The return of the Raj

C. Raja Mohan writes for The American Interest Magazine:

It is not clear what French President Nicolas Sarkozy had in mind when he invited a contingent of 400 Indian troops to march down the Champs-Élysées for the Bastille Day parade in 2009. But Paris might be on to something that Washington has missed, in spite of its more intensive military engagement with India in recent years. Although Paris does not have the power to engineer international structural changes in New Delhi's favor, it has often been ahead of Washington in strategizing about India. In its effort to build a partnership with India, ongoing since the mid-1990s, France has helped India renegotiate its position in the global nuclear order: It provided diplomatic cover when India defied the world with nuclear tests in May 1998, promoted the idea of changing the global non-proliferation rules to facilitate civilian nuclear cooperation with India, and worked with the Bush Administration to get the international community to endorse India's nuclear exceptionalism.

Of course, Sarkozy's motives might have been merely tactical: a move to butter up Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who was among the honored guests at the parade, or to raise its share of India's rapidly expanding market for advanced arms. But Paris is capable of more than tactics: It may sense the prospects of a fundamental change in India's defense orientation and its potential to contribute significantly to international security politics in the 21st century. It may see that a rising India, which runs one of the world's major economies and fields a large armed force, will eventually bear some of the military burdens of maintaining the global order.

If so, it would not be the first time that India has done so. Western analysts, some British excepted, seem not to appreciate two historical facts: that the Indian armed forces contributed significantly to Allied efforts in the 20th century's two world wars; and that India's British Raj was the main peacekeeper in the Indian Ocean littoral and beyond. And it is not just the West that is ignorant of the security legacy of the British Raj; India's own post-colonial political class deliberately induced a collective national amnesia about the country's rich pre-independence military traditions. Its foreign policy establishment still pretends that India's engagement with the world began on August 15, 1947.

The image of Indian troops marching in Paris should remind the world that India's military past could be a useful guide to its strategic future. If the United States and India can together rediscover and revive the Indian military's expeditionary tradition, they will have a solid basis for strategic cooperation not only between themselves but also with the rest of the world's democracies. The Bush Administration showed an instinctive sense of this possibility when it committed itself to assisting India's rise and boosting its defense capabilities. President Barack Obama does seem to have a fund of goodwill toward India, which was reflected in his decision to receive Prime Minister Singh in November 2009 as the first state guest at the White House. But it is not clear if the Obama Administration has a larger strategic conception of the prospects for military and security cooperation with India.

In general, the Democratic administrations of recent times have tended to define engagement with India in terms of global issues and multilateralism rather than converging bilateral interests. Rather than frame the relationship with India using such ambitious but unrealizable multilateral goals, or drag Delhi further than it wishes to go into the Af-Pak mess, the Obama Administration needs to elevate the bilateral military engagement with India to a strategic level. While the U.S. debate on military burden-sharing has traditionally taken place in the context of Washington's alliances with Western Europe and Japan, a rising India may well be a more credible and sustainable partner than these two in coping with new international security challenges. If both sides can shake off the remaining historical baggage that has kept them at arm's length for most of the past sixty years, we may see something remotely like the return of the Raj.

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