Our inaugural column briefly touched upon the practice of theorising. To theorise is to examine something systematically.
In this piece, we will theorise India’s South Asia policy. A simple way to do this is to bunch the available evidence into existing International Relations (IR) concepts and juxtaposing them.
If one surveys India’s words and actions vis-à-vis its periphery since independence, one will see that Delhi—including the government, dilliwallahs, and the Indian street—has approached South Asia in five distinct ways: as a neighbourhood, a region, a coterminous with India, a backyard, and an arena of great power competition.
South Asia as a neighbourhood
A neighbourhood is a place of community, cooperation, good faith and trust. Cultural and ethnic linkages across the subcontinent and around India’s boundaries are classic preconditions for a neighbourly neighbourhood, which Delhi has not often enjoyed.
‘Friends can be changed but not neighbours.’ Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s remark from 2003 reflects an approach that has informed Indian policy, which has been marked—not always—by restraint, responsibility and generosity.
Restraint has been seen in India’s dealings with Pakistan. During the Bangladesh liberation war, it didn’t press its overall military advantage to coerce Islamabad to settle Kashmir. It has behaved with moderation on the Line of Control. And it chose international diplomacy rather than military force after the 2008 Mumbai terror. This trend has largely held even in the past decade, even though the current Indian leadership has radically differed from its predecessors. The Balakot strikes were less aggressive than how they were projected within India. The rhetoric around “Ghar mein ghus ke maareinge” is meant more to arouse domestic passions than signal a radically new policy.
Responsibility has been shown in Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief (HADR), Vaccine Maitri, and other first-responder initiatives. And while there may be debates about whether generosity is a virtue in foreign policy, the idea that India will give and accommodate without expecting reciprocity from its neighbours—a feature of the Gujral Doctrine—remains attractive.
Is there an IR theory of neighbourhood? No, but it is worth developing one.
South Asia as a region
Regions in international relations translate into institutional frameworks that are built by sovereign states who live in proximity and share something—historical experience, culture, or religion—in common. A good regional organisation, at the very least, binds countries to choose consultation over conflict to resolve disputes. It also provides a platform for estranged neighbours to initiate rapprochement. An ambitious regional organisation makes nations pool sovereignty, relax borders, lower tariffs, and spend less on security.
India’s challenge has been to transform South Asia from a mere geographical name into a robust mesh of institutions—not to emulate an Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) or a European Union but to elevate South Asia to their category.
Ideas and a degree of intent have always been around. The best period for South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) regionalism was the first 15 years of this century when Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh tried to develop a prosperous and connected region. Even Prime Minister Narendra Modi tried to.
But results have been less than encouraging.
The SAARC project has stagnated because there has not been a breakthrough in India-Pakistan relations. But Delhi still sees the value of connectivity. It has pursued smaller ‘sub-regional’ projects in the east, such as the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation (BIMSTEC), Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, and Nepal Initiative (BBIN), and others. These have fared better, but they have also fragmented the region.
South Asia as a backyard
The word ‘backyard,’ used as slang in IR theory, conjures the image of a space at the house owner’s disposal. How the landlord uses that space is up to them, but the backyard remains secondary in status in relation to the house. The suggestion that India approaches the rest of South Asia as its backyard is impolitic, so don’t expect Delhi to own it.
But consider the hostile ‘India Out’ narrative that periodically mushrooms in Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Maldives. Don’t rule out a China angle, realism would say. To the realist, India’s actions aimed at ensuring friendly dispensations in these countries—even if they cause domestic resentment—should not be surprising. The realist counsel is to ask if political, intelligence and military activism produces the results that Delhi desires.
Some of Delhi’s actions that fit the backyard trope have been taken without careful attention to their consequences. One, the military intervention in Sri Lanka, which alienated Sri Lankans for a while and cost Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s life. Two, the amendment to India’s citizenship law that effectively positioned India as a refuge for the region’s non-Muslims. It may have deepened communal fault-lines across the region. And three, the support for Sheikh Hasina’s regime in Bangladesh, which has been interpreted as India’s backing for authoritarianism.
