Bulletin N°46

By most estimations, the G-20 summit organized and lead by India in the month of September was a success^[1]See Marc Filippino, Michael Stott, and John Reed, “India Shines at G-20,” Financial Times, September 11, 2023. [Online] https://www.ft.com/content/c742224a-a110-415a-b5c9-bf5f6e397e47; Walter … Continue reading. Unlike the previous iteration of the summit in Indonesia, India was able to get all the participant countries to agree to a collective communiqué on the very first day of the summit. Exclusion from this statement of any direct reference to Russia for their role in the outbreak of war with Ukraine was seen as a diplomatic coup. This exclusion was perceived as a hard concession on the part of the Western countries of the uneven effects and outsized costs that this war has had on the economies of the poorer and the developing countries. Moreover, African Union was included in the ranks of permanent membership, a proposition in which the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was said to have a personal investment. These steps were in addition to the now standard collective nods towards requiring accelerated implementation of the 2030 SDG, increased renewable energy capacity, reformation of the international finance system and the multilateral development banks in particular, and a commitment to a transparent trading arrangement with WTO at its helm.

A slew of bilateral announcements and meetings also specifically put the spotlight on India as an indispensable geo-political and geo-economic node. The meeting with President Biden prior to the official conduct of the G-20, while not resulting in anything concrete, led to a range of reaffirmations including the possible inclusion of India as a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) and the necessity to diversify and make robust the global semiconductor supply chains. Announcement, on the summit sidelines, of the India-Middle East-Europe (IMEE) economic corridor, backed by the United States and Saudi Arabia, concretized the significance of Indian stewardship in creating any blueprint for the interlinked futures of these specific regions^[2][Online] https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2023/09/09/fact-sheet-world-leaders-launch-a-landmark-india-middle-east-europe-economic-corridor/.

Given the rotational nature of the G-20 presidency, some commentators have pointed out that the diplomatic euphoria surrounding the organization of the G-20 was, perhaps, exaggerated^[3]Rajesh Rajagopalan, “Delhi achieved 3 things at G20. But don’t exaggerate India’s real, material power from it,” The Print, September 11, 2023. [Online]  … Continue reading. Most of the outcomes that were considered novel had a rather measured and routinized predictability to them. Given the lack of any dissenting voice, the inclusion of the African Union as a permanent member was seen as a mere formality that had to be tabled rather than negotiated. Even the announcement of the IMEE economic corridor might be considered a nebulous project that only signaled a countervailing pull to the gravitational force of China^[4]Alan Beattie, “G-20 becomes shallower even as it expands,” Financial Times, September 11, 2023. [Online] https://www.ft.com/content/892f29cb-a63d-4af0-a4c8-4ee45164c5a0. Whether this announcement will result in a more substantive proposal is something that has to be carefully tracked in the future rather than assumed^[5]We can consider the remapping of supply chains away from China as an analogous cautionary example. For all the talk about the supply chain diversification away from China, recent firm level network … Continue reading.

However, there is another aspect to the summit where a more expeditious diplomatic strategy by the host country can be discerned. This aspect is found in realms beyond the official communiqué and the set of negotiated announcements and in the more ceremonial logistics of the summit. From this perspective, the summit was not merely an occasion to reach textual consensus but also a site for power projection^[6]Srinath Sridharan, “Rhetoric vs reality – G20 to COP28,” Observer Research Foundation, November 18, 2023. [Online] https://www.orfonline.org/expert-speak/rhetoric-versus-reality-g20-to-cop28/. More specifically, it was the site for presenting India as a type of internationalist power that is particularly well suited to mediate in a world that is undergoing the severe push and pull of multi-polarization. This power projection expresses itself in the genre of providential diplomacy that plays well in a situation of geopolitical ‘polycrisis’ where everything from diplomatic alliances, trade groupings, security partners, and financial dependencies seem to be up for renegotiation^[7]Adam Tooze, “Welcome to the world of polycrisis,” Financial Times, October 28, 2022. [Online] https://www.ft.com/content/498398e7-11b1-494b-9cd3-6d669dc3de33. A few clarifications on what I mean by the phrase ‘providential diplomacy’.

