August 13, 2009
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By Centre for Land Warfare Studies |
The Centre for Land Warfare Studies (CLAWS) organised a seminar on ‘Defence Diplomacy: Enhancing India’s National Interests’ on 13 August 2009 at the CLAWS campus. The seminar was attended by a large gathering of embassy officials and select guests from the strategic community. Lt Gen V K Kapoor (Retd.) was the chairman while Swapna Kona Nayudu, Associate Fellow at CLAWS presented her paper on the subject. Capt P K Ghosh from the Centre for Air Power Studies (CAPS) and Col Shantanu Dayal from CLAWS were the discussants. Swapna Kona Nayudu: Swapna introduced the paper by saying that although defence diplomacy had traditionally been used for the realpolitik purposes of strengthening allies against common enemies, increasingly, states have used it for a range of new purposes. These include strategic engagement with former or potential enemies encouraging multilateral regional cooperation, supporting the democratization of civil-military relations and assisting states in developing peacekeeping capabilities. Thus, over the last decade there have been major changes in patterns of international defence diplomacy. Further, she explained that independent India had to militarize and bolster its defence forces entirely on its own. Thus, she said that India’s defence diplomacy was a sum of many defence-related actions, collectively aimed at furthering the country’s national interests through the active pursuit of cooperation with friends and the building of consensus with foes. Swapna explained that she viewed defence diplomacy not as an equaliser but as a tool that enhances that the bargaining power of states like India, Brazil and South Africa. She said that the shift from a client-patron relationship to a more symbiotic relationship as can be witnessed clearly in the Indo-Russian relationship is illustrative. Also increasingly, there has been a greater focus towards balancing great power relationships with smaller and more medium power relations within the South Asian region. She said that developments in the region directly impinge on India’s borders, threatening to spill over and testing the force threshold. They also shape India’s status in its neighborhood and on the world stage. Projection of power is as important as actual defence preparedness. Thus, the conduct of defence diplomacy has two main flanks – the first is the execution of military strategy within the gambit of foreign and security policy and the second is the evolution of military capability that complements that strategy, however ambitious it might be. Swapna also said that an indicator of how defence diplomacy can be the victim of circumstances is best studied when one looks at India’s defence relations with the United States. The role played by changing strategic calculations and political will over the years has altered the nature of these relations. Indian and American foreign policies have also evolved, independently and in comparison to one another. After giving an overview of these relations, she added that the areas in which these two nations can now have a collaborative role to play are many. She said that India ought to recognize that the United States is becoming increasingly important for building Indian defense capability. While speaking of Sino-Indian relations, the presenter said that the strained relationship has percolated outwards to other countries in the region that view themselves as lying within either Chinese or Indian areas of influence. These relationships, whether economic or political, have traditionally been mutually exclusive. In the field of defence, this exclusivity is to India’s disadvantage as most countries on her eastern border and her east source their weapons and personnel from China more than they do from India. For South East Asia, the strategic path for India to pursue would be to maintain a healthy presence while refraining from anti-China projection. Swapna said that a balance of power can be brought out as a balance of presence, ensuring that India remains in South East Asia to further her national interests, not to hinder those of any other power, whether it is China or the United States. She also spoke about how India was also engaged in a wide range of activities with other friendly countries, ranging from Chile and Brazil in the Far-West to Japan and Korea in the Far-East and has concluded suitable defence cooperation agreements with over thirty countries. Dialogues such as the India-Brazil-South Africa (IBSA) Dialogue Forum are indicative of India’s growing interests even beyond its periphery. The range of defence cooperation activities comprises strategic security dialogues that enable understanding of the participant concerns and establishing areas of common interest. Also included are goodwill visits at the level of the Service Chiefs, professional defence and military expert exchanges, military training, combined exercises, reciprocal visits of warships, observers for exercises, sports and adventure activities, disaster management and humanitarian assistance; and cooperation in UN Peace Keeping Operations. The emergence of trilateral developmental initiative between India, Brazil and South Africa clearly reflected India’s priority of positioning itself as a major developmental power. The growing importance of the African Indian Ocean Rim to India is evidenced by increasing bilateral and trilateral efforts and improved relations, notably with Mauritius, the Seychelles, Madagascar and coastal states such as Mozambique, Kenya and Tanzania. India’s most formidable economic and commercial partnership in the African-rimmed Indian Ocean is with Mauritius. In the end, Swapna concluded by saying that till now, the Indian military is not represented in strategic security dialogues, as well as the various consultative processes. This must change at the earliest. She also emphasized the pursuit of proactive measures such as