India needs a global security forum it can lead
5 min read . Updated: 10 Mar 2023, 02:41 PM IST
Premium- The country has a history of organising large gatherings of government officials and other influential elites but such activity has fallen by the wayside over the years. It should be revived urgently
In the past two weeks the Indian government has organised two major G20 meetings – of finance and foreign ministers – while a private think-tank organised the Raisina Dialogue, India’s largest international affairs policy forum, in Delhi. Organising such large gatherings of policymaking elites, or of those who influence policy making, are now an essential facet of a country’s soft-power outreach, which is itself a means to achieving practical, hard-power goals.
India has a history of organising large gatherings of government and other influential elites. It hosted the Asian Relations Conference of 1947, even before it had attained Independence. It was also the moving spirit at the Afro-Asian Conference in 1955 in Bandung, Indonesia.
This outreach and spirit of leadership, however, fell by the wayside over the following decades as India focused its attention to combating a sometimes actively hostile external environment and several internal crises. It is only in the past two decades, when India’s economic growth has accelerated, that the old confidence on the world stage has started to return. Under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, foreign policy has developed a particular activism, with a former professional diplomat in charge of the external affairs portfolio and three ministers of state to boot – the most in any central government ministry.
The Raisina Dialogue is one result of this activism. Backed hugely by India’s External Affairs Ministry, it has grown to the level of its predecessors, such as the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies’ (IISS) Shangri La Dialogue in Singapore, and Manama Dialogue in Bahrain. But it is already past time that the Indian government launched new initiatives.
That’s because New Delhi, even now, is still playing catch-up in the region. India does not have the kind of inter-governmental forums it can actively lead, where its views and positions hold the kind of sway that ASEAN has, for example, with the ASEAN Regional Forum or the ASEAN Defence Ministers’ Meeting Plus. While these are largely talk-shops, they keep alive for ASEAN the useful fiction that it is at the centre of regional geopolitics and able to direct it.
China has, since the mid-1990s, actively sought to shape its region and the wider world through regional initiatives such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), with its focus on Eurasia, as well as a series of regional economic cooperation forums like the China-Eurasia Expo and the China-ASEAN Expo. These are massive platforms where business elites meet to exchange views and conclude deals under subtle Chinese political direction.
China has also had various kinds of South Asia-focused initiatives such as the China-South Asia Think-tank Forum and the China-South Asia Legal Forum. At these forums, Indians are often merely onlookers or are simply ignored as smaller countries in the region use China’s backing to criticise India or let the Chinese fire from their shoulder.
With time and greater confidence, China has organised pan-Asian or trans-regional initiatives such as the long-running Boao Forum for Asia, its rival to the World Economic Forum in Davos, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, and sub-regional forums like the Lancang-Mekong Cooperation Mechanism, which seeks to undermine both the Asian Development Bank-led Greater Mekong Subregion project and the India-led Mekong-Ganga Cooperation project. The Chinese have also used other forums such as the IISS’ Singapore forum to grandstand and sell their narratives about the perils of a US-led global order.
What India urgently needs is a major security dialogue forum that it can lead and set the agenda for, in order to promote its own interests between the dominant US-China or US-Russia competition narratives. As real or intractable as such issues might be, to allow them to dominate regional or global attention without putting forward an Indian narrative or showcasing India’s ability to handle major security tasks – mediation, peacekeeping, and yes, warfighting – is to undersell India and undo the good work of New Delhi’s presidency of the G20 and of forums such as the Raisina Dialogue.
The Chinese have a long-running Beijing Xiangshan Military Forum and other inter-governmental mechanisms such as the China-Africa Peace and Security Forum and the Middle East Security Forum, in addition to platforms within the SCO. The Concept Paper on China’s new Global Security Initiative, released in February, talks of “encourage[ing] more exchanges and cooperation among university-level military and police academies" and of China’s willingness “to provide other developing countries with 5,000 training opportunities in the next five years to train professionals for addressing global security issues". Such confidence comes from years of preparation and hosting of multilateral dialogues by the Chinese military.
India has active defence training and cooperation mechanisms with many countries in its immediate and extended neighbourhood, including for UN peacekeeping. But these initiatives are undersold or poorly advertised, at least in part because of a dysfunctional civil-military relationship in India. This has to change.
National Maritime Foundation, an Indian Navy-backed think-tank, conducts an annual Indo-Pacific Regional Dialogue focused on maritime issues and defence expos have caught on in a big way but this is not enough. India’s military diplomacy must move beyond port calls, military exercises and a few slots within the MEA allotted to serving defence personnel to make up for the ministry’s manpower shortages in administrative and logistical tasks.
Instead, the Indian government must do away with outdated service rules about contacts between serving Indian military officers and foreign counterparts they have met during officially sanctioned education and training exchanges, and promote a culture of area studies and intellectual endeavour within the Indian armed forces. India needs a global forum whose conduct and agenda are led by its military to signal more strongly its global capabilities and ambitions.