Evasive balancing: The limits of India's Indo-Pacific Strategy
Evasive Balancing: The Limits of India’s Indo-Pacific Strategy
WRITTEN BY RAJESH RAJAGOPALAN
2 April 2020
India’s Indo-Pacific strategy is largely a subset of its China policy. Starting out in the early 1990s as a way of attaching itself to the dynamic economies towards the east of India and slipstreaming behind them to economic growth, it is now dominated by strategic considerations of managing and balancing China. India’s strategy is a mixed one, one of balancing China while also attempting to reassure it. But as I point out in a recent essay in International Affairs, I am skeptical that this mixed strategy can work.
Of course, India is not alone in adopting such mixed strategies. Indeed, there has been a considerable amount of academic interest in these strategies. Most of China’s neighbours, India included, would rather trade with China than seek to engage in an expensive and uncertain effort to balance it, especially considering that the power differential is now so badly skewed in favor of China. But balancing is unavoidable, a consequence of both China’s power and its behavior in the region. Still, China’s neigbours are seeking to split the difference attempting to both balance China while also maintaining political and economic links to Beijing. Though such strategies are generally characterized as ‘hedging’, a number of scholars have recently pointed out that states in the region are actually balancing rather than really hedging.
But if states such as India are indeed balancing China, this is clearly a different kind of balancing than what we have seen so far. I label this kind of balancing as ‘evasive balancing’ because it includes elements of both balancing and reassurance. In other words, while it clearly includes elements of balancing, such as enhancing domestic military power and building security partnerships with like-minded states, it also includes elements of a reassurance strategy, especially in seeking to convince Beijing that such balancing is not really aimed at it. There is a lot of skepticism that reassurance strategies are viable: a mix that includes both balancing and reassurance should lead to even greater skepticism.
India’s evasive balancing strategy can neither balance China adequately nor accommodate it sufficiently. The likely end result is that India will neither please China, nor satisfy its own new partners, nor achieve a stable, non-hegemonic Indo-Pacific.
Nevertheless, this is what India (and a number of other neighbours of China) are attempting. The elements of India’s evasive balancing strategy are easy enough to see. The balancing components first: India is building up a robust security partnership with the US as well as others in the region such as Australia, Japan, Indonesia, Singapore and Vietnam. This is being done quite slowly, in fits and starts but it is progressing, and has actually picked up momentum over the last year. Clearly, the relationship with the US is the most important because it is today the only country that can balance China. Though well short of a military alliance, India has signed a number of agreements with the US including on logistics and communications security. In addition, Indian relations with Japan and Australia have improved tremendously, while New Delhi has also built up ties with smaller Southeast Asian powers such as Singapore, Indonesia and Vietnam. Moreover, India has become much more open about its interest in the Quadrilateral initiative (the Quad) and much less concerned about Beijing’s reaction. New Delhi is also building up its own defense capabilities, though it is proceeding much more slowly, hampered by poor civil-military relations and a broken military acquisitions process.
The second prong of the strategy is reassurance. There are five noteworthy strands to this: first, India has repeatedly declared that it has no interest in containing China. Second, going a step further, India has also engaged in bilateral and multilateral diplomacy to convince China that India intends it no harm, including buy joining minilateral groupings such as BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) and RIC (Russia, India, China). Third, India has attempted to convince China of India’s sincerity by taking unilateral actions, such as against the Tibetan exile community in India. Fourth, New Delhi has repeatedly sought dialogue on contentious issues such as Indian application to join the Nuclear Supplier’s Group (NSG). Finally, most crucially, India has attempted to slow-walk its balancing efforts, especially its external balancing efforts such as the Quad, as a way of convincing China of India’s goodwill. Whether any of these reassurance efforts have actually reassured China is difficult to say, but there is little indication that the disagreements have been lessened.
This combination of contradictory policies, or India’s evasive balancing strategy, is unlikely to work. China will likely react harshly to India’s balancing efforts; and it is likely to be dismissive of India’s efforts at reassurance, possibly even seeing it as subterfuge. Moreover, such efforts are also likely to hurt India’s credibility with various strategic partners, especially the US. Thus, as I conclude in my essay, India’s evasive balancing strategy “can neither balance China adequately nor accommodate it sufficiently. The likely end result is that India will neither please China, nor satisfy its own new partners, nor achieve a stable, non-hegemonic Indo-Pacific.”
DISCLAIMER: All views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent that of the 9DASHLINE.com platform.
Author biography
Rajesh Rajagopalan is a Professor of International Politics at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. Previously he was a senior fellow at the Observer Research Foundation and a research fellow at the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses, both in New Delhi. He has also served as deputy secretary at the National Security Council Secretariat of the Government of India, and in 2011 was the ICCR Visiting India Chair at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. Image credit: by Ministry of External Affairs (India)/Flickr.