A move away from central control is beginning to affect the autonomy of state institutions—including those dealing with foreign policy—which historically were the most insulated from public pressures.
By Walter K. Andersen
India frequently accused Pakistan of providing arms and training facilities to Sikh secessionists in the border state of Punjab and dissident Muslims in the contested state of Kashmir. Two of the three Indo-Pakistani wars were over Kashmir, and the two countries have come to the brink of war over Kashmir on several other occasions, the most recent in 2002. Pakistan for its part charges India with recurrent support for Baluch and Sindhi separatists and is still bitter about the secession of its eastern Bengali speaking province in the early 1970s, made possible by Indian armed intervention. The present Hamid Karzai government in Afghanistan accuses Pakistan of deliberately ignoring, if not facilitating, the cross-border movement of radical Islamic groups composed mainly of Pushtuns, an ethnic group straddling the Pakistan-Afghan border. The insurgency of the 2 million-strong Tamil minority in Sri Lanka has a popular resonance among the 65 million Indian Tamil speakers living across the narrow Palk Strait in India and periodically emerges as an issue in the politics of the state of Tamil Nadu and also at the center because of the demands of coalition politics. Over the past decade, a surge of terrorist bombings and assassinations throughout the region has prompted finger-pointing to neighbors, reflecting the continuing high levels of distrust among regional actors.
South Asia, a region defined here as extending from Afghanistan in the west and across the land mass of India to Bangladesh in the east and down to the island republics of Sri Lanka and the Maldives, historically formed a security system in which the foreign policy concerns of the states within it were regionally oriented. This inward orientation is rooted in geographic, historical and cultural factors. The region has well-defined geographic boundaries: the Himalayan mountain chain and its extensions that cap it across the top and the Indian Ocean that surrounds its long peninsular extension to the south. The South Asian states share a common history of British colonial rule and common constitutional habits derived in part from British models. All have highly central systems of governance now being challenged by local forces. This centralization took concrete institutional form in one-party dominance in India, military rule in Pakistan and Bangladesh and strong monarchies in Afghanistan and Nepal. Powerful bureaucracies reinforced a powerful center.
The transition away from political and administrative centralization, jus-tified in the name of democracy, is promoted preeminently by assertive ethnic groups in the multiethnic states of the region. South Asia has among the world’s most complex mix of sociocultural identities rooted in language and religion. This ethnic assertiveness is responsible for the recent emergence of coalition governments that more closely mirror society than did the dominant parties and leaders of the past. This move away from central control is beginning to affect the autonomy of state institutions, including those dealing with foreign policy, which historically were the most insulated from public pressures. In no South Asian state are parliaments required to ratify foreign agreements. Increasingly, however, foreign policy is being subjected to parliamentary debate and even public pressure and is beginning to become a subject of political discourse.
The interaction of South Asian states with each other has always been of key importance to regional governments, and it has often been adversarial. Regional issues generate popular passions because of the blurring of what is internal and what is external. The extraordinary degree of ethnic, cultural and linguistic overlap both within and between regional states provides a justification for the centralization of power to forestall the balkanization of newly independent states. It also is a source of regional tensions. India Builds a Foreign Policy
The end of the Cold War forced all the regional states to evaluate their links to major powers outside the region—and to a certain extent with each other. India used the opportunity to build a foreign policy around the goal of rapid economic expansion at home. Earlier liberal market reforms laid the foundation for this new foreign policy thrust. This reorientation demanded an unprecedented opening up to foreign investment and trade. It also required a shifting of focus away from the so-called nonaligned and former Eastern Bloc countries to capitalist powers such as France, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States that could provide the investment and trade needed to sustain high gross domestic product growth rates. The entry of foreign entrepreneurs, money and advice has generated controversy because they bring about changes that threaten important interests—and this byproduct of globalization has become an issue in elections.
A measure of the success of India’s foreign policy was the Japanese proposal in May to invite India to join the trilateral U.S./Australia/Japan security dialogue set up in the wake of the 2005 tsunami that devastated large parts of South and Southeast Asia. Perhaps even more dramatic are the U.S.-India negotiations started in 2005 to make a nuclear-capable India an exception to American nonproliferation legislation—an exception aimed at building a stronger security relationship with India. In return for U.S. nuclear fuel and technology for its civilian reactors, India agreed to place all its civilian nuclear plants under international safeguards. The Indian government’s positive response reflects the growing importance of the United States to Indian interests. Another indication of India’s shifting policy is its agreement to participate in bilateral and multilateral military exercises with the United States and its allies. Perhaps the most systematic have been the Malabar series of naval exercises, starting in 1995 and initially limited to the United States and India. The most recent, and to date the largest, such exercise was held September 4–9; this 2007 exercise was also the first concrete demonstration of the new “quadrilateral” security cooperation of Australia, India, Japan and the United States (with the addition of Singapore). Among the 34 ships from the five navies were one Indian and two U.S. aircraft carriers. The exercises stretched across the Bay of Bengal, from the southeastern coast of India to the Malacca Straits.