Providential diplomacy often coexists with the more conventional practice of cultivating soft power, and there are common elements to these strategies. Both involve projecting a positive image of one’s country. Both concepts involve providing the enabling conditions for the accrual of more concrete or ‘hard power’ diplomatic gains^[8]Soft power and hard power lie on the same spectrum but differ only in the degree to which the other party is allowed a say or a feeling of voluntarism in the negotiation. See Joseph Nye, “Soft … Continue reading. Both primarily rely on allurement or the ‘city on the hill’ effect for their eventual efficacy^[9]By ‘city on the hill’ effect, Nye meant the effect of attracting, rather than commanding, the other party to wanting the same outcome as oneself.. Where they differ is, as the name already divulges, the added quality of providentiality that this particular style of diplomacy possesses, and which is absent in the framing of strategies aimed at accruing soft power^[10]For a similar approach, see Walter Russell Mead, “God’s Country?” Foreign Affairs, September/October, 2006. [Online] https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2006-09-01/gods-country. Providentiality suggests a dimension or a narrative arc of time that is outside of the usual messiness of history. Whether it is through the temporality of eventual return, long-awaited arrival, or just fatefulness, the concept of providentiality captures the longue durée within which the self-evolution of a country and its place in the larger world is imagined. Countries that exhibit signs of diplomatic providentiality tend to present the inevitability of their global undertaking in a quasi-religious register. Whether such a role becomes or fails to become a self-fulfilling prophecy is a different matter^[11]By self-fulfilling prophecy, I mean a false definition of a situation that evokes a new behavior which makes the originally false conception come true. See Robert K. Merton, “The Self-Fulfilling … Continue reading. What is important is the abiding and accompanying presence of a perspective that adds salience to even the most minor diplomatic outcomes.

There is little doubt of the presence of this uniquely providential quality in the diplomatic tone that was struck by India at the G-20 summit. This is not surprising given the longstanding history of Indian intellectuals and leaders to present India as a spiritual alternative to the pervasive drive of nation-states towards power maximization. What is distinctive, however, about the contemporary moment is the different media through which this global vision is expressed. The first section of this essay documents the range of exhibits and announcements through which the providential and time-agnostic tone of the event was established. The second section contrasts the more quiescent mood of these self-depictions earlier in the century with a more ambitious and confident mood of these same self-depictions in the contemporary moment. The conclusion closes with a suggestion about placing these portrayals as belonging to a unique Indian genre of providential diplomacy and locates our fascination with them within the larger context of the situation of global polycrisis.

G-20 Summit

Verbal pronouncements can reveal the presence of a providential form of diplomacy quite directly. Often alluding to the unique destiny of a nation to address a moment of global exigency, such pronouncements often provide weighty crisis-laden descriptions of the geopolitical situation in a bid to establish a starkly contrasting appraisal of the situational capabilities that a nation can offer. Soon after the summit, Prime Minister Narendra Modi commented, “It is a matter of pride for all that India has carved a place for itself as ‘Vishwa Mitra’ (World Friend) and the entire world is seeing a friend in India. Reasons for that are our ‘Sanskaars’ (Morals) that we gathered from Vedas to Vivekananda^[12]The Vedas are considered the founding texts of Hinduism. Swami Vivekananda was a Hindu reformer, monk, and philosopher who, in the late nineteenth century, became one of the most important global … Continue reading. The Mantra of Sabka Saath Sabka Vikaas (‘Development for all’) is uniting us to bring the world with us^[13][Online] https://www.narendramodi.in/prime-minister-narendra-modi-addresses-special-session-of-parliament-in-lok-sabha-574094”. In his retrospective on the G-20 meeting, the Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar wrote, “The impact of skewed globalization, covid damage, conflict in Ukraine, big-power competition, climate events and now violence in the Middle East have certainly made the world far more volatile and unpredictable. To rise in such challenging circumstances required nimble and “multi-vector” Indian diplomacy^[14]S. Jaishankar, “India’s growing global role,” The Economist, November 13. 2023. [Online] https://www.economist.com/the-world-ahead/2023/11/13/s-jaishankar-on-indias-growing-global-role”. Read literally, these pronouncements might suggest the evolving and imperative role of India in mitigating the fissiparous character of contemporary geo-politics. Read symptomatically, these pronouncements reveal the fascination with the singularity of the ‘Indian Way’ in the cultural and political spheres.

