1
Evolution and practices of the
Indian notion of sovereignty
Happymon Jacob
Jawaharlal Nehru University
New Delhi
(Draft; not to be quoted)
Introduction
Making sense of the Indian understanding of sovereignty is as difficult as making sense of India itself: confusing and contradictory more often than not, its influences come from various sources and have transformed many times over the past six and a half decades of its independence. And yet, it’s a journey worth the travel. Indeed, for once, an interpretive analysis of the Indian notion of sovereignty does throw up certain clear threads running through its post-Independence history. As would be the case with most other countries, India’s images, understanding and practices of sovereignty are clearly determined both by external and internal influences, and material as well as ideational forces. Only the specifics differ. In the Indian case, some of the roots of its notion of sovereignty are anti-colonialism, anti-apartheid/racism, struggle for independence from the British colonial masters, Congress legacy, Gandhian philosophy, Nehruvian vision, among others. More importantly, as is the case everywhere else, again, the Indian notion of sovereignty is an ongoing project.
The Indian practices of sovereignty can be roughly periodized into three phases: In the immediate post-independence phase, India was much more relaxed and conciliatory about its claims of sovereignty which seems to undergo a clear change with the humiliation of the 1962 war with China. Post-1962, Indian practices of sovereignty seem to be rigid and non-conciliatory. This changes with the 1998 nuclear tests and the integration of India into the international system.
This paper makes five inter-related, often overlapping, arguments: One, Indian understanding of sovereignty tends to be non-territorial in its articulation. Sovereignty is seen more in terms of social-relations, symbolic representation and reputational claims; two, there is an apparent inside-outside tension in how the Indian practices of sovereignty have been in the past. This tension is primarily due to normative and existential reasons than a result of clear strategies of statecraft; three, there is an apparent relationship between the country’s understanding and practices of sovereignty and its sense of security and confidence in itself and others; four, Indian arguments and practices of sovereignty are also shaped by its perceived and expected role in the international system, and; five, end of the Cold War and the changes in its domestic political and economic processes have given rise to new practices of sovereignty.
Sovereignty as symbolic
Indian understanding of sovereignty tends to be non-territorial in its articulation. Sovereignty is perceived and articulated more in terms of social-relations, symbolic representation and reputational claims. Indeed, the idea of India is articulated more in ideational than territorial terms. That is, a territorially compact India without its underlying ideational basis may not amount to much or sustain for very long: the idea of India, in a sense, precedes the territory came to be called India. More so, the Indian struggle for independence was not as much a territorial one as it was an ideational one. The emphasis during the freedom struggle was not on the territorial integrity of an ‘imagined’ India as a successor state from the Mughal or the earlier empires. Indeed, the relative ease with which the Indian National Congress leaders agreed to a separate Muslim state to be carved out of British India is indicative of the fact that territorial concerns were secondary. Indian leaders also had a relatively ‘minimalist and understated’approach to territorial sovereignty in the early years after independence. The fact that they agreed to have external mediation over Kashmir rather than military fight to get back the lost territory from Pakistan, offering special status to Kashmir and the willingness to live with the idea of a not so territorially unified India from an absolute sovereignty point of view show that the emphasis was on the symbolic idea of sovereignty rather than the territory.
A closer look at the Mughal practices of sovereignty also shows that Symbolic sovereignty was a strategy of statecraft adopted by the Mughal Empire. Andre Wink writes about the Mughal empire “In India, as in all Islamic societies, sovereignty was primarily a matter of allegiances; the state organized itself around conflict and remained essentially open-ended instead of becoming territorially circumscribed”.[1]
Undoubtedly, a newly independent India would have materially benefitted by joining one of the two superpower alliances. A purely material understanding of sovereignty, one that is based on power balancing and military strength, would have prompted India do precisely that. Instead, persuaded by ideational underpinnings of security and sovereignty, India gave importance to an ethical, value-based and non-aligned foreign policy. It, of course, had implications for the Indian foreign policy. As Paul and Nayar point out, the Indian pursuit of an activist role “provoked Washington to undertake a policy of regional containment aimed at India, in order to squash its putative leadership role, through building up Pakistan militarily and siding with it in the South Asian regional conflict”.[2]
George Tanham writes: “Gaining recognition of India's status in the region and in the world also plays a pivotal role in Indian strategic thought. Indeed, external recognition and validation of India's place is almost as important as actually having that status.”[3]
For the newly independent India the most significant desire was to gain international recognition rather than raw power and hence when claims to power are madeeven today, they were more for symbolic purposes than material purposes. The history of the Indian nuclear programme is a good example in this regard. Ever since the 1960s, the international community, primarily the US, tried to make India fall in line with the global nuclear non-proliferation efforts.It used political isolation, diplomatic pressure and economic sanctions to make India give in to the demands of the nuclear non-proliferation regime, none of which worked. Only when the international community ‘recognised’ and appreciated the Indian arguments that choosing a particular nuclear path would be India’s ‘sovereign’ decision and that India would do that with utmost responsibility, did India start negotiating with the managers of the non-proliferation regime about ways of collaborating with the regime and avoiding a collision course with it.
