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India As an Asian Power

Dhruva Jaishankar

Is India an Asian power? Obviously, it is a large country in Asia. But conceptually, the answer to that question has not always been so simple. For about half of its seventy-year independent history, India did not seek to project its influence meaningfully across Asia and in the Pacific. And only recently—over the last twenty-five years—has a significant role for India in Asia come to be recognized and desired by other relevant actors.

To understand how and why India has had to reengage with Asia over the past quarter-century, it is helpful to consider the emergence of modern Asia in three overlapping phases. The first was shaped by the process of decolonization between the end of the Second World War, in 1945, and the sixties. This era had its brief heyday between the Bandung Conference in 1955 and the Sino-Indian war of 1962, and was marked by Asian solidarity against colonialism and attempts to establish principles of non-alignment and peaceful coexistence. India played a remarkable leadership role during this period, not just as a normative power—a newly independent democracy that was actively shaping regional values—but in facilitating Asian engagement with the People’s Republic of China, mediating during the Korean War, and facilitating Japan’s re-entry into the international community.

The second phase saw pockets of rapid Asian economic growth and the celebration of ‘Asian values’. The growth story was led by Japan, followed by the tiger economies of South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore, and replicated to a certain degree by Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines. These states benefited from political and security ties with the United States and the West, strong centralized governance and a focus on infrastructure, investment, manufacturing and exports. This period was also marked by the rise of a small-state-led institutionalism under the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), enabled by a relative vacuum of Great Power engagement. It lasted roughly from the Tokyo Olympics in 1964 to the end of the Cold War. For much of this period, India retreated. It became more preoccupied with its neighbourhood in South Asia and the Indian Ocean, and its position in international affairs was more heavily influenced by the dynamics of the Cold War. Moreover, with its economy remaining closed, India had only a marginal role to play in the Asian growth story of this era. Thus, for a time, Asia mattered less to India, and vice versa.

The third phase of Asia’s emergence is ongoing. It began with the end of the Cold War in 1991, accelerated after 2001, and was felt in earnest after the global financial crisis of 2008. This period has been defined by the shift in economic and political power from the West to Asia, the rebalance of power within Asia in favour of China, and the reassertion of several other major powers on matters of Asian security and politics. This post-Cold War world has coincided with India’s own economic liberalization. In the early nineties, India began to ‘Look East’, initially recognizing the economic importance and value of East and Southeast Asia. Gradually, China’s growing assertiveness, ASEAN fragility, and uncertainty about US involvement in the region—as well as its own growing capabilities—compelled India to assume a bigger political and security role in the region. India, therefore, upgraded its ‘Look East’ policy to ‘Act East’ with the objective of ensuring a multipolar Asia.

Acting East necessitates further commercial integration with the region so as to provide another economic pole in the area. India will also have to become more active in deepening its diplomatic and security footprint not just in its immediate neighbourhood and the Indian Ocean, but with partners such as the United States, Japan, Australia, and certain Southeast Asian states. Finally, India must remain active in Asian institutions so as to help preserve regional rules and norms, and help guide institutional evolution if necessary.

Asia 1.0: Colonization, Decolonization, and the Spirit of Bandung

It is impossible to appreciate India’s engagement with Asia without understanding Asia’s own evolution. The first phase of modern Asia’s emergence—from roughly 1945 to the mid-sixties—was informed by the processes of colonization and decolonization, and resulted in most of today’s states with their current geographical boundaries, their structures of governance, and their laws and languages.

The process of Asia’s colonization by European powers, the United States and Japan was a traumatic one. It resulted in the brutal suppression of local populations, the destruction of traditional industries, and devastating warfare.¹ It also led to the exchange of populations, cultures and ideas across geographies, although often within a single colonial system. For example, an Indian diaspora, consisting of traders, labourers, and even professionals, developed in Burma (now Myanmar), Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, and other British-controlled territories. It remains active and relevant to this day. The economic links were just as important, often replacing pre-colonial exchanges. There were also intra-Asian interactions in the military sphere, such as the use of Indian forces by the British in China during the Second Opium War and the Boxer Rebellion, and later against Japan during the Second World War.²

