Walking Away or Ignoring Afghanistan is not an Option for India

Lt General R K Sawhney, PVSM, AVSM, Dean, Centre for Defence Studies, VIF

Sushant Sareen, Senior Fellow, VIF

The policy shift being attempted by Afghanistan President Ashraf Ghani in which he sought to relegate India to the fourth circle of priority and appease Pakistan has had mixed reception in the Indian strategic community. It ranges from disappointment over side-lining of India to a resigned acceptance of an emerging situation in which India's space may get constricted. The result is both a sort of detachment over what happens in Afghanistan and hope of seeing China and Pakistan getting steadily bogged down in the Afghan quagmire.

At the policy level, uncertainty about how to handle the emerging situation in Afghanistan is visible. Some reports suggest that India has started to reduce its footprint in Afghanistan and slow down some of its projects. While it is entirely possible that India might be entering a phase of 'strategic pause', it can neither detach itself from Afghanistan nor be despondent over developments there. Between an aggressive 'forward policy' which India probably can't sustain on its own, and 'masterly inactivity' which it cannot afford because of its security and strategic implications, there is enough space available to India to keep itself relevant and in play in Afghanistan.

Given the fluid state of affairs in Afghanistan, a case can be made for a strategic review of India's Afghan policy. This must include a realistic assessment of what India can and cannot do and what it should and should not do. In other words, India must neither over-reach itself nor underplay itself. Even as India must remain conscious of its limitations-- economic, geographic and logistical--it should not lose sight of the advantages it enjoys that mitigate many of these limitations. Apart from clearly defining India's strategic objectives in Afghanistan and how these can be achieved, India also needs to work out contingencies and fallback positions in the event these objectives become unattainable.

In survey after survey, India has emerged as the most liked country in Afghanistan. The tremendous goodwill that India enjoys there is its biggest asset. Unlike countries like Pakistan that have only contributed to destruction of Afghanistan, or countries like the USA that has been involved in both rebuilding Afghanistan and using heavy handed methods to pacify the country, India has exercised only soft power. It is, therefore, seen as a benign and benevolent neighbour. But soft power has its limitations, especially in a country like Afghanistan that has had to contend with unremitting hostility from an implacable enemy--Islamist insurgents--supported by an inimical neighbour. What this means is that while India can help in stabilising Afghanistan, it has not been able to prevent Afghanistan's destabilisation.

Providing economic assistance, funding developmental projects, helping through military and administrative capacity building and security assistance in the form of intelligence cooperation and even providing some modest equipment to the Afghan security forces, was all necessary in the effort to help Afghanistan stabilise. But it wasn't sufficient because India's reluctance to exercise hard power was seen as a sign of weakness, not just by the Pakistanis, but to some extent even by the Afghans who saw India conceding to Pakistani concerns and sensitivities even when Pakistan had used all opportunities to damage India’s interests. If, therefore, the pre-eminent regional power was hesitant to play hard ball with Pakistan, then surely the Afghans needed to rethink their view of India as a solid counterbalance to the Pakistanis. This is precisely the kind of negative perception of India that needs to be removed, not just in Afghanistan, but also in the region and beyond. Such perception seriously reduces India's strategic space.

In Afghanistan, the overbearing nature of the Pakistani military establishment as well as its proclivity to overplay its hand works in favour of India. Regardless of which regime comes into power in Kabul, sooner or later it will seek to have a counterbalance to Pakistan, unless either the Afghans reconcile to living under Pakistani domination or else Pakistan changes its strategic thinking. Neither of this is likely to happen. For India therefore to ignore this natural advantage it has in the Afghanistan-Pakistan equation as a balancing factor would be a folly.

Much of India's strategic diffidence comes from its tendency to over-emphasise its limitations and underestimate its advantages. Partly to offset some of these limitations, India preferred to ride on American shoulders in Afghanistan. Although India thus benefitted from US presence in Afghanistan, it also paid the price of having to accept US pressure to limit its activity in Afghanistan to development areas so that the US could manage Pakistani paranoia about a strong Indian presence in Afghanistan. As long as the Americans were present in Afghanistan India could not altogether disregard some US demands and re-jig its policy accordingly.

