AS the prime minister heads into his fourth year, what is the Modi scorecard on foreign policy? It is mixed at best. Foreign policy is never easy. Gains are incremental and reverses common. In addition, one’s domestic politics can intrude to render policy less than ‘rational’. Modi has probably not done much worse in most areas than his recent predecessors; but he has not done better.

The prime minister’s tireless, quick-to-judgment supporters argue that Modi’s foreign policy has been a brilliant success and has righted the deficiencies of Manmohan Singh’s approach. This is hardly the case, and it is doubtful whether India is more secure than in the past or its interests better protected. If one looks at Modi’s South Asia policy and relations with China, it would be difficult to argue that he has had any great success – including in the Doklam standoff.

India’s neighbourhood policy under Modi was supposed to be a centrepiece of his foreign policy. If the neighbourhood means South Asia, his interest in it lasted about a year and brought India very little. Three years on, India is not much better off in the region. As I argued two years ago, China has been at the heart of his concerns. Here he has turned Indian policy since 1988 on its head. With the US, Modi has taken India closer to the US than any previous prime minister, but with Trump’s arrival on the international stage it is unclear whether Washington will be an asset or a liability.

In this essay, I deal largely with Modi’s South Asia and China policy. Dealing with our South Asian neighbours and China are the biggest challenges of Indian foreign policy. Over the years, India’s US policy has settled into a groove of steadily deepening cooperation. There are irritants, but nothing of a truly strategic nature: nothing Washington does will derogate greatly from India’s internal stability, its territorial integrity, or its economic and military strength. Developments in South Asia and China, on the other hand, could.

Modi began his foreign policy on a creative note by inviting his fellow South Asian leaders to his inauguration. This included Nawaz Sharif from Pakistan who, after some hesitation, attended the ceremony. Modi’s handling of the visit was already a sign that things could go wrong. After Sharif’s visit, New Delhi insisted publicly that Modi had not discussed Kashmir with his counterpart. Playing to his domestic audience in India, the prime minister seemed to forget the need to give Sharif something to take home. Sharif quickly came under intense criticism in Pakistan, not least by his powerful military.

New Delhi followed up by cancelling talks with Pakistan over the Pakistani High Commissioner’s meeting with the Hurriyat in August 2014 – a practice that Indian governments going back at least to Atal Behari Vajpayee’s time had ignored. Modi, playing once again to a domestic gallery, took a hard stand. It is fair to say that India’s Pakistan policy has never recovered from this early set of mistakes. While Modi tried to mend relations by dropping into Sharif’s daughter’s wedding a few weeks later, the damage had been done. The by-now inevitable terrorist attacks in India drove a final nail into the India-Pakistan coffin.

As things stand, there are no talks with Pakistan and no prospect of their resuming given that Modi has insisted he must be satisfied that Islamabad is cracking down on terrorism. In any case, his determination that India will not discuss Kashmir regardless of Pakistani actions or inaction means that the basic understanding with Islamabad going back to Narasimha Rao days has ended. During Rao’s time, it was agreed that the two sides would talk about a series of bilateral issues with security (read terrorism) and Kashmir at the top of the list. Modi has effectively repudiated that understanding.

 

Pakistan is the key problem of India’s South Asia policy, but it is far from being the only one. India’s small neighbours – Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, and Sri Lanka in particular – are always a worry. Domestic instabilities within these countries and growing great power (Chinese) influence in them are constantly on New Delhi’s dashboard.

Modi made a much better start with the small states, but even here things have gone wrong. In the case of Bangladesh, Modi has built on the positives that his predecessor had negotiated: finally seeing through the exchange of enclaves in Berubari, accepting the arbitration decision on the sea boundary, and delivering surplus electricity to Bangladesh. He also extended a $3 billion line of credit including $500 million for Indian armaments.

 

Unfortunately, these positives have been offset by Modi’s inability to take forward the Manmohan agreement on the Teesta river. Domestic politics in the form of Mamata Banerjee had stalled Manmohan’s deal with Dhaka; despite his brave words, Modi has not managed to move Mamata on the deal. This will hurt Sheikh Hasina’s efforts to blunt the rise of Islamic extremists in Bangladesh who use the India relationship to garner support. Nor has India blunted China’s blossoming relationship with Bangladesh. China is now Bangladesh’s biggest trade partner and its primary arms supplier. Amongst the arms it has sold are submarines.

Under Modi, India’s relations with Nepal have also see-sawed dizzyingly. Modi made an eye-catching trip to Kathmandu in August 2014, the first by an Indian prime minister in 17 years, but relations have stalled since then. While Modi signed a flurry of agreements during the visit, including for a $1 billion line of credit and cooperation on hydropower projects, New Delhi’s handling of Nepal’s Madhesi/Terai problems and the issue of the proper representation of various groups in Nepal’s parliament have taken relations to a low point.

Perhaps the lowest point was reached in September 2015 when Nepal accused India of supporting a blockade of various entry points along the border. The blockade lasted until February 2016. New Delhi’s bungling of its aid to Nepal in the wake of the earthquake in April 2015 has not been forgotten either. Not surprisingly, China has made further inroads into Nepal. Most recently, the electoral alliance between the two communist parties of Nepal has been a boost to Beijing’s influence.

