NonAlignment 2.0: A Foreign and Strategic Policy for India in the 21st Century Read Online Free PDF Page B

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    Meeting this challenge will require sensitivity and agility on India’s part. First, India will have to be willing to go the extra mile to reassure its neighbours, particularly the smaller ones. India has to safeguard its vital interests, and must recognize that its neighbours also have an interest in playing up the India threat to extract as many concessions as possible. This makes the task of crafting a South Asian strategy more challenging. For India will also have to be prepared for many more unilateral concessions on trade, investment and aid. Rather than insist on reciprocity or short-term equivalence, we will need to focus on longer-term goals. Building on some of its recent initiatives in this direction, India will have to single-mindedly pursue conditions that can make regional economic integration—via trade, investment, movement of people—a reality. This is a basic imperative of our regional strategy.
    This situation has been further complicated by the factthat South Asia is a region where other great powers, particularly China, are trying to expand their influence. An adequate counter-strategy will require clarity on three issues. First, we must have a much clearer assessment of which forms of Chinese engagement in the region present a threat, and which actually present an opportunity or at least converge with our own regional interests. Second, we must recognize that strategic advantage is a consequence of what we do, not what we say. The only way to counter Chinese economic engagement is to have a credible engagement plan of our own. But most important, India has lagged behind because of its inability to deliver on its promises—whether on aid or border infrastructure.
    South Asia is important also for the development of India’s own domestic regions. Areas like the North-East, which have remained outside the mainstream of national development, and whose people have often felt isolated, urgently require integration into the wider South Asian and Asian flows of goods and services which are bringing benefits to other parts of the region. For such parts of the country, South Asian economic integration is a necessary, not an optional, condition for growth. Different regions of India have vital stakes in our neighbours (Bengal in Bangladesh; Bihar in Nepal; Punjab in Pakistan; Tamil Nadu in Sri Lanka). We need to developnational-level policy protocols that can engage with India’s regional political pressures and opportunities and leverage them to effect change in both Delhi and our neighbours.
    In addition to its evident economic interdependencies, South Asia’s environmental destiny is also deeply tied together. The future of our glacial systems, rivers, rainfall patterns, forest cover and wildlife hangs and falls together. It could be argued that the biggest challenge for relations in South Asia will be managing the region’s environment and natural resources. Environmental risks pose clear and present threats. But they may also provide opportunities for new strategic alignments. India therefore needs to give these issues strategic priority.
    Environmental challenges within the region will be both a strategic opportunity and a threat. Several treaties with Pakistan and Bangladesh serve as exemplars of how fraught river water sharing issues can be made manageable. But ecological changes are likely to ensure that disputes over matters such as water resource distribution will raise future challenges. Further, both India and Bangladesh are lower riparian states vis-à-vis China. India will now have to deploy a range of instruments to ensure its interests as a lower riparian state. All countries of the region will also have common interests in Himalayan ecology, and theimplications of climate change. These common challenges do provide an opportunity to come together towards a compatible approach.
    Greater regional integration will be constrained unless there is some ideological convergence on basic