Lessons from History: India’s Strategic Vulnerabilities

Lacking a concrete stand, Indian foreign (security) policy wavers between the constructs of globalism and the realist approach, which leaves India ill prepared to face the growing threats of terrorism and other disasters. India’s civilizational tradition of ethics and morality perhaps pose the biggest obstacles to any rational approach.

For close to 1100 years, Islam’s “travelling caravan” treated India as a ‘convenient doormat’ to its expanding empire from India to North Africa and Spain. With the breakdown of the colonial structure and the creation of Israel, new tensions regarding territoriality, culture and race arose, especially after World War Two and America’s rise to superpower status.

With the ‘fall of the wall’ and the meltdown from the ‘Cold War’, India was quick to abandon its old ally and join forces with the powers that enabled economic globalization. In the quest to globalize and eagerness to ‘westernize’, Indian foreign and economic policy has chosen a ‘quick rewards’ approach with daydreams to ‘superpower-dom’ by 2020.

9/11 should have been a time for introspection into India’s security vulnerabilities in view of its growing economic ties with the US. Grossly ignorant to future strategic and security planning, India was lulled into Bollywood fantasies and aping the Mc-Life. If planners had applied the 9/11 situation or even the disaster scenario of the “tornadic tsunamis’ that hit Sri Lanka and Indonesia to the Indian context, it would reveal how behind India really is in the area of strategic preparedness.

In the zest and enthusiasm to emerge, rise and surge and lost in the political imaginings of becoming the next superpower, Indian politicians, planners and administrators have forgotten the lessons of history. Since the fall of the Mughals, Islam’s caravan has used the Indian ‘doormat’ to expand into Southeast Asia and strategically, India could not be more vulnerable. Are Indian planners even thinking of this? As long as Israel remains an American construct, extremists will find India to be a convenient target. The Bush administration and ‘Homeland Security’ has managed to keep the battle off US soil and India may prove to be a soft, reliable and convenient target.

India’s foreign policy behavior often challenges conventional theories of International Relations – India’s nuclear politics, relationship with China and Pakistan and other neighbors, suggests that a deep ambivalence towards Western modernity lies at the heart of India’s post colonial identity. In regard to this new threat, India should seriously revise its foreign and strategic policies – it is perhaps time to move away from an imitative postcolonial modernity to a realistic acceptance of its strategic positioning at the crossroads of major world religions.

By: Dr. Viraj P. Thacker