Chinese influence has been on the rise since the 2015 blockade, with Beijing increasingly contesting New Delhi’s dominance. Kathmandu is now doing military drills with the PLA, is receiving more developmental aid, and has joined the Belt and Route Initiative. At the heart of India’s difficulty with Nepal is the Madhesi/Terai problem, and here Modi’s tough approach, coming out of domestic political considerations in India (UP and Bihar affinities for Madhesis), has caused a rather precipitous slide in relations. Anti-Indian feelings run high in Nepal and reportedly have never been higher.

 

Modi’s first foreign visit after he became prime minister was to Bhutan. Relations with Bhutan had been rocky for some time, especially after New Delhi removed the subsidies for kerosene and gas in the run-up to the 2013 Bhutanese general elections (in what was widely seen as a warning to Bhutan to not re-elect the incumbent government that was thought to be overly independent in its foreign policy). Making Thimphu the first visit was an important symbolic move, but the real irritants in the relationship have not been removed. Bhutan resents what it regards as interference in its internal affairs and foreign policy and India’s stranglehold on its economy and water resources. Modi has not been able to change those perceptions; indeed, his intervention in Nepalese affairs has only made Thimphu more nervous.

In the wake of the Doklam stand-off, there has been a quiet sense of triumph in India over Delhi’s ‘facing down’ Beijing. This is premature, as several analysts have warned. Beijing’s real intent may have been to drive a wedge between Bhutan and India over Bhutan’s willingness to come to a border settlement with China, a willingness that New Delhi has opposed. If so, the strategic winner at Doklam is Beijing and not Delhi, as it is clear that Thimphu wants a settlement more or less along the lines proposed by China in past years and the confrontation near the tri-junction this summer has only made it more difficult for Bhutan to accept the deal.

 

In Sri Lanka, the Modi team may have played a role in undermining President Rajapaksha’s re-election bid and helped unite dissidents within the ruling and opposition parties, leading to Maithripala Sirisena’s presidential victory. With the change of government, India had an opportunity to nudge the Sri Lankan government in the direction of reconciliation with the Tamil minority and to check rapidly rising Chinese economic and political influence.

Modi’s visit to Sri Lanka was the first by an Indian prime minister in 28 years and ended with promises of aid, a currency swap, and Indian participation in upgrading Trincomalee’s oil farms. Three years on, New Delhi seems to have lost the initiative once again. Tamil interests are still at the mercy of Colombo, and Chinese influence continues to grow on the back of the Belt and Route Initiative and the construction of Hambantota port.

Even as Modi visited Sri Lanka again in 2017, Colombo turned down a request for a Chinese submarine visit. While this reassured Delhi, the fact and timing of the request suggest that Beijing has not given up on acquiring greater maritime access in Sri Lanka. In the meantime, Delhi has yet to find a solution to the bilateral quarrel with Colombo over fishing rights, and progress on the Economic and Technical Cooperation Agreement (ETCA) intended to replace the free trade agreement has been painfully slow.

 

If Modi’s South Asia policy has brought such modest returns, where are we with China? When Modi came to power, relations with China were relatively stable. At the heart of the China policy was the view that normalization of relations would lay the foundation for a final settlement of the border. This view was contrary to Indian policy in the period from November 1962 when the India-China war ended to December 1988 when Rajiv Gandhi visited China. In those 16 years, Delhi stood firm by the view that a border settlement was the condition for the resumption of normal intercourse between the two countries. In December 1988, Rajiv effectively overturned the orthodoxy of those 16 years and accepted Beijing’s contention that the time had come to normalize as a condition for an eventual border settlement.

What did normalization mean? Over time, it came to mean a policy consisting of four pillars: institutionalized negotiations over the border; military confidence-building measures or CBMs; regular summit and other high-level official meetings between the two governments; and business-to-business and people-to-people interactions.

Border negotiations between India and China had begun as early as 1981 and lasted until 1987. These were replaced after the Rajiv visit by the Joint Working Group which met from 1988 to 2003. Then in 2003, when Atal Behari Vajpayee visited China, the two sides agreed to the Special Representatives’ Meeting. The JWG deals with mostly technical issues relating to the border demarcation and CBMs. The Special Representatives focus on the political aspects of a border settlement. It is this mechanism that produced the 2005 agreement on the parameters and guidelines of a settlement.

 

In addition to the border negotiations, the two sides agreed on a set of CBMs to ensure that the two militaries did not get their signals crossed and get into a fight that neither wanted. The most important CBMs are the 1993 and 1996 agreements. In aggregate, these committed the two sides to abjuring the use of force, force reductions particularly of ‘offensive’ weaponry and the creation of a no-fly zone near the line of control, restrictions on and pre-notification of military exercises in the border areas, and regular communication between border personnel. The 1993 and 1996 agreements were followed by the 2012 and 2013 accords. The 2012 accord set up direct communications between the two foreign offices in the event of a border incident, and the 2013 accord contained a clause that committed the two militaries not to tail each other’s border patrols. While one could say that these various protocols did not prevent Doklam, one could also say that they may have prevented the 2017 stand-off from escalating.