the sale of military hardware, an area where defence diplomacy can be extremely useful. It is obvious that cooperation will be mutually beneficial to foster interaction amongst India and its partners, as the defence industries in different countries have developed excellence in diverse areas, which could offer a broad range of potential opportunities, capitalising on each others' respective strengths, for cooperation in defence production, joint development, trade and joint marketing. Capt P K Ghosh: Power projection is commonly understood in the west as hard power projection, such as in the bombing of a region. In India, the understanding is of soft power projection, such as the projection of our military capacities, despite a different definition used in India’s maritime doctrine. The reason India has not been part of military alliances in South Asia is because they haven’t existed, not because India did not want to participate in them. Nevertheless, India has taken a lot of initiatives such as the IONS, which have come to fruition. Thus, the absence of multilateral regional arrangements and India’s posturing as an independent nation in the Non-Aligned Movement, during the Cold War period were responsible for this stance. He did not agree with the recommendations towards India’s renewed commitment to disarmament and the concept of re-humanizing security in this context. Capt Ghosh pointed out that the question here is whether defence diplomacy is a subset of cooperative security, or if cooperative security is a subset of defence diplomacy? In this context, it is also important to note that our threat perception vis-à-vis China is existent and with the Russians, India has always had only a buyer-seller relationship. There have never been joint exercises as there are now. A lot more time is now being spent on very relevant joint exercises, fleet reviews and port calls, which all send out the subterraneous message of cooperation. Defence diplomacy can be broken up into two - peacetime diplomacy that looks at less-than-war conditions and the context where the failure of diplomacy could lead to war. In the end, he submitted that if elements of gunboat diplomacy using coercive forms of diplomacy were used for the prevention of conflict, would that come under defence diplomacy? Col Shantanu Dayal: Col Dayal began by pointing out that the driving force of the entire paper was the discussion of national interests and explained that what a country perceives as its vision for the future and the manner in which it wants to conduct its diplomacy could draw out the aims and objectives of its defence diplomacy. He recommended that these should be related to ground realities in a manner that could be useful for execution by policymakers, where applicability was important and achievable. He also said that important national interests include economic progress, energy security and enhancing the life of the citizens. As military security was part of that, it is important to study what role defence diplomacy plays in that regard. He opined that defence diplomacy in today’s world has much to do with the issue of security and the manner in which economic matters progress. Col Dayal pointed out that as the importance of defence diplomacy has been further enhanced by a globalising world; we should analyse the national interests of any country, their economic interests and other interests thereby coming to concrete defence diplomatic initiatives that further all of these. In the end, he pointed to the geo-strategic shift from the western world towards Asia, which is really apparent with the rise of China, Russia and India. He suggested that one must look at the role defence cooperation has to play in this matrix in the mid-term. He also asked if Asian countries think on western lines of thinking as apparent in the NATO. He disagreed with Capt Ghosh pointing out that although gunboat diplomacy was a potent force in the past, today, except for supporting other initiatives on the ground, it has no role to play as far as defence diplomacy is concerned. Discussion • While looking at defence diplomacy as a movement, it is useful to take the Indo-US relationship as a case study, but this should be supplemented with the study of enemies or potential enemies such as China or Pakistan. Chairperson’s Remarks: Lt Gen Kapoor complimented the paper on its comprehensiveness and said that the frameworks for the conduct of cooperation might differ depending on the status of the country for different levels of players. He added that given India’s construct as a multi-ethnic, multi-religious nation with a billion-plus nation, Indian national interests fundamentally are concerned with bringing the people below the poverty line above it. He also said that diplomatic strategy in the country was to be formulated keeping the myriad sensitivities of the people in mind. He emphasised three areas of focus – one, that strategy should be able to protect, two, that strategy must be able to deter an opponent and three, that being a larger neighbor in the violent neighborhood, India must help other nations. He recalled the concept of force projection not for aggressive designs but for out-of-area contingencies. He concluded by saying that India also has scores of internal problems, which can only be solved through solutions that are multilateral in nature and that for this, earlier adversaries should shed mental reservations and that way, India and the region around India can grow symbiotically. Concluding Remarks: Brig Gurmeet Kanwal, Director CLAWS thanked the audience and discussants for their valuable insights. He concluded by saying that the core objective of India’s defence diplomacy is to enhance India’s national interests and that he saw no reason why there will not be a multilateral security framework in Asia years from now where China will also be present. (Report compiled by Swapna Kona Nayudu, Associate Fellow, CLAWS)
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