Stand Up and Be Counted

India’s aloofness on international issues such as combating ISIS is unsustainable in the long-term.

Under the new government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) has found itself, perhaps unexpectedly, managing an avalanche of exchanges with India’s global partners, partners-to-be and foes alike.

This steadfast exercise of initiating global engagements could be seen as a two-fold agenda–to burnish Modi’s image, and attempt to regain the foothold in global politics and economics which India had gradually lost during the previous UPA regime.

Modi’s trip to the United States was the most important and talked about event, even though his actual big moves in the foreign policy domain started with the first prime ministerial visit to Nepal in 17 years when he visited Kathmandu in August. However, the visit to New York and Washington was crucial more so for him as a politician in the light of America’s visa ban on Modi the post 2002 Gujarat riots. Resuscitating the India – US relationship will take its own time.

More than the bilateral relations with countries such as the US, India’s shop-soiled foreign policy fundamentals need attention considering the changing global political and economic scenario, specifically with the rise of extremism and borderless terror groups with capabilities of moving, recruiting and influencing people across countries and continents.

Physical borders are not as effective as deterrents for modern global security threats as many believe they are, and India’s current foreign policies still seemed to be designed around such pretexts.

During the Modi-Obama meet, the globally hot issue of the rise of the ‘Islamic State’ or ISIS in the Middle East, and the worrisome security situation in Afghanistan featured prominently. Even though details of what direction these discussions took between the two heads of state remains largely unavailable, reports indicate that while India brought up the issue of the ISIS and the need to tackle the problem, it did not offer itself as a potential partner to the coalition now working militarily against the terror group in Iraq and Syria.

And it is not as if India has been completely unaffected by the rise of ISIS. Although the Indian government with the help of the Kurds skilfully managed to extract stranded Indian nurses who were working in the Iraqi city of Mosul, which now lies under complete control of the terror group, 41 Indian workers still remain missing from the city. According to sources providing information from Iraq, which unfortunately are often unverifiable, these workers were being kept under the guard of foreign fighters who are part of the ‘Islamic State’, the self-declared caliphate of ISIS.

The black market sales of oil from captured fields in Syria have funded ISIS’ swift territorial gains. Indian and Chinese state-owned energy firms had joint investment interests in one such field they were forced to abandon.

There are two factors at play even as the crisis in the Middle East worsens. The Obama’s administration’s influence in the region is definitely on the wane. Emerging Asian economies such as India and China are fast becoming the largest markets for the Middle East’s energy resources. Therefore, the Asian economies may well have a critical role to play in ensuring geo-political stability in the region.

The ‘Nehruvian’ approach towards foreign policy may have worked for India to some extent. But today, given India’s ambitions, indecisiveness on issues that affect the global community is going to hurt its interests and diminish its status.

India’s indecisiveness on international issues of contentions is not historic. New Delhi in fact used to be quite decisive on certain matters specifically in the post-independence era when it forged many strong ties with countries such as Egypt and so on. Later on, in the early 1990s, India maintained a clear stance on the issue of Saddam Hussein and his Ba’athist Party during the first Gulf War. In the 1980s India had trained Iraqi MiG 21 pilots, and when Saddam invaded Kuwait, India moved its high commission in Kuwait City to Basra in southern Iraq, the only nation to move its diplomatic corps out of Kuwait during that period.

Whether India’s support for Saddam was right or wrong is another debate all together, but it took a firm stand.
In the later years, we have witnessed the opposite. Even on crucial issues where Indian interests are directly involved, such as Afghanistan, the government in New Delhi over the past many years has over-sold its soft-power and shied away from a more direct engagement. For instance, India was specifically asked to help provide some military aid to an Afghanistan in crises as both Kabul and Washington failed to sign-off on the Bilateral Security Agreement (BSA).

During this period of uncertainty, the government in Kabul asked India to provide military assistance to its armed forces which, at that time, was struggling with some of its worst cases of ‘blue on green attacks’and facing a crippling shortage of both lethal and non-lethal military hardware such as trucks, temporary bridges, transport helicopters and so on. India remained largely passive to these requests for the longest time. It did provide some non-lethal equipment, but President Karzai’s wish lists remained just that.

India does not need to undertake any drastic foreign policy departure. But being stuck in the idea of ‘non-alignment’ in today’s geo-political landscape makes little sense.

ISIS is not just a regional problem as fighters from more than 80 countries are known to directly or indirectly be backing the group. ISIS’ impact in India is less than marginal so far. However, this does not mean that as a country which actually has a lot at stake in the stability of the Middle East, both politically and economically, should not publicly condemn such organisations in the strongest terms beyond anodyne media statements. It’s time to stand up and be counted.