Date: 21/12/2022

Relevance: GS-2: Bilateral, Regional, and Global Groupings and Agreements involving India and/or affecting India’s interests.

Key Phrases: world leader, bridging role, world wide web, hard power, soft power, superpowers, Non-Aligned Movement, power of attraction, strategic autonomy, de-risking of the global economy, G-77.

Why in News?

• A recent statement by External Affairs Minister that India can play a “stabilizing” and “bridging” role, at a time when the world no longer offers an “optimistic picture” is intriguing.

What makes a country a world leader?

• An archaic notion of “world leadership”
  • Is it population?
    • India is on course to top the charts, overtaking China as the world’s most populous country next year.
  • Is it military strength?
    • India has the world’s fourth-strongest army.
  • Is it nuclear capacity?
    • India’s status having been made clear in 1998, and then formally recognized in the India-U.S. nuclear deal some years later. India has been a responsible nuclear power since the beginning.
  • Is it economic development?
    • There, India has made extraordinary strides in recent years; it is already the world’s third-largest economy in PPP (purchasing power parity) terms and continues to climb, though too many of our people continue to live destitute, amidst despair and disrepair.
  • Is it soft power?
    • It could be a combination of all these, allied to something altogether more difficult to define — “soft power”.
• According to Joseph Nye, the power of attraction means much more today than the force of arms or economic muscle in wielding influence in the world.
• Much of the conventional analyses of any country’s stature in the world rely on the all-too-familiar economic and hard-power assumptions.
• India as a world leader:
  • India as a land of paradoxes:
    • So many speak about India as a great power of the 21st century when India is not yet able to feed, educate and employ all our people.
    • So, it is not economic growth, military strength, or population numbers when we think of our nation’s potential role in the world of the 21st century.
    • Rather, it is a transformation of the terms of global exchange and the way countries adapt to the new international, interlinked landscape that will shape their future role and direction.
  • India as an active participant:
    • Far from evolving into a “world leader”, India, for instance, should become an active participant in a world that is no longer defined by parameters such as “superpowers” or “great powers” exercising “world leadership”.

Changing of foreign policy:

• Decreasing relevance of old binaries:
  • The old binaries of the Cold War era are no longer relevant. At the same time, the distinction between domestic and international is less and less meaningful in today’s world.
• Foreign policy is no longer just foreign:
  • When we think of foreign policy, we must also think of its domestic implications.
  • The ultimate purpose of any country’s foreign policy is to promote the security and well-being of its own citizens.
• Aspiration from the ‘world’:
  • India wants a world that gives us the conditions of peace and security that will permit us to grow and flourish, safe from foreign depredations but open to external opportunities.
• Paradigm for foreign policy:
  • We are living in a world in which one defining paradigm for foreign policy is impossible.
  • India cannot simply be non-aligned between two superpowers when one of them sits on our borders and nibbles at our territory.
  • Nor can India afford to sacrifice its strategic autonomy in a quest for self-protection.
  • India needs to define a new role for itself that depends on our understanding of the way the world is.
• The World Wide Web:
  • In this increasingly networked world, we are going to have to work through multiple networks, which will sometimes overlap with each other with common memberships, and sometimes be distinct. But they all serve our interests in different ways and for different purposes.
  • Multiple networks of India as per needs:
    • Indian External Affairs Minister meets annually with his Russian and Chinese counterparts in the trilateral RIC;
    • India adds Brazil and South Africa to BRICS;
    • India subtracts both Russia and China in IBSA, for South-South cooperation; and
    • India retains China but excludes Russia in BASIC, for environmental negotiations.

Non-alignment to multi-alignment

• Paradox of non-alignment:
  • The world-wide-web style of networking reflects other paradoxes of our world.
  • India belongs both to:
    • The non-aligned movement, which reflects its experience of colonialism, and
    • The community of democracies, which reflects its 75 years of experience as a democracy alongside many of the countries it rails against in the non-aligned movement.
• Multi-lateral engagement:
  • India is a leading light of the global “trade union” of developing countries, the G-77 (Group of 77), which has some 120 countries, and also of the global macro-economic “management”, the G-20 (Group of 20 developed and developing countries whose presidency India has just assumed).
  • India plays an influential role both in the United Nations, a universal organization that has 193 member states, and in the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) which has only its seven neighbours.
  • India has the great ability to be in all these great institutional networks, pursuing different objectives with different partners, and in each finding a valid purpose that suits us.

Conclusion:

• India is now in a position to graduate from a focus limited to its own sovereign autonomy to exercising a vision of responsibility on the world stage, from a post-colonial concern with self-protection to a new role participating in the making of global rules and even playing a role in imposing them.
• India is contributing to the "de-risking of the global economy" and, in political terms, "in some way, helping depolarize the world,” and the evolution of this role is well worth watching.

Source: The Hindu

Mains Question:

Q. “The changing global order offers India an opportunity to participate in the crafting of political and economic institutions that are more pertinent to the emerging geopolitical equations”. Discuss.