India played an important role in the process of Asian decolonization in the immediate post-War period. In March and April 1947, Jawaharlal Nehru—‘by far the best-placed Asian leader to create and lead a broader Asian solidarity movement’³—hosted an Asian Relations Conference in Delhi. It was an idea that Nehru had discussed the previous year with Burmese leader Aung San, and considerable efforts were made to secure participation from the likes of Vietnam and Indonesia. ‘Asia is again finding itself,’ Nehru declared to the participants present from China, Korea, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Tibet, across Southeast Asia, and even Australia and New Zealand.⁴

At the time, India’s leadership in Asia was natural, and benefited from the nature and timing of its independence movement. It was a remarkable achievement, resulting in the single greatest act of decolonization and democratization in history, and foreshadowed similar movements in Southeast Asia. But it was not simply as a normative leader that India engaged Asia. In the early years of the post-War period, India served as a backchannel between the United States and communist China, supported the repatriation of prisoners of war during the Korean War in 1952, and facilitated Japan’s re-entry into the international community, as during Nehru’s visit to Japan in 1957.⁵ At the Bandung Conference in Indonesia in 1955, India along with a handful of other countries led newly independent Asian and African countries to condemn colonialism, engage the People’s Republic of China, and establish principles of peaceful coexistence that were to find continuing resonance over the years in Asia. As an American newspaper noted at the time of the Bandung Conference: ‘[A]t last the destiny of Asia is being determined in Asia, and not in Geneva, or Paris, or London, and Washington. Colonialism is out and hands off is the word. Asia is free. This is perhaps the historic event of our century.’⁶

However, this optimism was short-lived. The 1962 India–China border war buried the notion of India-led Asian solidarity. India’s frailties were exposed, the larger impulses of the Cold War began to define the entire region, and the notion of peaceful coexistence in Asia lay discredited.

Asia 2.0: Tiger Growth, Asian Values, and the ASEAN Way

By the early sixties, other developments were taking place that presaged a second phase of modern Asia’s evolution. Japan, which had already industrialized following the Meiji Restoration in 1868, recovered rapidly after the devastation of the Second World War. Benefiting economically from the Korean War and the United States’ military presence, Japan had rebuilt itself sufficiently by 1964 to host the Olympics and launched its first high-speed railway. But it was not the only Asian economy to chart a path for growth on the security benefits of a US-led order, spending on infrastructure and public welfare, a focus on manufacturing, and access to Western markets for exports. A year later, in 1965, Singapore became independent, and initiated an ambitious national development agenda of its own under Lee Kuan Yew. South Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong embarked on similar trajectories as Singapore, together becoming the ‘Four Asian Tigers’.

This development also had consequences for governance. The notion of ‘Asian values’—grounded in respect for authority, collective well-being, and social harmony—gained currency under Lee and Malaysia’s Mahathir Mohammed, as an alternative to both Soviet-style socialism and Western liberalism. Other successful Asian economies of this period similarly saw value in strong centralized leadership, such as the Indonesia of Suharto and the Philippines under Ferdinand Marcos. As a consequence, the cultural dimension of the idea of Asia gained in salience. Asia’s scope became more limited to regions that traditionally felt a Chinese cultural footprint, whether writing systems, religion, or other cultural attributes. ‘Asian values’ appeared to extend only to the region from Japan and Korea to Southeast Asia, and not westward to India and South Asia.⁷

The third feature of this new Asia was the advent of a regional institutional architecture defined by smaller states. In 1967, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines formed ASEAN. The centrality of ASEAN—which eventually incorporated Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Brunei, and Myanmar—to regional trade agreements, summits, and security conversations in the region, arose out of a set of unusual circumstances. The United States’ retreat from Vietnam in 1975; China’s focus on its domestic growth under Deng Xiaoping; the Soviet Union’s preoccupations with Afghanistan, Eastern Europe, and glasnost; Japan’s continuing non-militarization; and Australia’s remaining tensions with Indonesia, all contributed to a relative vacuum of major and middle powers exerting themselves in Southeast Asia.

