India Abroad - December 11, 2015

AZIZ HANIFFA

Professor Joseph S Nye Jr, one of the most influential scholars on American foreign policy and a former dean of the Kennedy School at Harvard, believes that ‘India
rising is good for the United States,’ and presents ‘one of the
really great opportunities in American foreign policy over the
next decade or so.’
Nye, the University Distinguished Service Professor at
Harvard, co-chaired the Council on Foreign Relations’ task
force report Working with a Rising India: A Joint Venture for
the New Century, which is now being circulated in adminis-
tration and think tank circles and also in Congress.

‘ There really is something of a structural realignment going on in the world — a structural realignment meaning that unlike the, let’s say, 30 years ago when India was insisting on non-aligned and the Americans were having different allies and so forth, the interests of India and the interests of the United States are pretty much in alignment,’ Nye said at one of the rollouts of the report.

India, he said, no longer needed an alliance. ‘Indians are
much too sensitive to ever agree to an alliance with a super-
power,’ he explained. ‘By definition, an alliance with a super-
power is unequal. And if there’s one thing you’ll never get an
Indian to say, it’s unequal. But what you can get an Indian to
say is what Foreign Secretary (Subrahmanyam) Jaishankar
has said, that India is going to take a more active, leading role
in its foreign policy, be less reactive.’
‘So, the name of the report, (the words) Rising India, tells it,
but if there were a subtitle it would be ‘And Structural
Realignment with the United States.’
The Washington, DC interaction with Nye — who has pre-
viously served as Deputy Under Secretary of State and as
Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security
Affairs, and chaired the National Security Council group on
nonproliferation of nuclear weapons as well as the National
Intelligence Council — was moderated by Elizabeth Bumiller,
a former Washington Post correspondent in New Delhi.

She asked him if the report’s contention about how India
can advance American interests was code for having India
serve as a counterweight to China in the region. Nye quipped,
‘I don’t know whether it’s a code, (but) it’s a fact. The report’s
very careful to say this is not designed for an anti-China
alliance — we have a lot of agenda items with China, some of
them positive, some of them negative.’
What we are showing is that if you look at the rise of China,
‘The chances of making China behave as a responsible
stakeholder, to use Bob Zoellick’s term, depends on shaping
the environment so that, as China faces options, it sees that
some are costly and some are less costly, and it is led to the
less-costly ones — the more cooperative ones.’
That, he reiterated, was not an alliance against China: ‘This
is what I mean by structural realignment.’
Asked how he would rate Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi — whose ascent to power has been viewed by many
as a huge step in the ‘Rising India’ story — Nye said, ‘Modi has
said the right things, but it’s not clear by the statistics that that
much has happened. My impression as a non-economist is he
came in with a very interesting agenda, and he’s been very
pragmatic on his domestic reforms, a bit too much so. He’s
certainly invested a good deal in foreign policy, which has
been good. I like the steps he’s taken in foreign policy.’
‘My feeling that some of the steps that are necessary for
domestic reform have been pretty cautious and pretty slow
and not up to the scale of the task that we describe in the
report. Land reform is just one example, but there are many
others.’
Nye asserted that the report was pretty clear on saying that
‘there are things that are holding India back that India has to
do something about. This report is very bullish on India, but
it’s not Pollyannish.’
Charles ‘Chip’ Kaye, co-chair of the task force and a former
chairman of the US-India Business Council, addressed the
question of the Modi moment and if it is over following the
Bharatiya Janata Party’s electoral defeat in Bihar during the
release of the report in New York.

‘He (Modi) redefined Indian politics in a way that is pretty
fundamental,’ Kaye said. ‘India was a place that struggled
for most of its history to have anything that resembled a
national icon, other than the Nehru family itself. He
changed that calculus. He’s also someone that redefined
kind of a pro-growth, pro-development message in a way
that was sort of understood and resonated within the local
populace as opposed to the populist politics that had played
before. He’s a pretty remarkable change agent.’
Kaye was apprehensive about what he saw as ‘interim
judgments’ in a 10-year journey: ‘There were the 100-day
articles that came out. And India also has this just terrible
dynamic of elections every few months, so it feels like every
time there’s one of these elections — it happened with the
Delhi one — whenever something sort of doesn’t go right, it
turns into this — is something wrong?’
He acknowledged that this was partly because Modi had
not only made himself head of state, but was also acting as
a sort of iconic figure of the party. ‘He’s putting himself front
and center in every one of the elections, so he’s making all of
these things feel more like a referendum on him,’ he said.
‘But broadly, keep your eye on the journey as opposed to lots
of these interim marks.’
R Nicholas Burns, former Under Secretary of State for
Political Affairs, and a member of the CFR Task Force — he
too was on the panel in New York — said, ‘You’re beginning
to see some criticism that he is traveling too much, that he
can’t get his reform agenda through the Upper House,
where the BJP does not have a majority,’ he said. ‘It’s very
reminiscent, actually, of our debate here in the United
States about President Obama — can he work the system
effectively?’
Burns predicted that since Modi has a secure mandate, ‘I
wouldn’t count him out. And I think in general the trajecto-
ry is in the right direction.’
‘One of the interesting things,’ Nye said, ‘is that India nd the US, as large democracies, are very good at
confusing each other because there is such a cacophony of
voices. But it also means that we sometimes are driven off
course by almost irrelevant things.’
He cited the problems after Indian diplomat Devyani
Khobragade was charged with visa fraud ‘even after you’d
had two decades starting with Clinton and then George W
Bush and then Obama trying to improve the relationship.’
Here, Nye also brought up the significance, the Indian-
American community as the catalytic bridge in enhancing
and fostering the US-India strategic partnership.

‘The saying is that American foreign policy always is
determined by the origins of Americans,’ he explained. ‘As
you have more people well-placed to have their origins in
India, it has an effect on American foreign policy. That is
natural and good.’
But the interesting question, he noted, is the reverse side
of this: Will the Diaspora change things back in India?

‘What’s interesting to me is that when Modi travels, he travels to the adulation of the Diaspora,’ he elaborated. ‘We saw this both in his visit to the US, but also in his visit to England... Presumably he’s not doing that just to please the Diaspora. He’s doing that to reverberate or echo back home. How effective that will be in Indian politics is, I think a good question, an interesting question. How powerful is it?’