Realism, which advises prudence, would disapprove of these actions.
South Asia as India
This idea is captured in the notion of ‘Akhand Bharat,’ meaning unfragmented India. For a section of India’s right-wing, the territories on which the sovereign states of Pakistan, Bangladesh—and even Afghanistan—exist are Indian. In their framing, those lands have played a crucial part in the development of the Hindu civilisation—and India, to them, is Hindu.
Hindu nationalists had declared the subcontinent as their sacred geography during British rule. After partition came the idea that Pakistan had occupied Indian geography. Afghanistan, too, was added.
In the 1950s, its partisans were open to using force to bring it about. These days, claims are made about the imminent realisation of ‘Akhand Bharat’. The question of means is left unaddressed.
There is no evidence that the government in Delhi takes the idea seriously. But India’s ruling party is organically linked to the ecology within which the ‘Akhand Bharat’ discourse thrives. This connection raises suspicion in the neighbourhood.
And embarrassment too. In the summer of 2023, a controversy erupted in Nepal around a mural in India’s new parliament that depicts early India, incorporating areas beyond the country’s present boundaries.
If one surveys India’s words and actions vis-à-vis its periphery since independence, one will see that Delhi—including the government, dilliwallahs and the Indian street—has approached South Asia in five distinct ways: as a neighbourhood, as a region, as coterminous with India, as a backyard, and as an arena of great power competition.
In its hard form, ‘Akhand Bharat’ expresses the concept of geopolitical revisionism, threatening the sovereignty of India’s neighbours. But currently, it circulates in its soft form, which signals geo-cultural revisionism, claiming that Hinduism is the ur-culture of the subcontinent, while all others are derivatives.
And what is revisionism? A practice of changing the map, challenging international boundaries, undermining another state’s sovereignty, and laying claim to it. It is a familiar concept in IR. ‘Akhand Bharat’ has some parallels in ideas like ‘Russky Mir’ (Russian World) and ‘Eretz Yisrael’ (Greater Israel).
South Asia an arena of great power competition
From the early days of the Kashmir conflict, India has been wary of the subcontinent getting entangled in the games of great powers, the classical meaning of geopolitics. The pattern has been familiar. The smaller neighbours have roped in external powers to balance India. During the Cold War, Pakistan used the United States and India looked towards Moscow for support. But India became wary when Moscow got involved in Afghanistan, reaching out to the US.
Both Russia and the US have become far less involved in the region, but China’s profile has grown dramatically. This has given all of India’s neighbours more leverage in their dealings with Delhi. That Beijing can disrupt India’s regional plans is a plain reality confronting India.
As China has closed in, India has fanned out towards the Indo-Pacific, where it has found dependable allies. Critics will call it a retreat, while supporters will term it as reorientation. But in both South Asia and the Indo-Pacific, China remains the great power challenge. Whether to find a bilateral equilibrium with China or join up with those wary of Beijing is a dilemma that Delhi cannot easily resolve.
Or maybe it doesn’t see a dilemma and prefers to pursue both strategies simultaneously.
Most of India’s actions in the region can be seen in terms of these approaches, which are not all in harmony. There is a complementarity between the neighbourhood and regionalism views. The great power politics dimension is unavoidable, and some of what gets viewed as the stemming from the backyard approach can be attributed to this geopolitical dimension. But there is a hint of carelessness in actions such as the citizenship move, intervention in Sri Lanka and prolonged support for Sheikh Hasina, which validates that perception.
We have used IR concepts to theorise Indian approaches to South Asia. The facts were examined and categorised into existing IR concepts that explain the policy. The relationship between the concepts and associated data was fleshed out, and more context was added by gesturing towards major IR theories, where it seemed natural to do so. The concepts were then juxtaposed.
The fruit of our intellectual labours is ready for use by those looking for a framework to understand India’s South Asia policy.
