Since its emergence as an independent state from the collapse of the British Indian Empire, many of India’s policymakers have harboured the hope that the country will eventually achieve the status of a great power. This chapter will first provide a brief historical overview of India’s quest for a great power status, and then take stock of the country’s current domestic institutional capabilities. Finally, it will conclude with a brief discussion of India’s prospects as a great power.
There is little or no question that the country’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, entertained this aspiration. Nehru, of course, did not seek this pathway through the acquisition of military capabilities but instead focused on building the sinews of heavy industry at home and through the pursuit of an ideational world order abroad.
His emphasis on industrialization stemmed from his admiration of the Soviet Union’s success with forced-draught industrialization albeit without its highly repressive features. The pursuit of a global order based on multilateralism and a rejection of power politics can be traced to two different sources. At one level there is little or no question that Nehru was convinced that a new global order, one that eschewed the use of force, promoted decolonization and reduced global inequalities, was a moral imperative. At another level, it can also be traced to a concern about the opportunity costs involved in diverting the scarce resources of a poor country to military expenditures. Furthermore, he had genuine fears about the possibility of Bonapartism—a hardly unreasonable misgiving given the fate of so many states that emerged from the end of colonialism, including Pakistan.
Nehru’s emphasis on industrialization laid the foundations for a modern Indian economy.1 However, it abjectly failed to promote significant economic growth or dramatically reduce poverty. His internationalist focus, especially under the aegis of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), did raise India’s profile in global affairs. More to the point, the country played a significant role in promoting international peacekeeping, in placing nuclear disarmament on the global agenda and in promoting decolonization. None of these were trivial achievements given India’s lack of material power.
Sadly, the significance of material capabilities was underscored when the country faced a military onslaught from the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1962 and confronted a complete rout. Few, if any members of the NAM, came to India’s assistance. The great powers, which had been subject to India’s stinging criticisms at various international forums on a range of issues, expressed no great sympathy for India’s plight. For example, both the United Kingdom and the United States only provided modest amounts of military assistance. Worse still, they exerted pressure on India to settle the Kashmir dispute with Pakistan on terms favourable to India’s adversary.
In the aftermath of the 1962 war and Nehru’s death, India’s great power aspirations were effectively set aside. The most important change that the war engendered was the much-needed modernization of the Indian military. However, even as this process was belatedly under way, the country had to cope with another war of aggression as Pakistan launched a second war in 1965 over the disputed state of Kashmir. Nehru’s successor, Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri, ably coped with the crisis. He also took the decision, shortly after the 1964 Chinese nuclear test, to authorize the Subterranean Nuclear Explosions Project (SNEP) that eventually culminated in the first Indian nuclear test of 1974. However, Shastri was not in office long enough to pursue any other significant initiatives at home or abroad. Those tasks fell to Nehru’s daughter, Indira Gandhi, who inherited his mantle of leadership following Shastri’s demise in 1966.
It is possible that Indira Gandhi shared her father’s vision of establishing India as a great power. However, more pressing domestic issues, including the possibility of a looming famine in 1966, consumed most of her energies in the initial years in office.2 Subsequently, especially after orchestrating a dramatic military victory over Pakistan in 1971 she did try to raise India’s global profile. To that end, India became one of the most vocal exponents of the New International Economic Order (NIEO). This effort, which was launched at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), sought to bring about a radical redistribution of global resources and to restructure the global economy for addressing extant North–South disparities.3 In the end, despite its grandiloquent goals, it accomplished little. Indeed its effects had perverse consequences for both growth and equity in the global south and certainly did little to enhance India’s stature in international affairs.
Indeed, during much of her tenure and that of her son and successor, Rajiv Gandhi, India could neither address critical problems of domestic poverty nor assert itself as a significant global presence. At home, the country witnessed mostly anaemic economic growth and abroad, its role was largely confined to grand rhetorical flourishes. Its failure to address domestic poverty, its limited significance in the global economic order and its lack of substantial military capabilities effectively reduced its status to that of a marginal actor in global affairs. India’s policymakers may have chafed at the country’s limited role in international politics but they lacked the wherewithal to make a meaningful difference.
