him to devote much time or attention to foreign policy. Domestic economic challenges loomed large before the incoming government. Besides, Modi’s own promises on the campaign trail had led to inflated expectations of a rapid return to a higher growth trajectory. Yet the prime minister has over the past many months expended more energy on foreign relations than any of his recent predecessors. He has travelled to a range of countries and engaged with international leaders and overseas Indians across the globe. But what does all this frenetic activity add up to? Is there a larger arc of strategy and purpose that we can discern amidst these prime ministerial sorties?
No scholar or commentator is better placed to answer these questions than C. Raja Mohan. For the past 25 years and more, he has been a prominent voice in discussions on Indian foreign policy. But his stature as the pre-eminent analyst of India’s international engagements stems from at least three qualities. The first is his ability to grasp the big picture and the emerging trends of global politics. Be it the impending collapse of the Soviet Union, the unipolar moment in US foreign policy, or the astonishing rise of China, Raja Mohan was quickest off the block in comprehending the scale of these changes and assessing their implications for India. Further, unlike most writers on the subject, he has a sound grasp of the history of Indian foreign policy and a knack for connecting the past and the present. Last, there is a refreshing core of clarity and realism in his thinking – one that is untinged by any reflexive nationalism. Each of these is admirable in itself, but their combination is rather rare.
Modi’s World is a collection of Raja Mohan’s columns in the Indian Express bookended by two new analytical essays. This is journalism very much as the first draft of history. As such, the pieces are worth reading again in this thematically organized format. The opening essay places Narendra Modi’s foreign policy against the long backdrop of India’s engagement with the world since 1947. The ‘First Republic’, stretching from 1947 to 1989, had three defining characteristics: the political dominance of the Congress, a quest for economic autarky, and non-alignment in the Cold War. These features, Mohan rightly emphasizes, were intertwined. Foreign policy was never divorced from domestic priorities. A trio of elements similarly marked the ‘Second Republic’ that began in 1989: coalition politics, economic reforms, and adaptation to a post-Cold War world.
After an initial period of flux in the early 1990s, New Delhi embarked on a purposive reorientation of its foreign policy. The NDA government under Prime Minister A.B. Vajpayee asserted India’s position as a significant power by testing nuclear weapons and thereafter moved to capitalize on this by deepening engagement with the United States and China, even while seeking to place relations with Pakistan on an even keel. The first UPA government under Prime Minister Manmohan Singh took each of these initiatives to new heights and placed India firmly on the global map as an emerging power.
UPA-II, in Mohan’s reading, undid many of the gains of the earlier period. A consistent advocate of a strong partnership with the United States, he is understandably disappointed that the Indo-US nuclear deal did not lead to major breakthrough in strategic relations between the two countries. Raja Mohan lays blame partly at the door of the Congress party’s leader Sonia Gandhi and partly at the revival of ideas of ‘strategic autonomy’ and ‘non-alignment’ that he believes are synonymous with the lingering anti-Americanism in the Indian establishment. However, neither Sonia Gandhi’s world view (if there was one), nor the content of the calls for strategic autonomy, receive sustained treatment at his hands. More importantly, he seems to underestimate the impact of the financial crisis of 2008 and the ensuing ‘great recession’ on global politics, including India’s relations with the United States.
All this, however, is important only as the immediate background to foreign policy under Modi. Mohan discerns five major threads running through the welter of visits and meetings over the past year and a half. To begin with, there is a clear focus on putting economic interest first in external engagements. This was partly circumstantial. The economic downturn inherited from the previous government necessitated reviving private investment, including foreign direct investment. Hence, Modi’s efforts to woo investors in Japan and China, United States and Canada, among other countries. Hence, too, his constant refrain abroad that India was open for business. The elaborately orchestrated events with the Indian diaspora are another aspect of this quest for external economic engagement.
The second defining feature of the new foreign policy is ‘confident globalization’. Mohan notes that despite two and a half decades of economic reform, there is considerable discomfort with the idea of globalization across the political spectrum. Modi, he claims, is determined to discard this defensive attitude. While this may be true of issues like cyberspace, Mohan is certainly on a weaker wicket in suggesting that this is true across domains. Consider the government’s trade policy. Far from embracing any multilateral or plurilateral trade agenda, New Delhi has resorted to old-fashioned measures of protectionism – especially on industries like steel. To be sure, much of this is in response to demands from industry for protection. Still, no one can accuse the government favouring liberal trade policies. Indeed, the Left’s description of the Modi government as staunchly ‘neo-liberal’ only shows how far it is removed from reality.
The third aspect is a revival of India’s leadership in the region. Mohan rightly underscores the changes ushered by the new government in our dealings with smaller neighbours: Bhutan, Nepal and Sri Lanka. On Bangladesh, Modi went against the stated position of his own party and the ideologically driven stance of the RSS in signing the Land Boundary Agreement. The prime minister has, however, found it harder to initiate change vis-à-vis Pakistan. Although he got off to a good start with Nawaz Sharif by inviting him to the swearing-in ceremony, ties soon went cold. New Delhi took umbrage at Pakistan’s meeting the Hurriyat Conference’s leadership prior to talks between the foreign secretaries and called them off. At the time, Mohan noted that this was a ‘bold gamble’ attempt at rewriting the rules of the game on Kashmir. But he also presciently added that Pakistan was unlikely to acquiesce in this and that the Indian gamble might prove ‘politically unsustainable’. This was a correct prediction – just that government chose to repeat the mistake a year later. It remains to be seen whether Mohan is proved right a second time. I would put my money on him.
The fourth aspect highlighted in the book is the new engagement with the US and China. Narendra Modi’s decision to double-down on the strategic partnership with the US was not widely foreseen; not least because of his own troubles in getting a visa to travel to the US over the past decade. But the rapidity with which he moved to rejuvenate the relationship underscores his unsentimental pursuit of Indian interests. Mohan believes that the US and India now have another opportunity to cement their strategic ties. If anything, the wider context is more propitious for such a turn. China’s increasing unilateralism and muscular behaviour in Asia has created fresh interest for countries in the region to wish to work with the US and India. In this context, other bilateral and multilateral strategic partnerships – with Japan, Australia and Vietnam among other – are crystallizing. Mohan is right in pointing out that Modi believes that India should be unconstrained by perceptions of China in its engagement with other Asian countries.
The last dimension highlighted by Mohan is cultural and civilizational soft power. Buddhism and Yoga have been trumpeted as India’s assets. There is also a clear realization in the government of the importance of crafting narratives about India’s place in the world: for instance, by highlighting its role in the First World War. All this is fine, insofar as soft power is backed up by a real build-up of capabilities. And here lies the main gap in Mohan’s assessment of the Modi government.
There is hardly any systematic analysis of the limitations on our ability to exercise power and influence, especially on the institutional side. Whether it is in extending lines of credit to another country or in defence diplomacy, our ability to identify and pursue nitty-gritty interests remains weak. What does it say about the quality of our defence policy making that after a process stretching over years to buy combat aircrafts we end up miscalculating their life-cycle costs? Strong leadership and vision at the top can only go so far. The forty-thousand feet view has to be matched by an ability to operate on the ground. Raja Mohan is our shrewdest observer of the former. But his insights on the latter will be even more essential in tracking the evolution of foreign policy under Prime Minister Modi.
Srinath Raghavan
Senior Fellow, Centre for Policy Research, Delhi
