India looks out of place in its own neighborhood
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This is the era of South Asian discontent as the region’s largest nation, India, grapples with its toughest foreign policy and geopolitical challenges. New Delhi is besieged by multiple crises – both internal and external – and it is beginning to look isolated and vulnerable in its own backyard.
The violent conflict between India and China in the disputed Himalayan territory of Ladakh has disrupted decades old bilateral consensus between the two Asian giants. This will have an unsettling impact on the economic and political engagement between the two largest nations of the world.
At the same time, India’s precarious position in the region tells a sad story of the failure of its much touted neighborhood-first policy. Inaugurated with much fanfare by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2014 when he assumed his country’s top political office for the first time, the policy was designed to provide fresh impetus to its relations with its immediate neighbors and beyond. Modi invited South Asian leaders, including the Pakistan prime minister, to his inauguration ceremony in May 2014.
The new Indian administration, however, could not match its geopolitical grandstanding with strategic action, and the optics of the event could not produce the desired reality. Relations with Pakistan continued to remain frozen in time and, in the absence of a much needed reset in India’s political thinking, the diplomatic bond between the two countries floundered right at the beginning of Modi’s first term.
This is the era of South Asian discontent as the region’s largest nation, India, grapples with its toughest foreign policy and geopolitical challenges. New Delhi is besieged by multiple crises – both internal and external – and it is beginning to look isolated and vulnerable in its own backyard.
Sanjay Kumar
The fact is that Pakistan became a punching bag for the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) that used it to appease the hardcore domestic constituency of Hindu voters. Modi’s second term began on a highly unpromising note with the premier exploiting his huge parliamentary mandate to advance his majoritarian rule in the country at the cost of regional peace with Pakistan.
The unilateral and abrasive abrogation of Kashmir’s constitutional autonomy and political remapping of the disputed territory further deepened the gap between the two neighbors and complicated attempts at reconciliation. This majoritarian project also injected greater political disruption and tension in the region.
Modi started on a good note with his country’s eastern neighbor, Bangladesh, by sorting out a contentious boundary dispute in 2015. However, in 2019 India rolled out a National Register of Citizens (NRC), an exercise in identifying illegal immigrants in the bordering state of Assam. While it was a longstanding issue in India’s northeastern region, the BJP made the NRC an anti-Muslim project and declared that those who were left out would be sent to Bangladesh.
This did not go down well with the people of Bangladesh and the relationship between the two countries became frosty again. The introduction of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) in December 2019 to shelter the persecuted Hindu minorities from three neighboring Muslim countries further frayed the Bangladeshi nerves who saw the CAA as an insult to the secular credentials of their state and an attempt to destabilize its political equilibrium.
New Delhi’s flawed policy also alienated Nepal in the last six years. In 2015, when Nepal was at the cusp of a historic transition with the adoption of a new constitution, India tried to play spoiler by stoking separatist tendency among the Madheshi community that was feeling left out of the deal. It imposed a long blockade on the landlocked nation to support the Madheshi grievances. Nepal’s economy almost collapsed and this left a lasting anger among its people against India. Taking advantage of this gap, China positioned itself as Nepal’s friend.
This growing distrust further got accentuated recently when Kathmandu issued a new map, claiming some of the disputed territories between India and Nepal.
India is also gasping for breath in Sri Lanka where it is struggling to hold its ground at a time when China is bolstering its presence in the island nation. New Delhi failed to push for large scale infrastructure projects in Sri Lanka. This strategic shortsightedness turned it into a marginal player in its own sphere of influence.
The Maldives too has fallen into the orbit of China, and India is now struggling to retain its old influence in that country.
Six years down the line, India, which was supposed to be the leader of South Asia and an integrating force in the region, stands isolated in its own neighborhood. It is without an ally, which is deeply ironic for a nation that, until recently, was thought to be the voice of developing countries.
All this reflects quite poorly on Modi who in the last six years did not demonstrate any visionary strategy to address the issue of disconnect in the region. His majoritarian agenda at home has also robbed India of the moral high ground that it always enjoyed as a secular and liberal country.
Had the neighborhood-first policy worked, it would have helped address some of the geopolitical tensions in the world. It could have also acted as a strong defense against Chinese growing encirclement of India in its own territory.
- Sanjay Kumar is a New Delhi based journalist with experience of covering South Asia for more than fifteen years. He is the correspondent for Arab News in Delhi.
Twitter: @destinydefier
