Contemporary India has the narrowest conception of neighbourhood ever in its history which has progressively shrunk over the millennia. Indian thinkers and policymakers have embraced the artificiality of South Asia and consider that construct as the country’s natural geopolitical habitat. To become a power of global consequence, India must move beyond its self-identification as a South Asian power. It should stop viewing wins and losses in South Asian geopolitics as major markers of success for an aspiring great power and shed the historical-psychological burden of reclaiming a periphery where its influence is diminishing.
More crucially, the view that India must first pacify South Asia before aspiring to be a global power is a mistaken belief deeply entrenched in India’s strategic culture; India’s path to global power does not run through South Asia. Instead, India must transcend South Asia to be a global power as South Asia can, as is, contribute little to India’s aspirations for global status. Attempting to fashion South Asia to its liking before it can rise as a global power is hardly a realistic timeline.
The logic behind this is not to challenge the legitimate sovereign claims of our neighbours, nor is it a refusal to acknowledge that the India of today is hardly the same as the ancient Gupta or the Mughal empires. The argument is definitely not to fuel the intellectually lazy Akhand Bharat narrative. The contention here is about our mental maps of what constitutes our region or neighbourhood and how mental maps bleed into policy. India’s territory has surely shrunk from the time of the Raj, for instance, and borders are closer to the national capital than ever before, a physical reality we must unhesitatingly accept. But should that territorial reality limit India’s sense of cultural, historical, and geopolitical relationships with a wider region?
South Asia has monopolised India’s geopolitical imagination
Let’s begin by examining why the contemporary Indian view of its neighbourhood is artificial and ahistorical. Unlike how South Asia has monopolised modern India’s geopolitical imagination, Indians have historically had a much larger sense of neighbourhood and their place in the world. Much of Indian political thought about the country’s external relations is about a much wider canvas than South Asia.
Yet those expansive geopolitical instincts were contained by post-colonial state-building processes in South Asia, whose contestations, wars, and conflicts bogged India down, leading to a neglect of its broader global history. India was organically not a ‘South Asian power,’ but circumstances forced it to become one, and aided by our amnesia, we got habituated to staying on as one. It is that habit of thought India must break out of today.
The argument is not that India has nothing to do with South Asia—it is, after all, physically located in the region—but that India’s world is far wider than South Asia, both historically and today. Whenever Indians have recognised this geopolitical destiny, they have tried to think beyond the region. This geopolitical longing to be part of a space larger than its immediate periphery started early on and was disrupted later.
The deeper instincts of India’s modern political thought were global and Asian, but certainly not South Asian. Nehruvian internationalism and Pan-Asianism, Tagore’s internationalism, Gandhian approaches to peace, or views about India’s role and place in the world had no South Asian provenance. Pre-independence geopolitical sentiments in Delhi were internationalist, as were the immediate post-independence ones.
It could be argued that India’s lack of interest in South Asia is also a product of its inherent angst about being limited to, or boxed in if you will, a small region which itself was once part of it, triggered by a dormant desire of a regionally contained ancient civilisation to reconnect with ruptured histories and to engage a larger geopolitical canvas. In one sense, India’s relationship with South Asia is a dialogue with itself, historically, culturally and civilisationally speaking.
South Asian regionalism doesn’t help India
As I once argued in the pages of Foreign Affairs. South Asia, as a functional entity or a regional consciousness, doesn’t work anymore, leading, in a sense, to ‘the end of South Asia’. But let me extend that argument a little further. Even if South Asia worked well as a functional regional entity in the form of SAARC or an organic regional construct, the region would still not make much sense for India because, at the heart of it, South Asia simply limits the country’s geopolitical imagination in terms of self-perception, historical consciousness and policy choices. Neither regional integration in South Asia nor a conflict-ridden region can help India realise its global ambitions: A regionally integrated South Asia will demand a great deal of political and diplomatic indulgence from New Delhi, and a conflict-ridden region, as is the case today, will keep India deeply entangled in its contestations and rivalries. Either way, as seen thus, South Asia limits India.
