Short notes on India’s geopolitical position

Right from its inception as a modern state, India has seen itself as a potential major power. Such an image emerged not only from the fact that India has been a seat of historic civilization and recognition of its potential economic and military Strengths but from the geopolitical factors as well.

India is located in the Indian subcontinent, which constitutes a single geopolitical fortress, bound by the Himalayas in the north and the Indian Ocean to the south.

In addition, although divided into seven states of South Asia, the subcontinent constitutes in some measure a single civilisation complex. It is a geopolitical unit of massive dimensions, comparable to Europe. Its location, lying astride the Indian Ocean and flanking the Persian Gulf and the Straits of Malacca, bestows the region with strategic significance.

The South Asia region as a whole is patently indo-centric, not only in the sense that India is located at the centre of the region, but also because India almost constitutes the region, holding three quarters of its territory and population. Within the region, India is singularly central to the geopolitics of the region, as all of the other countries in the region share borders with it but not with each other.

India’s predominant position in a largely well-defined and self-contained Indo-centric geopolitical region also meant that threats to its security emerged from outside the region, from the major powers, rather from other powers within the South Asia region. As a consequence, India is led-much as the US in the western hemisphere-to ^conception of national security which requires the exclusion of external powers from the subcontinent. Its conception of security is thus not simply national, but geopolitical and regional. However, such a conception of security necessarily entails interaction with other regions as a major power; role extension on the world scene is thus built into India’s dominant position in the region.

The image of India as a potential major power which was shared by the Indian elite meant, as Jawaharlal Nehru informed the Constituent Assembly in 1948, “the inevitability of India playing an important part by virtue of her tremendous potential, by virtue of the fact that she is the biggest political unit in terms of population today and is likely to be in terms of her resources also”.

Nehru and his successors rejected status for India as an object of the major powers in favour of the role of a subject. India’s self image as a potential major power and the domestic and foreign policies aimed at realising that potential, cast India in a revisionist role, for the underlying assumption is that the present global structure of power dominated by a few is to a certain degree unacceptable because it impinges on India’s independence.

This assumption was firmly held, even if unstated, by Nehru and his successors. This was manifest in both the domestic and foreign policies-in the development strategy that emphasised self-reliance and strengthened hard power capabilities and in the nonaligned foreign policy that emphasised independence and activism in world affairs.

It is also evident in its refusal to accept the hegemony of the major powers and in its resistance to the efforts of the major power to foreclose its options to emerge as a nuclear power by refusing to join the Non-proliferation treaty and similar other security regimes. India, however, has not pushed its revisionist role to the point of assuming the role of a full-fledged rebellious power.

It has avoided direct confrontation with the major powers and provided a more or less limited challenge to the major powers in their attempts to organise the world according to their own designs. India, thus, has been a reformist and middle of the road power, whether at home or abroad.

Just as there is a tenacious drive apparent on the part of India to acquire major power role, there is an equally a powerful resistance to it on the part of the existing major powers, principally the US and, in the recent years, China. In the early years, concerned that India’s activist role would circumscribe its influence in the developing power, the US adopted a policy of regional containment of India.

This containment policy involved the building up Pakistan militarily and siding with it in the South Asian regional conflict. It also involved the denial of material and technological assistance that could contribute to India’s hard power capabilities. Since the 1970s, particularly after India demonstrated its nuclear capability by detonating a nuclear device in 1974, the major powers have evolved a sanctions regime aimed at denying all technologies that might contribute to India’s nuclear and missile capabilities.

In the post-Cold war period, the US intensified its efforts to institute a nuclear non-proliferation regime that would preserve the nuclear monopoly of the five major powers while denying it to emerging powers such as India. China’s policy towards India has also been one that of containment.

Since 1963, China has actively sided with Pakistan in the latter’s conflict with India and has cooperated with Pakistan in building its nuclear and missile capabilities by supplying technology, components and materials.