The same is true of the India-US bilateral relations. The relations between the two sides were not the best during the Cold War and even in the early years of the post-Cold War world. The US was uneasy with India’s non-aligned stance which some of them described as an immoral policy.[4] Throughout the Cold War, even though the American government did provide occasional assistance to India they didn’t do so generously because India was not aligned to the Western bloc. India realized that US wanted India to be its client state on the chessboard of Cold War games, which India was unwilling to be. The relations begun to improve only when the Americans started engaging India in a completely different way: as equals. When the language and mode of engagement changed from a client-patron relationship to one between two great democracies, of equals etc., India began to change its stance towards the US. It was after the visit of President Bill Clinton that the relations started seeing new heights the path for which the pathway was paved by the Strobe Talbott-Jaswant Singh parlays. Today, the two countries share a very robust strategic partnership.
In sum, what mattered to India in its relations with the US was not merely material benefits which it would have received in plenty if it were to be an ally of the US during the Cold Waryears (and may even have avoided the defeat at the hands of the Chinese in 1962), but the symbolic recognition of being an equal with the United States of America, of its sovereign status, nothing short of which would have satisfied India.
This need for recognition and sovereign equality, in a sense, comes from the fact that for India sovereignty clearly means equality of nations – that they enjoy the same rights and duties. The Indian resistance to any attempt by outside forces to dictate India to adopt a certain policy measure comes straight out of such a worldview. India’s non-proliferation policy is another example. India has always maintained that it would never accept any treaty under pressure from the powerful countries. Hence althoughIndia was one of the key proponents of nuclear disarmament treaties during the 1950s and 1960s, it refused to sign the NPT since it was considered to be discriminatory by India.
Indeed, various Indian political parties have argued that signing the Indo-US nuclear deal wouldhave negative implications for India’s sovereignty. The Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI-M) argued during the Indo-US negotiations on the civilian nuclear deal: “the Hyde Act would severely compromise India’s independent foreign policy and sovereignty.”[5] The rightwing BharatiyaJanata Party (BJP) also made a similar argument in the same context: “We are also in favour of nuclear and political cooperation with the US. Our opposition is limited only to those unbalanced positions in the deal that endanger the nuclear sovereignty of India.”[6] The CIP-M had also opposed to the signing of the CTBT arguing that “[I]n effect, by throwing the entire burden of the CTBT coming into force on India's shoulders, by making India accountable for the treaty not entering into force and its consequences, and by fixing a deadline, Article XIV of the CTBT represents a direct demand on India's sovereignty and also an ultimatum.”[7]
This uneasiness is also seen in the manner India has responded to international institutions. Not only has India been stridently arguing that the UNSC does not reflect the changed realities of the international system, it has also been arguing that the global financial institutions also need to democratize and become more developing country friendly.[8]The Prime Minister of India recently argued at the 16th Summit meeting of the NAM that, “India remains convinced that until comprehensive reform of the UN Security Council is undertaken, the overall reform of the UN can only be regarded as piecemeal and incomplete. We also need a more representative international financial architecture, with an increase in the voice and representation of the developing countries. The current slow pace of quota and governance reforms in the International Monetary Fund must be expedited”.[9]In the Seattle and Doha meetings of the WTO (in 1999 and 2001 respectively), the Indian leadership of the developing nations was clearly visible in preventing the developed nations from imposing their agenda on the developing countries on issues such as labor, agriculture and market access for agricultural products.[10] Indeed, India has a rich history of raising pro-developing country positions at the global economic forums.