The abrupt end of the Cold War and the simultaneous collapse of the Soviet Union amounted to a dramatic exogenous shock to both India’s economy and polity. From an economic standpoint, India’s model of a mixed economy reliant on massive state intervention suffered a body blow with the Soviet collapse. The strategy of economic growth that the Soviet Union had pursued and that India had emulated to some degree was effectively discredited. The Soviet collapse also meant the loss of India’s most invaluable strategic partner. To compound matters, other factors, including the loss of substantial remittances from the Persian Gulf as well as a series of debt payments that became due, converged to create an unprecedented fiscal crisis for the country. These twin shocks, strategic and economic, induced India’s policymakers to undertake a fundamental reappraisal of the country’s economic and foreign policy.
In the realm of economic policymaking, the country abandoned its commitment to substantial state intervention, opened its markets and drastically reduced regulations. Within a year thereof, the economy not only recovered but began posting unprecedented rates of economic growth. Within the decade, the country had not only embarked upon a pathway of steady economic growth but had also made a significant dent on poverty. It also overcame its residual reservations about the utility of force in international politics. To that end it carried out a series of five nuclear tests in May 1998 ending a long span of strategic ambiguity.4 Despite widespread international diplomatic disapprobation and a raft of bilateral and multilateral sanctions, the country was able to cope with the fallout from the tests. Its economy was robust enough to withstand the sanctions and its diplomatic corps sufficiently dexterous to cope with the political condemnation.
Ironically, the crossing of the nuclear Rubicon, combined with significant economic growth, actually catapulted the country into an altogether new realm in the global arena. With two key elements of material power harnessed, India could now assert itself in a hitherto unprecedented fashion in the global sphere. Not surprisingly, it increasingly started to lay claim to a permanent seat in the United Nations Security Council (UNSC). It also became an active member of the G-20, helped create the India–Brazil–South Africa forum (IBSA) and embraced the Brazil–Russia–India–China–South Africa (BRICS) organization. All of these developments, both at home and abroad, boded well for India’s hopes of achieving a great power status.
Despite these obvious achievements, there are a number of factors, mostly domestic, that can hobble its quest. These need to be discussed in some detail. The first impediment can stem from what was one of India’s greatest strengths: the quality and efficacy of its political institutions. Indeed as early as the late sixties, the noted American political scientist Samuel Huntington had highlighted the significance of its institutions as an indicator of the country’s political development.5 Unfortunately, as Huntington had warned, political development cannot be assumed to be a linear process. Institutions can both develop and decay. Owing to a complex array of factors, virtually every political institution has witnessed a decline both in its probity and efficacy.
India now faces an interesting paradox. A host of countries in the global South are poorly institutionalized. A great deal of decision-making is simply based upon the personal vagaries and proclivities of leaders. Such a problem does not plague India. It has an extraordinary range of institutions that run the gamut from a working Parliament to a mostly independent judiciary. However, over the past several decades all of them have witnessed varying levels of decay. Their internal norms have frayed, their efficacy is at question and their autonomy increasingly at risk. Unless this process of deterioration is arrested, it is far from clear how the existing institutions can address the plethora of problems that currently besiege the country.
Just one or two examples should help illuminate the problem. There is little or no question that the higher echelons of the Indian judiciary have contributed to important developments in modern jurisprudence. For example, through the creation of the system of Public Interest Litigation (PIL) it has extended the reach of the law to many who had hitherto lacked the resources to approach the bench. However, there are widespread concerns about delays in disposing cases by the judiciary, particularly at the lower level. The large number of pending cases6 delays delivery of justice and adds to the woes of the aggrieved by imposing financial stress. Judicial delays also affect commercial transactions and investment decisions with investors apprehending possibilities of protracted litigations in case of disputes.
Another related area also demonstrates the limits of India’s existing institutions. This is the realm of policing. Admittedly, in the country’s federal system, the efficacy of the police does vary considerably across the country. That said, some aggregate statistics underscore the dimensions of a nationwide problem of under-policing. According to a Human Rights Watch report of 2009, India had one civil policeman for 1037 residents against an Asia-wide average of one per 558 residents and a global average of one per 333.7 Another recent article revealed that in India’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, as many as 50 per cent of police posts remained vacant. The same story indicated that on a nationwide basis as many as 24 per cent of police posts remained vacant.8
These statistics, of course, only underscore one facet of the myriad problems of policing in India. Beyond this issue of under-policing, the police in the vast majority of states are under-resourced, overworked and frequently venal. Worse still, a disproportionate number of them are assigned to the task of protecting India’s administrative and especially political elites.9 Though there have been no end of calls for police reform and various commissions have been formed to that end, they have had little or no effect on the actual conduct of policing in the country.