But this is no longer a compulsion, now that the Americans are in the process of withdrawing from Afghanistan. In the last couple of years there is a growing dis-connect between India and the US on the emerging situation in the AF-PAK region. Both want stability in the region but differ on how this can be achieved. The Americans seem to be tilting towards Pakistan as a stabilising factor, while India is convinced that Pakistan being the problem it cannot be part of the solution. The Indian government should therefore safe guard the country’s interests without being too concerned about US reaction. We need not take the lead from the Americans and pay too much attention to Pakistani views, especially as Pakistan has always totally disregarded Indian sensitivities and concerns. India, unlike the US, cannot wash its hands off this region. To the contrary, India will have to bear the consequences of American mistakes.

India's fundamental interest Afghanistan is not economic, whether in terms of benefiting from its market or mineral wealth (whose exploitation is beset with difficulties) or from its geographical location as the main trade and transit route to Central Asia (whose economic potential remains a question mark). Nor is it centred on encircling Pakistan. These are incidental to Indian interests. For India, a stable and peaceful Afghanistan is critical because instability and conflict in that country has a deleterious impact on India’s security. A Taliban type dispensation in Afghanistan will have a massive destabilising effect on rest of the region, and as such is not acceptable.

For India to protect its interests in Afghanistan, it can neither detach itself from the situation there nor become discouraged by any temporary setback. In Afghanistan there is never an endgame, and what is often called an endgame is usually the beginning of a new Great Game. This means India needs to not just maintain but expand its presence in Afghanistan as much as possible. At the very least, India's economic and developmental footprint must increase in Afghanistan, because unless there is more economic activity inside that country, ensuring security will remain a huge challenge. Therefore, India should do whatever it can to give a fillip to the Afghan economy. In this context, India should stop talking about its much quoted $ 2 billion assistance to Afghanistan, because as a two trillion dollar economy, India has the capacity to do more.

Pakistan will of course be the big stumbling block in terms of India’s enhanced involvement in the Afghan economy. By restricting Afghanistan's connectivity to its natural market in India, Pakistan is behaving true to form. Instead of harming India, it is harming Afghanistan as it is preventing it from becoming economically self-sustaining. Of course, where it suits Pakistan's interests- as in the case of the TAPI gas pipeline project- Pakistan’s reasons to block Afghan access to India and vice versa are set aside. Pakistan also believes that by restricting transit through its territory it will also deny India access to Central Asia. But as India can access Central Asia through Iran, Pakistan is effectively is cutting its own nose (it has the most to gain by becoming a bridge between Central Asia/ Afghanistan and India) to spite India's face. Despite all the impediments placed by Pakistan, India should still do what it can to meet Afghan’s expectations, not just in the realm of economics but also in terms of capacity building through training of civil and military personnel, and funding and building economic infrastructure. India should also continue to encourage and promote people-to-people ties between India and Afghanistan, especially in the fields of medicine and education.

At a time when the Modi government has a declared policy of reaching out to India's neighbours and tying them more closely to India's development process, to disengage ourselves from Afghanistan because of certain statements and actions of the new dispensation there, is against the strategic vision that India has developed for the region. No matter what the Afghans say in public- which is music to Pakistani ears- the fact remains that the Afghans don't trust or even like the Pakistanis, who, on their part, treat the Afghans with an element of disdain and misplaced superiority. Any tactical adjustment that the Afghans make with Pakistan should not cause an exaggerated reaction in India. We should display strategic patience and stay the course in Afghanistan. Lowering our presence in Afghanistan because of certain policy adjustments being made by the new Afghan government is not the way a regional power should behave. Not only will this mean leaving India's considerable number of friends in Afghanistan in the lurch, it would have serious negative implications for India's regional strategy because other regional countries will question India’s staying power in the face of a challenge to its interests.

This is precisely the advice that India's long-standing friends in Afghanistan give us. They ask India not to react to every small statement or policy shift by Afghanistan, stay the course and play the long game because given the convergence of interests of India and the Afghan people things will ultimately move in India's direction. Their message is that India is indispensable for Afghans and that India needs to understand this. Therefore, for India to detach itself from Afghanistan or reduce its footprint considerably – a form of masterly inactivity--would be leaving the field open to its and Afghanistan's adversaries. And while India cannot play the role that the Americans played in terms of propping up Afghanistan, there is much that India can do to support the Afghan state, which it should continue to do in the interest of the Afghans and of India itself.