The third pillar of normalization was the regularization of high-level meetings between the two countries. India and China’s presidents, prime ministers, assorted ministers, National Security Advisors (NSAs), and other senior officials meet bilaterally, in regional organizations, and on the sidelines of multilateral meetings several times every year. The two sides therefore know each other at the top level better than ever before.

Finally, after 1988, and especially from the mid-1990s onwards, India-China interactions have increased fairly dramatically. Trade has grown from $1.8 billion in 1997 to a high of $72 billion dollars in 2014. In 2008, only 98,700 Chinese tourists visited India and 436,600 Indians visited China. By 2015, the figures were 200,000 Chinese tourists to India and 730,000 Indian tourists to China. Chinese universities have also been an increasingly popular destination for Indian students. In 2015, the number of Indian students in China was 16,600 and the number of Chinese students in India was 2,000.

 

The Modi team has not jettisoned this structure of engagement. But it has made two key changes in India’s China policy. The first is that after the 2014 confrontation at Chumar, Delhi has insisted that any further normalization and deepening of the structure of engagement will require progress on the border negotiations. It is against this background that we should understand Delhi’s rejection of China’s Belt and Road Initiative. That rejection has little to do with the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor or arguments about the debt burden of small countries signing up to big infrastructure projects. It has far more to do with Modi’s sense that China is not making any concessions on a border settlement and on India’s worries about Pakistan and terrorism.

The second and more strategic change is the attempt to construct an anti-China coalition which had been in progress since India’s Look East policy of the 1990s but which Modi has intensified since he came to power. The coalition consists of the US, Japan, Australia, and Vietnam, who, except for South Korea, are the key military powers in East Asia. The culmination of the coalition building process has been India’s membership in the resurrected quadrilateral of democratic powers – the US, Japan, Australia, and India. Vietnam is not part of the quad, but Hanoi is certainly a part of Delhi’s larger effort to build an entente in Asia. It is important to underline that the coalition is not an alliance: no one in the coalition is expected to come to the aid of any other member in case of hostilities with a third party. Rather, the coalition is a signal to Beijing that Delhi has friends. Its objective is to increase India’s bargaining power with China, not to build an alliance.

The key elements of the coalition are: raising the level of diplomatic and defence dialogue among members; actual military cooperation in terms of naval exercises and interoperability; the purchase and sale of equipment; and discussions on military co-production and R&D (with the US, Japan, and Australia). With the US, military cooperation has gone furthest: most recently, Delhi finally signed the LEMOA agreement which allows both countries to access each other’s bases for refuelling and replenishment on a case by case request. In addition, defence talks with Japan and Australia have deepened. Japan has become a permanent member of the Malabar naval exercises (which involve India and the US), and Australia and India for the first time have a defence agreement.

The question ahead is: have the two key changes in China policy under Modi made India more secure? Are they a response to China’s greater assertiveness, or did they provoke Beijing to deepen relations with Islamabad and be unhelpful to New Delhi on issues such as its Nuclear Suppliers Group membership and UN actions against Hafeez Saeed and Masood Azhar?

 

Modi’s US policy since Donald Trump came to power has understandably been restrained. Trump’s unpredictability means that one must proceed slowly and carefully. The US under Trump certainly seems to have changed tack on two counts, both of which Delhi has applauded: an increased US military presence in Afghanistan, and greater pressure on Pakistan to rein in terrorism. Washington has also publicly supported Delhi on the Belt and Road Initiative, expressing skepticism about the benefits of China’s grand plan.

On the other hand, the US Congress has approved funds for Pakistan’s military so that Washington can maintain influence with Islamabad and, vitally, keep its supply lines to Afghanistan open. In the case of China, Trump needs Xi’s support in dealing with North Korea and in rebalancing trade with Beijing. Also troubling for Delhi are likely restrictions on work visas for Indians and continuing American grumbling over the lack of openness in the Indian economy.

 

It has become fashionable in India to decry everything that the Manmohan Singh government did and to celebrate everything Modi does. This review of foreign policy suggests that Modi has not done much better than his predecessor. India has made few if any gains in South Asia. Relations with Bangladesh were on the mend during Manmohan’s time, and there has been no breakthrough on Teesta. With Nepal, relations have scarcely been worse. Sri Lanka remains unmoved on internal reconciliation with the Tamil minority and unable to free itself from Chinese influence. Bhutan stood by India during Doklam but is in a sullen mood. Relations with Pakistan and China are arguably worse. India’s two greatest rivals are closer than ever, with the CPEC drawing them even tighter. India’s relations with the US have remained largely unproblematic, though there are geopolitical and economic irritants.

Given Modi’s mandate and given his reputation as a ‘problem solver’, many had hoped that he would be more creative and courageous in his foreign policy. He has brought energy to foreign policy and is a showman in his meetings with foreigners, but his achievements are modest. Can Modi do better? He has a year or so to show that he can.