This shift in foreign policy has sparked opposition from India’s political left, led by the Communist Party of India (Marxist), which heads a leftist coalition of 59 members of parliament and whose support from the outside keeps Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s minority coalition government, with 218 of 543 elected seats, in power. The Communists view the foreign policy shift—combined with earlier market reforms at home—as a body blow to their hopes for a Marxist future in India and to their political relevance. Almost immediately after the United States and India reached agreed language on the nuclear deal in September, the Communists and their leftist allies began hinting that they might withdraw from Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s government. These threats carry weight because the major opposition party, the right-of-center Bharatiya Janata Party, which ironically set in motion the talks on nuclear cooperation when in power from 1999 to 2004, also opposes the agreement. The government consequently agreed to open formal consultations with the Communists to consider their complaints, though it refused to cave in to demands for new negotiations with the United States. The government, however, delayed taking any additional steps re-quired before the U.S. Congress takes up the deal for final consideration.
More than ideological relevance is at stake in the nuclear question. The Communists, like many other parties, are trying to mobilize the large Muslim vote. Muslims are approximately 12 percent of the population, and their vote makes a difference in about a quarter of the parliamentary constituencies. It is widely believed that Muslims in India think U.S. foreign policy is anti-Muslim (though opinion polls are not so categorical on this), and the Communists and others are playing to this negative opinion by portraying the nuclear agreement as the start of Indian subservience to American foreign policy.
This is the first time a foreign policy issue has threatened an Indian government’s tenure. As coalitions are likely to be the mode for many years, the autonomy of the foreign policy process is effectively over. Besides the strategic issue now debated, other controversial issues—terms of international trade, foreign investment and regional issues such as water—are becoming part of the political discourse. Small States, Large Challenges
Pakistan and Nepal face uncertain constitutional futures as the political class in each seeks to work out arrangements that accommodate demands for democracy and greater decentralization of power. Parliamentary elections, scheduled for January 2008 in Pakistan and for a still to be decided 2008 date in Nepal, will test the ability of the political system in each country to work out a consensus the various stakeholders can accept. Given the concerns about a hegemonic India in the security calculations of the major political forces in both countries, foreign policy issues will be a large part of the political discourse.
A perceived vulnerability to foreign influence, especially among India’s smaller South Asian neighbors, often has led to an exaggerated sense of ma-nipulation by external actors, America in the case of Pakistan and India for Nepal. Pakistanis have long viewed the United States as exercising pervasive—and often negative—influence in Pakistan’s affairs. This perception of power is reinforced by the recurrent periods of American military assistance to Pakistan, initially during the first decade of the Cold War, then during the 1980s in the wake of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and most recently the post-9/11 military action against the Taliban/al Qaeda in Afghanistan, when the United States put enormous pressure on an initially reluctant Pakistan to support “Operation Enduring Freedom.” This latest security relationship brought with it an American military presence. An exaggerated sense of American ability to manipulate Pakistan has stoked a deep-seated distrust of the United States for letting Pakistan down repeatedly while Pakistan has taken significant risks to serve as a frontline state for the United States. The catalog of complaints is long: the absence of U.S. assistance to Pakistan in its three wars with India; U.S. neutrality on Pakistan’s dispute with India over Kashmir; U.S. abandonment of Pakistan following the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan; the sanctioning of Pakistan first in the early 1990s because of its nuclear weapons programs and then in the late 1990s for nuclear tests two weeks after India tested; and U.S. efforts to make India—and not Pakistan—an exception to U.S. nonproliferation legislation. Much of the country’s overwhelmingly Muslim population moreover believes that the U.S. “war on terrorism” is a war on Islam, and polls consistently show that cooperation by President Pervez Musharraf’s government with the United States in this effort is not popular. Still another source of criticism regarding the United States is voiced by Pakistan’s growing pro-democracy forces that the United States has adopted an uncritical and overly supportive policy toward Musharraf.