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Published Date: 24^th April 2015, Image Source: http://www.thelondoneveningpost.com

Ignoring ICCR: Undermining India’s ‘Soft Diplomacy’

Dr. Anirban Ganguly, Research Fellow, VIF

India’s premier and oldest agency for furthering her soft power, the Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR), is faced with an acute crisis of resources. The challenge is serious and yet it does not seem to have moved the powers that be. In terms of resource allocation, the ICCR, acknowledged as the ‘Government of India’s primary arm for projecting India’s soft power and earning goodwill’ has continued to stagnate.

In fact, trends reveal that the last active expansion phase for the ICCR was in 2009, when it had succeeded in opening seven new Indian Cultural Centres worldwide. Since then, successive Parliamentary Standing Committees have lamented the reduced and standstill allocation of funds to this principal agency for India’s cultural diplomacy. The ICCR was launched with the objective of developing into a main instrument for furthering India’s cultural power. The aim was to reactivate linkages with those civilisations and people who had once been open to and active in assimilating India’s culture and her traditions.

The ICCR was one of the first agencies to take off as early as 1950 with this lofty objective. Addressing its inaugural function on 9^th April 1950, post-independent India’s first Prime Minister Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru had emphasised this pre-eminent cultural role when he said that he ‘always looked forward to furthering the cause of India’s cultural association, not only with the neighbouring countries to the East and West but with the wider world outside.’ For Nehru, this reaching out to the world culturally was crucial, it was essential if India was to again regain her cultural spaces across the globe and especially in her immediate vicinity, ‘it is not a question of merely wanting such cultural association or considering it good’ Nehru pointed out, ‘it is rather a question of the necessity of the situation which is bound to worsen if nothing is done to prevent it.’

To see an organisation, in which was reposed such high hopes and aims, languish because of lack funds is a stark reflection of our lack of resolve to evolve a cultural strategy for Indian diplomacy. The twentieth report of the Standing Committee on External Affairs Demand for Grants 2013-2014 paints an unflattering picture of the financial state of affairs of the ICCR. Against the budget demand of Rs.282.50 crore, only Rs.160 crore has been allocated to ICCR. The Indian Foreign Secretary in course of his testimony before the House Committee has accepted that due to this repeated shortfall over the years ‘many of the Cultural Centres abroad are facing problems … and even many programme [and] activities of ICCR are suffering.’

This cash crunch has hit the agency most in its international outreach and commitments. The ICCR has decided to become the partner institution in 2013 for the prestigious Europalia festival held in Belgium and supported by the Government of Belgium and a consortium of companies, museums and art institutions. The Europalia festival offers a great opportunity to show case one’s own culture and throws up possibilities of conceiving and launching collaborative ventures with other museums and cultural institutions in other countries in Europe. The occasion could have turned, if seriously supported by Government resources, into a unique opportunity for projecting India’s thriving and fascinating cultural power in the heart of Europe. An invitation to these could have been turned into a positive opportunity to forge lasting cultural ties with other leading cultural institutions. But the occasion and its possibilities are being squandered away because the ICCR ‘has received no additional budgetary support’ for its initiative in partnering the Festival. While the idea of seeking other sources of funding, mainly from corporate India, is gaining ground and the Committee itself has asked the External Affairs Ministry to look into such possibilities in the future, the Government of the day cannot abdicate its principal responsibility in furthering globally the essence of India’s culture. Such an abdication, if it happens, shall be a retrograde step for India’s cultural power and its global potential.

Understandably the Ministry has raised an alarm at what it terms a ‘drastic reduction in allocations.’ Until 2009, the ICCR was upbeat about its worldwide expansion activities. That year it opened seven new Indian Cultural Centres in Asia – in Kabul, Kathmandu, Bangkok, Tokyo, Dhaka, Kuala Lumpur and Abu Dhabi. The same year saw the earmarking of a building in Washington to house the Indian Cultural Centre. The Washington Cultural Centre is yet to take off and other Centres are facing the brunt of lack of resources.