In this period, India too was noticeable by its relative absence. The India–Pakistan wars of 1965 and 1971, and India’s subsequent interventions during the eighties in Sri Lanka and elsewhere in the Indian Ocean, contributed to a focus on the immediate neighbourhood, at the expense of the broader Asian landscape. The Bangladesh and Afghanistan wars saw the dynamics of the Cold War creep closer to home. India also saw a deterioration of its domestic environment, including the rise of several insurgencies, such as the ones in Punjab and Jammu and Kashmir. The period of the Emergency in the seventies and political scandals in the eighties hobbled governance. But most importantly for Asia, India retreated from the economic dynamics that were starting to define the region. Trade in the seventies and the eighties was less than 15 per cent of India’s gross domestic product, and overall growth rates were low, as the country continued to embrace autarkic economic principles.

The second phase of modern Asia—marked by ‘tiger’ growth, ‘Asian values’, and ASEAN centrality—really came into its own between 1980 and 1991. In the early eighties, mainland China began to acknowledge the need to replicate the growth models successfully pursued by Japan and the Asian Tigers and started to become integrated into the trade and supply chain networks of the Asia–Pacific. But by the nineties, doubts started creeping in about this model. In the early nineties, the Japanese economic bubble burst, and the Asian financial crisis of 1997 tainted the notion of Asian values.

Asia 3.0: China’s Ascendance and the Asian Century

A third Asia has started to make itself apparent in the post-Cold War period. This period has seen the gradual economic integration of the region and more diversified economic growth. It is informed by the political circumstances of US primacy following the end of the Cold War and the consequences of the rapid economic rise of China, especially following its entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001.

The global balance of economic power has shifted rapidly to Asia.⁸ In 1992, the United States accounted for 32 per cent of the nominal GDP of what were later to become the G20 economies. The major Western European states (Germany, France, the UK, and Italy) enjoyed 29 per cent share and the six Asia–Pacific members (China, Japan, India, South Korea, Indonesia, and Australia) 27 per cent, of which Japan alone accounted for 19 per cent. By 2017, the balance looked quite different. The United States retained its 32 per cent share, but Europe’s had shrunk to 18 per cent and Asia’s had expanded to 37 per cent, of which China’s was 20 per cent.⁹

This period has also been marked by the re-emergence of Great Power competition in the region. The primary competitive dynamic is between an ascendant United States and a rising China. The aftermath of the Tiananmen Square crackdowns of 1989, the 1995 Taiwan Straits Crisis, the 1999 bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, and the 2001 Hainan Island incident were all eventually managed by Washington and Beijing, but hinted at a simmering adversarial relationship. After 2008, China’s relations became overtly competitive not just with the United States, but also with Japan. In response, Japan under Shinzo Abe embarked upon transformative defence reforms to emerge as a more ‘normal’ military power. Following the ascension to power of Xi Jinping, the Southeast Asian disputants in the South China Sea, South Korea, and India began to bear the brunt of Chinese assertiveness. The deterioration of Sino-Indian relations after 2014, the South China Sea arbitration ruling of 2016, and China’s response to North Korea’s nuclearization proved to be important turning points. For India, China has presented a series of challenges, from regional security in South Asia and the Indian Ocean, to terrorism, the long-standing boundary dispute, imbalanced trade and India’s position on global governance.

Thus, the third, and ongoing, era of modern Asia’s ascendance has seen, paradoxically, growth and economic cooperation resulting in the greatest elimination of poverty in history and the accentuation of Great Power competition to Asia. While China’s growth has created unprecedented opportunity, concerns about its opacity, unilateralism and mercantilism remain. Meanwhile, the reassertion of major and middle powers in the region—not just China, but also the United States, Japan, India and Australia—have raised questions about the viability of ASEAN centrality to Asia’s institutional architecture.