This uniqueness was showcased during the summit at every layer of architectural and cultural curation starting with the exterior form of the main building, “Bharat Mandapam”, itself. This groundscraper was renovated and inaugurated on 26^th July for the purpose of the G-20 summit and its structure was inspired by a historical but no longer surviving building called the Anubhav Mandapam^[15][Online] https://pib.gov.in/PressReleaseIframePage.aspx?PRID=1943050. The latter was a ‘religious parliament’ that was established by the guru of the Lingayat community to encourage an open and free exchange of philosophical discourse. Given the moribund nature of most historical institutions where Hinduism as a philosophical tradition was extant, it is not accidental that it was the Anubhav Mandapam that was used as a model for the construction of the conclave where the summit took place. Adorning the entrance of the building is a huge Nataraja statue made with a specific alloy called ‘asthadhatu’ (eight metals). The technique used for sculpting this statue was a low-wax casting method that was used during the Chola period to make its famous bronzes. Nataraja is the depiction of Shiva (the Hindu god of creative destruction and one of the most important deities in the larger Hindu pantheon) perched in his most iconic dancing posture. Symbolizing the simultaneous forces of creation and destruction, vitality and renewal, the Nataraja has been a privileged object of Indian diplomacy. Most famously, the Indian government in 2004 presented the CERN laboratory in Switzerland with a Nataraja statue after Fritjof Capra, the popular science writer, used the cosmic dance of Shiva as the bridging metaphor for understanding the physics of subatomic particles^[16][Online] http://www.fritjofcapra.net/shivas-cosmic-dance-at-cern/. Then there was the digital mural of Nalanda University that served as the backdrop for the site where the G-20 leaders were received for the dinner on the first day of the summit. Known to be one of the first residential universities in the world, Nalanda University, alongside a few other universities, was also one of the places where most of the institutional practices that we now consider to be an indelible part of the research university such as peer review, grading, academic governance, were first designed and experimented upon^[17]Shailenda Raj Mehta, “The Origin of the University in India and Its Global Impact,” Lakshmi Mittal South Asia Institute Harvard, October 30, 2023.. Finally, there was a curated ‘Cultural Corridor’ that housed important artworks and artefacts, in their physical or digital form, from twenty nine countries. Under the exhibit of India was present a page of handwritten inscriptions from Rig Veda (a founding sacred of Hinduism) in the Sharada script and copies of the foundational text of Sanskrit grammar, Asthadhyayi by Panini.

In a summit that is otherwise concerned with the hardnosed business of diplomacy, the presence of these objects or inspirations might seem arbitrary or redundant. But what makes them an integral part of diplomatic efforts is that in one way or another, all of them are aimed at alluding to the identity of the Indian civilization as a net contributor of global public goods and services. All the objects mentioned above encapsulate a principle or an idea the fount of which is supposed to have come from the Indian subcontinent gratis-free: the achievement of ideological and philosophical pluralism reflected in the Bharat Mandapam; the combination of science and spirituality for which the Nataraja has come to stand; the tradition of the university as a center for learning and human capital endowment; the foundational grammatical text of a primary Indo-European language which, according to the official statement, anticipated the recursive nature of modern day programming languages. No wonder that these historical significances were further collocated with two distinctively modern-day Indian contributions to the global pool of ideas and goods. First is the philosophy of civil disobedience and non-violence reflected in the collective walk that the G-20 leaders took on the final day to attend Gandhi’s memorial site. Second is the separate exhibition that displayed different elements of the digital public infrastructure called the ‘India Stack’, an endeavor that demonstrated a unique pathway for building and using frontier technologies towards fostering private innovation and social inclusion^[18]Tarun Khanna, Anjali Raina, & Rachna Chawla. "India Stack: Digital Public Infrastructure for All," Harvard Business School Case 724-371, July 2023..

Why does this carefully curated image of India as a non mala fide contributor of global public goods, both hard and soft, matter and how does it lead to the kind of providential diplomacy that was outlined in the introduction? A brief detour through the history of India diplomatic power play will help illuminate this dynamic.