One result of that growing pro-democracy sentiment in Pakistan was the decision of Musharraf’s government to permit the October 18 return of Benazir Bhutto to Pakistan after six years in exile to take part in the campaign for the January 2008 elections that will elect new representative bodies. It is widely believed in Pakistan and elsewhere that the U.S. government has been exerting pressure on Musharraf to cooperate politically with Bhutto in order to avoid the temptation of declaring martial law and to ensure free and fair elections. The large crowds that turned out on her arrival in the port city of Karachi reflect not only continuing support for her, but for the larger principle of democracy; the reception was marred on the evening of her arrival, however, by a suicide bombing that killed more than 130 of her supporters. Religious fundamentalist elements warned her not to return, angry at her open criticism of fundamentalism and fearful of the consequences of democracy. Bhutto will require significant political skill to sustain popular support while at the same time backing the “war on terrorism,” with its implicit linkage to the United States.
Nepal’s country of concern is India, and this is reflected in a nationalist effort to restrict Indian influence. Geography and culture give India preeminent influence in the region. Nepal’s links to the outside world are through India, the source of well over half its import/export trade. India imposed a trade blockade of Nepal in the late 1980s because of a difference on a security issue, underscoring Nepal’s economic dependence on India—and deepening Nepal’s distrust of its big neighbor. Open borders and pervasive poverty have driven millions of Nepalis to seek work and/or residence in India, and frequent cross-border movement occurs among people of similar cultural background on both sides of the border. Nationalist fears of Indian domination have hampered efforts to develop Nepal’s vast hydroelectric potential to meet India’s huge and rapidly growing energy needs. Nepal is sandwiched between China and India, and India has adopted the British policy of including Nepal within its security sphere; bilateral treaties affirm this position, though Nepal has periodically sought—with limited success—to play China against India to increase its leverage. A decade-long Maoist insurgency seeking radical social and political change in this very poor country has forced the king and the democratic forces to seek a new beginning in the way Nepal is governed through new elections of a Constituent Assembly. The Maoist leadership reflects the broader nationalist Nepali suspicion of India power. The India Factor
India’s two other neighboring South Asian powers, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, are similar to the other regional states in their apprehensions regarding India. With Bangladesh’s 1990 transition from military rule to a democracy, India was a theme in each succeeding election. Two political parties emerged as the major political actors: the Awami League, a party associated with the secession from Pakistan in 1972, and the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, a party with roots in the period of military domination. The former is widely perceived in Bangladesh as friendly to India and the latter less so. Both, however, have a similar nationalist approach to policy with India, rejecting the sale of the country’s oil and gas to India and denying India rights of transit. In the lead-up to scheduled elections in early 2007, the Bangladesh military in effect staged a coup, justifying it as a necessary corrective move against what the military characterized as rampant corruption and poor governance by the two major parties when they were in power. Elections were canceled, an interim president was replaced by a technocrat who had previously been governor of the country’s central bank and dozens of politicians and bureaucrats were arrested on corruption charges.
India looms equally large in the Sri Lankan political calculus. A major cause is the ongoing insurgency carried out by the country’s sizeable Tamil minority, a separatist movement that has resonance among India’s 65 million Tamils who live across the narrow Palk Strait. That issue assumes greater political salience in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu when the fighting in Sri Lanka escalates and the refugee flow to India increases, as seems to be the case presently. For the ruling coalition government in New Delhi, addressing the insurgency question is critical due to the necessity of satisfying partners sympathetic to the Tamil cause. It was among the top issues in Sri Lanka’s 2005 presidential elections, bringing to power a candidate advocating a tough line toward the Tamil insurgency.
Afghanistan has been on the international agenda since the Soviet invasion of that country in December 1979. During the long civil war following the Soviet departure a decade later, its neighbors intervened to protect their own interests and Pakistan did so most vigorously in its backing of the Taliban movement/government, which in the late 1999s developed a close relationship with Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda. The post-9/11 defeat of Taliban/al Qaeda forces in late 2001 was the start of a process toward democracy with the election of a president (2004), election of a parliament (2005) and revival of a court system. Despite the presence of some 40,000 troops from NATO (including U.S. troops), Taliban activity has revived in the mountainous southeast, close to the Pakistan border. Afghan government figures have complained that Pakistan seeks to destabilize the new Afghan government, many of whose key figures fought against the Taliban and recall Pakistan’s open support for the Taliban prior to U.S. pressure to abandon it after 9/11.
Decentralization of political power is the trend throughout the region. With the erosion of institutional autonomy and easier access to information through the Internet, satellite TV and the information technology revolution, foreign policy—once virtually the exclusive domain of the executive—is now less insulated from public scrutiny and increasingly on the political agenda. Economic globalization and increased regional interaction are likely to continue to blur the distinction between foreign and domestic is-sues and thus create incentives for important interests to influence the foreign policy process.
Walter K. Andersen is associate director of the South Asia Studies Program and a professorial lecturer. |