Looking East, Acting East, Achieving Multipolarity

For India, the original impetus of its reengagement with Asia after the end of the Cold War was economic.¹⁰ India’s then prime minister, P.V. Narasimha Rao, embarked upon visits to China, South Korea, Thailand and Singapore, among other places. As Rao’s biographer Vinay Sitapati notes: ‘It was not just . . . capital that Rao found in East Asia; it was also an alternative economic model.’¹¹ Gradually, India’s trade with Asian countries increased; private companies from Japan, South Korea, China, Thailand and Singapore entered the Indian market; and India reached trade and economic agreements with ASEAN, Japan and South Korea. ASEAN is now India’s fourth largest trade partner; in terms of goods, China is first. Ongoing efforts by India to deepen economic integration with Asia include constructing the India–Myanmar–Thailand (IMT) trilateral highway, participating in Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) talks, and negotiating an ASEAN–India Maritime Transport Cooperation Agreement.

Owing to India’s growing economic promise—and with the efforts and encouragement of Asian leaders, such as, for example, Singapore’s former prime minister Goh Chok Tong—it gradually became incorporated into the region’s institutional architecture. It joined the ASEAN Regional Forum in 1996 and subsequently became a member of the East Asia Summit (EAS) and Asian Defence Ministers Meeting-Plus. At the same time, India integrated into new China-led institutions, such as BRICS, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. At its own initiative, it has led a revival of the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation (BIMSTEC). Today, barring the Asia–Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum, India is well integrated into Asia’s institutional architecture. APEC membership for India has been supported by several countries, including the United States, but has been complicated by India’s approach to trade and questions about expanded membership for the institution. However, should existing institutions face further pressure or evolve, India is today far better situated to shape Asia-wide regional rules, laws, and norms.

India’s entry into the security architecture of the region followed, but not without difficulties. The most important progress was made with the United States. Defence cooperation began to take off in the early 2000s, with the next steps in strategic partnership; the India–US civilian nuclear agreement; the acquisition by India of major US defence platforms such as the C-130J and C-17 transportation aircraft and P-8I maritime surveillance planes; and India being designated a major defence partner.

Starting in 2000, India also normalized relations with Japan, following sharp differences resulting from its 1998 nuclear tests. The growing convergence and cooperation resulted in quadrilateral (India–US–Japan–Australia) humanitarian operations after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and maritime exercises in 2007. After China sent strong signals and changes in government took place in the four countries, progress slowed. Nonetheless, India now has frequent naval exercises with the United States (MALABAR), Japan (JIMEX) and Australia (AUSINDEX). Additionally, India has established regular high-level bilateral dialogues and trilateral India–US–Japan and India–Japan–Australia mechanisms. India has also initiated a different kind of security engagement with Southeast Asia. Among other initiatives, it has supported the Myanmar navy with technical assistance, provided facilities for Singapore to conduct artillery, mechanized force, and air exercises, coordinated maritime patrols with Indonesia and trained Vietnam’s combat aircraft pilots.¹²

As a reflection of these institutional, economic and security changes, India’s ‘Look East’ policy was upgraded to ‘Act East’. This was meant to widen the scope to encompass the entire Asia–Pacific; shift the focus beyond economic considerations to political, security, and social ties; and attempt to make progress more action- and result-oriented. While institutional engagement and security partnerships are proceeding apace, India’s commercial integration with Asia—and Southeast Asia in particular—has been underwhelming. Fast-tracking those efforts requires India to focus on developing northeast India and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands; improve air and land connectivity with Southeast Asia; reduce non-tariff barriers; leverage India’s prowess in services, technology, and English language education; and liberalize visa regimes. Specific projects that are underway—completing the Kaladan Multi-Modal Project in Myanmar, extending and enhancing the IMT network, and connecting into Myanmar’s Dawei deep-sea port project—would represent concrete efforts at improving India’s connectivity with Southeast Asia.

India’s role in Asia has undergone multiple changes as both India and Asia have evolved. Today, a more active Indian role in Asia is desired and sought after by many actors in Asia. With the imperative of creating a peaceful, interdependent, and multipolar Asia, India has little choice but to participate institutionally, integrate economically and become an active security provider across the region. Important strides have been made in these respects since the turn of the millennium, but an increased focus, particularly on the economic dimension, may yet be necessary if India is to achieve its objectives.