There is another important reason why South Asia doesn’t work for India. India’s quest to be a global power has been constrained by its harsh continental periphery, most of which is South Asia. India’s 15,106 kilometres-long land borders present formidable challenges. Half of this consists of tense, largely unsettled borders with Pakistan and China that have foreclosed any interaction with either them or with the world beyond those borders. The settled India-Pakistan border, while stable, is marked by minimal engagement and no trade, and the Line of Control has mostly been violent. Similarly, the unsettled India-China border, the Line of Actual Control, also allows for no interaction.
On the other hand, the remaining 8,000 kilometres of land border with Bangladesh, Nepal, Myanmar, and Bhutan offer some potential for engagement, but this, too, is increasingly complicated. An internally divided Myanmar allows very little opportunity for India, an increasingly unfriendly Bangladesh has dashed Delhi’s hopes for a friendly neighbourhood, and China’s growing influence in Nepal and Bhutan threatens to erode India’s relations with them. As a result, nearly half of India’s land borders effectively serve to box the country in, and the remaining half is in flux.
South Asia, as a functional entity or a regional consciousness, doesn’t work anymore, leading, in a sense, to ‘the end of South Asia’…Even if South Asia worked well as a functional regional entity in the form of SAARC or an organic regional construct, the region would still not make much sense for India because, at the heart of it, South Asia simply limits the country’s geopolitical imagination in terms of self-perception, historical consciousness and policy choices.
What if India breaks out of the limitedness continental South Asia presents? Beyond South Asia, India’s maritime borders, spanning about 7,500 kilometres, represent unlimited opportunities for global outreach. The Indo-Pacific region provides avenues for trade and strategic alliances, free from the constraints and challenges that most of South Asia poses to India. Therefore, while India must do what it takes to manage its contested borders, its future as a global power hinges on a strategic focus on maritime engagement, where it can expand its influence beyond the limitations imposed by its South Asian neighbours.
Delhi Must Transcend South Asia
Delhi must, therefore, think beyond South Asia and adopt a ‘new neighbourhood’ strategy. This entails several policy shifts. For one, India should find ways to alter the regional balance of power equations currently poised against it. There is little value for India in pouring in resources to either regain exclusive primacy or balance China on its own in a region in which it is growing geopolitically weaker and somewhat contained. Although New Delhi’s concerns about Beijing’s growing influence in South Asia are understandable, frantic attempts to ‘win back’ South Asia or compete with China for regional dominance are unlikely to work. It should encourage countries and groupings outside South Asia to take a more active role in the region. It could encourage innovative forms of cooperation between the Quad and smaller South Asian Island states, such as the Maldives and Sri Lanka, as well as landlocked ones, such as Bhutan and Nepal. India could proactively engage partners such as Japan, the United States, the EU, and other like-minded powers to help curb China’s growing influence in the region by countering Beijing’s economic and political narratives and providing alternative transparent development models.
Secondly, India’s postcolonial near-total grip on the region has dramatically loosened; this is a reality India must acknowledge and accept. Instead of refusing to acknowledge this reality and scrambling to reinstate its erstwhile primacy in the region with material resources it doesn’t have plenty of, Delhi must think of ways to ‘modernise’ its regional primacy through creative ways. By its sheer size, India is the region’s preeminent power, but its ability to micro-manage the region’s geopolitics is a thing of the past. If so, contemporary India should resist the temptation to bend over backwards to ‘control’ South Asia and free itself from the psychological pressures of such inherited legacies. It should, instead, transact and reciprocate with the regional states and spend its grand strategic energies in the larger neighbourhood consisting of the ‘Indo part’ of the Indo-Pacific, Middle East, and Southeast Asia, among others.
Viewing South Asia in this manner is not only useful in expanding the mental maps of our neighbourhood more in line with the country’s historical past, but it can also be the source of a geopolitical catharsis from having to ‘control’, ‘regain’, ‘win back’ or ‘micro-manage’ South Asia. South Asia is not a space Delhi should control; it is a space India should transcend.
In the meantime, Delhi should continue engaging with South Asian countries while steadfastly avoiding the constant drain of its limited diplomatic and foreign policy energies. Our primary focus should be on the broader global engagements for India’s true opportunities lie in the international arena rather than within South Asia.