Institutional Memories

For most of the twentieth century, India diplomatic efforts were seen to be trapped underneath the weight of institutional memories. There were two elements that were particularly prominent in constricting its perception as a great power. First was the hangover of autonomy from the era of colonialism^[19]Aparna Pande, “Being India: A Different Kind of World Power,” The Rise of India as a World Power (ed: Muqtedar Khan), New Lines Institute for Strategy and Policy, August 2023.. This manifested itself in a diplomatic modus operandi that has been described as that of ‘cautious prudence’^[20]Pratap Bhanu Mehta, “Still Under Nehru’s Shadow? The Absence of Foreign Policy Frameworks in India,” India Review, 8 (3), 2009, pp. 209-233., or, more colorfully, as possessing the defensiveness of a porcupine^[21]C. Raja Mohan, Crossing the Rubicon: the shaping of India’s foreign policy, Dehli, Viking Press, 2003.. Different commentators have noted different aspects of this reluctance to engage in the realpolitik necessary to become a viable leader in the global geopolitical arena. Equating military power with bellicosity, using the army primarily for the purposes of border defense, seeing power projection as being imperialistic became chiseled only into a will to security but never into a will to power^[22]Bharat Karnad, “India’s Strategic Diffidence,” European Council on Foreign Relations, 2015. [Online] https://ecfr.eu/archive/page/-/Karnad.pdf. This has led to a range of commentatorial designations of the kind of power that India aimed to be in the twentieth century: a ‘swing state’ that was not a genuine pole of power but would strengthen any group to which it belonged^[23]Ashley Tellis, “India as a Leading Power,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, April 4, 2016. [Online] https://carnegieendowment.org/2016/04/04/india-as-leading-power-pub-63185, a third world country with a first world attitude^[24]Sisir Gupta, India and the International System: New Delhi Vikas Books, 1981, p 47., a ‘precocious’ power^[25]Arvind Subramanian, “Precocious India,” Business Standard, June 14, 2013. [Online] https://www.business-standard.com/article/opinion/arvind-subramanian-precocious-india-107081401096_1.html, a reluctant power^[26]Aparna Pande, Making India Great: The Promise of a Reluctant Global Power, Harper Collins, 2020., and a leading power that is a system shaper but not a great power that is a system maker^[27]Ashley Tellis, “Grasping Greatness: Making India a Leading Power”, in Ashley Tellis, Bibek Debroy, C. Raja Mohan (dir.),  Grasping Greatness: Making India a Leading Power, Penguin Viking, 2022.. While there are differences between these designations, all of them, in their own way, capture the unwillingness of India to partake in great power politics.

The second element that constricted India’s capacity to accumulate power was the ambivalent and generally aversive relation that Indian state bore to the use of force. This was an effect of the self-attribution of spiritual exceptionalism to India by some of its prominent voices and was sealed by the non-violent independence movement spearheaded by Gandhi. Two quotes captured this earlier and routinized sense of Indian exceptionalism. The theosophist Annie Besant, in a town hall meeting in 1894, declared “Let lesser nations and lesser men fight for conquest, for place and for power; these gimcracks are toys for children, and the children should be left to quarrel over them… In India’s hand is laid the sacred charge of keeping alight the torch of spirit amid the fogs and storms of increasing materialism^[28]Cited in Rahul Sagar, “Introduction” To Raise a Fallen People: The Nineteenth Century Origins of Indian Views on International Politics (ed: Rahul Sagar), Columbia University Press, New York, … Continue reading”. The second is an episode that the famous Hindu spiritual leader Swami Vivekananda recounted in 1987: “I was asked by a young lady in London, “What have you Hindus done? You have never conquered a single nation.” That is true from the point of view of the Englishman, the brave, the heroic, the Kshatriya – conquest is the greatest glory that one man can have over another. That is true from his point of view, but from ours it is quite the opposite. If I ask myself what has been the cause of India’s greatness. I answered, “The cause is that we have never conquered.” That is our glory^[29]Ibid., p 55.”. This resistance to perceive India as one amongst other nations led it to a form of spiritual exceptionalism and moral aggrandizement that was even reflected in the concrete workaday strategies of Indian officials. The tendency to use distributive instead of integrative strategies while negotiating^[30]Amrita Narlikar & Aruna Narlikar, Bargaining with a Rising India: Lessons from the Mahabharata, Oxford University Press, 2014., the burden of seeing oneself as a bearer of a civilizational spirit rather than national interests^[31]Stephen Cohen, India: Emerging Power, Washington DC, Brookings Institute, 2001., the tendency to moralize^[32] Ibid., made the language of entitlement rather than the language of bargaining as the standing language of Indian diplomacy^[33]Pratap Bhanu Mehta, “Still Under Nehru’s Shadow? The Absence of Foreign Policy Frameworks in India,” India Review, 8 (3), 2009, pp. 209-233.

Traces of these sets of institutional memories still burden the Indian foreign policy establishment but a change in the background geopolitical conditions has elicited a perceptible shift in understanding the burden of prudence and civilizational path dependence. What used to be the burden of being prudent is now seen as an advantage in a world which is yet again organizing itself into internecine blocs. This sense of prudence now allows for the partnerships between India and other countries to be issue-based, contractual, and reciprocal, in short ‘limited liability partnerships’, without these partnerships solidifying into fully committed alliances. It also allows India to be cautious of the fair-weather character of these diplomatic relationships, something that became palpably real to the Indian establishment during COVID. This resistance to being subsumed by geopolitical blocs has also indirectly made India into a viable global node that can project its own image as a non mala fide contributor of global public goods. This is reflected in its efforts to be a ‘voice of the global south’.

