Individual and Ideological Immunity? The Resilience of Indian Foreign Policy

Abstract

Individual and Ideological Immunity?The Resilience of Indian Foreign Policy Constantino Xavier (bio) Following his victory in the 2014 Indian general election, Prime Minister Narendra Modi was quick to promise revisions to foreign policy. His government proclaimed the arrival of a new India that would be a "leading power," suggesting that the country's past policies had been too passive and defensive. Within South Asia, Modi spoke of a "neighborhood first" approach, alluding to regional neglect by his predecessors. In Southeast Asia, the Look East policy was renamed Act East, with a new focus on the wider Indo-Pacific and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Meanwhile, internally, members of Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) accused the country's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, and his Indian National Congress (INC) party of having sacrificed national security to appease Pakistan and China since the 1950s. Going beyond this noise, Ian Hall's Modi and the Reinvention of Indian Foreign Policy offers a deep and dispassionate assessment of these many promises and accusations to conclude that, in practice, Modi's foreign policy has been mostly marked by continuity with the past. Except for "some deviations" (p. 39), Hall observes that the individual role of the popular prime minister and the ideological role of Hindu nationalism promoted by the BJP have failed to reinvent India's external engagements: the "continuities in policy and implementation from earlier governments were clearer than the changes" (p. 125). Hall's conclusion departs from an important assumption, especially for international observers who had expected Modi's charismatic populism and his party's cultural conservativism to break with nonalignment and other cardinal principles. Did Modi not order unprecedented surgical strikes in Kashmir to punish Pakistan beyond the disputed Line of Control? Did he not welcome U.S. president Barack Obama and Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe while playing tough with China during Beijing's military incursion into neighboring Bhutan? Did he not deepen Indo-Pacific partnerships and revive the quadrilateral dialogue with Japan, Australia, [End Page 179] and the United States? Did he not announce the first ever chief of defense staff to increase India's military preparedness and interservice coordination? On all these and many other accounts, however, a closer look reveals that nothing was truly novel: many of these actions had been either initiated or promised before Modi's premiership, with some dating back to the turn of the new century. Some observers may flesh out nuances to argue that there have been occasional departures and changes in emphasis—such as in reaching out to the Indian diaspora, normalizing relations with the European Union, or building new power-projection capabilities in the Indian Ocean—but one or two adjustments do not a revolution make, Hall argues. In fact, the book suggests that a radical reinvention of Indian foreign policy was never really even attempted in the first place, but rather was a rhetorical and tactical move focused on consolidating Modi's domestic support base. Many may disagree with this cynical reading, but Hall touches a deeper nerve in Indian foreign policy analysis. The scholarly debate about how domestic factors such as individual leaders or party ideologies shape foreign policy in democratic India goes back several decades and is impossible to settle.1 In recent years, given new archival sources and a closer examination of specific cases, however, the pendulum has swung in favor of continuity and reduced the agency attributed to specific leaders, including even Nehru.2 This line of research has also deflated the alleged foreign policy differences between political parties, especially the INC and the BJP.3 For those interested in deeper debates about India's external engagements since 1947, Hall's book thus confirms that individuals and ideology are overrated. Mostly immune to Modi and the BJP, India's grand quest for strategic autonomy, coupled with institutional deficiencies in foreign policymaking, has once again prevailed to dictate continuity. Hall's book departs from the popular narratives about the new Modi doctrine and BJP ideology that allegedly transformed India's external relations, whether with the diaspora, the United States, or [End Page 180] India's neighbors.4 His close examination of economic liberalization...