- Diplomacy is about reading the tea leaves right, and India should read the Chinese tea leaves to brew a better Strategic Hedging Matrix to combat China.
- Strategic hedging is the art of using strategic space to advance a country’s national interests.
- Growing economically is thus a crucial criterion for India to hedge China, as India can become a rule-shaper only if it becomes a $10 trillion economy.
- India not only needs to rethink its border strategies, but also needs to secure its maritime interests amongst various other facets of its foreign policy.
Introduction
The unipolar moment of the world has come to an end, with power dynamics now shifting from the West to the East. This new era in geopolitics also calls for a rethink of India’s foreign policy. Foreign Policy is about states defending, securing and advancing their national interest, and India needs to gear up to do the same, especially with an aggressive China stationed as its neighbor. With the rise of China, and the United States not being a singular hegemon in the world anymore, India needs to devise a Strategic Hedging matrix to combat China’s power. India not only needs to rethink its border strategies, but also needs to secure its maritime interests amongst various other facets of its foreign policy. Hedging refers to the national security or alignment strategy that one state takes against the other, featuring a mix of both cooperative and confrontational elements (Ciorciari, 2019).
Strategic hedging is thus the art of using strategic space to advance a country’s national interests. The ‘Raison d’être’ for India to practice strategic hedging vis-à-vis any state, especially China, is to maintain its strategic autonomy in the world, as India does not align itself with any country, nor is it a Treaty Ally of any state. As India’s First Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru mentioned that by India aligning with any power, India would have to surrender its opinion and follow a policy that someone else asks to pursue (Ayres, 2023). The Nehruvian idea of non-alignment and peaceful coexistence contrasts with Indira Gandhi’s striving to follow Realpolitik in a world with a fallen Liberal International Order. In an international system which favours Realpolitik today, the rise of China has awakened and motivated India to carefully devise a foreign policy not only to combat China, but also to simultaneously advance and secure its other interests in the realm of international relations.
The Hedging Matrix
Strategic benefits and political costs need to be analysed before India makes any move in combating and hedging against China. India needs to consider the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats and do a SWOT analysis. India needs to adopt multiple strategies in the realms of Defence, Economy, Border Talks, Dialogue, Diplomacy, and a combination of Hard and Soft power needs to be utilised to Hedge against China. Internal and External balancing is also an imperative aspect in India’s hedging strategy. Prime Minister Narendra Modi visiting both Moscow and Kyiv in the span of a few weeks demonstrates India’s act of external balancing. This can also be compared with PM Nehru visiting the US in 1949 and then the USSR in 1955. This is a classic example of Strategic Hedging, as these were State Visits to two different blocs. PM Modi, then, visited Poland after visiting Ukraine. Is India increasing its strategic space for the future, as Warsaw is emerging to be a new leader in the Eastern European region?
Whilst India needs to keep its ties with Russia strong to safeguard its defence supplies, it also needs to stay in the good books of Ukraine to safeguard its naval equipment imports. Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov has also mentioned that Moscow understands the need for India to want to diversify its defence ties with other partners. Irrespective of India having the then “Treaty of Friendship, Peace and Cooperation” with USSR, India needs to diversify its partners in the global arena. This is to ensure that our avenues are always open in case we are confronted with a black swan geopolitical event. With both Beijing and Moscow claiming a ‘‘No Limits’’ partnership in February 2022, India needs to be cautious and not rely only on Russia for its defence, oil and other imports. This thus calls for expanding the horizons of partnerships for India. By strengthening its ties to the United States, Japan, France, and Australia, India has diversified its partnerships in recent years.
As a key player in the development of the Indo-Pacific strategy, India has positioned itself as a significant partner of the United States in countering China’s influence in the South Asian region and beyond (Rozen, 2023). The US has called China a “Pacing Threat” in most of its national documents. Building a partnership with India thus provides the US with a South Asian solution to control and contain China. India and the United States share multiple bilateral agreements to cooperate in the various aspects of defence, technology, maritime security, and intelligence. The United States is a significant supplier of Indian defence equipment and India’s largest military exercise partner (Mohan, 2023). It is thus important to note that the US and India have a strategic partnership with each other to counter a rising China.
The partnership of the US and India also extends into QUAD, which is a political and strategic partnership between the United States, India, Japan and Australia; which China also likes to call as the “Asian NATO”. This is to subtly symbolise that since NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organisation] is a military alliance in the Trans-Atlantic region, the QUAD is a military alliance between the four nations to control China in the Indo-Pacific region. Through QUAD, India hedges against China in the maritime sphere and beyond. Bolstering the resilience of all the Quad nations, especially for keeping the sea lanes open for critical supply chains of goods such as semiconductors and sharing concerns about China’s role in the region, is a priority for all QUAD members (A.Smith, 2021).
The Indo-Pacific is a vast region. It is at the heart of global trade. Alongside the QUAD, India also conducts a bilateral naval exercise called ‘Varuna’ with France, which has now become a hallmark of the India-France strategic bilateral relationship. India can thus also significantly rely on France to advance its economic, military and political interests in the Indo-Pacific arena. President Macron and Prime Minister Modi also agreed upon a “Joint Strategic Vision of India-France Cooperation in the Indian Ocean Region” in New Delhi, in March 2018. This Strategic vision of both countries has now also been extended to the Indo-Pacific as both nations share concerns related to maritime security, terrorism and piracy in the region. With France having the largest Exclusive Economic Zone [EEZs] in the region, the Indo-Pacific is imperative for Paris. The defence relationship between France and India has also upgraded from a ‘Buyer-Seller relationship’ to a shared designing and developing relationship.
India’s DRDO [Defence Research and Development Organisation] and Safran, a French company, are co-developing jet engines for combat aircraft. Safran is also jointly designing, developing and producing engines for the Indian Ministry of Defence’s [MoD] future 13-ton IMRH [Indian Multi-Role Helicopter] and its naval version DBMRH [Deck Based Multi-Role Helicopter alongside HAL [Hindustan Aeronautics Limited] (Safran, 2023). The Franco-Indian partnership on joint military exercises and defence deals thus provides India with a European friend to rely on. Paris states that the rise of China has shaken up traditional balances and considers the Indo-Pacific to have become a key strategic region of the 21st century. India and France thus jointly collaborate on various degrees to advance each other’s security, defence and economic interests, whilst simultaneously hedging China in the region and ensuring an open global maritime space. The India-France-UAE Trilateral is also an important minilateral that India can cooperate with to secure its Digital, Cultural, and Security interests. The Trilateral also jointly cooperates on a Maritime partnership exercise with each other. With multilateral organisations now on a decline, Plurilateral Diplomacy is the best way forward for India.
India relies on several plurilateral and minilateral cooperations as they are the coalitions of the willing. The “Hub and Spokes” system of India, wherein India has a reliable partner in every continent, should also be carefully manoeuvred to gain clout in hedging China. The United Nations, which is known as the Mecca of Multilateral Organisations, has failed to prevent the Russia-Ukraine conflict and has failed to resolve the Israel-Palestine conflict, along with the China-Taiwan question. Declining Multilateralism can be handled only by bringing in reforms in the existing architecture. But bringing in reforms to the United Nations, beginning with the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), seems to only be a pipe dream today. China will not entertain any reforms in the UNSC if it means to give India and Japan a permanent membership, just like China is against admitting India into the Nuclear Supply Group [NSG]. India thus needs to invest and focus on plurilateral groupings, which are ‘Issue-based Coalitions’, to deter and hedge China. Though Multilateralism is on a decline, Multipolarity is on a rise. Surprisingly, Russia, China and India believe in multipolarity in their foreign policies. A unipolar world also didn’t sustain for long because, as China emerged, trade between countries around the globe and China rose significantly. Sanctions against China will thus be much difficult, unlike it was with Russia, as world trade and the global economy can slow down and crash if sanctions are decided to be put against China.
Growing economically is thus a crucial criterion for India to hedge China, as India can become rule-shaperer only if it becomes a $10 trillion economy. India may put its political democracy ahead of economic prosperity, but Economic diplomacy is of paramount significance for India to be able to confront China. The Chinese Economic Diplomacy consists of the use of trade, investment and finance policies to support China’s diplomatic, political, and strategic purposes. The Chinese also focus on securing resources, expanding export markets and promoting China’s soft power to advance China’s rise. India needs to take inspiration from ASEAN, South Korea and Japan to advance its economic policy in the right direction. The most important challenge for India will be to lift the people from poverty and loop in ‘Land, Labour, and Logistics’ to increase investments in the country.
The Economic Wings in different Indian Embassies stationed around the world should also push to increase Foreign Direct Investments [FDI], Tourism and Foreign Trade Shares. Labour Mobility Partnership agreements need to be increased to be able to successfully conduct economic diplomacy. All these initiatives not only bring in investments from different companies, states and their population from across the world, but will also bring about substantive direct investments from the rich diaspora of India. WTO subsidy agreements, the India-European Union Free Trade Agreement and various other Free Trade Agreements [FTAs] also remarkably contribute towards India’s Economic Diplomacy. India should also strive to be the ‘Plus 1’ in the “China Plus 1” factor. The “China plus 1” factor is a call for different states around the world to not solely rely on China for trade and other specific commodities manufactured in China. The world may now be turning towards Taiwan to be the plus 1, but India needs to conquer the position of being the plus one here, starting with the production of Strategic International Trade commodities like Semiconductor chips, Solar Panels, batteries, Technology and the processing of critical minerals. India and China have a close geographical proximity, which should be played to India’s advantage in the world of trade. This will further contribute towards India achieving its goal of becoming a $10 trillion economy.
The Economic wing of Indian Embassies, along with the Indian Council for Cultural Relations, needs to jointly work towards promoting India’s soft power. This will provide India with the agency to combat China when carefully steeped with hard power. India’s hosting of the G20 summit was also a brilliant form of showcasing India’s culture and diversity on the global stage. The origin of Buddhism was in India, and the religion is today massively popular in South-east Asia, Nepal, Japan and China. India was also termed as the “Pharmacy of the World” as it supplied a vaccine against a virus that was supplied by China to the world. India should thus use its soft power to alleviate its hard power strategies.
Conclusion
India’s non-alignment policy gave way to strategic autonomy, which is the guiding force behind India’s Foreign Policy, wherein the Gujral Doctrine is still followed concerning Neighbourhood Polices. Strategic Policies and steps need to be taken to combat the rising might of China. It’s imperative to vigilantly practice external balancing and internal balancing to hedge China and secure India’s interests not only on the borders but also in the maritime lanes. The immediate Security concerns that the Houthi Rebel Attacks brought in the Red Sea are an example of the need of the hour to secure our maritime lanes and build a strong navy irrespective of our domestic constraints. By achieving the goal of becoming a $10 trillion economy, India will win a bigger policy space to negotiate its terms on the global stage. India not only needs to make advancements in the arenas of defence, economy, trade, and technology, but also in the spheres of Education, AI, and cybersecurity.
The American election results will also call for India to make agile changes in its foreign policy. China may constitute to be a major security challenge, but India needs to tackle the dragon with a flavourful blend of strategies and alliances. The QUAD and a tight grip on the Indian and Pacific Ocean will be India’s primary force in hedging China. India needs to further forge and create new security partners, including but not limited to South Korea, Taiwan, Philippines, and South Africa. Diplomacy is about reading the tea leaves right, and India should read the Chinese tea leaves to brew a better Strategic Hedging Matrix to combat China. India should brew chai that has a flavourful and flavourful aroma, and not an astringent aftertaste.
References:
- A.Smith, S. (2021, May 27). Council on Foreign Relations. Retrieved from The Quad in the Indo-Pacific: What to Know: https://www.cfr.org/in-brief/quad-indo-pacific-what-know
- Ayres, A. (2023, June 21st). India Is Not a U.S. Ally—and Has Never Wanted to Be. Time Magazine.
- Ciorciari, J. D. (2019). Hedging in international relations: an introduction. International Relations of the Asia-Pacific, 367-374.
- MINISTERE DE L’EUROPE ET DES AFFAIRS ETRANGERES. (2022, November). Retrieved from The Indo-Pacific: a priority for France: https://www.diplomatie.gouv.fr/en/country-files/regional-strategies/indo-pacific/the-indo-pacific-a-priority-for-france/#:~:text=The%20Indian%20and%20Pacific%20Oceans,7%2C000%20French%20subsidiaries%20are%20present.
- Mohan, G. (2023). India: Tilting Westwards. GMF.
- Rozen, J. (2023, May 11). India needs a strategic and not a reactive approach towards China. Retrieved from Observer Research Foundation: https://www.orfonline.org/expert-speak/india-needs-a-strategic-and-not-a-reactive-approach-towards-china
- Safran. (2023, July 14). Retrieved from Safran and HAL to form joint venture company to co-design and produce new generation helicopter engines in India: https://www.safran-group.com/pressroom/safran-hal-vont-creer-coentreprise-concevoir-produire-inde-moteurs-helicoptere-nouvelle-generation-2023-07-14
Vibha Hareesh has a Bachelor’s Degree in International Relations from Jindal Global University. She has a strong interest in geopolitics, international relations, and security studies. Views expressed are the author’s own.
Sughosh Joshi 
Divyanka Tandon