What makes this sense of identity providential is the gap between a realistic and actuarial assessment of the amount of the global goods that India actually provides and the image it has of itself as a bellwether for a fairer form of globalization^[34]For example, see Anup Roy, “India Far From Replacing China as Global Growth Engine, HSBC Says” Bloomberg, October 13, 2023. For a more sobering, maybe exaggerated, assessment of the lack of human … Continue reading. Being only in the nascent stages of becoming a viable global node of power is masked by the discrepant providential claims of having always been a guiding non-interventionist civilization with a deep history of a global mission that has resisted catapulting into the game of great power politics. What has shifted however is the degree of assertiveness of this spiritual signature. The more quiescent spiritual tone of the last century has given way to a more publicly declarative accent that was sensed in the G-20 summit. This new age is framed as the “age of ambition” in which everything is seen as a break from an era that was more timid and not ambitious enough^[35]Pratap Bhanu Mehta, “India’s Age of Ambition,” The Indian Express, October 6, 2023. [Online] … Continue reading. The press release that accompanied the inauguration ceremony of the Bharat Mandapam notes, “Bharat Mandapam is a call for India’s capabilities and new energy of the nation, it is a philosophy of India’s grandeur and will power^[36][Online] https://pib.gov.in/PressReleaseIframePage.aspx?PRID=1943050”. Even this new found zeal can be situated in the “deep sources of conduct” that emerged from the early twentieth century debates about the character of Indian nationalism^[37]Rahul Sagar, “Introduction” To Raise a Fallen People: The Nineteenth Century Origins of Indian Views on International Politics (ed: Rahul Sagar), Columbia University Press: New York, 2022, p2.. Vivekananda’s trait of spiritual quietude is replaced by Aurobindo’s trait of rajas or a combative dynamism^[38]Aurobindo was a famous Hindu philosopher of the twentieth century, equal in stature as Vivekananda, but who advocated for a more combative and martial national posture for India. He believed this … Continue reading. A contemporary shift in diplomatic strategy becomes perceived as an expression of a national trait that had only been recessive and history is yet again dissolved into providentiality.

Conclusion

In his book, ‘The India Way’, S. Jaishankar, the current Minister of External Affairs of India has an extended disquisition on the way in which lessons from the Hindu epic Mahabharata can be likened to the geopolitical dispositions of India’s immediate neighbors^[39]Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, The India Way: Strategies for an Uncertain World: Harper Collins India, 2022.. The Mahabharata is an epic known for the constant flouting of rules and norms by characters across the aisle, including the ones who lay down those rules and norms. This makes most of the characters in the Mahabharata morally compromised and, hence. apt for thinking about the murky realism of foreign politics. The relevant axis of difference in the Mahabharata is not between moral and immoral actions but between those who are aware of the magnitude of the personal cost that they will face in order to flout a rule or deceive an opponent and those who don’t. India’s neighbor to the left, Pakistan, is perceived as the less scrupulous character that flouts the rules and plays the victim. The instance that Jaishankar cites is its support of state-sponsored acts of terrorism while condemning any Indian response as an act of escalation. India’s neighbor to the right, China, is also considered to be an even more unscrupulous character for whom the act of dissembling is elevated into a craft without any accompanying doubt or guilt. In between these two unscrupulous actors lies India who for most of its history has been trapped by the blinders of its own righteousness but who is only now learning the occasional advantages of strategic deception at a great personal cost.

If there ever was a pithy depiction of the reluctant but providential rise of India as a non malafide power, it is this. Though this description pertains only to India’s immediate neighborhood, it can be extrapolated to a more global scale. The challenge is to read these passages, alongside the media of G-20, as a genre of providential diplomacy that symptomatically tries to capture the geopolitical tensions of the contemporary world by elevating the role of India as a diplomatic last resort for achieving some semblance of global coordination. The production of this genre of diplomacy does not absolve the Indian officials of the hard work of threshing out concrete bilateral deals. Nor does it directly add to India’s soft power capacity^[40]India remains outside of the Soft Power 30 Index.. What it does achieve is a tentative elevation of a country’s diplomatic profile as an alternate Schelling point in a world that, although characterized by a new tempestuous geopolitical reality, is still too tied down by the material inertia of longstanding network economies.