Coming down to 2012-2013, the pace appears to have heavily slowed down and questions of even running the existing centres have cropped up. The Ministry, in its reply to the Committee, pointed to the uncertain future of India’s cultural wings abroad. Explaining the surplus expenditure incurred by the ICCR, the Ministry pointed out that, ‘Closing down these Cultural Centres, Chairs and Regional Offices would send a wrong signal to the outside world putting India in an embarrassing position. The excess expenditure was therefore unavoidable, thought it was minimized by reducing several activities ….’

The plans for reaching out to newer regions, particularly the Caribbean, Latin American and African countries seem to have been put on hold. Its entire national as well as global expansion programme has been subjected to availability of funds, the Ministry’s note to the Parliamentary Committee indicated as much: ‘ICCR has also directed to open new Indian Cultural Centres in Buenos Aires (Argentina), Santiago (Chile), Lagos (Nigeria) and Nairobi (Kenya). In addition, ICCR has also six new Centres in the pipeline which include Washington, Paris, Toronto, Sydney, Hanoi, Singapore. However, opening of these new Centres although already committed, would be subject to availability of funds.’ In effect it means that India’s attempt to develop a dynamic roadmap for the expansion and projection of her soft power will continuously remain hostage to the non-availability of resources. It is evident that there is a total lack of focus and will, when it comes to utilizing India’s vast cultural resources to further her global power objectives.

The Standing Committee noted with great concern the state of affairs and has recommended to the Ministry to ‘enhance budgetary allocation’ for the ICCR ‘in view of emerging contours of cultural diplomacy.’ The Committee also noted that it was ‘essential to expand the network of Indian Cultural Centres and establishment of chairs abroad’ but this appears to be a tough call with the drying up of resources. The Committee flagged the crisis when it further stated that ‘with the funds allocated to ICCR, they are not even able to manage the established Centres outside India, then how can they think about new centres?’ While there is endless talk and clichéd references to the potentials of India’s soft power and how Indian culture had once permeated the world and can do it once more, little serious collective effort seems have been made on the ground to save and energise institutions that are mandated for spreading and popularizing that soft power.

In the meantime, a cultural hegemonist looms large and grows in our neighbourhood, a country that is determined to push through globally its image, way of life and belief. Through its formidable chain of Confucius Institutes (CI), China is making entry into world academia and cultural institutions. As of 2012, there were more than 400 CIs in 108 countries and regions. It has also been estimated that more than 500 Confucius classrooms with more than 600,000 registered students function across the globe. 70 of the world’s top 200 universities have already opened their CIs. The Hanban’s stated global target is to have 1000 CIs in operation by 2020. It is not the case that India should replicate or compete with such efforts in its own way. The CIs, which in any case do not reflect the essential Confucian culture and directions of Chinese civilisation, have, of late, come under the scanner for their espionage objectives and subtly pushing forward the CPC’s political agenda. In fact, a number of universities in the West seem to be having second thoughts on allowing the entry of CIs in their campuses. China’s determined projection of its soft power and the huge resources that it has made available for the purpose – it has been accepted that funding has been a major reason for universities agreeing to tie up with the Chinese government in opening CIs – is an example of what we shall eventually be faced with in the future if our pace of cultural outreach and expansion slows down.

The Indian Cultural Centres, with their open cultural agendas and programmes can in the long run be a greater attraction than tightly controlled and propagandist CIs. A long term view of the role of India’s Cultural Centres abroad, a far reaching plan for their sustenance, functioning and popularisation, a proactive effort to enlist a vast array of support for these initiatives are what need to be looked at urgently if the ICCR is to be saved and its mandate salvaged, otherwise we risk losing the race for reactivating our civilisational and cultural linkages.

A celebrated Indian sociologist and historian, a scholar of the nationalist school, Benoy Kumar Sarkar (1887-1949) in his treatise on the ‘Beginning of Hindu Culture as World Power (A.D. 300-600)’ (Shanghai, 1916) had made an interesting point, when he said Hindus possessed a vibrant ‘world-sense’ which attracted a continuous stream of representatives from other civilisations. It was this unique ‘world-sense’ that was a distinguishing characteristic of Indian civilisation, argued Sarkar.

Ironically, we seem to be frittering away and blunting that sense today and remain oblivious to its long term implications.