To compound matters, the police, with marked exceptions, have proven wholly inadequate to the task of quelling the resurgence of a neo-Maoist insurgency, the Naxalites, across vast swaths of the country. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, while in office, had publicly stated that the renewal of the Naxalite insurgency was the single greatest threat to the country’s internal security. The statement was hardly hyperbolic as Maoist violence has wracked as many as seven states across the country.10 Worse still, despite state strategies of both repression and co-opting, they have been able to inflict spectacular strikes on police and paramilitary forces. If a state cannot perform one of the most fundamental Weberian tasks—maintain a monopoly over the legitimate use of force—it is hard to see how it can emerge as a great power.
The institutional deficits that the Indian state confronts are not confined to entities dealing with domestic issues. They also afflict areas of foreign and defence policymaking. For example, there is little or no question that India has a highly professional and thoroughly dedicated foreign service. However, as a number of commentators have argued, its size is quite inapt for a country of India’s size. With a sanctioned strength of 912 in 2016, it had a mere 770 full-fledged officers.11 This made it comparable to that of the Singaporean Foreign Service that handles the foreign affairs of a country of five million.12 Despite multiple plans to expand the foreign service, the results of such efforts have been most uninspiring. It is indeed a testament to the service, that despite its small size, it has been able to cope with the growing complexity of India’s foreign relations. Of course, a counterfactual thought experiment might raise an uncomfortable question: what opportunities have been lost or squandered owing to the limited size of the service?
Despite the structural limits that plague the service, it is widely believed that it is mostly an efficacious institution. This judgement, however, cannot be proffered about various other governmental bureaucracies charged with safeguarding particular aspects of India’s national security. Few major defence projects in India have been completed on time. The ones completed have also often been noted to have design flaws. As a result, the armed forces have had to bear with poor-quality weapons and equipment. Indigenization of defence manufacturing has fallen short of its objectives with dependence on foreign prototypes and components continuing, as in the case of Light Combat Aircraft (LCA), which is reliant on an imported engine.13 Serious efforts to improve the situation in the foreseeable future are yet to be noted.
This overview has made clear that India’s quest for a great power status is long standing. For decades the effort was mostly chimerical as the country simply lacked the material wherewithal to achieve that standing. Seventy years later, it has some of the capabilities that might enable it to pursue that goal. It has one of the fastest growing economies in the world; it has managed to make a significant dent on endemic poverty; it is a de facto nuclear weapons state with a growing arsenal; and it has a military with increasing reach. All of these attributes should boost its search for great power standing.
Yet, as this analysis has demonstrated, it also suffers from a number of chronic institutional shortcomings that can hobble its efforts. These inadequacies are not subject to quick or easy redress. They have evolved over extended time spans and will require major reform efforts. Given the resistance of most institutions to drastic changes it is hard to see such reforms emanating from within. Significant exogenous shocks may induce these institutions to undertake the drastic changes that are necessary to enhance their capabilities and efficacy.
There is indeed reason to believe, based upon the country’s post-Independence trajectory, that major institutional reforms or policy shifts have been carried out only in the wake of significant endogenous or exogenous shocks. For example, the much-needed modernization of the Indian armed forces only took place in the aftermath of the 1962 military debacle. Similarly, the market-friendly reforms that were undertaken in the early nineties stemmed from an acute and unprecedented fiscal crisis. Unfortunately, after the initial impetus to pursue reforms the country has often witnessed a renewal of institutional inertia or policy stagnation. Consequently, while shocks have certainly played a vital role in boosting institutional and policy changes, their effects seem to wear off over time. India’s political culture of incremental change seems to prevail over attempts to induce drastic alternations. Given this uneven record, it is hard to envisage a future where the Indian state might harness the requisite motivation to propel itself to tackle various endemic problems that stand in the path towards a great power status. Indeed, it is tempting to conclude that the likelihood that India will achieve that status remains quite uncertain.14