Self-sufficiency was the mainstay of the Indian economic, foreign and defense policiesfor a long period since independence. Even when a particular technology originated abroad was imported and used in India with slight modifications, the Indian scientists would make claims of it being indigenously developed. The Indian state, especially under Nehru, wanted to develop the major sectors of its economic infrastructure so that it can produce the goods needed for itself rather than depending on the western powers for finished goods. Nehru famously said in the 1960s, “I believe, as a practical proposition, that it is better to have a second-rate thing made in our country, than a first-rate thing that one has to import.”[11]As Jason Dedrick and Kenneth L. Kraemer point out: “Beginning in the 1950s, the Indian government implemented a strategy of importsubstituting industrialization (ISI), in which local industry was to produce manufactured goods to replace imports. This approach followed the pattern of many developing countries at the time and also fit in well with the notion of self-reliance, which was interpreted as self-sustained growth without dependence on foreign aid.”[12] While there certainly was an economic logic to it, the argument from sovereignty cannot be ruled out. The underlying thinking clearly was that economic dependence on others could lead to erosion of India’s sovereignty. Nehru also argued: “In our external and internal domestic policy, in our political policy, or economic policy, we do not propose to accept anything that involves in the slightest degree dependence on any other authority.”[13]
India was also concerned about the dependence that acceptance of foreign aid would bring about. Given this apprehension, there was always a conscious attempt to diversify the sources of foreign aid. Today, there is an ongoing effort to reduce foreign aid and the Indian government has declared that it will accept aid only in certain specified areas from specific countries.[14]But even when India does accept aid, it no longer accepts ‘tied-aid’ which has strings attached to it. An official position paper on the external aid accepted by India clearly argues: “The disadvantages to the recipient country of credit tying by donor countries are well recognized by India. Tied aid implies that loans from a particular country have to be utilized for imports from that country alone. Though in the initial years of planning, aid to India was mostly tied, India’s dependence on aid has reduced with time, and it has affirmed its stand on not accepting tied aid. As of February 4, 2003, India is not availing of any tied external assistance.”[15]
According to the Economist, “Between 1951 and 1992 India received about $55 billion in foreign aid, making it the largest recipient in history.”[16] And yet India is now thinking of setting up an aid agency - Indian Agency for Partnership in Development (IAPD) with the aim to coordinate all aid-related projects, lines of credit (LOCs), technical cooperation and training of foreign nationals, to bring greater coherence and strategic intent to India’s economic and technical assistance activities. It is also likely to have an aid budget of $11 billion over next five to six years.[17]
India is also extremely conscious of the perceptions that others have of it and often react undiplomatically to criticism. India has always been sensitive about other countries discussing its internal problems like the Kashmir issue. Such criticism is often seen asa violation of its sovereign space. Recently India reacted negatively to the anti-nuclear agitations in Koodamkulam in the state of Tamil Nadu saying that the troubles are created by foreign-funded NGOs based in India.[18]
The government’s decision to strengthen and formalize its engagement with the Indian diaspora also show that social relations rather than territoriality is an important aspect of the Indian idea of sovereignty. With over 25 million people of Indian origin living outside India, the country has a powerful new global community to capitalize onwhich it has not been doing purposefully and consistently. One of the major reasons for this ‘underutilization’ of the Indian diaspora has been that India has traditionally looked at its expatriate population as a source of remittances for a long time. It has, however, now realized that there is a need to look at the Indian Diaspora in a more strategic sense, so as to better project India’s Public Diplomacy and soft power. With this understanding, the Ministry of Overseas Indian Affairs (MOIA) has been undertaking a number of initiatives to engage the Indian Diaspora such as organizing the PravasiBharatiya Divas, creation of an Insurance Programme for Indians working in the Gulf countries, publication of a periodical on Diaspora Affairs, setting up of India Development Fund, creation of a data base for Overseas Indians, a Facilitation Centre in New Delhi, issuing of the PIO card, among others.
In many countries powerful Indian communities have played a significant role in the host countries’ policies towards India. This was evident during the negotiations of the Indo-US nuclear deal when the Indian expatriate community in the United States was lobbying with the US government on behalf of the Indian government.India’s new diaspora policy, in short, shows the social basis of the idea of India and the evolution of the country’s socially constructed sovereign space. Remember that it was the BharatiyaJanata Party-led government that spearheaded the new diaspora policy of the country. Indeed, the Hindu rightwing in the country has always had a ‘socially constructed’ understanding of who an Indian is. One of the major ideologues of the Hindu right in the country V. D. Savarkar put forward the idea of pitrbhumi–punyabhumi(fatherland- holy-land). The concept treats the nation as holy land and all those who reside in the land must inherit the nation as fatherland. According this argument, non-Hindus in the country are not Indians because their holy-land is not India and any Indian living anywhere is Indian because his holy-land is India. Savarkar Writes: