Editorial 1 : The paradox of India’s global rise, its regional decline
Introduction
While India’s global rise is a function of growth in absolute power, peer accommodation and a conducive ‘chaotic’ international situation, its waning regional influence is caused by diminishing relative power (vis-à-vis China), loss of primacy in South Asia, and fundamental changes in South Asian geopolitics.
About
- India’s aggregate power has grown over the past two decades — evident in robust economic growth, military capabilities, and a largely young demography.
- Its inclusion in key global institutions such as the G-20, as an invitee at G-7 meetings, and active participation in multilateral groups such as the Quad, BRICS, and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation further highlight its geopolitical significance and its powerful presence globally, even if it is not a member of the United Nations Security Council.
- India’s global rise is also aided by growing international attention on the Indo-Pacific, a theatre that is pivotal to global strategic stability, where India has a central position, geographically and otherwise.
Extraneous factors
- Despite this global rise, paradoxically and worryingly, India’s influence is declining in South Asia.
- Paradoxically, again, some of the factors that have led to the decline of Indian influence in the region are also the reasons behind India’s global prominence.
- The American withdrawal from the region and China filling that power vacuum have been disadvantageous to India.
- But that is, at the same time, a major reason why the United States and its allies are keen to accommodate India’s global interests including in order to push back China in the region.
- In the case of the Indo-Pacific, while interest in the Indo-Pacific has increased, India’s global prominence as an indispensable Indo-Pacific power, New Delhi’s focus on the great power balance in the Indo-Pacific may have stretched New Delhi a bit too thin in the continental neighbourhood.
- If India’s global rise stems from the growth in absolute power and the geopolitical choices made by the leading powers of the contemporary international system, India’s regional decline is a product of the dynamics of comparative power, and geopolitical choices made by the region’s smaller powers.
- To that extent, overlooking the balancing acts by the region’s smaller powers to focus on the great power balancing might become counterproductive.
The rise of China and what India must do
- Faced with a rising superpower next door for the first time, India is facing stiff geopolitical competition for influence in South Asia.
- The arrival of China in South Asia, the withdrawal of the U.S. from the region, and India’s tilt to the Indo-Pacific have shifted the regional balance of power in Beijing’s favour.
- Sensing this new power equation, South Asia’s smaller powers, India’s neighbours, are engaged in a range of strategies: balancing, bargaining, hedging and bandwagoning.
- India’s smaller neighbours seem to find China as a useful hedge against India, for the moment at least.
- It is also important to keep in mind that a great deal of this regional balancing results from shifts in the regional balance of power, not merely from insufficient Indian outreach to the neighbourhood.
Suggestions
- To begin with, New Delhi must revisit some of its traditional conceptions of the region, ‘modernise’ its primacy in South Asia, and take proactive and imaginative policy steps to meet the China challenge in the region.
- First of all, we must accept the reality that the region, the neighbours and the region’s geopolitics have fundamentally changed over the decade-and-a-half at the least.
- Second, New Delhi must focus on its strengths rather than trying to match the might of the People’s Republic of China in every respect — the latter is a fool’s errand.
- Third, India’s continental strategy is replete with challenges whereas its maritime space has an abundance of opportunities for enhancing trade, joining minilaterals, and creating new issue-based coalitions, among others.
- New Delhi must, therefore, use its maritime (Indo-Pacific) advantages to cater to its many continental handicaps.
- New Delhi should try to wean them away from the China-led regional grand strategy by making them a key part of the Indo-Pacific grand strategy where India and its partners hold significant advantage over China.
- Fourth, there is today an openness in New Delhi to view the region through a non-India centric lens. This also means that New Delhi is no longer uneasy about external powers in its neighbourhood as it used to be during the Cold War.
- Finally, New Delhi should make creative uses of its soft power to retain its influence in the region. One way to do that is to actively encourage informal contacts between political and civil society actors in India and those in other South Asian countries.
Conclusion
The dichotomy between India’s global rise and regional decline has profound implications for India’s global aspirations. It is a legitimate question to ask whether a country that is unable to maintain primacy in its periphery will be able to be a pivotal power in international politics.
Editorial 2 : This is the year to get the SDG goals back on track
Introduction
The United Nations summit on Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), that was held in New York (September 18-19), assessed progress towards achieving the SDGs. The Agenda-2030, which was adopted by the UN General Assembly in 2015, identified 17 SDGs with 169 specific targets to be achieved by 2030. The programme is internationally non-binding, but all countries have committed to work towards these goals as transiting to sustainable development is a common global endeavour.
Slow progress
- Progress, according to available reports, is off track. From 2015 to 2019, there were some improvements, although grossly insufficient to achieve the goals.
- The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic and other global crises have virtually halted progress.
- Apart from slow progress, and little or no attention towards the goals related to the environment and biodiversity (including responsible consumption and production, climate action, life below water, and life on land), it is a matter of great concern that the current practice of pursuing SDGs defies the integrated and indivisible nature of SDGs.
- We are far from the overarching target of balancing human well-being and a healthy environment. The present trend, if it continues, will lead to accelerated environmental degradation and the purpose of transiting towards sustainability defeated.
- Given this emerging scenario, the UN SDG Report, 2023 identified five key areas for urgent action: Commitment of governments to seven years of accelerated, sustained and transformative actions to deliver on the promises of SDGs; concrete, integrated and targeted government policies and actions to eradicate poverty, reduce inequality and to end the war on nature with a focus on advancing the rights of women and girls and empowering the most vulnerable; strengthening of national and subnational capacity, accountability, and public institutions to deliver accelerated progress; recommitment of the international community to deliver and mobilise resources to assist developing nations, and continued strengthening of the UN development system.
- World leaders took cognisance of the situation, reaffirmed their commitments and agreed to step-up efforts to deliver SDGs, our global road map out of the crisis, by 2030. But how far these global pronouncements are operative at the ground level remains a big question.
Suggestions
- Actors from these levers must develop partnership and establish novel collaboration to design and rapidly implement integrated pathways to sustainable development corresponding to the specific needs and priorities of the country.
- This will ultimately contribute to global transformation. In the prologue to this report, Gro Harlem Brundtland, former Prime Minister of Norway and renowned for the famous Brundtland report, ‘Our Common Future”, expressed the hope that politicians and policymakers will take note of the suggestions advanced in this report and steer the world towards sustainable development.
Conclusion
The year 2024 is an election year across the world. At least 64 countries, both developed and developing, accounting for 49% of world population, will go to the polls. Perhaps, it is important for all the newly elected governments to ponder over the sustainability issue and align their national policies accordingly.